It

She began to cough and gasp at the same time and for one terrifying moment she thought she was going to choke.
‘Where is she?’
Kay shook her head. ‘Haven’t . . . seen her,’ she gasped. ‘Police . . . you’ll go to jail . . . asshole . . . ‘
He jerked her to her feet and she felt something give in her shoulder. More pain, so strong it was sickening. He whirled her around, still holding onto her arm, and now he twisted her arm up behind her and she bit down on her lower lip, promising herself that she would not scream again.
‘Where is she?’
Kay shook her head.
He jerked her arm up again, jerked it so hard that she heard him grunt. His warm breath puffed against her ear. She felt her closed right fist strike her own left shoulderblade and she screamed again as that thing in her shoulder gave some more.
‘Where is she?’
‘ . . . know . . . ‘
‘What?’
‘I don’t KNOW!’
He let go of her and gave her a push. She collapsed to the floor, sobbing, snot and blood running out of her nose. There was an almost musical crash, and when she looked around, Tom was bending over her. He had broken the top off another vase, this one of Waterford crystal. He held the base. The jagged neck was only inches from her face. She stared at it, hypnotized.
‘Let me tell you something,’ he said, the words coming out in little pants and blows of warm air, ‘you’re going to tell me where she went or you’re going to be picking your face up off the floor. You’ve got three seconds, maybe less. When I’ m mad it seems like time goes a lot faster.’
My face, she thought, and that was what finally caused her to give in . . . or cave in, if you liked that better: the thought of this monster using the jagged neck of the Waterford vase to cut her face apart.
‘She went home,’ Kay sobbed. ‘Her home town. Derry. It’s a place called Derry, in Maine.’
‘How did she go?’
‘She took a b-b-bus to Milwaukee. She was going to fly from there.’
‘That shitty little cooze! ‘ Tom cried, straightening up. He walked around in a large, aimless semicircle, running his hands through his hair so that it stood up in crazy spikes and whorls. ‘That cunt, that cooze, that nickelplated crotch! ‘ He picked up a delicate wood sculpture of a man and woman making love — she’d had it since she was twenty-two — and threw in into the fireplace, where it shattered to splinters. He came face to face with himself for a moment in the mirror over the fireplace and stood wide-eyed, as if looking at a ghost. Then he whirled on her again. He had taken something from the pocket of the sportcoat he was wearing, and she saw with a stupid kind of wonder that it was a paperback novel. The cover was almost completely black, except for the red-foil letters which spelled out the title and a pictu re of several young people standing on a high bluff over a river. The Black Rapids.
‘Who’s this fuck?’
‘Huh? What?’
‘Denbrough. Denbrough.’ He shook the book impatiently in front of her face, then suddenly slapped her with it. Her cheek flared with pain and then dull red heat, like stove –coals. ‘Who is he?’
She began to understand.
‘They were friends. When they were children. They both grew up in Derry.’
He whacked her with the book again, this time from the other side.
‘Please,’ she sobbed. ‘Please, Tom.’
He pulled an Early American chair with spindly, graceful legs over to her, turned it around, and sat down on it. His jackolantern face looked down at her over the chairback.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You listen to your ol d uncle Tommy. Can you do that, you bra-burning bitch?’
She nodded. She could taste blood, hot and coppery, in her throat. Her shoulder was on fire. She prayed it was only dislocated and not broken. But that was not the worst. My face,he was going to cut up my face —
‘If you call the police and tell them I was here, I’ll deny it. You can’t prove a fucking thing. It’s the maid’s day off and we’re all by our twosome. Of course, they might arrest me anyway, anything’s possible, right?’
She found herself nodding again, as if her head was on a string.
‘Sure it is. And what I’d do is post bail and come right back here. They’d find your tits on the kitchen table and your eyes in the fishbowl. Do you understand me? Are you getting your old uncle Tommy?’
Kay burst into tears again. That string attached to her head was still working; it bobbed up and down.
‘Why?’
‘What? I . . . I don’t.
‘Wake up, for God’s sake! Why did she go back?’
‘I don’t know!’ Kay nearly screamed.
He wiggled the broken vase