It (99 page)

This time the voice didn't come from the moon.

This time it came from under the bed.

Henry recognized the voice at once. It was Victor Criss, whose head had been torn off somewhere beneath Derry twenty-seven years ago. It had been torn off by the Frankenstein-monster. Henry had seen it happen, and afterward he had seen the monster's eyes shift and had felt its watery yellow gaze on him. Yes, the Frankenstein-mon
ster had killed Victor and then it had killed Belch, but here was Vic again, like the almost ghostly rerun of a black-and-white program from the Nifty Fifties, when the President was bald and the Buicks had portholes.

And now that it had happened, now that the voice had come, Henry found that he was calm and unafraid. Relieved, even.

“Henry,” Victor said.

“Vic!” Henry cried. “What you doing under there?”

Benny Beaulieu snorted and muttered in his sleep. Jimmy's neat nasal sewing-machine inhales and exhales paused for a moment. In the hall, the volume on Koontz's small Sony was turned down and Henry Bowers could sense him, head cocked to one side, one hand on the TV's volume knob, the fingers of the other hand touching the cylinder which bulged in the righthand pocket of his whites—the roll of quarters.

“You don't have to talk out loud, Henry,” Vic said. “I can hear you if you just think. And they can't hear me at all.”

What do you want, Vic? Henry asked.

There was no reply for a long time. Henry thought that maybe Vic had gone away. Outside the door the volume of Koontz's TV went up again. Then there was a scratching noise from under the bed; the springs squealed slightly as a dark shadow pulled itself out from under. Vic looked up at him and grinned. Henry grinned back uneasily. Ole Vic was looking a little bit like the Frankenstein-monster himself these days. A scar like a hangrope tattoo circled his neck. Henry thought maybe that was where his head had been sewed back on. His eyes were a weird gray-green color, and the corneas seemed to float on a watery viscous substance.

Vic was still twelve.

“I want the same thing you want,” Vic said. “I want to pay em back.”

Pay em back, Henry Bowers said dreamily.

“But you'll have to get out of here to do it,” Vic said. “You'll have to go back to Derry. I need you, Henry. We all need you.”

They can't hurt You, Henry said, understanding he was talking to more than Vic.

“They can't hurt Me if they only half-believe,” Vic said. “But there have been some distressing signs, Henry. We didn't think they could
beat us back then, either. But the fatboy got away from you in the Barrens. The fatboy and the smartmouth and the quiff got away from us that day after the movies. And the rockfight, when they saved the nigger—”

Don't talk about that!
Henry shouted at Vic, and for a moment all of the peremptory hardness that had made him their leader was in his voice. Then he cringed, thinking Vic would hurt him—surely Vic could do whatever he wanted, since he was a ghost—but Vic only grinned.

“I can take care of them if they only half-believe,” he said, “but you're alive, Henry. You can get them no matter if they believe, half-believe, or don't believe at all. You can get them one by one or all at once. You can pay em back.”

Pay em back, Henry repeated. Then he looked at Vic doubtfully again. But I can't get out of here, Vic. There's wire on the windows and Koontz is on the door tonight. Koontz is the worst. Maybe tomorrow night . . .

“Don't worry about Koontz,” Vic said, standing up. Henry saw he was still wearing the jeans he had been wearing that day, and that they were still splattered with drying sewer-muck. “I'll take care of Koontz.” Vic held out his hand.

After a moment Henry took it. He and Vic walked toward the Blue Ward door and the sound of the TV. They were almost there when Jimmy Donlin, who had eaten his mother's brains, woke up. His eyes widened as he saw Henry's late-night visitor. It was his mother. Her slip was showing just a quarter-inch or so, as it always had. The top of her head was gone. Her eyes, horribly red, rolled toward him, and when she grinned, Jimmy saw the lipstick smears on her yellow, horsy teeth as he always had. Jimmy began to shriek.
“No, Ma! No, Ma! No Ma!”

The TV went off at once, and even before the others could begin to stir, Koontz was jerking the door open and saying, “Okay, asshole, get ready to catch your head on the rebound. I've
had
it.”

