āR i i i i i c h i e e e .ā
The voice was barely audible, easily mistaken for a trick of the wind. With the rains and the hottest part of the season in the past, Derry welcoming the blustery winds of Autumn was hardly anything to worry about.
Humans were unobservant creatures even at the best of times. To them, Derry was old. Old enough for the townās most sordid hurts to scar over, paling in comparison to the meager day-to-day frustrations of Derry-folk. So the General Store was out of eggs? J u s t the luck! Townsfolk complaining that thirty feet of plastic Paul looked both trashy and out of place? Check. That was what they knewāharmless drivel; the stuff of simpler times.
Derry, Maine.
Not a missing flier or a HAVE YOU SEENā poster in sight. Though the lost ones never returned, six months seemed time enough to erase the recent past. Six months and not a single body! Children played freely without concern for a curfew that no longer existed.
Oh how he h a t e d it. A ravenous, broken thing awoken a mere six months after having his Deadlights t h r u s t into that endless starry void. Returning to a town he no longer felt. Sheād been an extension of himself, after all. Learning in his absence that the cistern, the sewers, and a great deal of the unused pipe-ways had caved in; age, rust and the sudden vanishing of an unnatural presence giving way to simple gravity.
And that wasnāt the worst of it, oh no! Was he now not only displaced but the butt of some great cosmic joke? Is this what the Other had intended? For him to be sent back and then starved into submission? Too vexed to fight down rising nausea every time he crept after one of the little ones?
Though otherworldly, IT was no self-proclaimed intellectual, and yet it knew. This was their fault.
The childrenāgrown but still so familiarāremained. Pinpricks of light in this otherwise morose waste. Heād underestimated the Otherās preference for them once. Never again. Ā
āWhat the shit -!ā Richie leaped from his seat, knowing full well hearing your name from no known source wasnāt all that uncommon for most people, but to him, oh to him it was a sign of danger. He looked around like a cat who just had his tail stepped on, breaths shaking as his paranoia eventually subsided. This sort of jumpy behavior is not what Eddie or the Loserās taught him. No, no, no. He cleared his throat, hand pushing his hair back before adjusting his shirt and sitting back down.Ā
Richie promised the Loserās he wouldnāt be scared anymore, and the man was determined to live and die by that. He wasnāt afraid of IT anymore, he had beaten IT when he was only a kid! Cāmon, anything a group of children can beat is nothing to him now! Oh, what a comforting thought this was to him, to be strong and fearless like the rest of his friends. Unlike IT, Richie was a self proclaimed intellectual, though reality faltered with this, still he stuck by that. The pipe ways were gone, there was no longer any damp, cold spot for such an evil, vile creature to live in.
āIf youāre there, you little shit,ā He paused, lowering his voice in case anything but IT was listening,Ā āYou can shut that noise up right now. Iām not going to listen to you anymore, so just go back into the back of my fuckinā head and stay there, fuckass.ā He felt around next to him for the Daily Paper he had brought to the bench with him, aggressively opening it.