It (91 page)

She went into the bathroom last.

It had been redone in a rose color that was too low and pleasant to seem gaudy. All of the fixtures were new, and yet she approached the basin feeling that the old nightmare had gripped her again; she would peer down into that black and lidless eye, the whispering would begin, and then the blood—

She leaned over the sink, catching a glimpse of her pallid face and dark eyes in the mirror over the basin, and then she stared into that eye, waiting for the voices, the laughter, the groans, the blood.

How long might she have stood there, bent over the sink, waiting for the sights and sounds twenty-seven years gone, she didn't know; it was Mrs. Kersh's voice that bid her return: “Tea, miss!”

She jerked back, the semi-hypnosis broken, and left the bathroom. If there had been dark magic somewhere down in that drain, it was gone now . . . or was sleeping.

“Oh, you shouldn't have!”

Mrs. Kersh looked up at her brightly, smiling a little. “O miss, if you knew how seldom company calls these days, you'd not say so. Why, I put on more than this for the man from the Bangor Hydro who comes to read my meter! I'm making him fat!”

Delicate cups and saucers stood on the round kitchen table, a clean bone-white edged with blue. There was a plate of small cakes and cookies. Beside the sweets a pewter teapot chuffed mild steam and pleasant fragrance. Bemused, Bev thought that the only things missing were the tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off:
auntsandwiches,
she'd thought them, always one word. Three main types of auntsandwiches—cream cheese and olive, watercress, and egg salad.

“Sit down,” said Mrs. Kersh. “Sit down, miss, and I'll pour out.”

“I'm not a miss,” Beverly said, and raised her left hand so that her ring would show.

Mrs. Kersh smiled and pushed a hand through the air—
pshaw!
the gesture said. “I call all the pretty young girls miss,” she said. “Just a habit. Don't take offense.”

“No,” Beverly said, “not at all.” But for some reason she felt a feather-touch of unease: there was something in the old woman's smile that had seemed a little . . . what? Unpleasant? False? Knowing? But that was ridiculous, wasn't it?

“I love what you've done to the place.”

“Do you?” Mrs. Kersh said, and poured out. The tea looked dark, muddy. Beverly wasn't sure she wanted to drink it . . . and suddenly she wasn't sure she wanted to be here at all.

It
did
say Marsh under the doorbell,
her mind whispered suddenly, and she was frightened.

Mrs. Kersh passed her tea.

“Thank you,” Beverly said. The look of it might have been muddy; the aroma, however, was wonderful. She tasted. It was fine.
Stop jumping at shadows,
she told herself. “That cedar chest in particular is a wonderful piece.”

“An antique, that one!” Mrs. Kersh said, and laughed. Beverly noticed that the old woman's beauty was flawed on only one score, and that was common enough here in the northlands. Her teeth were very bad—strong-looking, but bad all the same. They were yellow, and the front two had crossed each other. The canines seemed very long, almost like tusks.

They were white . . . when she came to the door she smiled and you thought to yourself how white they were.

Suddenly she was not just a
little
frightened. Suddenly she wanted—
needed—to
be away from here.

“Very old, oh yes!” Mrs. Kersh exclaimed, and drank her cup of tea off at a single gulp, with a sudden, shocking slurping sound. She smiled at Beverly—
grinned
at her—and Beverly saw that the woman's eyes had changed, too. The corneas were now yellow, ancient, threaded with bleary stitches of red. Her hair was thinner; the braid looked malnourished, no longer silver shot with bright yellow but a dull gray.

“Very old,” Mrs. Kersh reminisced over her empty cup, looking slyly at Beverly from her yellowed eyes. Her snaggle teeth showed in that repulsive, almost leering grin. “From home with me it came. The RG carved into it? You noticed?”

“Yes.” Her voice came from far away, and a part of her brain yammered
If she doesn't know you've seen the change perhaps you're still all right, if she doesn't know, doesn't see—

“My father,” she said, pronouncing it
fadder,
and Beverly saw that her dress had also changed. It had become a scabrous, peeling black. The cameo was a skull, its jaw hung in a diseased gape. “His name was Robert Gray, better known as Bob Gray, better known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Although that was not his name, either. But he did love his joke, my fadder.”

