by Stephen King
She wrote three books--one on feminism and the working woman, one on feminism and the family, one on feminism and spirituality. The first two were quite popular. In the three years since her last, she had fallen out of fashion to a degree, and Beverly thought it was something of a relief to her. Her investments had done well ("Feminism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive, thank God," she had once told Bev) and now she was a wealthy woman with a townhouse, a place in the country, and two or three lovers virile enough to go the distance with her in the sack but not quite virile enough to beat her at tennis. "When they get that good, I drop them at once," she said, and although Kay clearly thought this was a joke, Beverly wondered if it really was.
Beverly called a cab and when it came she piled into the back with her suitcase, glad to be away from the clerk's eyes, and gave the driver Kay's address.
She was waiting at the end of her driveway, wearing her mink coat over a flannel nightgown. Pink fuzzy mules with great big pompoms were on her feet. Not orange pompoms, thank God--that might have sent Beverly screaming into the night again. The ride over to Kay's had been weird: things were coming back to her, memories pouring in so fast and so clearly that it was frightening. She felt as if someone had started up a big bulldozer in her head and begun excavating a mental graveyard she hadn't even known was there. Only it was names instead of bodies that were turning up, names she hadn't thought of in years: Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Greta Bowie, Henry Bowers, Eddie Kaspbrak ... Bill Denbrough. Especially Bill--Stuttering Bill, they had called him with that openness of children that is sometimes called candor, sometimes cruelty. He had seemed so tall to her, so perfect (until he opened his mouth and started to talk, that was).
Names ... places ... things that had happened.
Alternately hot and cold, she had remembered the voices from the drain . . . and the blood. She had screamed and her father had popped her one. Her father--Tom--
Tears threatened ... and then Kay was paying the cab-driver and tipping him big enough to make the startled cabbie exclaim, "Thanks, lady! Wow!"
Kay took her into the house, got her into the shower, gave her a robe when she got out, made coffee, examined her injuries, Mercurochromed her cut foot, and put a Band-Aid on it. She poured a generous dollop of brandy into Bev's second cup of coffee and hectored her into drinking every drop. Then she cooked them each a rare strip steak and sauteed fresh mushrooms to go with them.
"All right," she said. "What happened? Do we call the cops or just send you to Reno to do your residency?"
"I can't tell you too much, " Beverly said. "It would sound too crazy. But it was my fault, mostly--"
Kay slammed her hand down on the table. It made a sound on the polished mahogany like a small-caliber pistol shot. Bev jumped.
"Don't you say that," Kay said. There was high color in her cheeks, and her brown eyes were blazing. "How long have we been friends? Nine years? Ten? If I hear you say it was your fault one more time, I'm going to puke. You hear me? I'm just going to fucking puke. It wasn't your fault this time, or last time, or the time before, or any of the times. Don't you know most of your friends thought that sooner or later he'd put you in a body cast, or maybe even kill you?"
Beverly was looking at her wide-eyed.
"And that would have been your fault, at least to a degree, for staying there and letting it happen. But now you're gone. Thank God for small favors. But don't you sit there with half of your fingernails ripped off and your foot cut open and belt-marks on your shoulders and tell me it was your fault. "
"He didn't use his belt on me," Bev said. The lie was auto-matic ... and so was the deep shame which brought a miserable flush to her cheeks.
"If you're done with Tom, you ought to be done with the lies as well," Kay said quietly, and she looked at Bev so long and so lovingly that Bev had to drop her eyes. She could taste salt tears in the back of her throat. "Who did you think you were fooling?" Kay asked, still speaking quietly. She reached across the table and took Bev's hands. "The dark glasses, the blouses with high necks and long sleeves ... maybe you fooled a buyer or two. But you can't fool your friends, Bev. Not the people who love you."
And then Beverly did cry, long and hard, and Kay held her, and later, just before going to bed, she told Kay what she could: That an old friend from Derry, Maine, where she had grown up, had called, and had reminded her of a promise she had made long ago. The time to fulfill the promise had arrived, he said. Would she come? She said she would. Then the trouble with Tom had started.
