. . . came whispering out of the drain:
“Help me. . . .”
Beverly drew back, startled, the dry washcloth dropping onto the floor. She shook her head a little, as if to clear it, and then she bent over the basin again and looked curiously at the drain. The bathroom was at the back of their four-room apartment. She could hear, faintly, some Western program going on the TV. When it was over, her father would probably switch over to a baseball game, or the fights, and then go to sleep in his easy chair.
The wallpaper in here was a hideous pattern of frogs on lily pads. It bulged and swayed over the lumpy plaster beneath. It was watermarked in some places, actually peeling away in others. The tub was rustmarked, the toilet seat cracked. One naked 40-watt bulb jutted from a porcelain socket over the basin. Beverly could remember—vaguely—that there had once been a light fixture, but it had been broken some years ago and never replaced. The floor was covered with linoleum from which the pattern had faded, except for a small patch under the sink.
Not a very cheery room, but Beverly had used it so long that she no longer noticed what it looked like.
The wash-basin was also water-stained. The drain was a simple cross-hatched circle about two inches in diameter. There had once been a chrome facing, but that was also long gone. A rubber drain-plug on a chain was looped nonchalantly over the faucet marked C. The drain-hole was pipe-dark, and as she leaned over it, she noticed for the first time that there was a faint, unpleasant smell—a slightly fishy smell—coming from the drain. She wrinkled her nose a little in disgust.
“Help me—”
She gasped. It was a voice. She had thought perhaps a rattle in the pipes . . . or maybe just her imagination . . . some holdover from those movies. . . .
“Help me, Beverly. . . .”
Alternate waves of coldness and warmth swept her. She had taken the rubber band out of her hair, which lay spread across her shoulders in a bright cascade. She could feel the roots trying to stiffen.
Unaware that she meant to speak, she bent over the basin again and half-whispered, “Hello? Is someone there?” The voice from the drain had been that of a very young child who had perhaps just learned to talk. And in spite of the gooseflesh on her arms, her mind searched for some rational explanation. It was an apartment house. The Marshes lived in the back apartment on the ground floor. There were four other apartments. Maybe there was a kid in the building amusing himself by calling into the drain. And some trick of sound . . .
“Is someone there?” she asked the drain in the bathroom, louder this time. It suddenly occurred to her that if her father happened to come in just now he would think her crazy.
There was no answer from the drain, but that unpleasant smell seemed stronger. It made her think of the bamboo patch in the Barrens, and the dump beyond it; it called up images of slow, bitter smokes and black mud that wanted to suck the shoes off your feet.
There were no really little kids in the building, that was the thing. The Tremonts had had a boy who was five, and girls who were three and six months, but Mr. Tremont had lost his job at the shoe shop on Tracker Avenue, they got behind on the rent, and one day not long before school let out they had all just disappeared in Mr. Tremont’s rusty old Power-Flite Buick. There was Skipper Bolton in the front apartment on the second floor, but Skipper was fourteen.
“We all want to meet you, Beverly. . . .”
Her hand went to her mouth and her eyes widened in horror. For a moment . . . just for a moment . . . she believed she had seen something moving down there. She was suddenly aware that her hair was now hanging over her shoulders in two thick sheaves, and that they dangled close—very close—to that drainhole. Some clear instinct made her straighten up quick and get her hair away from there.
She looked around. The bathroom door was firmly closed. She could hear the TV faintly, Cheyenne Bodie warning the bad guy to put the gun down before someone got hurt. She was alone. Except, of course, for that voice.
“Who are you?” she called into the basin, pitching her voice low.
“Matthew Clements,” the voice whispered. “The clown took me down here in the pipes and I died and pretty soon he’ll come and take you, Beverly, and Ben Hanscom, and Bill Denbrough and Eddie—”
Her hands flew to her cheeks and clutched them. Her eyes widened, widened, widened. She felt her body growing cold. Now the voice sounded choked and ancient . . . and still it crawled with corrupted glee.
“You’ll float down here with your friends, Beverly, we all float down here, tell Bill that Georgie says hello, tell Bill that Georgie misses him but he’ll see him soon, tell him Georgie will be in the closet some night with a piece of piano wire to stick in his eye, tell him—”
The voice broke up in a series of choking hiccups and suddenly a bright red bubble backed up the drain and popped, spraying beads of blood on the distained porcelain.
