It (100 page)

She screamed, she screamed, and then his fist looped into her belly, driving the air out of her and she could only gasp. She began to cough and gasp at the same time and for one terrifying moment she thought she was going to choke.

“Where is she?”

Kay shook her head. “Haven't . . . seen her,” she gasped. “Police . . . you'll go to jail . . . asshole. . . .”

He jerked her to her feet and she felt something give in her shoulder. More pain, so strong it was sickening. He whirled her around, still holding onto her arm, and now he twisted her arm up behind her and she bit down on her lower lip, promising herself that she would not scream again.

“Where is she?”

Kay shook her head.

He jerked her arm up again, jerked it so hard that she heard him grunt. His warm breath puffed against her ear. She felt her closed right fist strike her own left shoulderblade and she screamed again as that thing in her shoulder gave some more.

“Where is she?”

“. . . know . . .”

“What?”

“I don't KNOW!”

He let go of her and gave her a push. She collapsed to the floor, sobbing, snot and blood running out of her nose. There was an almost musical crash, and when she looked around, Tom was bending over
her. He had broken the top off another vase, this one of Waterford crystal. He held the base. The jagged neck was only inches from her face. She stared at it, hypnotized.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, the words coming out in little pants and blows of warm air, “you're going to tell me where she went or you're going to be picking your face up off the floor. You've got three seconds, maybe less. When I'm mad it seems like time goes a lot faster.”

My face,
she thought, and that was what finally caused her to give in . . . or cave in, if you liked that better: the thought of this monster using the jagged neck of the Waterford vase to cut her face apart.

“She went home,” Kay sobbed. “Her home town. Derry. It's a place called Derry, in Maine.”

“How did she go?”

“She took a b-b-bus to Milwaukee. She was going to fly from there.”

“That shitty little
cooze!
” Tom cried, straightening up. He walked around in a large, aimless semicircle, running his hands through his hair so that it stood up in crazy spikes and whorls. “That
cunt,
that
cooze,
that nickelplated
crotch!”
He picked up a delicate wood sculpture of a man and woman making love—she'd had it since she was twenty-two—and threw in into the fireplace, where it shattered to splinters. He came face to face with himself for a moment in the mirror over the fireplace and stood wide-eyed, as if looking at a ghost. Then he whirled on her again. He had taken something from the pocket of the sportcoat he was wearing, and she saw with a stupid kind of wonder that it was a paperback novel. The cover was almost completely black, except for the red-foil letters which spelled out the title and a picture of several young people standing on a high bluff over a river.
The Black Rapids.

“Who's this fuck?”

“Huh? What?”

“Denbrough. Denbrough.” He shook the book impatiently in front of her face, then suddenly slapped her with it. Her cheek flared with pain and then dull red heat, like stove-coals. “Who is he?”

She began to understand.

“They were friends. When they were children. They both grew up in Derry.”

He whacked her with the book again, this time from the other side.

“Please,” she sobbed. “Please, Tom.”

He pulled an Early American chair with spindly, graceful legs over to her, turned it around, and sat down on it. His jackolantern face looked down at her over the chairback.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You listen to your old uncle Tommy. Can you do that, you bra-burning bitch?”

She nodded. She could taste blood, hot and coppery, in her throat. Her shoulder was on fire. She prayed it was only dislocated and not broken. But that was not the worst.
My face, he was going to cut up my
face—

“If you call the police and tell them I was here, I'll deny it. You can't prove a fucking thing. It's the maid's day off and we're all by our twosome. Of course, they might arrest me anyway, anything's possible, right?”

She found herself nodding again, as if her head was on a string.

“Sure it is. And what I'd do is post bail and come right back here. They'd find your tits on the kitchen table and your eyes in the fishbowl. Do you understand me? Are you getting your old uncle Tommy?”

Kay burst into tears again. That string attached to her head was still working; it bobbed up and down.

“Why?”

“What? I . . . I don't . . .”

