It
Stephen King
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, Bewie," 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.
"Bewie?"
"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?"
"Bewie--"
"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?"
"Bewie, 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, Bewie. 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 BEWIE 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, A1 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.
She ran toward downtown, passing more and more people as she went. They stared--first at her, then at her pursuing father--and they looked surprised, some of them even amazed. But what was on their faces went no further. They looked and then they went on toward wherever they had been going. The air circulating in her lungs was growing heavier now.
She crossed the Canal, feet pounding on cement while cars rumbled over the heavy wooden slats of the bridge to her right. To her left she could see the stone semicircle where the Canal went under the downtown area. She cut suddenly across Main Street, oblivious to the honking horns and squealing brakes. She went right because the Barrens lay in that direction. It was still almost a mile away, and if she was to get there she would somehow have to outdistance her father on the gruelling slope of Up-Mile Hill (or one of the even steeper side-streets). But that was all there was.
"COME BACK YOU LITTLE BITCH I'M WARNING YOU!"
As she gained the sidewalk on the far side of the street she snatched another glance behind her, the heavy weight of her red hair shifting over her shoulder as she did. Her father was crossing the street, as heedless of the traffic as she had been, his face a bright sweaty red.
She ducked down an alley that ran behind Warehouse Row. This was the rear of the buildings which fronted on Up-Mile Hill: Star Beef, Armour Meatpacking, Hemphill Storage & Warehousing, Eagle Beef & Kosher Meats. The alley was narrow and cobbled, made narrower still by the bunches of fuming garbage cans and bins set out here. The cobbles were slimy with God knew what offal and ordure. There was a mixture of smells, some bland, some sharp, some simply titanic ... but all spoke of meat and slaughter. Flies buzzed in clouds. From inside some of the buildings she could hear the blood-curdling whine of bone-saws. Her feet stuttered unevenly on the slick cobbles. One hip struck a galvanized garbage can and packages of tripe wrapped in newspaper fell out like great meaty jungle blossoms.
"YOU GET RIGHT THE HELL BACK HERE BEWIE! I MEAN IT NOW! DON'T MAKE IT ANY WORSE THAN IT ALREADY IS GIRL!"
Two men lounged in the loading doorway of the Kirshner Packing Works, munching thick sandwiches, open dinner-buckets near at hand. "You in a woeful place, girl," one of them said mildly. "Looks like you goin in the woodshed with your pa." The other laughed.
He was gaining. She could hear his thundering footfalls and heavy respiration almost behind her now; looking to her right she could see the black wing of his shadow flying along the high board fence there.
Then he yelled in surprise and fury as his feet slipped out from under him and he thumped to the cobblestones. He was up a moment later, no longer bellowing words but only shrieking out his incoherent fury while the men in the doorway laughed and slapped each other on the back.
The alley zigged to the left ... and Beverly came to a skittering halt, her mouth opening in dismay. A city dumpster was parked across the alley's mouth. There was not even nine inches of clearance on either side. Its motor was idling. Under that sound, barely audible, she could hear the murmur of conversation from the dumpster's cab. More men on lunch-break. It lacked no more than three or four minutes of noon; soon the courthouse clock would begin to chime the hour.
She could hear him coming again, closing in. She threw herself down and hooked her way under the dumpster, using her elbows and wounded knees. The stink of exhaust and diesel fuel mixed with the smell of ripe meat and made her feel a kind of giddy nausea. In a way, the ease of her progress was worse: she was skidding greasily over a coating of slime and garbagey crud. She kept moving, once rising too high off the cobbles so that her back came in contact with the dumpster's hot exhaust-pipe. She had to bite back a scream.
"Beverly? You under there?" Each word separated from the last by an out-of-breath gasp for air. She looked back and met his eyes as he bent and peered under the truck.
"Leave ... me alone!" she managed.
"You bitch," he replied in a thick, spit-choked voice. He threw himself flat, keys jingling, and began to crawl after her, using a grotesque swimming stroke to pull himself along.
Beverly clawed her way from under the truck's cab, grabbed one of the huge tires--her fingers hooked their way into a tread up to the second knuckle--and yanked herself up. She banged her tailbone on the dumpster's front bumper and then she was running again, heading up Up-Mile Hill now, her blouse and jeans smeared with goop and stinking to high heaven. She looked back and saw her father's hands and freckled arms shoot out from under the dumpster's cab like the claws of some imagined childhood monster from under the bed.
