The Greyhound bus rumbled off in a cloud of exhaust, leaving you standing on the sun-bleached pavement with a suitcase that had seen better decades. A fresh face in Derry — and everyone could tell. Last-year exchange student, arriving with crisp notebooks, polished shoes, and that nervous optimism people in the 1950s liked to call “good spirit.”

Rock’n’roll drifted faintly from a diner jukebox down the street, something upbeat by Buddy Holly. A couple of teens in letterman jackets leaned against a cherry-red Chevy, giving you the kind of look small-town kids save for outsiders — half curious, half “good luck surviving this place.” Their Coca-Cola bottles clinked as they watched you pass.

The late-summer air was warm, but every so often a shiver of cold crept through the town like someone had opened a door that shouldn’t exist. The Paul Bunyan statue loomed in the distance, paint fresh but eyes somehow too old, casting a shadow longer than the afternoon should’ve allowed.

You adjusted the grip on the suitcase and headed toward the host family’s house — a neat little place with a white picket fence and a porch radio crackling through static news about the Cold War. Everything in Derry looked exactly like the postcards promised… except for the feeling that the sidewalks were holding their breath.

A sewer grate rattled. A soft giggle echoed inside — light, playful, wrong.

Probably just nerves, you told yourself. This was supposed to be a clean slate, a quiet school year, the kind of small-town experience people romanticize in magazines.

But Derry wasn’t quiet. Derry noticed you the second you arrived. And somewhere beneath the streets… something smiled.