It (21 page)

“I'LL KILL YOU, YOU BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH!”

She slammed the suitcase closed and latched it. The arm of a blouse poked out like a tongue. She looked around once, quickly, suspecting that she would never see this house again.

She discovered only relief in the idea, and so opened the door and let herself out.

She was three blocks away, walking with no clear sense of where she was going, when she realized her feet were still bare. The one she had cut—the left—throbbed dully. She had to get something on her feet, and it was nearly two o'clock in the morning. Her wallet and credit-cards were at home. She felt in the pockets of the jeans and came up with nothing but a few puffs of lint. She didn't have a dime; not so much as a red penny. She looked around at the residential neighborhood she was in—nice homes, manicured lawns and plantings, dark windows.

And suddenly she began to laugh.

Beverly Rogan sat on a low stone wall, her suitcase between her dirty feet, and laughed. The stars were out, and how bright they were! She tilted her head back and laughed at them, that wild exhilaration washing through her again like a tidal wave that lifted and carried and cleansed, a force so powerful that any conscious thought was lost; only her blood thought and its one powerful voice spoke to her in some inarticulate way of desire, although what it was it desired she neither knew nor cared. It was enough to feel that warmth filling her up with its insistence.
Desire,
she thought, and inside her that tidal wave of exhilaration seemed to gather speed, rushing her onward toward some inevitable crash.

She laughed at the stars, frightened but free, her terror as sharp as pain and as sweet as a ripe October apple, and when a light came on in an upstairs bedroom of the house this stone wall belonged to, she
grabbed the handle of her suitcase and fled off into the night, still laughing.

“Leave?”
Audra repeated. She looked at him, puzzled, a bit afraid, and then tucked her bare feet up and under her. The floor was cold. The whole
cottage
was cold, come to that. The south of England had been experiencing an exceptionally dank spring, and more than once, on his regular morning and evening walks, Bill Denbrough had found himself thinking of Maine . . . thinking in a surprised vague way of Derry.

The cottage was supposed to have central heating—the ad had said so, and there certainly was a furnace down there in the tidy little basement, tucked away in what had once been a coalbin—but he and Audra had discovered early on in the shoot that the British idea of central heating was not at all the same as the American one. It seemed the Brits believed you had central heating as long as you didn't have to piss away a scrim of ice in the toilet bowl when you got up in the morning. It was morning now—just quarter of eight. Bill had hung the phone up five minutes ago.

“Bill, you can't just
leave.
You
know
that.”

“I have to,” he said. There was a hutch on the far side of the room. He went to it, took a bottle of Glenfiddich from the top shelf and poured himself a drink. Some of it slopped over the side of the glass. “Fuck,” he muttered.

“Who was that on the telephone? What are you scared of, Bill?”

“I'm not scared.”

“Oh? Your hands always shake like that? You always have your first drink before breakfast?”

He came back to his chair, robe flapping around his ankles, and sat down. He tried to smile, but it was a poor effort and he gave it up.

On the telly the BBC announcer was wrapping up this morning's batch of bad news before going on to last evening's football scores. When they had arrived in the small suburban village of Fleet a month before the shoot was scheduled to begin, they had both marvelled
over the technical quality of British television—on a good Pye color set, it really did look as though you could climb right inside.
More lines or something,
Bill had said.
I don't know what it is, but it's great,
Audra had replied. That was before they discovered that much of the programming consisted of American shows such as
Dallas
and endless British sports events ranging from the arcane and boring (champion darts-throwing in which all the participants looked like hypertensive sumo wrestlers) to the simply boring (British football was bad; cricket was even worse).

“I've been thinking about home a lot lately,” Bill said, and sipped his drink.

“Home?” she said, and looked so honestly puzzled that he laughed.

“Poor Audra! Married almost eleven years to the guy and you don't know doodley-squat about him. What do you know about that?” He laughed again and swallowed the rest of his drink. His laughter had a quality she cared for as little as seeing him with a glass of Scotch in his hand at this hour of the morning. The laugh sounded like something that really wanted to be a howl of pain. “I wonder if any of the others have got husbands and wives who are just finding out how little they know. I suppose they must.”

“Billy, I know that I love you,” she said. “For eleven years that's been enough.”

“I know.” He smiled at her—the smile was sweet, tired, and scared.

“Please. Please tell me what this is about.”

She looked at him with her lovely gray eyes, sitting there in a tatty leased-house chair with her feet curled beneath the hem of her nightgown, a woman he had loved, married, and still loved. He tried to see through her eyes, to see what she knew. He tried to see it as a story. He could, but he knew it would never sell.

Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There's one guy who wants to be Updike. There's another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner—only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. There's a girl who admires Joyce Carol Oates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is “radioactive in a literary sense.” Oates is unable
to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There's the short fat grad student who can't or won't speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with “War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.” This fellow's play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master's thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer's play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.

Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson—in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.

One of the sf tales earns him a B.

“This is better,”
the instructor writes on the title page.
“In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the ‘needle-nosed' spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.”

All the others do no better than a C.

Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman's vignette about a cow's examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class—and the instructor—agree, but still the discussion drones on.

When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tall, and has a certain presence.

Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: “I don't understand this at all. I don't understand
any
of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean . . .” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean . . . can't you guys just let a story be a
story?”

No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.

Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling
stories?
Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a
buck?
Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.”

“I think that's pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

“I suggest,” the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, “that you have a
great deal
to learn.”

The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.

Bill leaves . . . but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called “The Dark,” a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a kind of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much
telling
the story as he is allowing the story to
flow through
him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to
bulge
with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. “Going to knock the
shit
out of it,” he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little—a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that—after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter
button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn't careful, it will knock
him
down.

He rushes inside and finishes “The Dark” at white heat, writing until four o'clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring-binder. If someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years—or so he honestly believes.

The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the title page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other.

Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the woodstove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it!

“Let them fucking trees fall!” Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face.

He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor's judgment on it, and sends it off to a men's magazine named
White Tie
(although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled
Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users).
Yet his battered
Writer's Market
says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good.

He sends “The Dark” off with no real hopes—he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slips—and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of
White Tie
buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it “the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury's ‘The Jar.' ” He adds, “Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it,” but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars!

He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor
initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editor's congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative-writing instructor's door. In the corner of the bulletin board he sees an anti-war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this:
If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I'm going to kill myself, because I won't know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do.
He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds:
I suggest you have a lot to learn.