The choking voice spoke rapidly now, and as it spoke it changed: now it was the young voice of the child that she had first heard, now it was a teenaged girl’s voice, now—horribly—it became the voice of a girl Beverly had known . . . Veronica Grogan. But Veronica was dead, she had been found dead in a sewer-drain—
“I’m Matthew . . . I’m Betty . . . I’m Veronica . . . we’re down here . . . down here with the clown . . . and the creature . . . and the mummy . . . and the werewolf . . . and you, Beverly, we’re down here with you, and we float, we change . . .”
A gout of blood suddenly belched from the drain, splattering the sink and the mirror and the wallpaper with its frogs-and-lilypads pattern. Beverly screamed, suddenly and piercingly. She backed away from the sink, struck the door, rebounded, clawed it open, and ran for the living room, where her father was just getting to his feet.
“What the Sam Hill’s wrong with you?” he asked, his brows drawing together. The two of them were here alone this evening, Bev’s mom was working the three-to-eleven shift at Green’s Farm, Derry’s best restaurant.
“The bathroom!” she cried hysterically. “The bathroom, Daddy, in the bathroom—”
“Was someone peekin at you, Beverly? Huh?” His arm shot out and his hand gripped her arm hard, sinking into the flesh. There was concern on his face but it was a predatory concern, somehow more frightening than comforting.
“No . . . the sink . . . in the sink . . . the . . . the . . .” She burst into hysterical tears before she could say anything more. Her heart was thundering so hard in her chest that she thought it would choke her.
Al Marsh thrust her aside with an “O-Jesus-Christ-what-next” expression on his face and went into the bathroom. He was in there so long that Beverly became afraid again.
Then he bawled: “Beverly! You come here, girl!”
There was no question of not going. If the two of them had been standing on the edge of a high cliff and he had told her to step off—right now, girl—her instinctive obedience would almost certainly have carried her over the edge before her rational mind could have intervened.
The bathroom door was open. There her father stood, a big man who was now losing the auburn hair he had passed on to Beverly. He was still wearing his gray fatigue pants and his gray shirt (he was a janitor at the Derry Home Hospital), and he was looking hard at Beverly. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not chase after women. I got all the women I need at home, he said on occasion, and when he said it a peculiar secretive smile would cross his face—it did not brighten it but did quite the opposite. Watching that smile was like watching the shadow of a cloud travel rapidly across a rocky field. They take care of me, and when they need it, I take care of them.
“Now just what the Sam Hill is this foolishness all about?” he asked as she came in.
Beverly felt as if her throat had been lined with slate. Her heart raced in her chest. She thought that she might vomit soon. There was blood on the mirror, running in long drips. There were spots of blood on the light over the sink; she could smell it cooking onto the 40-watt bulb. Blood ran down the porcelain sides of the sink and plopped in fat drops on the linoleum floor.
“Daddy . . .” she whispered huskily.
He turned, disgusted with her (as he was so often), and began casually to wash his hands in the bloody sink. “Good God, girl. Speak up. You scared hell out of me. Explain yourself, for Lord’s sake.”
He was washing his hands in the basin, she could see blood staining the gray fabric of his pants where they rubbed against the lip of the sink, and if his forehead touched the mirror (it was close) it would be on his skin. She made a choked noise in her throat.
He turned off the water, grabbed a towel on which two fans of blood from the drain had splashed, and began to dry his hands. She watched, near swooning, as he grimed blood into his big knuckles and the lines of his palms. She could see blood under his fingernails like marks of guilt.
“Well? I’m waiting.” He tossed the bloody towel back over the rod.
There was blood . . . blood everywhere . . . and her father didn’t see it.
“Daddy—” She had no idea what might have come next, but her father interrupted her.
“I worry about you,” Al Marsh said. “I don’t think you’re ever going to grow up, Beverly. You go out running around, you don’t do hardly any of the housework around here, you can’t cook, you can’t sew. Half the time you’re off on a cloud someplace with your nose stuck in a book and the other half you’ve got vapors and megrims. I worry.”
His hand suddenly swung and spatted painfully against her buttocks. She uttered a cry, her eyes fixed on his. There was a tiny stipple of blood caught in his bushy right eyebrow. If I look at that long enough I’ll just go crazy and none of this will matter, she thought dimly.
“I worry a lot,” he said, and hit her again, harder, on the arm above the elbow. That arm cried out and then seemed to go to sleep. She would have a spreading yellowish-purple bruise there the next day.
“An awful lot,” he said, and punched her in the stomach. He pulled the punch at the last second, and Beverly lost only half of her air. She doubled over, gasping, tears starting in her eyes. Her father looked at her impassively. He shoved his bloody hands in the pockets of his trousers.
“You got to grow up, Beverly,” he said, and now his voice was kind and forgiving. “Isn’t that so?”