She laughed again. Some of her teeth had turned as black as her dress. The wrinkles in her skin now cut deep. Her milk-rose skin had gone a sickly yellow. Her fingers were claws. She grinned at Beverly. “Have something to eat, dear.” Her voice had risen half an octave, but the octave was cracked in this register, and her voice was the sound of a crypt door swinging mindlessly on hinges clogged with black earth.

“No, thank you,” Beverly heard her mouth say in a child's high oh-I-must-be-going voice. The words did not seem to originate in her brain; rather they came out of her mouth and then had to travel around to her ears before she was aware of what she had said.

“No?” the witch asked, and grinned. Her claws scrabbled on the plate and she began to cram thin molasses cookies and delicate frosted slices of cake into her mouth with both hands. Her horrid teeth plunged and reared, plunged and reared; her fingernails, long and dirty, dug into the sweets; crumbs tumbled down the bony slab of her chin. Her breath was the smell of long-dead things burst wide
open by the gases of their own decay. Her laugh was now a dead cackle. Her hair was thinner. Scaly scalp showed in patches.

“Oh, he loved his joke, my fadder! This is a joke, miss, if you enjoy them: my fadder bore me rather than my mutter. He shat me from his asshole! Hee! Hee! Hee!”

“I ought to go,” Beverly heard herself say in that same high wounded voice—the voice of a small girl who has been viciously embarrassed at her first party. There was no strength in her legs. She was dimly aware that it was not tea in her cup but shit, liquid shit, a little party-favor from the sewers under the city. She had
drunk
some of that, not much but a sip,
oh God, oh God, oh blessed Jesus, please, please—

The woman was shrinking before her eyes, thinning; it was now a crone with an apple-doll's face who sat across from her, giggling in a high, squealing voice and rocking back and forth.

“Oh my fadder and I are one,” she said, “just me, just him, and dear, if you are wise you will run, run back to where you came from, run quickly, because to stay will mean worse than your death. No one who dies in Derry really dies. You knew that before; believe it now.”

In slow motion Beverly gathered her legs under her. As if from outside she saw herself gaining her feet and backing away from the table and from the witch in an agony of horror and disbelief, disbelief because she realized for the first time that the neat little dining-room table was not dark oak but fudge. Even as she watched, the witch, still giggling, her ancient yellow eyes slanted slyly off into the corner of the room, broke a piece of it off and stuffed it avidly into the black-ringed trap that was her mouth.

The cups, she saw, were white bark that had been carefully looped with blue-dyed frosting. The pictures of Jesus and John Kennedy were creations of nearly transparent spun sugar, and as she looked at them, Jesus stuck out His tongue and Kennedy dropped a stinky wink.

“We're all waiting for you!” the witch screamed, and her fingernails scrabbled over the surface of the fudge table, drawing deep scars in its shining surface. “Oh yes! Oh yes!”

The overhead lights were globes of hard candy. The wainscotting was caramel taffy. She looked down and saw that her shoes were leaving
prints on the floorboards, which were not boards at all but slices of chocolate. The smell of candy was cloying.

Oh God it's Hansel and Gretel it's the witch the one that always scared me the worst because she ate the children—

“You and your friends!”
the witch screamed, laughing.
“You and your friends! In the cage! In the cage until the oven's hot!”
She screamed laughter, and Beverly ran for the door, but she ran as if in slow motion. The witch's laughter beat and swirled around her head, a cloud of bats. Beverly shrieked. The hall stank of sugar and nougat and toffee and sickening synthetic strawberries. The doorknob, mock crystal when she came in, was now a monstrous sugar diamond.

“I worry about you, Bevvie . . . I worry a LOT!”

She turned, swirls of red hair floating around her face, to see her father staggering toward her down the hallway, wearing the witch's black dress and skull cameo; her father's face hung with doughy, running flesh, his eyes as black as obsidian, his hands clenching and unclenching, his mouth grinning with soupy fervor.

