Summer of Night

In the summer of 1960, in the small, declining town of Elm Haven, Illinois, a group of boys confronts an ancient evil lurking inside their condemned elementary school. Old Central School, an imposing Romanesque structure built in 1876 by Judge Ashley, a local millionaire, was once the centerpiece of an ambitious plan for five county schools. Only Old Central was ever constructed, and by 1960 it serves just 134 students in a town that has shrunk to about 1,800 people. Scheduled to close permanently that fall, the building still looms over the town, its belfry boarded up and its corridors thick with the smell of dust and something harder to name.

On the last day of school, June 1, eleven-year-old Dale Stewart sits in Mrs. Doubbet's sixth-grade classroom watching the clock. Around him are classmates including Jim Harlen, Cordie Cooke, and Duane McBride, an overweight, quietly brilliant farm boy who keeps detailed notebooks and aspires to be a writer. Dale's best friend, Mike O'Rourke, is in the fifth-grade class next door, having been held back a year. Dale's younger brother Lawrence is in third grade, and his neighbor Kevin Grumbacher is in fifth. While the students wait for dismissal, Cordie's brother Tubby sneaks into the basement restroom, discovers a hole in the plaster wall, and crawls into a narrow passage behind it, where he sees a faint greenish glow. Minutes later, a terrible, inhuman shrieking echoes through the building. Principal Dr. Roon claims the noise was a boiler test. The children are dismissed, but Tubby is never seen leaving the school. He simply vanishes.

The first day of summer finds the boys gathered in Mike's chickenhouse, their unofficial clubhouse. The group forms a loose club called the Bike Patrol: Dale, Lawrence, Mike, Kevin, and Harlen. As days pass, strange events multiply. The Rendering Truck, a foul-smelling vehicle used to collect dead livestock and driven by the school custodian Van Syke, parks near their baseball field, and Mike hears an infant's wailing from its cargo bed. Cordie and her mother confront Dr. Roon about Tubby's disappearance; Mrs. Doubbet claims she saw Tubby leave, but Cordie insists the teacher is lying. At a meeting in a large culvert they call "the Cave," Mike proposes that the group investigate by following Roon, Van Syke, and Mrs. Doubbet, while Duane researches the school's history.

Harlen follows Mrs. Doubbet to Old Central one night and climbs the exterior drainpipe to peer through a second-floor window. Inside, he sees her sitting at a table with the glowing, decomposing corpse of her teaching partner Mrs. Duggan, who died the previous February. The dead woman turns and looks at Harlen through the glass. He falls from the ledge and is found the next morning with a serious concussion and multiple fractures. Meanwhile, Mike discovers a hole in a cemetery toolshed with red, ribbed walls that seem to pulse and contract, and sees a figure in a World War I uniform following him home at dusk.

Duane's research at the Oak Hill library uncovers the history of the Borgia Bell, also called the Stele of Revealing: an artifact associated with Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead, which Judge Ashley purchased during his 1876 honeymoon and installed in Old Central's belfry. Occult texts indicate the Stele demands sacrifice and grants power to those who serve it. The Rendering Truck attempts to run down Duane on a country road, killing his elderly collie Wittgenstein. When Duane's Uncle Art, his intellectual companion, finds crucial information about the bell in the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley and drives over to share it, Art is killed in a suspicious car crash. Evidence of red paint on the car, suggesting another vehicle forced him off the road, is destroyed when J.P. Congden, the local justice of the peace, removes the doors from the impounded wreck.

At a gathering at a relative's farm, Duane mentions he has important information to share. That night, he is ambushed in a cornfield by multiple figures, including the Soldier and reanimated corpses, who hold him down while a combine is driven toward him. Duane is killed. Across town, the boys are awakened by the deep tolling of the bell, heard for the first time in decades.

Over the following weeks, supernatural attacks escalate against every boy. Tunnels with red, ribbed walls burrow under Mike's house toward his bedridden grandmother Memo. A shadow-creature invades Dale and Lawrence's bedroom. The decomposing figure of Mrs. Duggan appears in Harlen's room. The boys decode Duane's notebooks, written in Gregg shorthand, and uncover his research. In January 1900, after several children disappeared, a mob led by Judge Ashley lynched an innocent Black man by hanging him from the bell in Old Central's belfry. The body was sealed inside, and two months later another child vanished, proving they had hanged the wrong man. A passage in Crowley's The Book of the Law, which Dale steals from the library of Mr. Ashley-Montague, a descendant of the town's founder, states the Stele "was created of two of the Elementals, earth and air, and may be destroyed only by the final two," meaning fire and water.

The boys formulate a plan: camp overnight to confirm that living humans are among their attackers, then destroy Old Central. They assemble weapons, holy water, a consecrated Communion Host that Mike takes from the altar at St. Malachy's, and Molotov cocktails. During the camping ambush, three men hack at their stuffed sleeping bags after midnight; the boys open fire and the attackers flee. Days later, they lure the Rendering Truck into a chase through town and firebomb it at an abandoned grain elevator. Van Syke is killed in the explosion. In a warehouse nearby, they find the murdered body of J.P. Congden bearing shotgun pellet wounds from the camping ambush, confirming the human conspiracy behind the attacks. Meanwhile, Father Cavanaugh, Mike's priestly mentor, has been taken over by the evil force after being infected by parasitic slugs. The creature wearing Cavanaugh's body attacks Mike at home but is destroyed by holy water and the consecrated Host.

On Saturday night, July 16, a massive arm reaches from beneath Lawrence's bed and drags him through a hole in the floor. Mike enters the tunnel system through the Stewarts' basement, crawling toward Old Central. Dale and Harlen break into the school, which has been transformed into a living organism: walls coated in translucent flesh, corridors festooned with pulsing webs and egg sacs. In the open belfry, a massive, many-eyed entity pulses with light, the awakened Stele. Dr. Roon, backed by reanimated corpses, holds Lawrence hostage and forces the boys to surrender their weapons. Kevin and Cordie drive a gasoline-laden milk tanker into the school's entrance. When the shattered tank fails to ignite, Kevin fires his .45 until a bullet sparks and 800 gallons of gasoline explode.

The fireball ignites the organic matter throughout the building. Mike fires into the entity's central sac, rupturing it. The boys escape to the roof and descend by rope as the building collapses, consuming Roon and the creatures within. In the aftermath, the boys maintain a cover story, and C.J. Congden, the town bully who flees Elm Haven, becomes a convenient suspect for the unsolved crimes. Forensic teams discover old bones in the ruins but never uncover the full truth.

The novel closes on August 12 with the launch of the Echo communications satellite. The boys gather at the farm of Dale and Lawrence's Uncle Henry, where they finally break through to a legendary cave they have long sought but decide by mutual consent to seal it back up, preserving it as their shared secret. Memo begins to recover. Dale reveals that Duane's father gave him all of Duane's notebooks before moving away and, inspired by his friend's years of meticulous preparation, announces that he will become a writer. The group watches Echo cross the sky exactly when and where Duane had predicted. Dale silently observes his friends, thinking of Duane and the words his friend might have used to describe this moment, as a warm breeze promises many more weeks of summer.