She nodded. Her head throbbed. She cried, but silently. If she sobbed aloud—started what her father called “that baby whining”—he might go to work on her in earnest. Al Marsh had lived his entire life in Derry and told people who asked (and sometimes those who did not) that he intended to be buried here—hopefully at the age of one hundred and ten. “No reason why I shouldn’t live forever,” he sometimes told Roger Aurlette, who cut his hair once each month. “I have no vices.”
“Now explain yourself,” he said, “and make it quick.”
“There was—” She swallowed and it hurt because there was no moisture in her throat, none at all. “There was a spider. A big fat black spider. It . . . it crawled out of the drain and I . . . I guess it crawled back down.”
“Oh!” He smiled a little at her now, as if pleased by this explanation. “Was that it? Damn! If you’d told me, Beverly, I never would have hit you. All girls are scared of spiders. Sam Hill! Why didn’t you speak up?”
He bent over the drain and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out a warning . . . and some other voice spoke deep inside her, some terrible voice which could not have been a part of her; surely it was the voice of the devil himself: Let it get him, if it wants him. Let it pull him down. Good-fucking-riddance.
She turned away from that voice in horror. To allow such a thought to stay for even a moment in her head would surely damn her to hell.
He peered into the eye of the drain. His hands squelched in the blood on the rim of the basin. Beverly fought grimly with her gorge. Her belly ached where her dad had hit her.
“Don’t see a thing,” he said. “All these buildings are old, Bev. Got drains the size of freeways, you know it? When I was janitorin down in the old high school, we used to get drowned rats in the toilet bowls once in awhile. It drove the girls crazy.” He laughed fondly at the thought of such female vapors and megrims. “Mostly when the Kenduskeag was high. Less wildlife in the pipes since they put in the new drain system, though.”
He put an arm around her and hugged her.
“Look. You go to bed and don’t think about it anymore. Okay?”
She felt her love for him. I never hit you when you didn’t deserve it, Beverly, he told her once when she had cried out that some punishment had been unfair. And surely that had to be true, because he was capable of love. Sometimes he would spend a whole day with her, showing her how to do things or just telling her stuff or walking around town with her, and when he was kind like that she thought her heart would swell with happiness until it killed her. She loved him, and tried to understand that he had to correct her often because it was (as he said) his God-given job. Daughters, Al Marsh said, need more correction than sons. He had no sons, and she felt vaguely as if that might be partly her fault as well.
“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I won’t.”
They walked into her small bedroom together. Her right arm now ached fiercely from the blow it had taken. She looked back over her shoulder and saw the bloody sink, bloody mirror, bloody wall, bloody floor. The bloody towel her father had used and then hung casually over the rod. She thought: How can I ever go in there to wash up again? Please God, dear God, I’m sorry if I had a bad thought about my dad and You can punish me for it if You want, I deserve to be punished, make me fall down and hurt myself or make me have the flu like last winter when I coughed so hard once I threw up but please God make the blood be gone in the morning, pretty please, God, okay? Okay?
Her father tucked her in as he always did, and kissed her forehead. Then he only stood there for a moment in what she would always think of as “his” way of standing, perhaps of being: bent slightly forward, hands plunged deep—to above the wrist—in his pockets, the bright blue eyes in his mournful basset-hound’s face looking down at her from above. In later years, long after she stopped thinking about Derry at all, she would see a man sitting on the bus or maybe standing on a corner with his dinnerbucket in his hand, shapes, oh shapes of men, sometimes seen as day closed down, sometimes seen across Watertower Square in the noonlight of a clear windy autumn day, shapes of men, rules of men, desires of men: or Tom, so like her father when he took off his shirt and stood slightly slumped in front of the bathroom mirror to shave. Shapes of men.
“Sometimes I worry about you, Bev,” he said, but there was no trouble or anger in his voice now. He touched her hair gently, smoothing it back from her forehead.
The bathroom is full of blood, Daddy! she almost screamed then. Didn’t you see it? It’s everywhere! Cooking onto the light over the sink, even! Didn’t you SEE it?
But she kept her silence as he went out and closed the door behind him, filling her room with darkness. She was still awake, still staring into the darkness, when her mother came in at eleven-thirty and the TV went off. She heard her parents go into their room and she heard the bedsprings creaking steadily as they did their sex-act thing. Beverly had overheard Greta Bowie telling Sally Mueller that the sex-act thing hurt like fire and no nice girl ever wanted to do it (“At the end of it the man pees all over your bug,” Greta said, and Sally had cried: “Oh yuck, I’d never let a boy do that to me!”). If it hurt as badly as Greta said, then Bev’s mother kept the hurt to herself; Bev had heard her mom cry out once or twice in a low voice, but it hadn’t sounded at all like a pain-cry.
