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.