Chapter 11: The Final Bell Tolls
One night in mid-April as Thomas sat in the floor of his room drawing a picture, he got a strange feeling in his heart that events were transpiring that were the work of Pennywise at that very moment. It was as if he could sense that something awful was taking place somewhere in Derry, and that whatever it was would be the fulfillment of Pennywise's cycle of violence. Thomas went to bed that night with a dread that made any hope of sleep a fleeting and distant wish. He knew that there would be bad news about someone in town by tomorrow, and he struggled with a burning fear that it would be someone he knew well.
The next morning he awoke and ate breakfast and started off on his routine walk with his father to the schoolhouse. When they got to the school they found the schoolmaster, Mr. Hayden, who with a grave face was informing the children and their parents that classes would be canceled for the remainder of the week. He told everyone that something else terrible had happened and that several more people from Derry were found dead that very morning. When pressed for further details, he declined comment and referred any further questions to Constable Grenier, who was investigating the incident as they spoke.
It was around 10 that morning on April 16th, 1851 as Constable Grenier stood in the front parlor of the Markson house on south Center Street and looked out the window towards the bright blue sky. He was looking outside because he felt nauseous and was worried he would feel ill if he had continued to keep his eyes on what lay behind in the parlor floor. To his back lay the bodies of the entire Markson family, who had been found this morning by a concerned neighbor who noticed that they were not up and about as was normal. When Constable Grenier arrived about a half hour later with his assistant deputy, they immediately cordoned off the house to curious neighbors and set to the grim work of the investigation. In the floor of the front parlor lay the bodies of John Markson, his wife Sarah, and their three children: James, Lucas, and Elizabeth. The bodies were arranged on the floor in a circle, with John Markson's corpse in the middle surrounded by his deceased wife and children. Constable Grenier was greatly disturbed by the awful white smile of John Markson's face, almost giving the appearance that he was grinning. The investigation revealed that the times of death were most likely the previous evening, and it was determined that John Markson had poisoned his family with cyanide, probably by slipping it into their food just before they ate supper. After they were dead, John Markson apparently arranged the bodies in the circle and laid down in the middle, and killed himself by eating a deadly white nightshade mushroom. The whiteness of his grin turned out to be the pieces of mushroom, of which he had a large mouthful. It would have guaranteed to cause him an excruciating and agonizing death, which was what he deserved in the unspoken opinion of Constable Grenier. The crime was classified as a murder-suicide and the town mortician came to collect and remove the bodies to take to the Derry Funeral Home. And with all important evidence collected, the house was shut and locked up and the curtains were drawn closed. As Constable Grenier left the house around 3 that afternoon to return to his office to begin writing the reports of the crime, he had an odd sensation. It was almost if a great deal of the darkness and the blanket of negativity was at that point removed from Derry. The sun seemed to shine a bit brighter and feel warmer and the air did not feel as heavy. And although he couldn't explain how or why, Constable Grenier knew somehow that the string of disappearances, murders, and violence that had pervaded Derry for almost two years was over, at least for the foreseeable future. And he felt relieved to be sure, glad to put this awful chapter of his life behind him.
Thomas also felt relief to know that the long nightmare that had torn at the fabric of Derry was at least for a while anyway, had come to an end. He felt terrible when he had heard what happened to the Markson family, knowing that their fate was the work of Pennywise and his evil ways. His inner intuition made it apparent to him that this awful act of violence that befell the Markson family was the final piece of Pennywise's twisted puzzle of death. But his intuition also made it very clear that Pennywise would certainly return and wreck havoc on Derry at some point, as he apparently had for an untold number of centuries. Thomas certainly hoped that he would not be alive when the time came for Pennywise to awaken again.
As the months went by and spring turned to summer, the people of Derry had steadily gone back to their normal way of life, free of the burden and fear that all of the death and violence had caused. And as Thomas and Franklin and the rest of the children of Derry resumed the adventure of life that were their childhoods, the memories of that awful chapter of the town's history became more and more distant in their minds. Thomas felt like he was being stripped of his memories of what had happened little by little, and Franklin told him that the same was true for him as well. Maybe it was better that they didn't remember, thought Thomas, because they were bad memories of things that had traumatized them, and that shouldn't be a burden carried by children. One memory that Thomas did hold on to was of the beautiful day in late July that his father had taken him and Franklin fishing on the banks of the Penobscot River to enjoy the warm weather. The sky was a lovely and cloudless blue and the trees were filled with singing birds and the air was filled with the smell of pine. And it was the memory of that single day that Thomas carried with him throughout the years, the memory of a boy and his father in the company of his best friend, fishing and enjoying the wonderful and precious moments offered by life.
