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.
'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.