It (41 page)

A local nursery-school teacher who declined to be identified told a
News
reporter yesterday that young Dorsey Corcoran came to his twice-weekly nursery-school class with bad sprains of his right thumb and three fingers of his right hand less than a week before his death in a purported garage accident.

“It was hurting him enough so that the poor little guy couldn't color his Mr. Do safety poster,” the teacher said. “The fingers were swelled up like sausages. When I asked Dorsey what happened, he said that his father (stepfather Richard P. Macklin) had bent his fingers back because he had walked across a floor his mother had just washed and waxed. ‘Daddy had to take me up 'cause I'm bad' was the way he put it. I felt like crying, looking at his poor, dear fingers. He really wanted to color his poster like the other children, so I gave him some baby aspirin and let him color while the others were having Story Time. He loved to color the Mr. Do posters—that was what he liked best—and now I'm so glad I was able to help him have a little happiness that day.

“When he died it never crossed my mind to think it was anything but an accident. I guess at first I thought he must have fallen because he couldn't grip very well with that hand. Now I think I just couldn't believe an adult could do such a thing to a little person. I know better now. I wish to God I didn't.”

Dorsey Corcoran's older brother, Edward, ten, is still missing. From his cell in Derry County Jail, Richard Macklin continues to deny any part in either the death of his younger stepson or the disappearance of the older boy.

From the Derry
News,
June 30th, 1958 (page 5):

MACKLIN QUESTIONED IN DEATHS OF GROGAN, CLEMENTS

Produces Unshakable Alibis, Source Claims

From the Derry
News,
July 6th, 1958 (page 1):

MACKLIN TO BE CHARGED ONLY WITH MURDER OF STEPSON DORSEY, BORTON SAYS

Edward Corcoran Still Missing

From the Derry
News,
July 24th, 1958 (page 1):

WEEPING STEPFATHER CONFESSES TO BLUDGEON DEATH OF STEPSON

In a dramatic development in the District Court trial of Richard Macklin for the murder of his stepson Dorsey Corcoran, Macklin broke down under
the stern cross-examination of County Attorney Bradley Whitsun and admitted he had beaten the four-year-old boy to death with a recoilless hammer, which he then buried at the far end of his wife's vegetable garden before taking the boy to Derry Home Hospital's emergency room.

The courtroom was stunned and silent as the sobbing Macklin, who had previously admitted beating both of his stepsons “occasionally, if they had it coming, for their own good,” poured out his story.

“I don't know what came over me. I saw he was climbing on the damn ladder again and I grabbed the hammer from the bench where it was laying and I just started to use it on him. I didn't mean to kill him. With God as my witness I never meant to kill him.”

“Did he say anything to you before he passed out?” Whitsun asked.

“He said, ‘Stop daddy, I'm sorry, I love you,' Macklin replied.

“Did you stop?”

“Eventually,” Macklin said. He then began to weep in such a hysterical manner that Judge Erhardt Moulton declared the court in recess.

From the Derry
News,
September 18th, 1958 (page 16):

WHERE IS EDWARD CORCORAN?

His stepfather, sentenced to a term of two to ten years in Shawshank State Prison for the murder of his four-year-old brother, Dorsey, continues to claim he has no idea where Edward Corcoran is. His mother, who has instituted divorce proceedings against Richard P. Macklin, says she thinks her soon-to-be ex-husband is lying.

Is he?

“I, for one, really don't think so,” says Father Ashley O'Brian, who serves the Catholic prisoners at Shawshank. Macklin began taking instruction in the Catholic faith shortly after beginning his prison term, and Father O'Brian has spent a good deal of time with him. “He is sincerely sorry for what he has done,” Father O'Brian goes on, adding that when he initially asked Macklin why he wanted to be a Catholic, Macklin replied, “I hear they have an act of contrition and I need to do a lot of that or else I'll go to hell when I die.”

“He knows what he did to the younger boy,” Father O'Brian said. “If he also did something to the older one, he doesn't remember it. As far as Edward goes, he believes his hands are clean.”

How clean Macklin's hands are in the matter of his stepson Edward is a question which continues to trouble Derry residents, but he has been convincingly cleared of the other child-murders which have taken place here. He was able to produce ironclad alibis for the first three, and he was in jail when seven others were committed in late June, July, and August.

