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  He stood there for a moment, staring at her as if he had never seen her before. In a way he never had. Her breasts heaved rapidly. Her face, all flush and livid pallor, blazed. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a snarl. She had, however, denuded the top of the vanity table. The missile silo was empty. He could still read the fear in her eyes ... but it was still not fear of him.

  "You put those clothes back," he said, struggling not to pant as he spoke. That would not sound good. That would sound weak. "Then you put the suitcase back and get into bed. And if you do those things, maybe I won't beat you up too bad. Maybe you'll be able to go out of the house in two days instead of two weeks."

  "Tom, listen to me." She spoke slowly. Her gaze was very clear. "If you come near me again, I'll kill you. Do you understand that, you tub of guts? I'll kill you."

  And suddenly--maybe it was because of the utter loathing on her face, the contempt, maybe because she had called him a tub of guts, or maybe only because of the rebellious way her breasts rose and fell--the fear was suffocating him. It was not a bud or a bloom but a whole goddam garden, the fear, the horrible fear that he was not here.

  Tom Rogan rushed at his wife, not bellowing this time. He came as silently as a torpedo cutting through the water. His intent now was probably not merely to beat and subjugate but to do to her what she had so rashly said she would do to him.

  He thought she would run. Probably for the bathroom. Maybe for the stairs. Instead, she stood her ground. Her hip whacked the wall as she threw her weight against the vanity table, pushing it up and toward him, ripping two fingernails down to the quick when the sweat on her palms caused her hands to slip.

  For a moment the table tottered on an angle and then she shoved herself forward again. The vanity waltzed on one leg, mirror catching the light and reflecting a brief swimmy aquarium shadow across the ceiling, and then it tilted forward and outward. Its leading edge slammed into Tom's upper thighs and knocked him over. There was a musical jingle as bottles tipped over and shattered inside. He saw the mirror strike the floor on his left and threw an arm up to shield his eyes, losing the belt. Glass coughed across the floor, silver on the back. He felt some of it sting him, drawing blood.

  Now she was crying, her breath coming in high, screamy sobs. Time after time she had seen herself leaving him, leaving Tom's tyranny as she had left that of her father, stealing away in the night, bags piled in the trunk of her Cutlass. She was not a stupid woman, certainly not stupid enough even now, standing on the rim of this incredible shambles, to believe that she had not loved Tom and did not in some way love him still. But that did not preclude her fear of him ... her hate of him ... and her contempt of herself for choosing him for dim reasons buried in the times that should be over. Her heart was not breaking; it seemed rather to be broiling in her chest, melting. She was afraid the heat from her heart might soon destroy her sanity in fire.

  But above all this, yammering steadily in the back of her mind, she could hear Mike Hanlon's dry, steady voice: It's come back, Beverly ... it's come back ... and you promised...

  The vanity heaved up and down. Once. Twice. A third time. It looked as if it were breathing.

  Moving with careful agility, her mouth turned down at the corners and jerking as if in prelude to some sort of convulsion, she skirted the vanity, toe-stepping through the broken glass, and grabbed the belt just as Tom heaved the vanity off to one side. Then she backed up, sliding her hand into the loop. She shook her hair out of her eyes and watched to see what he would do.

  Tom got up. Some of the mirror-glass had cut one of his cheeks. A diagonal cut traced a line as fine as thread across his brow. He squinted at her as he rose slowly to his feet, and she saw drops of blood on his boxer shorts.

  "You just give me that belt," he said.

  Instead she took two turns of it around her hand and looked at him defiantly.

  "Quit it, Bev. Right now."

  "If you come for me, I'm going to strap the shit out of you." The words were coming out of her mouth but she couldn't believe it was her saying them. And just who was this caveman in the bloody undershorts, anyway? Her husband? Her father? The lover she had taken in college who had broken her nose one night, apparently on a whim? Oh God help me, she thought. God help me now. And still her mouth went on. "I can do it, too. You're fat and slow, Tom. I'm going, and I think maybe I'll stay gone. I think maybe it's over."

  "Who's this guy Denbrough?"

  "Forget it. I was--"

  She realized almost too late that the question had been a distraction. He was coming for her before the last word was out of his mouth. She whickered the belt through the air in an arc and the sound it made when it smashed across his mouth was the sound of a stubborn cork coming out of a bottle.

