'You're a pretty girl,' he said. 'There's plenty of people happy to roon a pretty girl. Plenty of pretty girls willing to be roont. You been a slutchild to them boys, Bevvie?'
At last she understood what It had put in his head . . . except part of her knew the thought might almost have been there all along; that It might only have used the tools that had been there just lying around, waiting to be picked up.
'No Daddy. No Daddy - '
'I seen you smoking!' he bellowed. This time he struck her with the palm of his hand, hard enough to send her reeling back in drunken strides to the kitchen table where she sprawled, a flare of agony in the small of her back. The salt and pepper shakers fell to the floor. The pepper shaker broke. Black flowers bloomed and disappeared before her eyes. Sounds seemed too deep. She saw his face. Something in his face. He was looking at her chest. She was suddenly aware that her blouse had come untucked, that some of the buttons had popped off, and that she wasn't wearing a bra . . . as of yet, she owned only one, a training bra. Her mind sideslipped back to the house at Neibolt Street, when Bill had given her his shirt. She had been aware of the way her breasts poked at the thin cotton material, but their occasional, skittering glances had not bothered her; these had seemed perfectly natural. And Bill's look had seemed more than natural - it had seemed warm and wanted, if deeply dangerous.
Now she felt guilt mix with her terror. Was her father so wrong? Hadn't she had
(you been a slutchild to them)
thoughts? Bad thoughts? Thoughts of whatever it was that he was talking about?
It's not the same thing! It's not the same thing as the way
(you been a slutchild)
he's looking at me now! Not the same!
She tucked her blouse back in.
'Bevvie?'
'Daddy, we just play, that's all. We play . . . We . . . we don't do anything like . . . anything bad. We - '
'I seen you smoking,' he said again, walking toward her. His eyes moved across her chest and her narrow uncurved hips. He chanted suddenly, in a high schoolboy's voice that frightened her even more: 'A girl who will chew gum will smoke! A girl who will smoke will drink! And a girl who will drink, everyone knows what a girl like that will do!'
'I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING!' she screamed at him as his hands descended on her shoulders. He was not pinching or hurting now. His hands were gentle. And that was somehow scariest of all.
'Beverly,' he said with the inarguable, mad logic of the totally obsessed, 'I seen you with boys. Now you want to tell me what a girl does with boys down in all that trashwood if it ain't what a girl does on her back?'
'Let me alone!' she cried at him. The anger flashed up from a deep well she had never suspected. The anger made a bluish-yellow flame in her head. It threatened her thoughts. All the times he had scared her; all the times he had shamed her; all the times he had hurt her. 'You just let me alone!'
'Don't talk to your daddy like that,' he said, sounding startled.
'I didn't do what you're saying! I never did!'
'Maybe. Maybe not. I'm going to check and make sure. I know how. Take your pants off.'
'No.'
His eyes widened, showing yellowed cornea all the way around the deep blue irises. 'What did you say?'
'I said no.' His eyes were fixed on hers and perhaps he saw the blazing anger there, the bright upsurge of rebellion. 'Who told you?'
'Bevvie - '
'Who told you we play down there? Was it a stranger? Was it a man dressed in orange and silver? Did he wear gloves? Did he look like a clown even if he wasn't a clown? What was his name?'
'Bevvie, you want to stop - '
'No: you want to stop,' she told him.
He swung his hand again, not open but this time closed in a fist meant to break something. Beverly ducked. His fist whistled over her head and crashed into the wall. He howled and let go of her, putting the fist to his mouth. She backed away from him in quick mincing steps.
'You come back here!'
'No,' she said. 'You want to hurt me. I love you, Daddy, but I hate you when you're like this. You can't do it anymore. It's making you do it, but you let It in.'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' he said, 'but you better get over here to me. I am not going to ask you no more.'
'No,' she said, beginning to cry again.
'Don't make me come over there and collect you, Bevvie. You're going to be one sorry little girl if I have to do that. Come to me.'
'Tell me who told you,' she said, 'and I will.'
He leaped at her with such scrawny, catlike agility that, although she suspected such a leap was coming, she was almost caught. She fumbled for the kitchen doorknob, pulled the door open just wide enough so she could slip though, and then she was running down the hall toward the front door, running in a dream of panic, as she would run from Mrs Kersh twenty-seven years later. Behind her, Al Marsh crashed against the door, slamming it shut again, cracking it down the center.
'YOU GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW BEVVIE!' he howled, yanking it open and coming after her.
The front door was on the latch; she had come home the back way. One of her trembling hands worked at the lock while the other yanked fruitlessly at the knob. Behind, her father howled again; the sound of an
(take those pants off slutchild)
animal. She turned the lock-knob and the front door finally swept open. Hot breath plunged up and down in her throat. She looked over her shoulder and saw him right behind her, reaching for her, grinning and grimacing, his horsey yellow teeth a beartrap in his mouth.
Beverly bolted out through the screen door and felt his fingers skid down the back of her blouse without catching hold. She flew down the steps, overbalanced, and went sprawling on the concrete walkway, erasing the skin from both knees.
'YOU GET BACK HERE NOW BEVVIE OR BEFORE GOD I'LL WHIP THE SKIN OFF YOU!'
He came down the steps and she scrambled to her feet, holes in the legs of her jeans,
(your pants off)
her kneecaps sizzling blood, exposed nerve-endings singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' She looked back and here he came again, Al Marsh, janitor and custodian, a gray man dressed in khaki pants and a khaki shirt with two flap pockets, a keyring attached to his belt by a chain, his hair flying. But he wasn't in his eyes - the essential he who had washed her back and punched her in the gut and had done both because he worried about her, worried a lot, the he who had once tried to braid her hair when she was seven, made a botch of it, and then got giggling with her about the way it stuck out everyway, the he who knew how to make cinnamon eggnogs on Sunday that tasted better than anything you could buy for a quarter at the Derry Ice Cream Bar, the father-he, maleman of her life, delivering a mixed post from that other sexual state. None of that was in his eyes now. She saw blank murder there. She saw It there.
She ran. She ran from It.
Mr Pasquale looked up, startled, from where he was watering his crab-grassy lawn and listening to the Red Sox game on a portable radio sitting on his porch rail. The Zinnerman kids stood back from the old Hudson Hornet which they had bought for twenty-five dollars and washed almost every day. One of them was holding a hose, the other a bucket of soapsuds. Both were slack-jawed. Mrs Denton looked out of her second-floor apartment, one of her six daughters' dresses in her lap, more mending in a basket on the floor, her mouth full of pins. Little Lars Theramenius pulled his Red Ball Flyer wagon quickly off the cracked sidewalk and stood on Bucky Pasquale's dying lawn. He burst into tears as Bevvie, who had spent a patient morning that spring showing him how to tie his sneakers so they would stay tied, flashed by him, screaming, her eyes wide. A moment later her father passed, hollering at her, and Lars, who was then three and who would die twelve years later in a motorcycle accident, saw something terrible and inhuman in Mr Marsh's face. He had nightmares for three weeks after. In them he saw Mr Marsh turning into a spider inside his clothes.