Kay looked at her shrewdly. 'You're afraid he might talk you out of it, aren't you?'

Beverly thought of the seven of them standing in the stream, of Stanley and his piece of broken Coke bottle glinting greenly in the sun; she thought of the thin pain as he cut her palm lightly on a slant, she thought of them clasping hands in a children's circle, promising to come back if it ever started again . . . to come back and kill it for good.

'No,' she said. 'He couldn't talk me out of this. But he might hurt me, security guards or not. You didn't see him last night, Kay.'

'I've seen him enough on other occasions,' Kay said, her brows drawing together. 'The asshole that walks like a man.'

'He was crazy,' Bev said. 'Security guards might not stop him. This is better. Believe me.'

'All right,' Kay said reluctantly, and Bev thought with some amusement that Kay was disappointed that there was going to be no confrontation, no big blowoff.

'Cash the check quick,' Beverly told her again, 'before he can think to freeze the accounts. He will, you know.'

'Sure,' Kay said. 'If he does that, I'll go see the son of a bitch with a horsewhip and take it out in trade.'

'You stay away from him,' Beverly said sharply. 'He's dangerous, Kay. Believe me. He was like — ' Like my father was what trembled on her lips. Instead she said, 'He was like a wildman.'

'Okay,' Kay said. 'Be easy in your mind, dear. Go keep your promise. And do some thinking about what comes after.'

'I will,' Bev said, but that was a lie. She had too many other things to think about: what had happened the summer she was eleven, for instance. Showing Richie Tozier how to make his yo-yo sleep, for instance. Voices from the drain, for instance. And something she had seen, something so horrible that even then, embracing Kay for the last time by the long silvery side of the grumbling Greyhound bus, her mind would not quite let her see it.

Now, as the plane with the duck on the side begins its long descent into the Boston area, her mind turns to that again . . . and to Stan Uris . . . and to an unsigned poem that came on a postcard . . . and the voices . . . and to those few seconds when she had been eye to eye with something that was perhaps infinite.

She looks out the window, looks down, and thinks that Tom's evil is a small and petty thing compared with the evil waiting for her in Derry. If there is a compensation, is that Bill Denbrough will be there . . . and there was a time when an eleven-year-old girl named Beverly Marsh loved Bill Denbrough. She remembers the postcard with the lovely poem written on the back, and remembers that she once knew who wrote it. She doesn't remember anymore, any more than she remembers exactly what the poem said . . . but she thinks it might have been Bill. Yes, it might well have been Stuttering Bill Denbrough.

She thinks suddenly of getting ready for bed the night after Richie and Ben took her to see those two honor movies. After her first date. She had cracked wise with Richie about it — in those days that had been her defense when she was out on the street — but a pan of her had been touched and excited and a little scared. It really had been her first date, even though there had been two boys instead of one. Richie had paid her way and everything, just like a real date. Then, afterward, there had been those boys who chased them . . . and they had

spent the rest of the afternoon in the Barrens . . . and Bill Denbrough had come down with another kid, she couldn't remember who, but she remembered the way Bill's eyes had rested on hers for a moment, and the electric shock she had felt . . . the shock and a flush that seemed to warm her entire body.

She remembers thinking of all these things as she pulled on her nightgown and went into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She remembers thinking that it would take her a long time to get to sleep that night; because there was so much to think about . . . and to think about in a good way, because they seemed like good kids, like kids you could maybe goof with and maybe even trust a little bit. That would be nice. That would be . . . well, like heaven.

And thinking these things, she took her washcloth and leaned over the basin to get some water and the voice

2

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.