  He squealed and clapped his hands to his mouth, his eyes huge, hurt and shocked. Blood began to pour between his fingers and over the backs of his hands.

  "You broke my mouth, you bitch!" he screamed, muffled. "Ah God you broke my mouth!"

  He came at her again, hands reaching, his mouth a wet red smear. His lips appeared to have burst in two places. The crown had been knocked from one of his front teeth. As she watched, he spit it to one side. Part of her was backing away from this scene, sick and moaning, wanting to shut her eyes. But that other Beverly felt the exultation of a death-row convict freed in a freak earthquake. That Beverly liked all of this just fine. I wish you'd swallowed it! that one thought. Wish you'd choked on it!

  It was this latter Beverly who swung the belt for the last time--the belt he had used on her buttocks, her legs, her breasts. The belt he had used on her times without number over the last four years. How many strokes you got depended on how badly you'd screwed up. Tom comes home and dinner is cold? Two with the belt. Bev's working late at the studio and forgets to call home? Three with the belt. Oh hey, look at this--Beverly got another parking ticket. One with the belt ... across the breasts. He was good. He rarely bruised. It didn't even hurt that much. Except for the humiliation. That hurt. And what hurt worse was knowing that part of her craved the hurt. Craved the humiliation.

  Last time pays for all, she thought, and swung.

  She brought the belt in low, brought it in sidearm, and it whacked across his balls with a brisk yet heavy sound, the sound of a woman striking a rug with a carpet-beater. That was all it took. All the fight promptly went out of Tom Rogan.

  He uttered a thin, strengthless shriek and fell on his knees as if to pray. His hands were between his legs. His head was thrown back. Cords stood out on his neck. His mouth was a tragedy-grimace of pain. His left knee came down squarely on a heavy, pointed hook of shattered perfume bottle and he rolled silently over on one side like a whale. One hand left his balls to grab his squirting knee.

  The blood, she thought. Dear Lord, he's bleeding everywhere.

  He'll live, this new Beverly--the Beverly who seemed to have surfaced at Mike Hanlon's phone call--replied coldly. Guys like him always live. You just get the hell out of here before he decides he wants to tango some more. Or before he decides to go down cellar and get his Winchester.

  She backed away and felt pain stab her foot as she stepped on a chunk of glass from the broken vanity mirror. She bent down to grab the handle of her suitcase. She never took her eyes off him. She backed out the door and she backed down the hall. She was holding the suitcase in front of her in both hands and it banged her shins as she backed. Her cut foot printed bloody heel-prints. When she reached the stairs she turned around and went down quickly, not letting herself think. She suspected she had no coherent thoughts left inside anyway, at least for the time being.

  She felt a light pawing against her leg and screamed.

  She looked down and saw it was the end of the belt. It was still wrapped around her hand. In this dim light it looked more like a dead snake than ever. She threw it over the bannister, her face a wince of disgust, and saw it land in an S on the rug of the downstairs hallway.

  At the foot of the
stairs she grasped the hem of her white lace nightgown cross-handed and pulled it over her head. It was bloody, and she would not wear it one second longer, no matter what. She tossed it aside and it billowed onto the rubber-plant by the doorway to the living room like a lacy parachute. She bent, naked, to the suitcase. Her nipples were cold, hard as bullets.

  "BEVERLY, YOU GET YOUR ASS UPSTAIRS!"

  She gasped, jerked, then bent back to the suitcase. If he was strong enough to scream that loud, her time was a good deal shorter than she had thought. She opened the case and pawed out panties, a blouse, an old pair of Levi's. She jerked these on standing by the door, her eyes never leaving the stairs. But Tom did not appear at the top of them. He bawled her name twice more, and each time she flinched away from that sound, her eyes hunted, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl.

  She jabbed the buttons of the blouse through the holes as fast as she could. The top two buttons were gone (it was ironic how little of her own sewing ever got done) and she supposed she looked quite a bit like a part-time hooker looking for one last quickie before calling it a night--but it would have to do.

  "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.

  6

  Bill Denbrough Takes Time Out

  "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 ha
ck 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.