He leaned over and picked up the switchblade.' . . . on,' he wheezed.
'What, Henry?' Belch said anxiously.
Henry turned a face toward him that was so full of sweating pain and sick, blazing hate that Belch fell back a step. 'I said . . . come . . . on!' he managed, and began to stagger and lurch up the street after Beverly, holding his crotch.
'We can't catch her now, Henry,' Victor said uneasily. 'Hell, you can hardly walk.'
'We'll catch her,' Henry panted. His upper lip was rising and falling in an unconscious dog-like sneer. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and ran down his hectic cheeks. 'We'll catch her, all right. Because I know where she's going. She's going down into the Barrens to be with her asshole
5
The Derry Town House / 2:00 A.M.
friends,' Beverly said.
'Hmmm?' Bill looked at her. His thoughts had been far away. They had been walking hand-in-hand, the silence between them companionable, slightly charged with mutual attraction. He had caught only the last word of what she had said. A block ahead, the lights of the Town House shone through the low ground-fog.
'I said, you were my best friends. The only friends I ever had back then.' She smiled. 'Making friends has never been my strong suit, I guess, although I've got a good one back in Chicago. A woman named Kay McCall. I think you'd like her, Bill.'
'Probably would. I've never been real fast to make friends myself.' He smiled. 'Back then, we were all we nuh-nuh-needed.' He saw beads of moisture in her hair, appreciated the way the lights made a nimbus about her head. Her eyes were turned gravely up to his.
'I need something now,' she said.
'W-What's that?'
'I need you to kiss me,' she said.
He thought of Audra, and for the first time it occurred to him that she looked like Beverly. He wondered if maybe that had been the attraction all along, the reason he had been able to find guts enough to ask Audra out near the end of the Hollywood party where they had been introduced. He felt a pang of unhappy guilt . . . and then he took Beverly, his childhood friend, in his arms.
Her kiss was firm and warm and sweet. Her breasts pushed against his open coat and her hips moved against him . . . away . . . and then against him again. When her hips moved away a second tune, he plunged both of his hands into her hair and moved against her. When she felt him growing hard, she uttered a little gasp and put her face against the side of his neck. He felt her tears on his skin, warm and secret.
'Come on,' she said. 'Quick.'
He took her hand and they walked the rest of the way to the Town House. The lobby was old, festooned with plants, and still possessed of a certain fading charm. The decor was very much Nineteenth Century Lumberman. It was deserted at this hour except for the desk clerk, who could be dimly seen in the inner office, his feet cocked up on the desk, watching TV. Bill pushed the third-floor button with a finger that trembled just slightly - excitement? nervousness? guilt? all of the above? Oh yeah sure, and a kind of almost insane joy and fear as well. These feelings did not mix pleasantly, but they seemed necessary. He led her down the hallway toward his room, deciding in some confused way that if he were to be unfaithful, it should be a complete act of infidelity, consummated in his place, not hers. He found himself thinking of Susan Browne, his first book-agent and, at the age of not quite twenty, his first lover.
Cheating. Cheating on my wife. He tried to get this through his head, but it seemed both real and unreal at the same time. What seemed strongest was an unhappy sense of homesickness: an old-fashioned feeling of falling away. Audra would be up by now, making coffee, sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, perhaps studying lines, perhaps reading a Dick Francis novel.
His key rattled in the lock of room 311. If they had gone to Beverly's room on the fifth floor, they would have seen the message-light on her phone blinking; the TV-watching desk clerk would have given her a message to call her friend Kay in Chicago (after Kay's third frantic call, he had finally remembered to post the message), things might have taken a different course: the five of them might not have been fugitives from the Derry police when that day's light finally broke. But they went to his - as things had perhaps, been arranged.
The door opened. They were inside. She looked at him, eyes bright, cheeks flushed, her breast rising and falling rapidly. He took her in his arms and was overwhelmed by the feeling of rightness - the feeling of the circle between past and present closing with a triumphant seamlessness. He kicked the door shut clumsily with one foot and she laughed her warm breath into his mouth.
'My heart - ' She said, and put his hand on her left breast. He could feel it below that firm, almost maddening softness, racing like an engine.
'Your h-h-heart - '
'My heart.'
They were on the bed, still dressed, kissing. Her hand slipped inside his shirt, then out again. She traced a finger down the row of buttons, paused at his waist . . . and then that same finger slipped lower, tracing down the stony thickness of his cock. Muscles he hadn't been aware of jumped and fluttered in his groin. He broke the kiss and moved his body away from hers on the bed.
'Bill?'
'Got to stuh-stuh-stop for a m-m-minute,' he said. 'Or else I'm going to shoot in my p-p-pants like a k-kid.'
She laughed again, softly, and looked at him. 'Is it that? Or are you having second thoughts?'
'Second thoughts,' Bill said. 'I a-a-always have those.'
'I don't. I hate him,' she said.
He looked at her, the smile fading.
'I didn't know it all the way to the top of my mind until tonight,' she said. 'Oh, I knew it - somewhere - all along, I guess. He hits and he hurts. I married him because . . . because my father always worried about me, I guess. No matter how hard I tried, he worried. And I guess I knew he'd approve of Tom. Because Tom would worry, too. He worried a lot. And as long as someone was worrying about me, I'd be safe. More than safe. Real.' She looked at him solemnly. Her blouse had pulled out of the waistband of her slacks, revealing a white stripe of stomach. He wanted to kiss it. 'But it wasn't real. It was a nightmare. Being married to Tom was like going back into the nightmare. Why would a person do that, Bill? Why would a person go back into the nightmare of her own accord?'
Bill said, 'The o-o-only reason I can f-figure is that p-people go back to f-f-find thems-s-selves.'
'The nightmare's here,' Bev said. 'The nightmare is Derry. Tom looks small compared to that. I can see him better now. I loathe myself for the years I spent with him . . . You don't know . . . the things he made me do, and oh, I was happy enough to do them, you know, because he worried about me. I'd cry . . . but sometimes there's too much shame. You know?'
'Don't,' he said quietly, and put his hand over hers. She held it tightly. Her eyes were overbright, but the tears didn't fall. 'Everybody g-g-goofs it. But it's not an eh-eh-exam. You just go through it the b-b-best you can.'
"What I mean,' she said, 'is that I'm not cheating on Tom, or trying to use you to get my own back on him, or anything like that. For me, it would be like something . . . sane and normal and sweet. But I don't want to hurt you, Bill. Or trick you into something you'll be sorry for later.'
He thought about this, thought about it with a real and deep seriousness. But the odd little mnemonic - he thrusts his fists, and so on - had begun to circle back, breaking into his thoughts. It had been a long day. Mike's call and the invitation to lunch at Jade of the Orient seemed a hundred years ago. So many stories since then. So many memories, like photographs from George's album.