The slow creak of the springs speeded up to a beat so rapid it was just short of frantic, and then stopped. There was a period of silence, then some low talk, then the sound of her mother’s footsteps as she went into the bathroom. Beverly held her breath, waiting for her mother to scream or not.
There was no scream—only the sound of water running into the basin. That was followed by some low splashing. Then the water ran out of the basin with its familiar gurgling sound. Her mother was brushing her teeth now. Moments later the bedsprings in her parents’ room creaked again as her mom got back into bed.
Five minutes or so after that her father began to snore.
A black fear stole over her heart and closed her throat. She found herself afraid to turn over on her right side—her favorite sleeping position—because she might see something looking in the window at her. So she just lay on her back, stiff as a poker, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling. Some time later—minutes or hours, there was no way of telling—she fell into a thin troubled sleep.
Beverly always woke up when the alarm went off in her parents’ bedroom. You had to be fast, because the alarm no more than got started before her father banged it off. She dressed quickly while her father used the bathroom. She paused briefly (as she now almost always did) to look at her chest in the mirror trying to decide if her breasts had gotten any bigger in the night. She had started getting them late last year. There had been some faint pain at first, but that was gone now. They were extremely small—not much more than spring apples, really—but they were there. It was true; childhood would end; she would be a woman.
She smiled at her reflection and put a hand behind her head, pushing her hair up and sticking her chest out. She giggled a little girl’s unaffected giggle . . . and suddenly remembered the blood spewing out of the bathroom drain the night before. The giggles stopped abruptly.
She looked at her arm and saw the bruise that had formed there in the night—an ugly stain between her shoulder and elbow, a stain with many discolored fingers.
The toilet went with a bang and a flush.
Moving quickly, not wanting him to be mad with her this morning (not wanting him to even notice her this morning), Beverly pulled on a pair of jeans and her Derry High School sweatshirt. And then, because it could no longer be put off, she left her room for the bathroom. Her father passed her in the living room on his way back to his room to get dressed. His blue pajama suit flapped loosely around him. He grunted something at her she didn’t understand.
“Okay, Daddy,” she replied nevertheless.
She stood in front of the closed bathroom door for a moment, trying to get her mind ready for what she might see inside. At least it’s daytime, she thought, and that brought some comfort. Not much, but some. She grasped the doorknob, turned it, and stepped inside.
That was a busy morning for Beverly. She got her father his breakfast—orange juice, scrambled eggs, Al Marsh’s version of toast (the bread hot but not really toasted at all). He sat at the table, barricaded behind the News, and ate it all.
“Where’s the bacon?”
“Gone, Daddy. We finished it yesterday.”
“Cook me a hamburger.”
“There’s only a little bit of that left, t—”
The paper rustled, then dropped. His blue stare fell on her like weight.
“What did you say?” he asked softly.
“I said right away, Daddy.”
He looked at her a moment longer. Then the paper went back up and Beverly hurried to the refrigerator to get the meat.
She cooked him a hamburger, mashing the little bit of ground meat that was left in the icebox as hard as she could to make it look bigger. He ate it reading the Sports page and Beverly made his lunch—a couple of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a big piece of cake her mother had brought back from Green’s Farm last night, a Thermos of hot coffee heavily laced with sugar.
“You tell your mother I said to get this place cleaned up today,” he said, taking his dinnerbucket. “It looks like a damn old pigsty. Sam Hill! I spend the whole day cleaning up messes over to the hospital. I don’t need to come home to a pigsty. You mind me, Beverly.”
“Okay, Daddy. I will.”
He kissed her cheek, gave her a rough hug, and left. As she always did, Beverly went to the window of her room and watched him walk down the street. And as she always did, she felt a sneaking sense of relief when he turned the corner . . . and hated herself for it.
She did the dishes and then took the book she was reading out on the back steps for awhile. Lars Theramenius, his long blonde hair glowing with its own serene inner light, toddled over from the next building to show Beverly his new Tonka truck and the new scrapes on his knees. Beverly exclaimed over both. Then her mother was calling her.
They changed both beds, washed the floors and waxed the kitchen linoleum. Her mother did the bathroom floor, for which Beverly was profoundly grateful. Elfrida Marsh was a small woman with graying hair and a grim look. Her lined face told the world that she had been around for awhile and intended to stay around awhile longer. . . . It also told the world that none of it had been easy and she did not look for an early change in that state of affairs.
