It (66 page)

Ben went scarlet again. “You weren't cheating,” he mumbled, and abruptly gulped down half of his coffee frappe in three monster swallows. This was followed by a burp as loud as a shotgun blast.

“Get any on you, Daddy-o?” Eddie asked, and Beverly laughed helplessly, holding her stomach.

“No more,” she giggled. “My stomach hurts. Please, no more.”

Ben was smiling. That night, before sleep, he would play the moment when she had kissed him over and over again in his mind.

“Are you really okay now?” he asked.

She nodded. “It wasn't
him.
It really wasn't even what he said about my mother. It was something that happened last night.” She hesitated, looking from Ben to Eddie and back to Ben again. “I . . . I have to tell somebody. Or show somebody. Or something. I guess I cried because I've been scared I'm going looneytunes.”

“What are you talking about, looneytunes?” a new voice asked.

It was Stanley Uris. As always he looked small, slim, and preternaturally neat—much too neat for a kid who was just barely eleven. In his white shirt, neatly tucked into his fresh jeans all the way around, his hair combed, the toes of his high-top Keds spotlessly clean, he looked instead like the world's smallest adult. Then he smiled, and the illusion was broken.

She won't say whatever she was going to say,
Eddie thought,
because he wasn't there when Bradley called her mother that name.

But after a moment's hesitation, Beverly did tell. Because somehow Stanley was different from Bradley—he was
there
in a way Bradley had not been.

Stanley's one of us,
Beverly thought, and wondered why that should cause her arms to suddenly break out in bumps.
I'm not doing any of them any favors by telling,
she thought.
Not them, and not me, neither.

But it was too late. She was already speaking. Stan sat down with them, his face still and grave. Eddie offered him the last of the strawberry frappe and Stan only shook his head, his eyes never leaving Beverly's face. None of the boys spoke.

She told them about the voices. About recognizing Ronnie Grogan's voice. She knew Ronnie was dead, but it was her voice all the same. She told them about the blood, and how her father had not seen it or felt it, and how her mother had not seen it this morning.

When she finished, she looked around at their faces, afraid of what she might see there . . . but she saw no disbelief. Terror, but no disbelief.

Finally Ben said, “Let's go look.”

They went in by the back door, not just because that was the lock Bev's key fitted but because she said her father would kill her if Mrs. Bolton saw her going into the apartment with three boys while her folks were gone.

“Why?” Eddie asked.

“You wouldn't understand, numbnuts,” Stan said. “Just be quiet.”

Eddie started to reply, looked again at Stan's white, strained face and decided to keep his mouth shut.

The door gave on the kitchen, which was full of late-afternoon sun and summer silence. The breakfast dishes sparkled in the drainer. The four of them stood by the kitchen table, bunched up, and when a door slammed upstairs, they all jumped and then laughed nervously.

“Where is it?” Ben asked. He was whispering.

Her heart thudding in her temples, Beverly led them down the little hall with her parents' bedroom on one side and the closed bathroom door at the end. She pulled it open, stepped quickly inside, and pulled the chain over the sink. Then she stepped back between Ben and Eddie again. The blood had dried to maroon smears on the mirror
and the basin and the wallpaper. She looked at the blood because it was suddenly easier to look at that than at them.

In a small voice she could hardly recognize as her own, she asked: “Do you see it? Do
any
of you see it? Is it there?”

Ben stepped forward, and she was again struck by how delicately he moved for such a fat boy. He touched one of the smears of blood; then a second; then a long drip on the mirror. “Here. Here. Here.” His voice was flat and authoritative.

“Jeepers! It looks like somebody killed a pig in here,” Stan said, softly awed.

“It all came out of the drain?” Eddie asked. The sight of the blood made him feel ill. His breath was shortening. He clutched at his aspirator.

Beverly had to struggle to keep from bursting into fresh tears. She didn't want to do that; she was afraid if she did they would dismiss her as just another girl. But she had to clutch for the doorknob as relief washed through her in a wave of frightening strength. Until that moment she hadn't realized how sure she was that she was going crazy, having hallucinations, something.

“And your mom and dad never saw it,” Ben marvelled. He touched a splotch of blood which had dried on the basin and then pulled his hand away and wiped it on the tail of his shirt. “Jeepers-creepers.”