"What was this promise?" Kay asked.
Beverly shook her head slowly. "I can't tell you that, Kay. Much as I'd like to. "
Kay chewed on this and then nodded. "All right. Fair enough. What are you going to do about Tom when you get back from Maine?"
And Bev, who had begun to feel more and more that she wouldn't be coming back from Derry, ever, said only: "I'll come to you first, and we'll decide together. Okay?"
"Very much okay," Kay said. "Is that a promise, too?"
"As soon as I'm back," Bev said steadily, "you can count on it." And she hugged Kay hard.
With Kay's check cashed and Kay's shoes on her feet, she had taken a Greyhound north to Milwaukee, afraid that Tom might have gone out to O'Hare to look for her. Kay, who had gone with her to the bank and the bus depot, tried to talk her out of it.
"O'Hare's lousy wth security people, dear," she said. "You don't have to worry about him. If he comes near you, what you do is scream your fucking head off."
Beverly shook her head. "I want to avoid him altogether. This is the way to do it."
Kay looked at her shrewdly. "You're afraid he might talk you out of it, aren't you?"
Beverly thought of the seven of them standing in the stream, of Stanley and his piece of broken Coke bottle glinting in the sun; she thought of the thin pain as he cut her palm lightly on a slant, she thought of them clasping hands in a children's circle, promising to come back if it ever started again ... to come back and kill it for good.
"No," she said. "He couldn't talk me out of this. But he might hurt me, security guards or not. You didn't see him last night, Kay."
"I've seen him enough on other occasions," Kay said, her brows drawing together. "The asshole that walks like a man."
"He was crazy," Bev said. "Security guards might not stop him. This is better. Believe me. "
"All right," Kay said reluctantly, and Bev thought with some amusement that Kay was disappointed that there was going to be no confrontation, no big blowoff.
"Cash the check quick," Beverly told her again, "before he can think to freeze the accounts. He will, you know."
"Sure," Kay said. "If he does that, I'll go see the son of a bitch with a horsewhip and take it out in trade."
"You stay away from him," Beverly said sharply. "He's dangerous, Kay. Believe me. He was like--" Like my father was what trembled on her lips. Instead she said, "He was like a wildman."
"Okay," Kay said. "Be easy in your mind, dear. Go keep your promise. And do some thinking about what comes after. "
"I will," Bev said, but that was a lie. She had too many other things to think about: what had happened the summer she was eleven, for instance. Showing Richie Tozier how to make his yo-yo sleep, for instance. Voices from the drain, for instance. And something she had seen, something so horrible that even then, embracing Kay for the last time by the long silvery side of the grumbling Greyhound bus, her mind would not quite let her see it.
Now, as the plane with the duck on the side begins its long descent into the Boston area, her mind turns to that again ... and to Stan Uris ... and to an unsigned poem that came on a postcard ... and the voices ... and to those few seconds when she had been eye to eye with something that was perhaps infinite.
She looks out the window, looks down, and thinks that Tom's evil is a small and petty thing compared with the evil waiting for her in Derry. If there is a compensation, it is that Bill Denbrough will be there ... and there was a time
when an eleven-year-old girl named Beverly Marsh loved Bill Denbrough. She remembers the postcard with the lovely poem written on the back, and remembers that she once knew who wrote it. She doesn't remember anymore, any more than she remembers exactly what the poem said ... but she thinks it might have been Bill. Yes, it might well have been Stuttering Bill Denbrough.
She thinks suddenly of getting ready for bed the night after Richie and Ben took her to see those two horror movies. After her first date. She had cracked wise with Richie about it--in those days that had been her defense when she was out on the street--but a part of her had been touched and excited and a little scared. It really had been her first date, even though there had been two boys instead of one. Richie had paid her way and everything, just like a real date. Then, afterward, there had been those boys who chased them ... and they had spent the rest of the afternoon in the Barrens ... and Bill Denbrough had come down with another kid, she couldn't remember who, but she remembered the way Bill's eyes had rested on hers for a moment, and the electric shock she had felt ... the shock and a flush that seemed to warm her entire body.