“Will you do the living-room windows, Bevvie?” she asked, coming back into the kitchen. She had changed into her waitress uniform. “I have to go up to Saint Joe’s in Bangor to see Cheryl Tarrent. She broke her leg last night.”
“Yeah, I’ll do them,” Beverly said. “What happened to Mrs. Tarrent? Did she fall down or something?” Cheryl Tarrent was a woman Elfrida worked with at the restaurant.
“She and that no-good she’s married to were in a car wreck,” Beverly’s mother said grimly. “He was drinking. You want to thank God in your prayers every night that your father doesn’t drink, Bevvie.”
“I do,” Beverly said. She did.
“She’s going to lose her job, I guess, and he can’t hold one.” Now tones of grim horror crept into Elfrida’s voice. “They’ll have to go on the county, I guess.”
It was the worst thing Elfrida Marsh could think of. Losing a child or finding out you had cancer didn’t hold a candle to it. You could be poor; you could spend your life doing what she called “scratchin.” But at the bottom of everything, below even the gutter, was a time when you might have to go on the county and drink the worksweat from the brows of others as a gift. This, she knew, was the prospect that now faced Cheryl Tarrent.
“Once you got the windows washed and take the trash out, you can go and play awhile, if you want. It’s your father’s bowling night so you won’t have to fix his supper, but I want you in before dark. You know why.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“My God, you’re growing up fast,” Elfrida said. She looked for a moment at the nubs in Beverly’s sweatshirt. Her glance was loving but pitiless. “I don’t know what I’m going to do around here once you’re married and have a place of your own.”
“I’ll be around for just about ever,” Beverly said, smiling.
Her mother hugged her briefly and kissed the corner of her mouth with her warm dry lips. “I know better,” she said. “But I love you, Bevvie.”
“I love you too, Momma.”
“You make sure there aren’t any streaks on those windows when you’re done,” she said, picking up her purse and going to the door. “If there are, you’ll catch the blue devil from your father.”
“I’ll be careful.” As her mother opened the door to go out, Beverly asked in a tone she hoped was casual: “Did you see anything funny in the bathroom, Mom?”
Elfrida looked back at her, frowning a little. “Funny?”
“Well . . . I saw a spider in there last night. It crawled out of the drain. Didn’t Daddy tell you?”
“Did you get your dad angry at you last night, Bevvie?”
“No! Huh-uh! I told him a spider crawled out of the drain and scared me and he said sometimes they used to find drowned rats in the toilets at the old high school. Because of the drains. He didn’t tell you about the spider I saw?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, it doesn’t matter. I just wondered if you saw it.”
“I didn’t see any spider. I wish we could afford a little new linoleum for that bathroom floor.” She glanced at the sky, which was blue and cloudless. “They say if you kill a spider, it brings rain. You didn’t kill it, did you?”
“No,” Beverly said. “I didn’t kill it.”
Her mother looked back at her, her lips pressed together so tightly they almost weren’t there. “You sure your dad wasn’t angry with you last night?”
“No!”
“Bevvie, does he ever touch you?”
“What?” Beverly looked at her mother, totally perplexed. God, her father touched her every day. “I don’t get what you—”
“Never mind,” Elfrida said shortly. “Don’t forget the trash. And if those windows are streaked, you won’t need your father to give you blue devil.”
“I won’t
(does he ever touch you)
“forget.”
“And be in before dark.”
“I will.”
(does he)
(worry an awful lot)
Elfrida left. Beverly went into her room again and watched her around the corner and out of view, as she had her father. Then, when she was sure her mother was well on her way to the bus stop, Beverly got the floorbucket, the Windex, and some rags from under the sink. She went into the living room and began on the windows. The apartment seemed too quiet. Each time the floor creaked or a door slammed, she jumped a little. When the Boltons’ toilet flushed above her, she uttered a gasp that was nearly a scream.
And she kept looking toward the closed bathroom door.
At last she walked down there and drew it open again and looked inside. Her mother had cleaned in here this morning, and most of the blood which had pooled under the sink was gone. So was the blood on the sink’s rim. But there were still maroon streaks drying in the sink itself, spots and splashes of it on the mirror and on the wallpaper.
Beverly looked at her pale reflection and realized with sudden, superstitious dread that the blood on the mirror made it seem as if her face was bleeding. She thought again: What am I going to do about this? Have I gone crazy? Am I imagining it?
The drain suddenly gave a burping chuckle.
Beverly screamed and slammed the door and five minutes later her hands were still trembling so badly that she almost dropped the bottle of Windex as she washed the windows in the living room.