“I beat you because I wanted to FUCK you, Bevvie, that's all I wanted to do, I wanted to FUCK you, I wanted to EAT you, I wanted to eat your PUSSY, I wanted to SUCK your CLIT up between my teeth, YUM-YUM, Bevvie, oooohhhhh, YUMMY IN MY TUMMY, I wanted to put you in the cage . . . and get the oven hot . . . and feel your CUNT . . . your plump CUNT . . . and when it was plump enough to eat . . . to eat
 . . .
EAT . . .”

Screaming, she grasped the sticky doorknob and bolted out onto a porch that was decorated with praline doodads and floored with fudge. Far away, dim, seeming to swim in her vision, she saw cars passing back and forth, and a woman pushing a cartful of groceries back from Costello's.

I have to get out there,
she thought, just barely coherent.
That's reality out there, if I can only get out to the sidewalk—

“Won't do you any good to run, Bevvie,” her father

(my fadder)

told her, laughing. “We've waited a long time for this. This is going to be
fun.
This is going to be
YUMMY
in our
TUMMIES.”

She looked back again and now her dead father was not wearing the witch's black dress but the clown suit with the big orange buttons. There was a 1958-style coonskin cap, the kind popularized by
Fess Parker in the Disney movie about Davy Crockett, perched on its head. In one hand it held a bunch of balloons. In the other it held the leg of a child like a chicken drumstick. Written on each balloon was the legend
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
.

“Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race,” it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the porch steps after her. “The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women . . . rape all the men . . . and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!”

It began to do a mad shuck-and-jive, balloons in one hand, severed, bleeding leg in the other. The clown costume writhed and flapped, but Beverly felt no wind. Her legs tangled in each other and she spilled to the pavement, throwing out her palms to take up the shock, which went all the way to her shoulders. The woman pushing the grocery cart paused and looked back doubtfully, then hurried on a little faster.

The clown came toward her again, casting the severed leg aside. It landed on the lawn with an indescribable thud. Beverly only lay sprawled on the pavement for a moment, sure somewhere inside that she must wake soon, this couldn't be real, had to be a dream—

She realized that wasn't true a moment before the clown's crooked, long-clawed fingers touched her. It was real; it could kill her. As it had killed the children.

“The grackles know your real name!”
she screamed at it suddenly. It recoiled, and it seemed to her that for a moment the grin on the lips inside the great red grin that had been painted on and around them became a grimace of hate and pain . . . and perhaps of fear as well. It might only have been her imagination, and she certainly had no idea why she had said such a crazy thing, but it bought her an instant of time.

She was on her feet and running. Brakes squealed and a hoarse voice, both mad and scared, yelled: “Why don't you look where you're going, you dumb quiff!” She had a blurred impression of the bakery truck that had almost hit her when she bolted into the street like a child after a rubber ball, and then she was standing on the opposite sidewalk, panting, a hot stitch in her left side. The bakery truck went on down Lower Main.

The clown was gone. The leg was gone. The house still stood there, but she saw now that it was crumbling and deserted, the windows boarded up, the steps leading up to the porch cracked and broken.

Was I really in there, or did I dream it all?

But her jeans were dirty, her yellow blouse smeared with dust.

And there was chocolate on her fingers.

She rubbed them on the legs of her jeans and walked away fast, her face hot, her back cold as ice, her eyeballs seeming to pulse in and out with the rapid thud of her heart.

We can't beat It. Whatever It is, we can't beat It. It even wants us to try—It wants to settle the old score. Can't be happy with a draw, I guess. We ought to get out of here . . . just leave.

Something brushed against her calf, light as a cat's questing paw.

She jerked away from it with a little shriek. She looked down and cringed, one hand against her mouth.

It was a ballon, as yellow as her blouse. Written on the side of it in electric blue were the words
THAT'S WIGHT, WABBIT
.

As she watched, it went bouncing lightly up the street, urged by the pleasant late-spring breeze.