A/N - I have been the target of a petty internet bully lately, and have had to begin the tedious task of screening reviews before they post. While the whining, lies, and uninformed opinions of my detractors do not bother me, the drama is upsetting to those around me. I will not tolerate it. No one should. Having said that, I welcome anyone to write to me privately if they wish to quarrel. To those who read my work for enjoyment, continue to do so! Those of you who actually read the preceding chapters know that this is not a 14 year old girl and a demon clown. Beverly has aged, she is damaged and hurting and seeking something miraculous. And the miracle is not about to disappoint her. ;) - NR
Chapter Four: Water
It's the sound of dripping that awakens me. Blood? Is it my blood? I can't move, my whole body feels shot through with pain. Not just the agony from the wounds on my arms, but also a deep soul-pain that has been with me for too long and is now almost crippling in its intensity. I try to open my eyes…no dice. The aroma that reaches me tells me where I am though. Not in a thousand years could I forget the musty mineral aroma of the subterranean stronghold that you called home. How the hell did I get here? The last thing I was aware of was glass, sharp and clean, slicing through my skin. Then just a blur.
With a groan, I struggle to at least role to my side, succeeding after a few moments of effort. My eyes slide open as though weights were attached to the lids. Wood, not stone, is what greets my gaze. Worn, warped wood suffused with a subtle reddish glow. Heavy red velvet fabric draped in folds down one side of my field of vision.
"Oh my God."
I sit up abruptly, too fast, and pain shoots through my head. The stage. I'm lying on the stage that once you danced upon, and my clothes are sticky with my own blood. I feel faint and dizzy and sick. Shit, too sick. I barely make it to the edge and roll to the stone floor before I'm on my knees, heaving up what seems like everything I've eaten for the past twelve hours. It's while I'm shivering there, the taste of vomit in my mouth, supporting myself on my trembling arms, that I notice the scars. Jagged and pink, puffy skin in a line down each arm. No wounds close this fast. It looks like they've been healed a month already. Staring at the marks, moving one shaky hand to my mouth to wipe my lips, I don't even notice the moment when my solitude is broken.
But I feel it.
A heaviness to the air, the breathless tension of a looming thunderhead just over the horizon. Blood and starlight, the faint aroma of stone and ancient wood, arcane secrets, bones that lie deep within the earth and have not seen the light since humans were still in their infancy. The scent of popcorn and cotton candy. Far away, as though carried on a breeze that shifts just the right way, and is then gone.
"The Clown." I whisper the word, goosebumps rippling across my skin and lifting the hairs on the back of my neck. I wobble to my feet and hug myself. Human, thy end is near. But my self-inflicted injuries are closed, however unsightly the scars, and I'm not dead. Wouldn't I be dead already if you wanted me that way? Or do you have to play with your food a little first to get the full effect? I turn in a circle, looking for you all around me in every shadow. But you're not there. When you'd kidnapped me five years ago and dragged me down here, you made your presence known with flair not long after my eyes opened. I felt you then too. But now? There's no pageantry, no flair, no clown dancing on a stage and then leaping out to grab me. There is silence and shadows and dripping water. I should find the exit, get out of here. Stumble back to the light and get the hell out of town. Go back to Portland. Drink myself into a stupor like Aunt Tess does every night, fall asleep in the little double bed in their guest room and forget all this and wake to a world where clowns sell junk food and cereal.
"Do you know what floats?" I ask the empty darkness, "Nothing, you illusion. Nothing floats. We're all just falling slowly."
A moldering clown doll pops out of a jack-in-the-box in the midden heap nearby, and a little voice comes from it.
"Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too. Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too. Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too. Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too."
It repeats the poem to me, brokenly. Over and over until its little voice fades.
I kneel again here in the fetid darkness and stare at the little bobbing toy with its mocking voice. My head feels like it's in a vice grip and my eyes burn. Weakness floods my limbs, they don't want to obey me. I have no idea what's real and what's some death-dream caused by firing synapses as the rest of my body shuts down.
"I wanted you to be real." The words come out brokenly, grief and anger cracking my voice. The sweat has even dried on my forehead. Somewhere outside, high above in a world that doesn't belong to me any more than I belong to it, the rain is still falling and the water is still swirling down into nothingness.
"We killed you. I didn't want to kill you. But I couldn't abandon my friends. They needed you dead. I knew that was impossible. I went back, you know. To the well. But there was only blood and nothing more. It was late. So late. Just me, and all that wreckage. I called for you. I didn't even have a real name to call. Just Pennywise. I knew you wouldn't answer. I was terrified that you would. It broke me when you didn't."
Nothing is floating down here now. It's still and dark as the places between the stars. I look to the side, my eyes searching the darkness.
"I came here to die. I wanted to die here like I should have. With you. For you. The only time I felt alive was when you were killing me. How is that for fucked up?"
Still nothing. With a sigh, I close my eyes and bow my head. "I need water."