“No, Ma! No, Ma! Please, Ma! No, Ma—”

Koontz came rushing in. First he saw Bowers, standing tall and paunchy and nearly ridiculous in his johnny, his loose flesh doughy in the light spilling in from the corridor. Then he looked left and screamed out two lungfuls of silent spun glass. Standing by Bowers
was a thing in a clown suit. It stood perhaps eight feet tall. Its suit was silvery. Orange pompoms ran down the front. There were oversized funny shoes on its feet. But its head was not that of a man or a clown; it was the head of a Doberman pinscher, the only animal on God's green earth of which John Koontz was frightened. Its eyes were red. Its silky muzzle wrinkled back to show huge white teeth.

A cylinder of quarters fell from Koontz's nerveless fingers and rolled across the floor and into the corner. Late the following day Benny Beaulieu, who slept through the whole thing, would find them and hide them in his footlocker. The quarters bought him cigarettes—tailor-mades—for a month.

Koontz hitched in breath to scream again as the clown lurched toward him.

“It's time for the circus!” the clown screamed in a growling voice, and its white-gloved hands fell on Koontz's shoulders.

Except that the hands inside those gloves felt like paws.

For the third time that day—that long, long day—Kay McCall went to the telephone.

She got further this time than she had on the first two occasions; this time she waited until the phone had been picked up on the other end and a hearty Irish cop's voice said, “Sixth Street Station, Sergeant O'Bannon, how may I help you?” before hanging up.

Oh, you're doing fine. Jesus, yes. By the eighth or ninth time you'll have mustered up guts enough to give him your name.

She went into the kitchen and fixed herself a weak Scotch-and-soda, although she knew it probably wasn't a good idea on top of the Darvon. She recalled a snatch of folk-song from the college coffee-houses of her youth—
Got a headful of whiskey and a bellyful of gin/Doctor say it kill me but he don't say when
—and laughed jaggedly. There was a mirror running along the top of the bar. She saw her reflection in it and stopped laughing abruptly.

Who is that woman?

One eye swollen nearly shut.

Who is that battered woman?

Nose the color of a drunken knight's after thirty or so years of tilting at ginmills, and puffed to a grotesque size.

Who is that battered woman who looks like the ones who drag themselves to a women's shelter after they finally get frightened enough or brave enough or just plain mad enough to leave the man who is hurting them, who has systematically hurt them week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out?

Laddered scratch up one cheek.

Who is she, Kay-Bird?

One arm in a sling.

Who? Is it you? Can it be you?

“Here she is . . . Miss America,” she sang, wanting her voice to come out tough and cynical. It started out that way but warbled on the seventh syllable and cracked on the eighth. It was not a tough voice. It was a scared voice. She knew it; she had been scared before and had always gotten over it. She thought she would be a long time getting over this.

The doctor who had treated her in one of the little cubicles just off Emergency Admitting at Sisters of Mercy half a mile down the road had been young and not bad-looking. Under different circumstances she might have idly (or not so idly) considered trying to get him home and take him on a sexual tour of the world. But she hadn't felt in the least bit horny. Pain wasn't conducive to horniness. Neither was fear.

His name was Geffin, and she didn't care for the fixed way he was looking at her. He took a small white paper cup to the room's sink, half-filled it with water, produced a pack of cigarettes from the drawer of his desk, and offered them to her.

She took one and he lit it for her. He had to chase the tip for a second or two with the match because her hand was shaking. He tossed the match in a paper cup.
Fssss.

“A wonderful habit,” he said. “Right?”

“Oral fixation,” Kay replied.

He nodded and then there was silence. He kept looking at her. She got the feeling he was expecting her to cry, and it made her mad because she felt she might just do that. She hated to be emotionally pre-guessed, and most of all by a man.

“Boyfriend?” he asked at last.

“I'd rather not talk about it.”

“Uh-huh.” He smoked and looked at her.

“Didn't your mother ever tell you it was impolite to stare?”

