He Likes Boys//It (2017)

e i g h t e e n

Chapter Eighteen:

It's stomach rumbled ever louder as It tried to decide which one of those children it would go for next.

It choose Mike Hanscom.

What a precious little creature, afraid of so much, It could smell the ear from 50 miles away. It smelt the fear as it enetered the room, watching Mike squirm in the corner, trying to find a way out.

It came to Mike in the form of the corpses of the lambs he so often was forced to ruthlessly kill on the farm.

There were plenty of them, the soft, innocent sounds that they made as they approached him.

Mike backed up against the wall with fright, then he grabbed the axe that had been trapped between the floorboards and slashed his way through the lambs.

He knew these things weren't real.

It had no choice but to move onto the next boy.

But It feared that he wouldn't be able to catch that one either. That was a bad thing for It. Fear weakened it's powers. Fear made it nearly powerless.

He couldn't fight the next few children.

He had to flee.

It let go of the locks on the doors and went back down to place from which it came. The sewers, where it liked to stay only because they were as dirty as it was.

"Beverly!" Hom called to his lover as he saw her standing right across the hallway. Somehow, some mysterious force had pushed them all into separate rooms.

"Did you see It?" He asked her, still wide eyed from his experience with the monster.

It scared him to know that there were creatures that could do that. That could manipulate people's fears just so, and that people clung to their fears enough for it to catch them, snap, right between it's powerful jaws and dig into him, like a dog who caught it's prey. Hom thought he might be one of those people who clung onto his fears just enough that he might not make it out after all. He had to learn to be fearless, and to let go of the fears he held deep within his heart, for all those petty fears could be used against him.

Beverly shook her head. "No." She furrowed her eyebrows in concern. "Did you?"

Hom nodded. "Yeah, but I had nothing to fight with, and eventually it just kind of let me go." He felt brave.

"Did you see what It looked like for you? Bilk thinks it's supposed to look different for everyone?" Beverly asked.

Hom nodded. But he didn't want to tell Beverly the truth of what It had looked like for him.

If she knew, she might not like him anymore. And if he wasn't with her, he didn't have a chance of trying to change his feelings. He needed to be straight. He needed to look at girls the way he looked at boys. He needed to love her in the way that he loved Stan.

What he felt for Stan wasn't love. Hom tried to convince himself of that at least. What he felt for Stan was perverted. It wad disgusting and unnatural. It went against everything he had ever been taught.

It was wrong.

It was so wrong.

Yet it felt so right.

Hom turned as Stan came running down the hall. He couldn't help but be concerned as he saw the look of fear on Stan's face.

"I'll tell you guys about it later." Hom promised Beverly. He did plan to tell her about his true feelings eventually. It just wasn't the right time right now. They had just escaped from some sort of a strange inter dimensional monster, if there was a possibly worse time to bring this up, Hom couldn't possibly think of it.

He couldn't possibly imagine how he planned on telling her. Or at least, he couldn't imagine a situation where she didn't start freaking out over the fact that he liked boys. And if he was being honest, he still wasn't completely at terms with himself quite yet. He felt bad about lying, though, to both her and himself. He felt as though he was putting on a mask to try and disguise this. He couldn't bare to tell Beverly that he still loved her, just not in the romantic way he loved Stan.

It wasn't as though Stan would ever like Hom back. Sure, he'd never actually seen Hom with a girl, but he was fairly certain that Stan was straight. Plus being seen with a girl doesn't necessarily guarantee straightness. Take one good look at Hom and you'd know.

"W-w-we should probably all go home now." Bill suggested, still fairly shaken up by the whole experience.

Richie nodded. "That was officially the freakiest thing I've ever seen in my entire life." Shivers rose up Richie's spine as he walked straight out the door of the old creaking house, hoping that he would never have to see the likes of it ever again. It now occurred to Richie that the creature they were dealing with was a living nightmare, something that quite literally looked inside you and mirrored whatever your darkest fears were, using whatever it thought it could against you.

"We should all walk together." Stan suggested. "So that if It catches one of us, the others came help."

They all nodded, agreeing that they would try their best not to get separated from each mother from then onward. They were all feeling at least a little bit jumpy that night, thinking that any moment now, the creature might come jump out at them from the shadows.

Any moment now there would be something there to attack them.

Beverly quickly unlinked her and Hom's hands as they approached her house, not wanting her father to see.

She could see that he had the lights on in the kitchen. She didn't know what time it was, or if she had cone back late, but she knew that nothing good was in store for her in that Hom.

She prepared to face her fears.

For real this time.