Beside me a broken pipe suddenly begins to gush water. I reach out a pale hand to touch the stream, lifting a few drops to my lips, and it is clean. Greedily I drink my fill, cupping my hands and pouring the icy water into my open mouth. Washing away the sour taste of sickness. Feeling infinitely better, I slick my hair back and address the darkness that holds and hides you again.
"You were in my dreams every night, Pennywise. You dominated my nightmares. I woke up screaming so many times. My Aunt and Uncle thought it was post traumatic episodes from what my father had done to me. Or from the near-death experience I had underground with a serial killer who escaped. That's what they called it. Do you know...Henry Bowers confessed to the murders. All of them. He's in prison now, tried as an adult. He'll never see freedom again. No one really mourned him."
At last, movement in all that shadowy blackness. Two pinpoints of orange light eight feet off the floor. My breath catches, but only for a moment. I turn my whole body towards you, rising to my feet again. Woman-child and otherworldly being regard one another across the vastness of the sewer vault. I want you to speak. You do not. So I speak again, and say what I've come to say.
"Will you let me change clothes? I'll come back to the house and wait in the living room for you. I've been preparing for this, actually. It's why I cut myself. To attract your notice if you were here, to just end it if you weren't. Twenty minutes, and you will have me. No tricks. No fighting. No running. Unarmed and alone. What's twenty minutes more, when you've waited this long?"
Your huge body shifts, and it is like hearing a rhino moving in its enclosure. And then, finally, words.
"Go. Leave now, before I change my mind."
It's the voice that brings my mind to perfect clarity once more. Ageless and familiar. But something's changed…you're not cackling or sneering at me. The voice is deeper and less mocking. It's not so much the voice of a clown, but soft and intelligent and dripping with menace.
I nod and turn to leave. I know the way out, and none of the passages are blocked. The doors open easily when I push against them. It's a rare mercy, letting me do this at least partially my way. More than I'd hoped for, actually. You can afford to be a little kind right now. Your prey is finished with running. This is always how it was supposed to be.
I walk home in the rain. When I reach the house, I go inside and up to the room that used to be my own. I've barely unpacked a single thing except the dress I wanted to wear for the end. I take it down from the hanger on the wall at the foot of the bed, and carry it with me to the bathroom. Twenty minutes. I won't be late. Not for this.
Apple scented body wash, the nice kind that people give at Christmas. I shave everything from the neck down, carefully to avoid nicking myself. There will be plenty of time to bleed. I know I will, and I know it will hurt and there will be teeth in this skin. It's so strange, how little fear I feel. The sensation in my chest as I rinse shampoo from my hair is more like the feeling you get right before bed after a long and difficult day. You were always the method of suicide I'd chosen. The glass in the abandoned house, slicing my arm open...that really was only to call you. And you came. You actually came.
Stepping out of the shower now, I dry off and rub my whole body with apple scented lotion, not missing any spots. My most expensive underwear, the best silk stockings, the diamond earrings that Mom left me before she died. The ones Dad always wanted to sell but couldn't find because I hid them. Ivory colored slip. And the white dress. I sewed it myself, stitch by stitch, in senior Home Ec class as my final project. The praise I'd received! No one knew I was stitching my own burial gown. But I was. I step into it and draw up the zipper.
Carefully, with the care of a bride on her wedding day, I apply my makeup in the dirty mirror over the sink in the bathroom that had been filled with so much blood years and years ago when you first began to terrify all of us. The blood only I could see. I wonder how brutal you'll be as you kill me. How much it will hurt. It doesn't matter. Just a little more pain, and then the January embers will go cold and dark and there will be no more nightmares and no more longing for the void and no more pain ever again. This is right. This is as it should be. This is how it always should have been.
Finally finished, I take the only other object I need from the box I brought with me. An old and worn doll, the doll that has absorbed a million tears of pain and fear and anger and desperation. The doll I clutched during every moment of the night all growing up, thinking that she could hear me and understand me and that she, at least, would store up all the pain in my life and keep it stored inside her cloth and plastic body. Keep it, like a vault of memories, so that it wouldn't poison me. I pause to look in the mirror, studying myself from head to toe. A sense of calm settles over me, and I nod to my reflection in the glass.
"See you around, Beverly." I tell myself. Because how do you bid farewell to the story, shut the book, and set it on the shelf? How? There's no ceremony to be held here. No candles or dirges or village elders to carry the sacrifice to the volcano. Just me, and this dress, and this doll. It's my gift to you, a toy filled with all the tears I had to hide and all the pain I whispered into the dark. I walk from the house through rain that is now only a mist, and make my way on foot down the gray street. A few curtains twitch, people looking out at me now. Watching me pass by. I don't look at them. I just keep walking, until I am again in front of the abandoned house where m y journey ends. I don't pause to cry or take one last look at the sky or anything else. I've had plenty of time to look at the sky, to weep, to linger barefoot in the grass. It's enough. All of it was enough.
I walk up the steps and into the house, pulling the door shut behind me.