She wanted it to come out hard-edged, but it sounded like a plea:
Stop looking at me, I know how I look, I saw.
This thought was followed by another, one she suspected her friend Beverly must have had more than once, that the worst of the beating took place inside, where you were apt to suffer something that might be called interspiritual bleeding. She knew what she looked like, yes. Worse still, she knew what she felt like. She felt yellow. It was a dismal feeling.

“I'll say this just once,” Geffin said. His voice was low and pleasant. “When I work E.R.—my turn in the barrel, you might say—I see maybe two dozen battered women a week. The interns treat two dozen more. So look—there's a telephone right here on the desk. It's my dime. You call Sixth Street, give them your name and address, tell them what happened and who did it. Then you hang up and I'll take the bottle of bourbon I keep over there in the file cabinet—strictly for medicinal purposes, you understand—and we'll have a drink on it. Because I happen to think, this is just my personal opinion, that the only lower form of life than a man who would beat up a woman is a rat with syphilis.”

Kay smiled wanly. “I appreciate the offer,” she said, “but I'll pass. For the time being.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “But when you go home take a good look at yourself in the mirror, Ms. McCall. Whoever it was, he jobbed you good.”

She did cry then. She couldn't help it.

Tom Rogan had called around noon of the day after she had seen Beverly safely off, wanting to know if Kay had been in touch with his wife. He sounded calm, reasonable, not the least upset. Kay told him she hadn't seen Beverly in almost two weeks. Tom thanked her and hung up.

Around one the doorbell rang while she was writing in her study. She went to the door.

“Who is it?”

“Cragin's Flowers, ma'am,” a high voice said, and how stupid she
had been not to realize it had been Tom doing a bad falsetto, how stupid she had been to believe that Tom had given up so easily, how stupid she had been to take the chain off before opening the door.

In he had come, and she had gotten just this far: “You get out of h—” before Tom's fist came flying out of nowhere, slamming into her right eye, closing it and sending a bolt of incredible agony through her head. She had gone reeling backward down the hallway, clutching at things to try and stay upright: a delicate one-rose vase that had gone smashing to the tiles, a coat-tree that had tumbled over. She fell over her own feet as Tom closed the front door behind him and walked toward her.

“Get out of here!” she had screamed at him.

“As soon as you tell me where she is,” Tom said, walking down the hall toward her. She was dimly aware that Tom didn't look very good—well, actually,
terrible
might have been a better word—and she felt a dim but ferocious gladness skyrocket through her. Whatever Tom had done to Bev, it looked as if Bev had given it back in spades. It had been enough to keep him off his feet for one whole day, anyhow—and he still didn't look as if he belonged anywhere but in a hospital.

But he also looked very mean, and very angry.

Kay scrambled to her feet and backed away, keeping her eyes on him as you might keep your eyes on a wild animal that had escaped its cage.

“I told you I haven't seen her and that was the truth,” she said. “Now get out of here before I call the police.”

“You've seen her,” Tom said. His swollen lips were trying to grin. She saw that his teeth had a strange jagged look. Some of the front ones had been broken. “I call up, tell you I don't know where Bev is. You say you haven't seen her in two weeks. Never a single question. Never a discouraging word, even though I know damn well that you hate my guts. So where is she, you numb cunt? Tell me.”

Kay turned then and ran for the end of the hall, wanting to get into the parlor, rake the sliding mahogany doors closed on their recessed tracks, and turn the thumb-bolt. She got there ahead of him—he was limping—but before she could slam the doors shut he had inserted his body between. He gave one convulsive lunge and pushed
through. She turned to run again; he caught her by her dress and yanked her so hard he tore the entire back of it straight down to her waist.
Your wife made that dress, you shit,
she thought incoherently, and then she was twisted around.

“Where is she?”

Kay brought her hand up in a walloping slap that rocked his head back and started the cut on the left side of his face bleeding again. He grabbed her hair and pulled her head forward into his fist. It felt to her for a moment as if her nose had exploded. She screamed, inhaled to scream again, and began to cough on her own blood. She was in utter terror now. She had not known there could be so much terror in all the wide world. The crazy son of a bitch was going to kill her.