“Wake up, for God's sake! Why did she go back?”

“I don't know!” Kay nearly screamed.

He wiggled the broken vase at her.

“I don't know,” she said in a lower voice. “Please. She didn't tell me. Please don't hurt me.”

He tossed the vase in the wastebasket and stood up.

He left without looking back, head down, a big shambling bear of a man.

She rushed after him and locked the door. She rushed into the kitchen and locked that door. After a moment's pause she had limped upstairs (as fast as her aching belly would allow) and had locked the french doors which gave on the upstairs verandah—it was not beyond possibility that he might decide to shinny up one of the pillars and come in again that way. He was hurt, but he was also insane.

She went for the telephone for the first time and had no more than dropped her hand on it before remembering what he had said.

What I'd do is post bail and come right back here . . . your tits on the kitchen table and your eyes in the fishbowl.

She jerked her hand off the phone.

She went into the bathroom then and looked at her dripping tomato nose, her black eye. She didn't weep; the shame and horror she felt were too deep for tears.
Oh Bev, I did the best I could, dear,
she thought.
But my face
 . . .
he said he would cut up my
face. . . .

There was Darvon and Valium in the medicine cabinet. She debated between them and finally swallowed one of each. Then she went to Sisters of Mercy for treatment and met the famous Dr. Geffin, who right now was the only man she could think of whom she would not be perfectly happy to see wiped off the face of the earth.

And from there home again, home again, jiggety-jog.

She went to her bedroom window and looked out. The sun was low on the horizon now. On the East Coast it would be late twilight—just going on seven o'clock in Maine.

You can decide what to do about the cops later. The important thing now is to warn Beverly.

It would be a hell of a lot easier,
Kay thought,
if you had told me where you were staying, Beverly my love. I suppose you didn't know yourself.

Although she had quit smoking two years before, she kept a pack of Pall Malls in the drawer of her desk for emergencies. She shot one out of the pack, lit up, grimaced. She had last smoked from this pack around December of 1982, and this baby was staler than the ERA in the Illinois state Senate. She smoked it anyway, one eye half-lidded against the smoke, the other just half-lidded, period. Thanks to Tom Rogan.

Using her left hand laboriously—the son of a bitch had dislocated her good arm—she dialed Maine information and asked for the name and number of every hotel and motel in Derry.

“Ma'am, that's going to take awhile,” the directory-assistance operator said dubiously.

“It's going to take even longer than that, sister,” Kay said. “I'm going to have to write with my stupid hand. My good one's on vacation.”

“It is not customary for—”

“Listen to me,” Kay said, not unkindly. “I'm calling you from Chicago, and I'm trying to reach a woman-friend of mine who has just left her husband and gone back to Derry, where she grew up. Her husband knows where she went. He got the information out of me by beating the living shit out of me. This man is a psycho. She needs to know he's coming.”

There was a long pause, and then the directory-assistance operator said in a decidedly more human voice, “I think the number you really need is the Derry Police Department.”

“Fine. I'll take that, too. But she has to be warned,” Kay said. “And . . .” She thought of Tom's cut cheeks, the knot on his forehead, the one on his temple, his limp, his hideously swelled lips. “And if she knows he's coming, that may be enough.”

There was another long pause.

“You there, sis?” Kay asked.

“Arlington Motor Lodge,” the operator said, “643–8146. Bassey Park Inn, 648–4083. The Bunyan Motor Court—”

“Slow down a little, okay?” she asked, writing furiously. She looked for an ashtray, didn't see one, and mashed the Pall Mall out on the desk blotter. “Okay, go on.”

“The Clarendon Inn—”

She got half-lucky on her fifth call. Beverly Rogan was registered at the Derry Town House. She was only half-lucky because Beverly was out. She left her name and number and a message that Beverly should call her the instant she came back, no matter how late it was.

