It

“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-lily-pads 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 hard 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 red-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.

He turned off the water, grabbed a towel on which two fans of blood from the drain had splashed, and began to dry his hands. She watched, near swooning, as he grimed blood into his big knuckles and the lines of his palms. She could see blood under his fingernails like marks of guilt.

“Well? I’m waiting.” He tossed the bloody towel back over the rod.

There was blood… blood everywhere… and her father didn’t see it.

“Daddy-” She had no idea what might have come next, but her father interrupted her.

“I worry about you,” Al Marsh said. “I don’t think you’re ever going to grow up, Beverly. You go out running around, you don’t do hardly any of the housework around here, you can’t cook, you can’t sew. Half the time you’re off on a cloud someplace with your nose stuck in a book and the other half you’ve got vapors and megrims. I worry.”

His hand suddenly swung and spatted painfully against her buttocks. She uttered a cry, her eyes fixed on his. There was a tiny stipple of blood caught in his bushy right eyebrow. If I look at that long enough I’ll just go crazy and none of this will matter, she thought dimly.

“I worry a lot,” he said, and hit her again, harder, on the arm above the elbow. That arm cried out and then seemed to go to sleep. She would have a spreading yellowish-purple bruise there the next day.

“An awful lot,” he said, and punched her in the stomach. He pulled the punch at the last second, and Beverly lost only half of her air. She doubled over, gasping, tears starting in her eyes. Her father looked at her impassively. He shoved his bloody hands in the pockets of his trousers.

“You got to grow up, Beverly,” he said, and now his voice was kind and forgiving. “Isn’t that so?”

She nodded. Her head throbbed. She cried, but silently. If she sobbed aloud-started what her father called “that baby whining “-he might go to work on her in earnest. Al Marsh had lived his entire life in Derry and told people who asked (and sometimes those who did not) that he intended to be buried here-hopefully at the age of one hundred and ten. “No reason why I shouldn’t live forever,” he sometimes told Roger Aurlette, who cut his hair once each month. “I have no vices.”

“Now explain yourself,” he said, “and make it quick.”

“There was-” She swallowed and it hurt because there was no moisture in her throat, none at all. “There was a spider. A big fat black spider. It… it crawled out of the drain and I… I guess it crawled back down.”

“Oh” He smiled a little at her now, as if pleased by this explanation. “Was that it? Damn! If you’d told me, Beverly, I never would have hit you. All girls are scared of spiders. Sam Hill! Why didn’t you speak up?”

He bent over the drain and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out a warning… and some other voice spoke deep inside her, some terrible voice which could not have been a part of her; surely it was the voice of the devil himself: Let it get him, if it wants him. Let it pull him down. Good-fucking-riddance.

She turned away from that voice in horror. To allow such a thought to stay for even a moment in her head would surely damn her to hell.

He peered into the eye of the drain. His hands squelched in the blood on the rim of the basin. Beverly fought grimly with her gorge. Her belly ached where her dad had hit her.

“Don’t see a thing,” he said. “All these buildings are old, Bev. Got drains the size of freeways, you know it? When I was janitorin down in the old high school, we used to get drowned rats in the toilet bowls once in awhile. It drove the girls crazy.” He laughed fondly at the thought of such female vapors and megrims. “Mostly when the Kenduskeag was high. Less wildlife in the pipes since they put in the new drain system, though.”

He put an arm around her and hugged her.

“Look. You go to bed and don’t think about it anymore. Okay?”

She felt her love for him. I never hit you when you didn’t deserve it, Beverly, he told her once when she had cried out that some punishment had been unfair. And surely that had to be true, because he was capable of love. Sometimes he would spend a whole day with her, showing her how to do things or just telling her stuff or walking around town with her, and when he was kind like that she thought her heart would swell with happiness until it killed her. She loved him, and tried to understand that he had to correct her often because it was (as he said) his God-given job. Daughters, Al Marsh said, need more correction than sons. He had no sons, and she felt vaguely as if that might be partly her fault as well.

“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I won’t.”

They walked into her small bedroom together. Her right arm now ached fiercely from the blow it had taken. She looked back over her shoulder and saw the bloody sink, bloody mirror, bloody wall, bloody floor. The bloody towel her father had used and then hung casually over the rod. She thought: How can I ever go in there to wash up again? Please God, dear God, I’m sorry if I had a bad thought about my dad and You can punish me for it if You want, I deserve to be punished, make me fall down and hurt myself or make me have the flu like last winter when I coughed so hard once I threw up but please God make the blood be gone in the morning, pretty please, God, okay? Okay?

Her father tucked her in as he always did, and kissed her forehead. Then he only stood there for a moment in what she would always think of as “his” way of standing, perhaps of being: bent