From the Top Shelf - Bev Gets a Whuppin

Recently I read It, one Stephen King's early horror novels. Written in 1980, the story is about a monster that looks like a clown, lives in the underground sewers of a small town in Maine, and eats children. Believable, right?

This is from an early chapter in the book, called "Beverly Rogan Takes a Whuppin". I pondered for several weeks on whether or not to share this with you. The chapter does have some DD and spanko elements in it that make for good reading, but as usual, King gets carried away and overdoes the violence. He also ascribes the characters'  dominant/submissive relationship to the fact that both had been physically abused as children. I filtered out the descriptions of adult brutality and childhood corporal punishment, and what I was left with was somewhat titillating. I will leave it up to you to decide whether you want to seek out the book and read the entire chapter.

The scene takes place in Tom and Bev Rogan's apartment. It is late and they are in bed. Tom has overindulged in beer while watching a ballgame on TV and is almost asleep. Bev receives a phone call and Tom is annoyed. He gets up to go to the bathroom and shouts at her to get rid of the caller if it's her friend, Lesley.

Beverly glanced up briefly, shook her head to indicate it wasn't Lesley, then looked back at the phone. Tom felt the muscles at the back of his neck tighten up. It felt like a dismissal. Dismissed my Milady. Mifuckinlady. This was starting to look like it might turn into a situation. It might be that Beverly needed a short refresher course on who was in charge around here.  It was possible. Sometimes she did. She was a slow learner...

He had been looking for someone like Beverly Marsh all his life... not that her vulnerability showed on the surface—you looked and saw a gorgeous woman, slim but abundantly stacked. Hips weren't so great maybe, but she had a great ass and the best set of tits he had ever seen... Oh, she had been some kind of fine-looking, all right, with that dynamite body and that gorgeous fall of red wavy hair. But she was weak...weak somehow. it was as if she was sending out radio signals which only he could receive.

As Beverly talks on the phone and Tom fumes, he hears her light a cigarette. Cigarette smoking is something Tom has taught Bev not to do.

The dull rage came again. His stomach filled with a heat which was not entirely unpleasant. Smoking. She was smoking. They had had a few of Tom Rogan`s Special Seminars on the subject. And here she was, doing it again. She wss a slow learner, all right, but a good teacher is at his best with slow learners...

At this point there is a lengthy description of how they met and how he slowly asserted his dominance over her. The methods he used were too violent for my taste, so we resume at a later point. Tom has worked himself into an alcohol-fueled fury.

He had forgotten the telephone call that had wakened him out of his deepening sleep. It was the cigarette. If she was smoking now, then she had forgotten Tom Rogan. Temporarily, of course, only temporarily, but even temporarily was too damned long. What might have caused her to forget didn't matter. Such things were not to happen in his house for any reason.

There was a wide black strip of leather hanging from a hook inside the closet door. There was no buckle on it; he had removed that long ago. It was doubled over at one end where the buckle would have gone, and this doubled-over section formed a loop into which Tom Rogan now slipped his hand...

He flipped the loose end of the belt over once and pulled the loop snug. Then he closed his fist over it. It felt good. It made him feel like a grown-up. The strip of leather hung from his fist like a dead blacksnake. His headache was gone.

Bev is packing a suitcase. She tries to tell her husband that the phone call was from a childhood friend, and she needs to leave right away for Maine, but Tom is having none of it.

Got to give you a whuppin," he said. "Sorry about that, babe."

Bev resists and is uncharacteristically unsubmissive. She tries once more to explain that the monster of her childhood—IT—has resurfaced once more, and she and her friends need to go back home and destroy it. Tom doesn`t buy it. (Neither would I.)

but Tom had listened to enough craziness from within and from without. He moved in on her fast, cocking his right arm back...

"Gonna whup you," Tom repeated. His voice was sane, even regretful, but his teeth showed in a white and frozen smile. He wanted to see that look in her eyes, that look of fear and terror and shame, that look that said yes you're right, I deserved it. That look that said yes you're there all right, I feel your presence....

But for once, there is no fear in Bev's eyes. Tom goes wild with the belt and it lands on Bev`s butt as well as other places. Bev keeps dodging away and finally manages to get the belt away from him. The shoe is now on the other foot, so to speak, and she gives as good as she got.

Beverly... swung the belt for the last time—the belt he had used on her buttocks, her legs... 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... He was good. He rarely bruised. It didn't even hurt that much. Except fot 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. 

I won`t reveal where the belt landed, but Tom was not at all pleased. It gave her a chance to grab her suitcase and run for her life.