Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
FOR SOME REASON OR ANOTHER, Romy had always hated the duration of summer. It wasn't the sunburn on her pale skin, or the blistering heat that got to her. It was the solidarity and the lonesomeness that crept into her mindset as she spent her days feasting on the isolation that she was served. Whilst Heather and Kim and Monica and Cindy swept the town and enchanted boys into buying them cigarettes and slushies and inviting them to discos, Romilda was often left in their dust, and regularly feared the question, so what did you do over the summer?
Now this, this would be one hell of a story. The clown, this clown, snatched Bill, holding him tight like a lifeline, completely unblinking throughout the whole ordeal. Unintentionally, she thought of the moment when Eddie's mom had grabbed him in such a way. Because of the jerking movements and the raw panic she'd so often felt, she'd never been too descriptive when it came to what this IT had looked like.
Its head was oversized, and its hair was orange. The clothing it donned was dirty and grey, possibly from wearing it for an eternity and a day. It had a ruby red nose, and eyes that were yellow like two separate torchlights, or alternatively, the headlights on a car. It had to be nearly seven foot tall, and it strolled in a weird jerky motion that fractured the borderline of human and something else. Was "IT" what they were calling this thing, now? "IT" was that cute thing that the five children found in the sandpit in that book, The Five Children and IT. Here, it was shapeshifting and definitely not the kind of companion one would want to discover in a sandpit. That, and there were eight of them. The Eight Children and IT.
"Let him go!" Beverly cried, as the "it" tightened his grip demanded Bill, who struggled uncomfortably with an arm fastened tight around his neck.
"No! I'll take him! I'll take all of you!" The clown screeched, "I'll feast on your flesh as I feed on your fear ... or ... you'll just leave us be ... I will take him, only him, and I will have my long rest and you will all live to grow and thrive and lead happy lives, until old age takes you back to the weeds."
"Leave," Bill begged, struggling for breath beneath the clown's tight clamp, "I'm the one who dragged you all into this. I'm s-s-sorry. Go!"
"Guys, we can't."
"Alright," demanded Richie, angrily pacing back and forth and listing all the times that Bill had done him dirty on his fingers, "I told you, Bill. I fucking told you. I don't wanna die. It's your fault. You punched me, you made me walk through shitty water, dragged me through a crackhead house ... and now I'm gonna have to kill this fucking clown. Welcome to the Losers Club, asshole!"
Mike was one of the first to run fully at the creature, that still was laying on its back. He wielded a rod, but the clown had the upper hand (literally) as he clawed for Mike with a plethora of charred limbs, as the flaking fingers grasped for the boy's face.
It towered down, now, all seven feet of it, morphing and twisting from Stan's woman from the painting to Freddy Krueger to a spidery black mass as they did their best to batter the creature into nonexistence.
Undeniably, Romy's confidence was rising. She brandished a baseball bat and even got a hit or so in on the creature as it twisted between the fears of all eight children, before it became the leper that Eddie had so graphically described. This transformation made it warty and gave it a peeling face, opening its jaws and belching right onto Eddie with a shiny black goo that covered him head to toe.
"We're gonna kill you!" (Yeah, well, they really didn't have any plan b).
It changed, and it changed again. She could hardly tell what was supposed to be what until everything seemed to slow. IT was now a man; he had a slack face, yet the skin on his cheekbones was stretched tightly. She didn't recognise him from anywhere, perhaps a movie or something, she supposed, until the man spoke, "Hey, Bevvy, are you still my little —?"
Beverly slammed a metal rod down his throat, and Romy cringed at the thought of it puncturing his organs. This certainly was not PG. Beverly stepped back, and though she'd never met him, she somehow expected the man to have been Beverly's father.
Romy grimaced as the being actually swallowed the rod like some kind of vanishing act, and she found herself assuming that there was no way they'd ever be able to defeat the creature at all.
"Oh, shit!" Richie screeched as they presumed round two to commence, but the clown, instead, had other plans. It crawled away, backing up from the group in cowardice. It was then that Romy truly evaluated how stupid it really looked, with those goofy teeth and silly costume. Why had she ever been afraid at all?
The clown breathed heavily, and every exhale seemed to rattle out a chuckle, a grin curling into his cheekbones. It had backed completely up, pinned against a single surface as it couldn't move any further. Upon closer inspection, it was a brick well. It smiled, and then, it frowned.
"That's why you didn't kill Beverly," Bill thought aloud, the cogs turning inside his brain as he worked out the puzzle like someone from Mystery INC, "'Cause sh-sh-she wasn't afraid of you. And we aren't either. Not anymore. Now you're the one who's afraid, because you're going to starve."
The clown looped backwards into the well, its bony hands grasping the edges of the brickwork as to leave himself in sight. He said words then, words with little significance to any of the children but one, he thrusts his fists against the post and still insists he sees the ghosts.
And that was all. Finished. Gone. The clown began to flake, peeling away into the darkness. "Fear," IT said. It vanished, after that. Poof.
Romy gulped. Is it over? the inside of her throat burned, and she could only imagine how she'd explain this to Meg, once she asked about the bruises around her niece's neck. It was then that she noticed Eddie's cast. It had one single signing on it, that said LOSER. The S had been drawn over in a red marker, replacing it with a V, to create LOVER instead.
"I know what I'm doing for my summer experience essay."
She inclined her head upwards to look at the tower, only to be welcomed by the sight of the children — the missing children — as they floated down. It was over, she told herself, as her friends rejoiced amongst themselves. She was separated a couple of meters or so away from the group. It's done. She frowned, but it's not going to bring those kids back to life.
Meg would never learn of how Patrick had truly left this world in favour of the next. Missing, the thought, presumed dead. She imagined the sweet feeling of being able to continue their lives in peace. Closure.
They made the conscious decision not to sick around as those lifeless feet touched the floor.