“I don't know how I can ever come in here again,” Beverly said. “Not to wash up or brush my teeth or . . . you know.”

“Well, why don't we clean the place up?” Stanley asked suddenly.

Beverly looked at him. “Clean it?”

“Sure. Maybe we couldn't get all of it off the wallpaper—it looks sorta, you know, on its last legs—but we could get the rest. Haven't you got some rags?”

“Under the kitchen sink,” Beverly said. “But my mom'll wonder where they went if we use them.”

“I've got fifty cents,” Stan said quietly. His eyes never left the blood that had spattered the area of the bathroom around the washbasin. “We'll clean up as good as we can, then take the rags down to that coin-op laundry place back the way we came. We'll wash them and dry them and they'll all be back under the sink before your folks get home.”

“My mother says you can't get blood out of cloth,” Eddie objected. “She says it sets in, or something.”

Ben uttered a hysterical little giggle. “Doesn't matter if it comes out of the rags or not,” he said.
“They
can't see it.”

No one had to ask him who he meant by “they.”

“All right,” Beverly said. “Let's try it.”

For the next half hour, the four of them cleaned like grim elves, and as the blood disappeared from the walls and the mirror and the porcelain basin, Beverly felt her heart grow lighter and lighter. Ben and Eddie did the sink and mirror while she scrubbed the floor. Stan worked on the wallpaper with studious care, using a rag that was almost dry. In the end, they got almost all of it. Ben finished by removing the light-bulb over the sink and replacing it with one from the box of bulbs in the pantry. There were plenty: Elfrida Marsh had bought a two-year supply from the Derry Lions during their annual light-bulb sale the fall before.

They used Elfrida's floorbucket, her Ajax, and plenty of hot water. They dumped the water frequently because none of them liked to have their hands in it once it had turned pink.

At last Stanley backed away, looked at the bathroom with the critical eye of a boy in whom neatness and order are not simply ingrained but actually innate, and told them: “It's the best we can do, I think.”

There were still faint traces of blood on the wallpaper to the left of the sink, where the paper was so thin and ragged that Stanley had dared do no more than blot it gently. Yet even here the blood had been sapped of its former ominous strength; it was little more than a meaningless pastel smear.

“Thank you,” Beverly said to all of them. She could not remember ever having meant thanks so deeply. “Thank you all.”

“It's okay,” Ben mumbled. He was of course blushing again.

“Sure,” Eddie agreed.

“Let's get these rags done,” Stanley said. His face was set, almost stern. And later Beverly would think that perhaps only Stan realized
that they had taken another step toward some unthinkable confrontation.

They measured out a cup of Mrs. Marsh's Tide and put it in an empty mayonnaise jar. Bev found a paper shopping bag to put the bloody rags in, and the four of them went down to the Kleen-Kloze Washateria on the corner of Main and Cony Streets. Two blocks farther up they could see the Canal gleaming a bright blue in the afternoon sun.

The Kleen-Kloze was empty except for a woman in a white nurse's uniform who was waiting for her dryer to stop. She glanced at the four kids distrustfully and then went back to her paperback of
Peyton Place.

“Cold water,” Ben said in a low voice. “My mom says you gotta wash blood in cold water.”

They dumped the rags into the washer while Stan changed his two quarters for four dimes and two nickels. He came back and watched as Bev dumped the Tide over the rags and swung the washer's door closed. Then he plugged two dimes into the coin-op slot and twisted the start knob.

Beverly had chipped in most of the pennies she had won at pitch for the frappes, but she found four survivors deep down in the lefthand pocket of her jeans. She fished them out and offered them to Stan, who looked pained. “Jeez,” he said, “I take a girl on a laundry date and right away she wants to go Dutch.”

Beverly laughed a little. “You sure?”

“I'm sure,” Stan said in his dry way. “I mean, it's really breaking my heart to give up those four pence, Beverly, but I'm sure.”

