It

He glanced behind and saw the library half a block away. Richie and Eddie were on the top step; Ben was standing at the bottom, looking after them. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, his shoulders were slumped, and seen through the drifting lens of the low fog, he might almost have been eleven again. If he had been able to send Ben a thought, Bill would have sent this one: It doesn't matter, Ben. The love is what matters, the caring . . . it's always the desire, never the time. Maybe that's all we get to take with us when we go out of the blue and into the black. Cold comfort, maybe, but better than no comfort at all.

'My father knew,' Beverly said suddenly. 'I came home one day from the Barrens and he just knew. Did I ever tell you what he used to say to me when he was mad?'

'What?'

'"I worry about you, Bevvie." That's what he used to say. "I worry a lot. "' She laughed and shivered at the same time. 'I think he meant to hurt me, Bill. I mean . . . he'd hurt me before, but that last time was different. He was . . . well, in many ways he was a strange man. I loved him. I loved him very much, but — '

She looked at him, perhaps wanting him to say it for her. He wouldn't; it was something she was going to have to say for herself, sooner or later. Lies and self-deceptions had become a ballast they could not afford.

'I hated him, too,' she said, and her hand bore down convulsively upon Bill's for a long second. 'I never told that to anyone in my life before. I thought God would strike me dead if I ever said it out loud.'

'Say it again, then.'

'No, I– '

'Go on. It'll hurt, but maybe it's festered in there long enough. Say it.'

'I hated my dad,' she said, and began to sob helplessly. 'I hated him, I was scared of him, I hated him, I could never be a good enough girl to suit him and I hated him, I did, but I loved him, too.'

He stopped and held her tight. Her arms went around him in a panicky grip. Her tears wet the side of his neck. He was very conscious of her body, ripe and firm. He moved his torso away from hers slightly, not wanting her to feel the erection he was getting . . . but she moved against him again.

'We'd spent the morning down there,' she said, 'playing tag or something like that. Something harmless. We hadn't even talked about It that day, at least not then . . . we usually talked about It every day, at some point, though. Remember?'

'Yes,' he said. 'At some p-p-point. I remember.'

'It was overcast . . . hot. We played most of the morning. I went home around eleven-thirty. I thought I'd have a sandwich and a bowl of soup after I took a shower. And then I'd go back and play some more. My parents were both working. But he was there. He was home. He

2

Lower Main Street / 11:30 A.M.

threw her across the room before she had even gotten all th e way through the door. A startled scream was jerked out of her and then cut off as she hit the wall with shoulder-numbing force. She collapsed onto their sagging sofa, looking around wildly. The door to the front hall banged shut. Her father had been standing behind it.

'I worry about you, Bevvie,' he said. 'Sometimes I worry a lot. You know that. I tell you that, don't I? You bet I do.'

'Daddy what — '

He was walking slowly toward her across the living room, his face thoughtful, sad, deadly. She didn't want to see that last, but it was there, like the blind shine of dirt on still water. He was nibbling reflectively on a knuckle of his right hand. He was dressed in his khakis, and when she glanced down she saw that his high-topped shoes were le aving tracks on her mother's carpet. I'll have to get the vacuum out, she thought incoherently. Vacuum that up. If he leaves me able to vacuum. If he —

It was mud .Black mud. Her mind sideslipped alarmingly. She was back in the Barrens with Bill, Richie, Eddie, and the others. There was black, viscous mud like the kind on Daddy's shoes down there in the Barrens, in the swampy place where the stuff Richie called bamboo stood in a skeletal white grove. When the wind blew the stalks rattled together hollo wly, producing a sound like voodoo drums, and had her father been down in the Barrens? Had her father —

WHAP!

His hand rocketed down in a wide sweeping orbit and struck her face. Her head thudded back against the wall. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked at her with that expression of deadly disconnected curiosity. She felt a trickle of blood running warmly from the left corner of her lower lip.

'I have seen you getting big,' he said, and she thought he would say something more, but for the time being that seemed to be all.

'Daddy, what are you talking about?' she asked in a low trembling voice.

'If you lie to me, I'll beat you within an inch of your life, Bevvie,' he said, and she realized with horror that he wasn't looking at her; he was looking at the Currier and Ives picture over her head, on the wall above the sofa. Her mind sideslipped crazily again and she was four, sitting in the bathtub with her blue plastic boat and her Popeye soap; her father, so big and so well-loved, was kneeling beside her, dressed in gray twill pants and a strappy tee-shirt, a washcloth in one hand and a glass of orange soda in the other, soaping her back and saying, Lemme see those ears, Bevvie; your ma needs taters for supper. And she could hear her small self giggling, looking up at his slightly grizzled face, which she had then believed must be eternal.

'I . . . I won't lie, Daddy,' she said. 'What's wrong?' Her view of him was gradually shivering apart as the tears came.

'You been down there in the Bar'ns with a gang of boys?'

Her heart leaped; her eyes dropped to his mud-caked shoes again. That black, clingy mud. If you stepped into it too deep it would suck your sneaker or your loafer right off . . . and both Richie and Bill believe d that, if you went in all the way, it turned to quickmud.

'I play down there somet — '

Whap! the hand, covered with hard calluses, rocketing down again. She cried out hurt, afraid. That look on his face scared her, and the way he wouldn't look at her scared her, too. There was something wrong with him. He had been getting worse . . . What if he meant to kill her? What if

(oh stop it Beverly he's your FATHER and FATHERS don't kill DAUGHTERS)

he lost control, then? What if —

'What have you let them do to you?'

'Do? What — ' She had no idea what he meant.

'Take your pants off.'

Her confusion increased. Nothing he said seemed connected to anything else. Trying to follow him made her feel . . . seasick, almost.

'What . . . why . . . ?'

His hand rose; she flinched back. 'Take them off, Bevvie. I want to see if you are intact.'

Now there was a new image, crazier than the rest: she saw herself pulling her jeans off, and one of her legs coming off with them. Her father belting her around the room as she tried to hop away from him on her one good leg, Daddy shouting: I knew you wasn't intact! I knew it!I knew it!

'Daddy, I don't know what — '

His hand came down, not slapping this time but clutching. It bit into her shoulder with furious strength. She screamed. He pulled her up, and for the first time looked directly into her eyes. She screamed again at what she saw there. It was . . . nothing. Her father was gone. And Beverly suddenly understood that she was alone in the apartment with It, alone with It on this dozey August morning. There was not the thick sense of power and untinctured evil she had felt in the house on Neibolt Street a week and a half ago — It had been diluted somehow by her father's essential humanity — but It was here, working through him.