Chapter Five: Broken Doll
It's still and dusty and reverent inside the house on Neibolt Street. And maybe it's the fact that this is the end, but somehow the room and everything in it is beautiful in a way that none of it was before. Even the dust shimmers like glitter in the pale beams of late afternoon sun that break through the clouds here and there. I look around at it all fondly, wondering why I never noticed it before. I'd once heard a story about Saint Lawrence, the deacon condemned to die for heresy by a cruel Roman prefect. His method of execution was unbelievably cruel even for the times. Slow roasting on a grid iron before the assembled townspeople, that they may know the price of rebellion. The flames were lit, the iron heated to a red glow, and the saint was tied to the grill over its slow fire. But Lawrence was burning with so much love for all he had been and all he had done and the treasure of being given even a little time to do good in the world that he almost did not feel the flames.
I wonder what I'll feel when you come to me.
"It's alright." I tell the doll in my hands. "This is right. This is how it's supposed to happen."
Waiting in the breathless room, I look at the light on the worn floorboards. Something to memorize before the long darkness. Every comfort I've ever known has been stripped or crushed or taken from me in one way or another. Greta was my tormentor in school, filling trash bags with water only to have them dumped on me. Putting gum in my hair or tossing my school lunch on the floor in the cafeteria. School was supposed to be a time for mental and social growth. Education. But no, not with Greta there. Not with Henry Bowers there. Not with any bully there.
Home wasn't an escape, either. I'd find excuses not to return home, even go as far as to get myself in trouble. Detention after-school was more of a mercy than a punishment. I knew that if I stayed at school long enough that my father would tire of waiting, maybe drink himself to sleep if I was really lucky. Most nights. But there were some nights where he drank a lot and stayed awake for hours. The mornings after those nights, I'd spent an extra half an hour in the bathroom to apply a layer of makeup to cover the bruises that he left on my face. I couldn't do anything about the body. Long sleeves, tall boots. Anything to cover what had happened. It was all I could do.
Things were starting to change when I met Ben and grew close to the rest of the Losers. I thought that I'd finally found my home away from hell, but even they left Derry after what happened. They stopped writing, stopped caring about the redhead that made all of them blush that one summer so many years ago. Now I'm here, awaiting my death.
It's quiet, like a cathedral. I stand still here in the room, holding my breath, until I feel the warmth of a shadow on my back.
I know what it is. I know who it is. And a sense of unnatural calm descends over me. Slowly, I turn around.
And I have to look up. Way up. The last time that we were this close, you had your hands around my throat. White flesh, not paint on human skin. Not at all. That would be something that might alleviate the fear a little, the thought that you were wearing a clown's makeup like a human might. No, this is different. Your flesh is truly white, with hair-thin cracks around the hairline of your preternaturally broad forehead. Wild orange hair the color of flame. Markings of blood red. Markings, not paint. For just like your skin, these red lines that serve as the demarcation of your inhuman jaws are as much a part of you as the marbled pale flesh that seems to glow in the yellowish light that streams through the dingy windows. You haven't aged of course. You're still precisely the same, perhaps a little bigger than the last time we came face to face. But then, I'm bigger too. Your regalia is as I remember, tattered satin and silk in a parody of some giant Harlequin doll come to life. The ruffled collar has a few bloodstains on it, and I'm not naïve enough to imagine that it's animal blood. Or yours. All of this, I take in within a few seconds. But it is your eyes that are truly arresting. As they always were. Horribly strange and horribly intelligent, golden deepening to red near the pupils.
I freeze, the mouse beneath the shadow of a hawk, and we simply regard one another. Your full, blood red lips part, and I can see the glint of razor sharp teeth behind them.
"Beverly Marsh." You speak my name carefully, with relish, and your voice is hypnotic. "So young, though not as young as when we last met. I must say, the young do not often seek death, especially not a vicious and painful and terrifying one."
The red nose twitches as you sniff at me, and God only knows what you're able to detect.
"You're not like the others that I've come across. You never were. What would bring a fractured young thing like you back to the site of her greatest battle? And alone, no less."
Good GOD you're huge. I feel ice forming in the pit of my stomach. I would back up, inch away, make a break for the door if I thought I had a chance of reaching it. But it might as well be a thousand miles away, and you and I in the middle of nowhere. I hold out the doll to you, not looking away from those large red-gold eyes. Because this is what I came for. You are what I came for. An abandoned living room, an eight foot tall clown, a girl in a white dress ready to die, and a doll between us. It's such a little thing, the way your huge white-gloved hand takes the gift, but it's important. This is important.
"Not so young anymore. I guess I never was. But you know already, don't you. You read us. All of us. You read our histories and our fears and the things that haunted us, and you became all of it. You're the most deadly thing I have ever known. No one believed us, you know. I mean, believed them. I wasn't naive enough to tell the police or the social workers what I'd seen. Part of me didn't say because I knew they wouldn't believe me. Part of me didn't explain because I figured there might be some small chance that they DID believe me, and they might come looking for you. Hurt you, or kill you. The world needs its monsters, Pennywise."
Silence. Your teeth will be in my flesh soon enough, and all the secrets I ever had will be swallowed down along with the fleeting joys and the pain and the terror and the exhaustion. I am so tired. And you are as beautiful in your way as the dust motes in the room; the worn floorboards. Release and an ending of everything.
"I wanted to die in some miraculous way. You're the only miracle I know. But before you do it...and I know it's going to be brutal, and I'm not asking you to alter that. I didn't come here for mercy. But before it happens, I want to thank you. For...you know...all of it. That was the greatest summer of my life. You shook me up and gave me something bigger to fear than daddy. You showed me I was strong. I don't know what you are, or where you came from, or how long you've lived and how long you'll keep living. But I bet no one has ever told you that you were valuable before. So I guess I wanted to say it.
Life wasn't a friend to me. So before I go, I want to make friends with Death. Take me where you need to take me. I hope that, even though I'm not scared, you can still absorb something usable. I'm grateful to you. I should have died that summer, maybe. But I wasn't ready. I am now. There are no miracles left in the world...not one. Except you."
I look up at you again, up to the towering figure that stands poised to rip me apart. With a hand that doesn't shake, I reach up and touch your face. Then, when you don't immediately jerk back, I wrap my arms around your steel-strong torso and press my cheek against your chest. A lamb, hugging a wolf in the moments before the hot rush of blood and the agony and the momentary fear. 'Vicious clown with fire eyes, hold me fast that I may die. Death with you is hardly more, than the little deaths before.' Scrawled in a notebook in some class at the new high school, my mind two years back and a hundred miles away, already thinking ahead to this moment now. I close my eyes, and hold onto you as long as you will allow before it's time.
"I'm ready."