All ten murders remain unsolved.

In an exclusive interview with the
News
last week Macklin again asserted that he knows nothing of Edward Corcoran's whereabouts. “I beat them both,” he said in a painful monologue which was often halted by bouts of weeping. “I loved them but I beat them. I don't know why, any more than I know why Monica let me, or why she covered up for me after Dorsey died. I guess I could have killed Eddie as easy as I did Dorsey, but I swear before God and Jesus and all the saints of heaven that I didn't. I know how it looks, but I didn't do it. I think he just ran away. If he did, that's one thing I've got to thank God for.”

Asked if he is aware of any gaps in his memory—if he could have killed Edward and then blocked it out of his mind—Macklin replied: “I ain't aware of any gaps. I know only too well what I did. I've given my life to Christ, and I'm going to spend the rest of it trying to make up for it.”

From the Derry
News,
January 27th, 1960 (page 1):

BODY NOT THAT OF CORCORAN YOUTH, BORTON ANNOUNCES

Police Chief Richard Borton told reporters early today that the badly decomposed body of a boy about the age of Edward Corcoran, who disappeared from his Derry home in June of 1958, is definitely not that of the missing youth. The body was found in Aynesford, Massachusetts, buried in a gravel pit. Both Maine and Massachusetts State Police at first theorized that the body might be that of the Corcoran boy, believing that he might have been picked up by a child molester after running away from the Charter Street home where his younger brother had been beaten and killed.

Dental charts showed conclusively that the body found in Aynesford was not that of the Corcoran youth, who has now been missing for nineteen months.

From the Portland
Press-Herald,
July 19th, 1967 (page 3):

CONVICTED MURDERER COMMITS SUICIDE IN FALMOUTH

Richard P. Macklin, who was convicted of the murder of his four-year-old stepson nine years ago, was found dead in his small third-floor Falmouth apartment late yesterday afternoon. The parolee, who had lived and worked quietly in Falmouth since his release from Shawshank State Prison in 1964, was an apparent suicide.

“The note he left indicates an extremely confused state of mind,” Assistant Falmouth Police Chief Brandon K. Roche said. He refused to divulge the note's contents, but a Police Department source said it consisted of two sentences: “I saw Eddie last night. He was dead.”

The “Eddie” referred to may well have been Macklin's stepson, brother of the boy Macklin was convicted of killing in 1958. It was the disappearance of Edward Corcoran which eventually led to Macklin's conviction for the beating death of Edward's younger brother, Dorsey. The elder boy has been missing for nine years. In a brief court proceeding in 1966 the boy's mother had her son declared legally dead so she could enter into possession of Edward Corcoran's savings account. The account contained a sum of sixteen dollars.

Eddie Corcoran was dead, all right.

He died on the night of June 19th, and his stepfather had nothing at all to do with it. He died as Ben Hanscom sat home watching TV with his mother, as Eddie Kaspbrak's mother anxiously felt Eddie's forehead for signs of her favorite ailment, “phantom fever,” as Beverly Marsh's stepfather—a gent who bore, in temperament at least, a remarkable resemblance to Eddie and Dorsey Corcoran's stepfather—lifted a high-stepping kick into the girl's
derrière
and told her “to get out there and dry those goddam dishes like your mummer told you,” as Mike Hanlon got yelled at by some high-school boys (one of whom would some years later sire that fine upstanding young homophobe John “Webby” Garton) passing in an old Dodge while Mike pulled weeds out of the garden beside the small Hanlon home out on Witcham Road, not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers's crazy father, as Richie Tozier was sneaking a look at the half-undressed
girls in a copy of
Gem
he had found at the bottom of his father's socks-and-underwear drawer and getting a regular good boner, and as Bill Denbrough was throwing his dead brother's photograph album across the room in horrified unbelief.

Although none of them would remember doing so later, all of them looked up at the exact moment Eddie Corcoran died . . . as if hearing some distant cry.