The four of them went over to the line of plastic contour chairs against the Washateria's cinderblock wall and sat there, not talking. The Maytag with the rags in it chugged and sloshed. Fans of suds slobbered against the thick glass of its round porthole. At first the suds were reddish. Looking at them made Bev feel a little sick, but she found it was hard to look away. The bloody foam had a gruesome sort of fascination. The lady in the nurse's uniform glanced at them more and more often over the top of her book. She had perhaps been
afraid they would be rowdy; now their very silence seemed to unnerve her. When her dryer stopped she took her clothes out, folded them, put them into a blue plastic laundry-bag and left, giving them one last puzzled look as she went out the door.

As soon as she was gone, Ben said abruptly, almost harshly: “You're not alone.”

“What?” Beverly asked.

“You're not alone,” Ben repeated. “You see—”

He stopped and looked at Eddie, who nodded. He looked at Stan, who looked unhappy . . . but who, after a moment, shrugged and also nodded.

“What in the world are you talking about?” Beverly asked. She was tired of people saying inexplicable things to her today. She gripped Ben's lower arm. “If you know something about this, tell me!”

“Do you want to do it?” Ben asked Eddie.

Eddie shook his head. He took his aspirator out of his pocket and sucked in on it with a monstrous gasp.

Speaking slowly, picking his words, Ben told Beverly how he had happened to meet Bill Denbrough and Eddie Kaspbrak in the Barrens on the day school let out—that was almost a week ago, as hard as that was to believe. He told her about how they had built the dam in the Barrens the following day. He told Bill's story of how the school photograph of his dead brother had turned its head and winked. He told his own story of the mummy who had walked on the icy Canal in the dead heart of winter with balloons that floated against the wind. Beverly listened to all this with growing horror. She could feel her eyes widening, her hands and feet growing cold.

Ben stopped and looked at Eddie. Eddie took another wheezing pull on his aspirator and then told the story of the leper again, speaking as rapidly as Ben had slowly, his words tumbling over one another in their urgency to escape and be gone. He finished with a sucking little half-sob, but this time he didn't cry.

“And you?” she asked, looking at Stan Uris.

“I—”

There was sudden silence, making them all start the way a sudden explosion might have done.

“The wash is done,” Stan said.

They watched him get up—small, economical, graceful—and
open the washer. He pulled out the rags, which were stuck together in a clump, and examined them.

“There's a little stain left,” he said, “but it's not too bad. Looks like it could be cranberry juice.”

He showed them, and they all nodded gravely, as if over important documents. Beverly felt a relief that was similar to the relief she had felt when the bathroom was clean again. She could stand the faded pastel smear on the peeling wallpaper in there, and she could stand the faint reddish stain on her mother's cleaning rags. They had
done
something about it, that seemed to be the important thing. Maybe it hadn't worked completely, but she discovered it had worked well enough to give her heart peace, and brother, that was good enough for Al Marsh's daughter Beverly.

Stan tossed them into one of the barrel-shaped dryers and put in two nickels. The dryer started to turn, and Stan came back and took his seat between Eddie and Ben.

For a moment the four of them sat silent again, watching the rags turn and fall, turn and fall. The drone of the gas-fired dryer was soothing, almost soporific. A woman passed by the chocked-open door, wheeling a cart of groceries. She glanced in at them and passed on.

“I did see something,” Stan said suddenly. “I didn't want to talk about it, because I wanted to think it was a dream or something. Maybe even a fit, like that Stavier kid has. Any you guys know that kid?”

Ben and Bev shook their heads. Eddie said, “The kid who's got epilepsy?”

“Yeah, right. That's how bad it was. I would have rather thought I had something like that than that I saw something . . . really real.”

“What was it?” Bev asked, but she wasn't sure she really wanted to know. This was not like listening to ghost-stories around a campfire while you ate wieners in toasted buns and cooked marshmallows over the flames until they were black and crinkly. Here they sat in this stifling laundromat and she could see great big dust kitties under the washing machines (ghost-turds, her father called them), she could see dust-motes dancing in the hot shafts of sunlight which fell through the laundromat's dirty plate-glass window, she could see old magazines with their covers torn off. These were all normal
things. Nice and normal and boring. But she was scared. Terribly scared. Because, she sensed, none of these things were made-up stories, made-up monsters: Ben's mummy, Eddie's leper . . . either or both of them might be out tonight when the sun went down. Or Bill Denbrough's brother, one-armed and implacable, cruising through the black drains under the city with silver coins for eyes.