Overview

No one knew his real name. Giving him one felt too intimate, like naming a hurricane or trying to baptize lightning. Names implied beginnings and endings, parents and report cards, bedtimes and curfews, dental appointments and Little League tryouts. This legend had none of those. He existed outside the calendar, outside the census, outside the very idea that children were supposed to grow up or grow old or grow anything at all except chaos. So the town settled on the only honest description they could muster, whispered first by a kindergartener who saw him vanish into a bush after turning the school fountain into a geyser of root beer, and repeated until it became scripture, carved into desks and spray-painted on water towers and sung in jump-rope rhymes: Dumb Kid. He never knocked. He never called ahead. He never filled out a visitor's form or asked permission or waited for an invitation. He simply materialized: one moment a street corner was empty except for a stray cat blinking lazily in the sun, the next there was a lanky silhouette in clothes that looked borrowed from three different giants (a yellow raincoat that dragged on the ground, a cape made from a bedsheet with suspicious spaghetti stains, swim flippers on the wrong feet), moving with the serene confidence of someone who had never once in his life considered the possibility that gravity might win, or that fire might burn, or that a grown man with a badge and a very large flashlight might actually catch him. Then something exploded, or caught fire, or turned itself inside out in ways physics textbooks had never anticipated. Paint cans became rainbows that painted the sky for three days. Fountains became volcanoes that erupted goldfish and lemonade. Libraries became confetti cannons that buried story hour in shredded encyclopedias. Town squares became impromptu circuses where the ringmaster was a plunger-wielding pirate king who crowned himself with deviled eggs. And by the time the smoke cleared and the foam settled and the feathers stopped falling and the rubber chickens stopped squeaking, he was gone: no footprints leading away, no witnesses who could agree on what color his eyes had been (some said blue, some said green, some said they glowed like fireflies), only the lingering smell of popcorn, paint, and pure unfiltered chaos, and the faint, fading echo of a nasal giggle carried away on the wind like the last note of a song you can't quite remember but can't forget either. Old men at the diner argued for hours over black coffee and burnt toast, their voices rising and falling like the river in spring flood. ""Prankster,"" claimed Mayor Buford P. Grumbles between sips of decaf and dabs at his perpetually glitter-flecked toupee, which had never quite recovered from the Great Glitter Gremlin Caper. ""Poltergeist,"" countered Sheriff Hank Wilkins, flipping through a file labeled DK INCIDENTS that now required its own drawer, its own reinforced lock, and its own fire extinguisher after the Mummy Inferno. ""Living warning against boredom,"" muttered Mrs. Finch the librarian, who had taken to locking the fog machines in a vault after last Halloween and still found rubber chickens in the card catalog every Tuesday morning, as regular as clockwork. Children drew him in crayon: stick figure, triangle hat, sneakers like boats, grin stretching ear to ear, sometimes with a rubber chicken under one arm and a plunger under the other. Teenagers dared each other to spend the night in Widow's Woods, hoping to catch a glimpse of the floppy hat drifting between the trees like a ghost ship, or to hear the squeak-squeak-squeak of those impossible shoes on the crunching leaves. Mothers warned their kids to come straight home after dark, then found themselves listening at open windows for that same squeak-squeak-squeak crossing the porch roof at 2 a.m., hearts pounding with a mixture of terror and something dangerously close to excitement.

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