She remembers thinking of all these things as she pulled on her nightgown and went into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She remembers thinking that it would take her a long time to get to sleep that night; because there was so much to think about ... and to think about in a good way, because they seemed like good kids, like kids you could maybe goof with and maybe even trust a little bit. That would be nice. That would be ... well, like heaven.
And thinking these things, she took her washcloth and leaned over the basin to get some water and the voice
2
came whispering out of the drain:
"Help me...."
Beverly drew back, startled, the dry washcloth dropping onto the floor. She shook her head a little, as if to clear it, and then she bent over the basin again and looked curiously at the drain. The bathroom was at the back of their four-room apartment. She could hear, faintly, some Western program going on the TV. When it was over, her father would probably switch over to a baseball game, or the fights, and then go to sleep in his easy chair.
The wallpaper in here was a hideous pattern of frogs on lily pads. It bulged and swayed over the lumpy plaster beneath. It was watermarked in some places, actually peeling away in others. The tub was rustmarked, the toilet seat cracked. One naked 40-watt bulb jutted from a porcelain socket over the basin. Beverly could remember--vaguely--that there had once been a light fixture, but it had been broken some years ago and never replaced. The floor was covered with linoleum from which the pattern had faded, except for a small patch under the sink.
Not a very cheery room, but Beverly had used it so long that she no longer noticed what it looked like.
The washbasin was also water-stained. The drain was a simple cross-hatched circle about two inches in diameter. There had once been a chrome facing, but that was also long gone. A rubber drain-plug on a chain was looped nonchalantly over the faucet marked C. The drainhole was pipe-dark, and as she leaned over it, she noticed for the first time that there was a faint, unpleasant smell--a slightly fishy smell--coming from the drain. She wrinkled her nose a little in disgust.
"Help me--"
She gasped. It was a voice. She had thought perhaps a rattle in the pipes ... or maybe just her imagination ... some holdover from those movies....
"Help me, Beverly...."
Alternate waves of coldness and warmth swept her. She had taken the rubber band out of her hair, which lay spread across her shoulders in a bright cascade. She could feel the roots trying to stiffen.
Unaware that she meant to speak, she bent over the basin again and half-whispered, "Hello? Is someone there?" The voice from the drain had been that of a very young child who had perhaps just learned to talk. And in spite of the gooseflesh on her arms, her mind searched for some rational explanation. It was an apartment house. The Marshes lived in the back apartment on the ground floor. There were four other apartments. Maybe there was a kid in the building amusing himself by calling into the drain. And some trick of sound ...
"Is someone there?" she asked the drain in the bathroom, louder this time. It suddenly occurred to her that if her father happened to come in just now he would think her crazy.
There was no answer from the drain, but that unpleasant smell seemed stronger. It made her think of the bamboo patch in the Barrens, and the dump beyond it; it called up images of slow, bitter smokes and black mud that wanted to suck the shoes off your feet.
There were no really little kids in the building, that was the thing. The Tremonts had had a boy who was five, and girls who were three and six months, but Mr. Tremont had lost his job at the shoe shop on Tracker Avenue, they got behind on the rent, and one day not long before school let out they had all just disappeared in Mr. Tremont's rusty old Power-Flite Buick. There was Skipper Bolton in the front apartment on the second floor, but Skipper was fourteen.
"We all want to meet you, Beverly. . . ."
Her hand went to her mouth and her eyes widened in horror. For a moment ... just for a moment ... she believed she had seen something moving down there. She was suddenly aware that her hair was now hanging over her shoulders in two thick sheaves, and that they dangled close--very close--to that drainhole. Some clear instinct made her straighten up quick and get her hair away from there.
She looked around. The bathroom door was firmly closed. She could hear the TV faintly, Cheyenne Bodie warning the bad guy to put the gun down before someone got hurt. She was alone. Except, of course, for that voice.
"Who are you?" she called into the basin, pitching her voice low.
