Chapter 8: The Long Cruel Winter

As the weeks and then the months slowly crawled by, life for Thomas and Franklin and the rest of Derry was rather uneventful for the most part. The snow started to fall in the middle of November and continued off and on through Christmas. With the snow and the extra chill in the air, the sightings of Pennywise lessened and became less frequent. Thomas saw the evil clown smiling and waving at him in the meadow beside the Derry Schoolhouse a couple of times, and Franklin saw the clown one morning out of the corner of his eye while his father walked him to school. But other than that, things were fairly quiet and the people of Derry soon slipped back into their normal routines. The parents of the children still took extra precautions however, and as such, no child was ever left alone or unattended without an adult chaperone. Because of this, there were no more disappearances or murders in Derry for the rest of 1850, and as the new year arrived and everyone in town prepared to welcome the beginning of 1851, Thomas had high hopes that perhaps Derry's long nightmare would at last be over. Along with Franklin, he had warned the other children at school about Pennywise and he had told them what he and Franklin had seen that day on the Kenduskeag Stream, along with all of the other sightings of the evil clown. Some of their classmates were unconvinced and thought the stories were dumb and foolish, but a good deal of others in their class believed the boys and admitted that they had seen Pennywise too. And all of the ones who had seen the clown agreed that there was an inherently evil aura about it.

January of 1851 came with the familiar bone-chilling cold of the Maine winter, and as the inhabitants of Derry prepared for a seasonal blizzard, an icy chill settled over the hearts of the townspeople. It was as if everyone somehow knew that something else terrible was about to happen, and it wasn't long before they were proven correct. On January 7th, the horribly mutilated body of a young girl was found in an empty field just off from Jackson Street. The body was found early in the morning by a town resident, who quickly called the town Marshal and his assistant deputy and an additional constable to the scene. The only part of the body that was recovered was the torso and the right arm, and it appeared that the child had been voraciously eaten by an unknown attacker. The crime was nearly identical to the string of murders that Derry had suffered the previous year, so it was assumed by everyone that the same unknown culprit was responsible. Due to the extreme damage to the body and because of the fact that all of the children in town were accounted for, the identity of the victim was unable to be determined. It was theorized that the girl may have been a runaway from another town who was just passing through, and was thus an easy target for her attacker. It was determined that the attack had happened at nighttime, and it was quite windy that night. Once again, no one reported seeing or hearing anything out of the ordinary that night, and the howling winds and snow would have made a child's screams inaudible. This most recent murder left a blanket of negativity over the hearts of the townspeople.

A meeting was called with Derry Town Council soon after, and the topic of discussion was the ineffectiveness of the town's law enforcement in guaranteeing the safety of the locals or in apprehending the unknown suspect. It was argued that because city funds and tax dollars were used to pay for the Derry police force, that the money was being wasted due to the ineptitude of the town Marshal. Many citizens felt that the reason for the decline in the murders had been the vigilance of parents keeping a constant eye on their children, rather than anything the Marshal had done. An emergency vote was called, and the result was that the position of town Marshal was liquidated and the police force was to be reorganized. Going forward, the law enforcement of Derry would consist of a single constable and an assistant deputy, with two secretaries to handle the paperwork. Witnesses to the meeting said that the topics of conversation were very heated, and bad feelings and animosity between the parties ran high. The most vocal opponents of the Derry police force were a group of about 20 men led by a local man named John Markson. They announced at the end of the meeting that they would be patrolling the streets of Derry armed with shotguns and long rifles at all times, and that if the unknown murderer showed his face anywhere in town, they would catch him and burn him alive. Markson was viewed as a temperamental and possibly violent ruffian, and as such, the group of men were viewed by many as a mob, and it was feared that their use of vigilante justice might only make things worse.

As the weeks went by and January gave way to February the mood of the townspeople continued to decline. Neighbors didn't talk and visit with each other like they normally would, families grew apart and husbands spent much more time drowning their problems in drinking and fighting at the local taverns, and even church services on Sundays were unusually somber and cheerless. And the entire time, John Markson and his mob patrolled the streets of Derry in the guise of keeping the town safe, but appearing to onlookers to be behaving more like soldiers from an invading army, as they rarely had a good word for the citizens they said they were protecting. It was as if Derry was being immersed in darkness and hatred more and more by the day, and a warm smile soon became as rare of a sight as a blue moon.

Even the mood of Thomas' schoolmates was noticeably more apathetic and depressing. The only exception was Franklin, who had been the one friend who Thomas felt he could trust and rely on. The other children rarely seemed to laugh and play like they had before, and even the hour of outdoor recreation in the middle of the day seemed almost forced, as if the children had been stripped of their playful and adventurous spirits somehow. Thomas noticed this change, and that was mostly because his own family seemed to not have been as affected by the shift as everyone else had. His mother and father had stayed indoors more due to the winter cold, and it had given the family more time to enjoy each other's company. Thomas felt that somehow this extra time indoors and away from the town had preserved his family's peaceful tranquility. He even noticed that he thought much less about Pennywise and the mysterious nature of the clown's motives, but he remained on the lookout and kept his guard up. He thought that perhaps the reason his family had been spared from the wave of negativity was because their cabin was at the far edge of the Barrens. That was a possibility, because it seemed like the negativity of the townspeople was centered in the middle of Derry. It seemed to Thomas like the town was under some sort of spell that was no doubt the work of Pennywise, and he had the feeling that everything that had transpired was certainly coming to a head. And somehow deep inside, he just knew that Pennywise had orchestrated and intended it to be that way.