Prologue

The year was 1951.

Things were not looking good for this country in Korea, where the communists had retaken Seoul and General MacArthur was fired.

The Yankees looked like they were going to win the pennant again.

The most popular shows on television were the Milton Berle, Fireside Theater, and Philco Playhouse.

Playing at the Grand Theater in Prescott, Indiana, was Father of the Bride.

On the third Saturday in June the citizens of Prescott were little concerned with the police action in Korea. Except, of course, for the families that had sons in the armed forces.

The predictable success of the Yankees was no cause for celebration in Prescott. The only major league team recognized here was the Chicago Cubs. The other league was unanimously despised. But this being Indiana, all of baseball had to take a back seat to the One True Game - basketball.

As for television, there were only a handful of sets operating in the whole town, so the small screen had made little impact on Prescott.

It was a moviegoing town, but on the third Saturday of June the Grand was three-quarters empty for the matinee. It was the day of Reverend Kettering's church picnic.

Church picnics were still important in Prescott in 1951, but those presided over by the Reverend Harlan Kettering were widely recognized as the best. There was more and better food, prettier girls, more enthusiastic games, and somehow they always seemed to have the finest weather.

One of the very few who were not thoroughly enjoying the picnic on that June Saturday in 1951 was the reverend's son Brian. At the age of six he was just beginning to find out what it meant to be the preacher's kid.

It meant, for one thing, that he was supposed to stay cleaner and generally be better behaved than other boys his age. It meant he was not supposed to say some of the neat words Billy Riddell brought to the first-grade class at Prescott Elementary. It meant he was expected always to leave the biggest piece of cake for somebody else, and he was supposed to smile and walk away when some kid called him a name. It was true that Brian did not live up to all these expectations, but he knew he was supposed to.

These attitudes toward him, Brian knew, had something to do with his father's job. It might have been different if Harlan Kettering worked in a store or in the Delco plant like the fathers of many of Brian's classmates. Or if he rode on a tractor and tended a dairy herd like the farmers just outside of town. But he didn't. He worked in a church. He spent weekdays in his study writing, or going somewhere to officiate at a wedding or christening or funeral. And he worked on Sundays. Brian resented it, but he never, never said so. Brian loved his father.

As for his father's history, Brian knew he had graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, traveled to North Africa in the late 1930s with some scientific expedition, and served there as an Army chaplain during World War II. He was sent home with a wound in 1943, when he married Brian's mother.

The Church assigned him to the Prescott parish in 1945, the year Brian was born. Like most children, Brian considered anything that happened before his birth to be irrelevant. He later had cause to regret that he paid so little attention to his father's stories of a rather adventurous early life.

Even though he loved the man, there were times when young Brian Kettering wished his father did almost anything else for a living. Times like this day at the church picnic, when all the other kids were playing softball or shooting baskets or just running around making noise and he had to help set out the food. And now, with the potato salad spooned out, the hot dogs and hamburger patties ready for the grill, the bottles of Hires root beer buried to their necks in tubs of crushed ice, just when he had finished his chores and was about to dash off and join the ball game, his mother had something else for him to do.

"Brian, will you run home and tell your father to bring back the big jar of mustard out of the cooler along with the iced-tea crock? I declare, he's been so absentminded lately - "

"Why can't Jessie go?" Brian was not interested in hearing about his father's recent forgetfulness.

"Because I asked you."

Adult logic you could not argue with. Pausing to make a mad face at his sister, who pretended not to see, Brian took off running. The Kettering house on Bailey Street was five blocks from Hoosier Park and the picnic. Brian was a fast runner, and he gave it all he had.

The hot summer wind felt good on his face, and the comfortable old sneakers slapped the hot sidewalk with a satisfying phwap, phwap, phwap. A new pair of Keds was always a treat, and it felt good to run your fingers over the new, unworn tread, but a well-worn pair that had molded themselves to a guy's feet were like old friends.

As he crossed the street before his own block, Brian slowed. Something was different. Something was not as it was supposed to be. For one thing, the hot wind in his face had chilled, as though somebody had opened a refrigerator in front of him. The sky was still bright blue, the sun high, but there was no warmth in the air.

And it was quiet. More than quiet, it was silent. Brian stopped for a moment and listened. There should have been the normal springtime sounds - birds chirping, insects buzzing, a dog barking, the breeze rustling the branches of the silver maples that lined the street. There was nothing. Deadness. It was so quiet he could smell it.