Quickly, hardly thinking at all, she darted between Feldman's Storage and the Tracker Brothers' Annex. This covert, too narrow even to be called an alley, was filled with broken crates, weeds, sunflowers, and, of course, more garbage. Beverly dived behind a pile of crates and crouched there. A few moments later she saw her father pound by the mouth of the covert and on up the hill.
Beverly got up and hurried to the far end of the covert. There was a chainlink fence here. She monkeyed to the top, got over, and worked her way down the far side. She was now on Derry Theological Seminary property. She ran up the manicured back lawn and around the side of the building. She could hear someone inside playing something classical on an organ. The notes seemed to engrave their pleasant, calm selves on the still air.
There was a tall hedge between the seminary and Kansas Street. She peered through it and saw her father on the far side of the street, breathing hard, patches of sweat darkening his work-shirt under the arms. He was peering around, hands on hips. His keyring twinkled brightly in the sun.
Beverly watched him, also breathing hard, her heart beating rabbit-fast in her throat. She was very thirsty, and her simmering smell disgusted her. If I was drawn in a comic strip, she thought distractedly, there'd be all those wavy stink-lines coming up from me.
Her father crossed slowly to the seminary side.
Beverly's breath stopped.
Please God, I can't run anymore. Help me, God. Don't let him find me.
Al Marsh walked slowly down the sidewalk, directly past where his daughter crouched on the far side of the hedge.
Dear God, don't let him smell me!
He didn't--perhaps because, after a tumble in the alley-way and crawling under the dumpster himself, Al smelled as bad as she did. He walked on. She watched him go back down Up-Mile Hill until he was out of sight.
Beverly picked herself up slowly. Her clothes were covered with garbage, her face was dirty, her back hurt where she had burned it on the exhaust-pipe of the dumpster. These physical things paled before the confused swirl of her thoughts--she felt that she had sailed off the edge of the world, and none of the normal patterns of behavior seemed to apply. She could not imagine going home; but she could not imagine not going home. She had defied her father, defied him--
She had to push that thought away because it made her feel weak and trembly, sick to her stomach. She loved her father. Wasn't one of the Ten Commandments "Honor thy mother and father that thy days may be long upon the earth"? Yes. But he hadn't been himself. Hadn't been her father. Had, in fact, been someone completely different. An impostor. It--
She stopped where the seminary walk joined the Kansas Street sidewalk and peered around the hedge. Her father was truly gone. She turned right and began to walk along Kansas Street toward the Barrens. Probably none of them would be there right now; they would be at home, eating their lunches. But they would be back. Meantime, she could go down into the cool clubhouse and try to get herself under some kind of control. She would leave the little window wide open so she could have some sunshine, and perhaps she would even be able to sleep. Her tired body and overstrained mind grasped eagerly at the thought. Sleep, yes, that would be good.
Her head drooped as she plodded past the last bunch of houses before the land grew too steep for houses and plunged down into the Barrens--the Barrens where, as incredible as it seemed to her, her father had been lurking and spying.
She certainly did not hear footfalls behind her. The boys there were at great pains to be quiet. They had been outrun before; they did not intend to be outrun again. They drew closer and closer to her, walking cat-soft. Belch and Victor were grinning, but Henry's face was both vacant and serious. His hair was uncombed and snarly. His eyes were as unfocused as Al Marsh's had been in the apartment. He held one dirty finger pressed over his lips in a shhh gesture as they closed the distance from seventy feet to fifty to thirty.
Through that summer Henry had been edging steadily out over some mental abyss, walking on a bridge that had grown relentlessly more and more narrow. On the day when he had allowed Patrick Hockstetter to caress him, that bridge had narrowed to a tightrope. The tightrope had snapped this morning. He had gone out into the yard, naked except for his ragged, yellowing undershorts, and looked up into the sky. The ghost of last night's moon still lingered there, and as he looked at it the moon had suddenly changed into a skeletal grinning face. Henry had fallen on his knees before this face, exalted with terror and joy. Ghost-voices came from the moon. The voices changed, sometimes seemed to merge together in a soft babble that was barely understandable ... but he sensed the truth, which was simply that all these voices were one voice, one intelligence. The voice told him to hunt up Belch and Victor and be at the comer of Kansas Street and Costello Avenue around noon. The voice told him he would know what to do then. Sure enough, the cunt had come bopping along. He waited to hear what the voice would tell him to do next. The answer came as they continued to close the distance. The voice came not from the moon, but from the sewer-grating they were passing. The voice was low but clear. Belch and Victor glanced toward the grating in a dazed, almost hypnotized way, then back at Beverly.