"Matthew Clements," the voice whispered. "The clown took me down here in the pipes and I died and pretty soon he'll come and take you, Beverly, and Ben Hanscom, and Bill Denbrough and Eddie--"
Her hands flew to her cheeks and clutched them. Her eyes widened, widened, widened. She felt her body growing cold. Now the voice sounded choked and ancient ... and still it crawled with corrupted glee.
"You'll float down here with your friends, Beverly, we all float down here, tell Bill that Georgie says hello, tell Bill that Georgie misses him but he'll see him soon, tell him Georgie will be in the closet some night with a piece of piano wire to stick in his eye, tell him--"
The voice broke up in a series of choking hiccups and suddenly a bright red bubble backed up the drain and popped, spraying beads of blood on the distained porcelain.
The choking voice spoke rapidly now, and as it spoke it changed: now it was the young voice of the child that she had first heard, now it was a teenaged girl's voice, now--horribly--it became the voice of a girl Beverly had known ... Veronica Grogan. But Veronica was dead, she had been found dead in a sewer-drain--
"I'm Matthew . . . I'm Betty . . . I'm Veronica . . . we're down here . . . down here with the clown . . . and the creature . . . and the mummy . . . and the werewolf . . . and you, Beverly, we're down here with you, and we float, we change . . ."
A gout of blood suddenly belched from the drain, splattering the sink and the mirror and the wallpaper with its frogs-and-lilypads pattern. Beverly screamed, suddenly and piercingly. She backed away from the sink, struck the door, rebounded, clawed it open, and ran for the living room, where her father was just getting to his feet.
"What the Sam Hill's wrong with you?" he asked, his brows drawing together. The two of them were here alone this evening, Bev's mom was working the three-to-eleven shift at Green's Farm, Derry's best restaurant.
"The bathroom!" she cried hysterically. "The bathroom, Daddy, in the bathroom--"
"Was someone peekin at you, Beverly? Huh?" His arm shot out and his hand gripped her arm hard, sinking into the flesh. There was concern on his face but it was a predatory concern, somehow more frightening than comforting.
"No . . . the sink . . . in the sink . . . the ... the . . ." She burst into hysterical tears before she could say anything more. Her heart was thundering so h
ard in her chest that she thought it would choke her.
Al Marsh thrust her aside with an "O Jesus-Christ-what-next" expression on his face and went into the bathroom. He was in there so long that Beverly became afraid again.
Then he bawled: "Beverly! You come here, girl!"
There was no question of not going. If the two of them had been standing on the edge of a high cliff and he had told her to step off--right now, girl--her instinctive obedience would almost certainly have carried her over the edge before her rational mind could have intervened.
The bathroom door was open. There her father stood, a big man who was now losing the auburn hair he had passed on to Beverly. He was still wearing his gray fatigue pants and his gray shirt (he was a janitor at the Derry Home Hospital), and he was looking hard at Beverly. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not chase after women. I got all the women I need at home, he said on occasion, and when he said it a peculiar secretive smile would cross his face--it did not brighten it but did quite the opposite. Watching that smile was like watching the shadow of a cloud travel rapidly across a rocky field. They take care of me, and when they need it, I take care of them.
"Now just what the Sam Hill is this foolishness all about?" he asked as she came in.
Beverly felt as if her throat had been lined with slate. Her heart raced in her chest. She thought that she might vomit soon. There was blood on the mirror, running in long drips. There were spots of blood on the light over the sink; she could smell it cooking onto the 40-watt bulb. Blood ran down the porcelain sides of the sink and plopped in fat drops on the linoleum floor.
"Daddy ..." she whispered huskily.
He turned, disgusted with her (as he was so often), and began casually to wash his hands in the bloody sink. "Good God, girl. Speak up. You scared hell out of me. Explain yourself, for Lord's sake."
He was washing his hands in the basin, she could see blood staining the gray fabric of his pants where they rubbed against the lip of the sink, and if his forehead touched the mirror (it was close) it would be on his skin. She made a choked noise in her throat.