Something else. Across the street from his house was parked the red, green, and white truck from Mr. Riggio's House of Pizza. Normally, the pizza wagon was a happy sight, bringing a cheesy treat for a cold night. For some reason the sight of it parked in his block today made Brian shudder. Who ever ordered pizza in the middle of the day? And especially on the day of the picnic, when there was all that great food and stuff to drink over at the park for anybody who wanted it?

The whole thing gave him a creepy feeling, like when Uncle Art told scary stories. Uncle Art was the reverend's brother and he worked in Chicago in some job that took him way up on the skyscrapers they were building there. He came to visit a couple of times a year, always with presents for Jessie and Brian. But what Brian loved most about Uncle Art's visits were the scary stories he told. Brian's father tried to discourage the stories, but Brian couldn't get enough of them, even though they made him feel creepy and sometimes kept him awake at night. The best was a story the last time Uncle Art came. It was about an unstoppable creature of supreme evil which unleashed a horrible vengeance on its victims. Brian had never heard the end of that one because Uncle Art had to go back to Chicago. Before he could come and visit again, there was an accident on a skyscraper, and Uncle Art came no more.

His uncle had not given a name to the undying monster, but Brian had come up with one in his mind. A name he never spoke aloud, but which could send him shivering under the covers at the mere thought.

Doomstalker.

Brian continued toward his house in the middle of the block, walking now. He kept looking at the pizza wagon. Mr. Riggio's House of Pizza was a wondrous place with flashing, clanging pin-ball machines, a jukebox with only the best and loudest music, and magical posters you could almost walk into. The kids loved it, but the marvels of the place seemed lost on grown-ups.

Mr. Riggio was a big man with a big stomach, heavy black eyebrows, and shiny eyes. He always greeted the kids with a smile and knew the kind of jokes a kid laughed at. He had a big, rumbling laugh himself and was always ready to ruffle a guy's hair or pretend to square off for a punch.

All the kids liked him. After school a lot of them would hang out at the House of Pizza, often getting a free sample slice from the jovial pizza man. Older kids mostly, but a few Brian's age too. The fact that their parents didn't like it made hanging out there that much more fun.

All of which added to the confusion in young Brian's mind at the strange, unpleasant way the sight of the pizza wagon made him feel. He turned away from it and walked more quickly toward his house.

The strange cold grew more intense as Brian turned in at the walk leading to their two-story brick house. The silence was so heavy he could not even hear the thud of his sneakers as he climbed the five steps to the wide front porch. The drapes were pulled across the front window. Why? The drapes were never closed in the daytime. Anxious now to find his father, talk to him, be reassured, Brian hurried to the front door, reached for the latch ... and froze.

Coming suddenly as it did from the dead silence, the voice from inside the house hit him like a clap of thunder. It was a voice strained with anger. An anger shot through with a threat of violence that was jarringly out of place on quiet, shady Bailey Street in Prescott, Indiana. The voice, though distorted in its booming rage, was unmistakably that of his father.

Not that the Reverend Kettering had never before raised his voice. A minister of the Gospel was, after all, still a man capable of anger. But nothing like this. The dark fury of the man inside was beyond anything Brian had ever heard. He could make out only a few of the words in the thundering tirade. And some that he recognized had never before, to Brian's knowledge, passed his father's lips.

The boy stood with his hand still on the latch. His eyes bugged, his mouth hung open. The unnatural cold bit right through his Cubs T-shirt. His father's words, thunderous but not quiet understandable, echoed in his ears as though he were standing at the end of a tunnel.

Then there was another voice. Louder, deeper, and a hundred times more terrible than his father's. Again, Brian could not make out the words, but the tone was clearly dark and threatening. The menace in the voice was so strong that tears started to flow from Brian's eyes. And he was not a crier.

Moving stiffly, as though the unnaturally cold air around him had turned to gelatin, Brian moved to the front window. He got down on his knees and looked in through the space where the drapes had not quite closed.

Shadows on the wall. Movement, sudden and violent. His father and ... and ... and somebody ... something ... unspeakably ugly. A scream. A howl of mingled rage and pain. Blood. A blinding flash of white light.

Darkness.

Young Brian Kettering toppled backward and banged his head on the wooden boards of the porch.