The desk clerk repeated the message. Kay went upstairs and took another Valium. She lay down and waited for sleep. Sleep didn't come.
I'm sorry, Bev,
she thought, looking into the dark, floating on the dope.
What he said about my face . . . I just couldn't stand that. Call soon, Bev. Please call soon. And watch out for the crazy son of a bitch you married.

The crazy son of a bitch Bev had married did better on connections than Beverly had the day before because he left from O'Hare, the hub of commercial aviation in the continental United States. During the flight he read and reread the brief note on the author at the end of
The Black Rapids.
It said that William Denbrough was a native of New England and the author of three other novels (which were also available, the note added helpfully, in Signet paperback editions). He and his wife, the actress Audra Phillips, lived in California. He was currently at work on a new novel. Noticing that the paperback of
The Black Rapids
had been issued in 1976, Tom supposed the guy had written some of the other novels since then.

Audra Phillips . . . he had seen her in the movies, hadn't he? He rarely noticed actresses—Tom's idea of a good flick was a crime story, a chase story, or a monster picture—but if this babe was the one he was thinking of, he had noticed her especially because she looked a lot like Beverly: long red hair, green eyes, tits that wouldn't quit.

He sat up a little straighter in his seat, tapping the paperback against his leg, trying to ignore the ache in his head and in his mouth. Yes, he was sure. Audra Phillips was the redhead with the good tits. He had seen her in a Clint Eastwood movie, and then about a year later in a horror flick called
Graveyard Moon.
Beverly had gone with him to see that one, and coming out of the theater, he had mentioned his idea that the actress looked a lot like her. “I don't think so,” Bev had said. “I'm taller and she's prettier. Her hair's a darker red, too.” That was all. He hadn't thought of it again until now.

He and his wife, the actress Audra Phillips . . .

Tom had some dim understanding of psychology; he had used it to manipulate his wife all the years of their marriage. And now a nagging unpleasantness began to nag at him, more feeling than thought. It centered on the fact that Bev and this Denbrough had played together as kids and that Denbrough had married a woman who, in spite of what Beverly said, looked amazingly like Tom Rogan's wife.

What sort of games had Denbrough and Beverly played when they were kids? Post-office? Spin-the-bottle?

Other games?

Tom sat in his seat and tapped the book against his leg and felt his temples begin to throb.

When he arrived at Bangor International Airport and canvassed the rental-car booths, the girls—some dressed in yellow, some in red, some in Irish green—looked at his blasted dangerous face nervously and told him (more nervously still) that they had no cars to rent, so sorry.

Tom went to the newsstand and got a Bangor paper. He turned to the want-ads, oblivious to the looks he was getting from people passing by, and isolated three likelies. He hit paydirt on his second call.

“Paper says you've got a '76 LTD wagon. Fourteen hundred bucks.”

“Right, sure.”

“I tell you what,” Tom said, touching the wallet in his jacket pocket. It was fat with cash—six thousand dollars. “You bring it out to the airport and we'll do the deal right here. You give me the car and a bill of sale and your pink-slip. I'll give you cash money.”

The fellow with the LTD for sale paused and then said, “I'd have to take my plates off.”

“Sure, fine.”

“How will I know you, Mr.—?”

“Mr. Barr,” Tom said. He was looking at a sign across the terminal lobby that said
BAR HARBOR AIRLINES GIVES YOU NEW ENGLAND—AND THE WORLD
! “I'll be standing by the far door. You'll know me because my face doesn't look so hot. My wife and I went roller-skating yesterday and I took one hell of a fall. Things could be worse, I guess. I didn't break anything but my face.”

“Gee, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Barr.”

“I'll mend. You just get the car out here, my good buddy.”

He hung up, walked across to the door, and stepped out into the warm fragrant May night.

The guy with the LTD showed up ten minutes later, driving out of the late-spring dusk. He was only a kid. They did the deal; the kid scribbled him a bill of sale which Tom stuffed indifferently into his overcoat pocket. He stood there and watched the kid take off the LTD's Maine plates.