It (144 page)

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 believed 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 ill . . . 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.

He threw her aside. She struck the coffee table, tripped over it, and went sprawling on the floor with a cry.
This is how it happens,
she thought.
I'll tell Bill so he understands. It's everywhere in Derry. It just . . . It just fills the hollow places, that's all.

She rolled over. Her father was walking toward her. She skidded away from him on the seat of her jeans, her hair in her eyes.

“I know you been down there,” he said. “I was told. I didn't believe it. I didn't believe my Bevvie would be hanging around with a gang of boys. Then I seen you myself this morning. My Bevvie with a bunch of boys. Not even twelve and hanging around with a bunch of boys!” This latter thought seemed to send him into a fresh rage; it trembled through his scrawny frame like volts.
“Not even twelve years old!”
he shouted, and fetched a kick at her thigh that made her
scream. His jaws snapped over this fact or concept or whatever it was to him like the jaws of a hungry dog worrying a piece of meat.
“Not even twelve! Not even twelve! Not even TWELVE!”

He kicked. Beverly scrambled away. They had worked their way into the kitchen area of the apartment now. His workboot struck the drawer under the stove, making the pots and pans inside jangle.

“Don't you run from me, Bevvie,” he said. “You don't want to do that or it'll be the worse for you. Believe me, now. Believe your dad. This is serious. Hanging around with the boys, letting them do God knows what to you—not even
twelve
—that's serious, Christ knows.” He grabbed her and jerked her to her feet by her shoulder.

“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, 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 yellow horsey 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.

Beverly ran. She was perfectly aware that she might be running for her life. If her father caught her now, it wouldn't matter that they were on the street. People did crazy things in Derry sometimes; she didn't have to read the newspapers or know the town's peculiar history to understand that. If he caught her he would choke her, or beat her, or kick her. And when it was over, someone would come and collect him and he would sit in a cell the way Eddie Corcoran's stepfather was sitting in a cell, dazed and uncomprehending.