The
News
had been absolutely right about one thing: Eddie's rank-card was just bad enough to make him afraid to go home and face his stepdad. Also, his mother and the old man were fighting a lot this month. That made things even worse. When they got going at it hot and heavy, his mother shouted a lot of mostly incoherent accusations. His stepdad responded to these first with grunts, then yells to shut up, and finally with the enraged bellows of a boar which has gotten a quiver of porcupine needles in its snout. Eddie had never seen the old man use his fists on her, though. Eddie didn't think he quite dared. He had saved his fists for Eddie and Dorsey in the old days, and now that Dorsey was dead, Eddie got his little brother's share as well as his own.

These shouting matches came and went in cycles. They were most common at the end of the month, when the bills came in. A policeman, called by a neighbor, might drop by once or twice when things were at their worst and tell them to tone it down. Usually that ended it. His mother was apt to give the cop the finger and dare him to take her in, but his stepdad rarely said boo.

His stepdad was afraid of the cops, Eddie thought.

He lay low during these periods of stress. It was wiser. If you didn't think so, just look at what had happened to Dorsey. Eddie didn't know the specifics and didn't want to, but he had an idea about Dorsey. He thought that Dorsey had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: the garage on the last day of the month. They told Eddie that Dorsey fell off the stepladder in the garage—“If I told him once to stay off'n it I told him sixty times,” his stepdad had said—but his mother wouldn't look at him except by accident . . . and when their eyes did meet, Eddie had seen a frightened ratty little gleam in hers that he didn't like. The old man just sat there silently at the kitchen table with a quart of Rheingold, looking at nothing from beneath his heavy lowering eyebrows. Eddie kept out of his reach. When his
stepfather was bellowing, he was usually—not always but usually—all right. It was when he stopped that you had to be careful.

Two nights ago he had thrown a chair at Eddie when Eddie got up to see what was on the other TV channel—just picked up one of the tubular aluminum kitchen chairs, swept it back over his head, and let fly. It hit Eddie in the butt and knocked him over. His butt still ached, but he knew it could have been worse: it could have been his head.

Then there had been the night when the old man had suddenly gotten up and rubbed a handful of mashed potatoes into Eddie's hair for no reason at all. One day last September, Eddie had come in from school and foolishly allowed the screen door to slam shut behind him while his stepdad was taking a nap. Macklin came out of the bedroom in his billowy boxer shorts, hair standing up in corkscrews, cheeks grizzled with two days of weekend beard, breath grizzled with two days of weekend beer. “There now, Eddie,” he said, “I got to take you up for slammin that fuckin door.” In Rich Macklin's lexicon, “taking you up” was a euphemism for “beating the shit out of you.” Which was what he then did to Eddie. Eddie had lost consciousness when the old man threw him into the front hall. His mother had mounted a pair of low coathooks out there, especially for him and Dorsey to hang their coats on. These hooks had rammed hard steel fingers into Eddie's lower back, and that was when he passed out. When he came to ten minutes later he heard his mother yelling that she was going to take Eddie to the hospital and he couldn't stop her.

“After what happened to Dorsey?” his stepdad had responded. “You want to go to jail, woman?”

That was the end of her talk about the hospital. She helped Eddie into his room, where he lay shivering on his bed, his forehead beaded with sweat. The only time he left the room during the next three days was when they were both gone. Then he would hobble slowly into the kitchen, groaning softly, and get his stepdad's whiskey from under the sink. A few nips dulled the pain. The pain was mostly gone by the fifth day, but he had pissed blood for almost two weeks.

And the hammer wasn't in the garage anymore.

What about
that?
What about
that,
friends and neighbors?

Oh, the Craftsman hammer—the ordinary hammer—was still there. It was the Scotti recoilless which was missing. His stepdad's
special hammer, the one he and Dorsey had been forbidden to touch. “If one of you touches that baby,” he had told them the day he bought it, “you'll both be wearing your guts for earmuffs.” Dorsey had asked timidly if that hammer was very expensive. The old man told him he was damn tooting. He said it was filled with ballbearings and you couldn't make it bounce back up no matter how hard you brought it down.

Now it was gone.

Eddie's grades weren't the best because he had missed a lot of school since his mother's remarriage, but he was not a stupid boy by any means. He thought he knew what had happened to the Scotti recoilless hammer. He thought maybe his stepfather had used it on Dorsey and then buried it in the garden or maybe thrown it in the Canal. It was the sort of thing that happened frequently in the horror comics Eddie read, the ones he kept on the top shelf of his closet.