“I’m at a Seven-Eleven on the comer of S trey land Avenue and some other street. I… Kay, I’ve left Tom.”
Kay, quick and emphatic and excited: “Good! Finally! Hurray! I’ll come and gel you! That son of a bitch! That piece of shit! I’ll come and get you in the fucking Mercedes! I’ll hire a forty-piece band! I’ll-”
“I’ll take a cab,” Bev said, holding the other two dimes in one sweating palm. In the round mirror at the back of the store she could see the pimply clerk staring at her ass with deep and dreamy concentration. “But you’ll have to pay the tab when I get there. I don’t have any money. Not a cent.”
“I’ll tip the bastard five bucks,” Kay cried. “This is the best fucking news since Nixon resigned! You get your buns over here, girl. And-” She paused and when she spoke again her voice was serious and so full of kindness and love that Beverly felt she might weep. “Thank God you finally did it, Bev. I mean that. Thank God.”
Kay McCall is a former designer who married rich, divorced richer, and discovered feminist politics in 1972, about three years before Beverly first met her. At the time Of her greatest popularity/controversy she was accused of having embraced feminism after using archaic, chauvinistic laws to take her manufacturer husband for every cent the law would allow her.
“Bullshit!” Kay had once exclaimed to Beverly. “The people who say that stuff never had to go to bed with Sam Chacowicz. Two pumps a tickle and a squirt, that was ole Sammy’s motto. The only time he could keep it up for longer than seventy seconds was when he was pulling off in the tub. I didn’t cheat him; I just took my combat pay retroactively.”
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 automatic… 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 Ben’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 with 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 greenly 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, 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 honor 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 pan 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 wash-basin 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 drain-hole 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.
