Harold Gardener

Harold Gardener is a Derry police officer whose life is bookended by two of the town's most notorious murders, each tied to the entity known as It. As a five-year-old boy in the fall of 1957, he was present when his father, Dave Gardener, pulled the mutilated body of George Denbrough from a storm drain on Witcham Street. The image of the dead boy, his left arm torn away and his eyes filling with rain, was seared into Harold's memory. Twenty-seven years later, on the night of July 21st, 1984, Harold Gardener, now a thirty-two-year-old balding officer, was one of the first responders to the death of Adrian Mellon, a gay man thrown from the Main Street Bridge by three teenagers. During the investigation, Harold interviewed Mellon's boyfriend, Don Hagarty, who described a clown under the bridge—a clown with balloons and silver eyes. Harold's partner, Jeffrey Reeves, dismissed the story as the ravings of a hysterical man, but Harold was troubled. He later learned that one of the teenage assailants, Christopher Unwin, had independently described the same clown, a detail that was suppressed by the Assistant District Attorney to ensure a conviction. Harold tried to raise the issue with ADA Tom Boutillier, but was overruled. The case went to trial without any mention of the clown, and the three teenagers were convicted of manslaughter. Harold kept his peace, but the knowledge that something else had been present that night—something that had bitten into Mellon's armpit and left a chunk of flesh missing—continued to gnaw at him. He was one of the few adults in Derry who sensed that the town's violence was not merely human, and his role as a witness to two of Its most public acts of murder makes him a silent, haunted figure in the town's long history of horror.