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The town of Derry, with its neat lawns, pleasant streets, and appealing buildings, looked like a place where absolutely nothing could go wrong, simply by virtue of how out of place the idea of tragedy felt. To walk down the streets was to stroll through a sitcom brought to life. It felt like a man in cheery clothes could pop out of one of the doors at any moment and greet you with a jolly “Howdy, neighbor!” and a wave.
This, of course, was a lie. Tragedy was part of Derry, inextricably baked into it through centuries of agony. When things went wrong in Derry, they went very wrong. And though they faded into the background, like monuments obscured by fog, the scars they left remained in plain sight. The Kitchener Ironworks lay ruined, the clearing that was once the Black Spot remained seared into the forest, the house on Neibolt street stood ominously behind a contorted fence, and the sewer system lurked everywhere. As the citizens of Derry went about their lives, the blood of countless tragedies was swallowed as it ran from the corpse-like monuments and into the maws of the storm drains.
Just like the tragedies, the sewers defined Derry, though nobody (even the people tasked with maintaining them) wanted to acknowledge them. Like mycelium, they crept through the decay, concealed by the thin layer of the lawns and streets and houses. Pain and blood, the refuse of millenia, accumulated in its depths like clots as it washed down time after time.
And through these sewers, something unspeakable crept.
It had existed since time immemorial, sleeping and eating, leaving in its wake a cycle of hushed pain and ignorance punctuated by bouts of unbelievable agony. It was defined by its cruelty. It delighted in seeking out the innocent, the helpless, and subjecting them to inconceivable torture and brutality. It delighted in feasting upon the flesh of infants, children, innocents. And above all else, it knew it was unstoppable. What could possibly oppose it? Those insects, those dogsbodies? They were nothing more than tiny fleas. It was a titan, and it would take what it wanted and there was nothing to stop it.
It had slumbered for years, replete with gore and exultant in superiority, dreaming lazily of the death of a young girl. But it had awoken, and the dream faded. In its place was the hunger. The hunger for more.
It slinked through the sewers, beneath the land the dogsbodies called Witcham street. Above it, it sensed the patter of tiny feet as they splashed in the water running across the curb. It was a boy. Unafraid. But not for long.
This child would join the nearly infinite legions of victims. He would join the lumberjacks it tore apart, the children it consumed in a fiery blaze, the settlers it massacred, the men driven to madness and taken in turn. He would join civilizations, worlds fallen to ruin, the neverending parade of victims savaged by raw brutality. He was next.
It had just awoken, which meant it was desperate and partially coordinated. It was hyper focused on its prey, and overlooked the seemingly innocuous presence of seven children nearby. They clung to the back of the house on the corner of Jackson and Witcham, the house doing little to keep the rain from soaking their clothes. One might wonder what they were all doing there, soaked to the bone. Nobody, not even it, could possibly suspect the true reason.
“He’s in sight!” Richie hissed, gripping his baseball bat and sticking his head out slightly from behind the house. The others gasped and hurriedly readied their weapons.
“Holy shit. This is it, guys!” Eddie exclaimed quietly, eyes wide. Beverley nodded resolutely, squeezing Ben’s hand. “We can do this.”
Bill rushed to the edge of the house and peered out from behind, watching as the S.S. Georgie vanished into the maw of the storm drain. His heart pounded in his chest. Stan placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Not yet,” Mike whispered, eyes wide with nervousness. “Wait for the signal.”
“I hate this so f-f-fucking much,” Bill agonized. He readied himself, ready to sprint at full speed. Every fiber of his body screamed to attack, but sense held him in place. He concentrated on Stan’s presence nearby.
They had been working on the plan for several days now, biding their time. The losers, Bill especially, furiously protested Georgie’s plan to lure the clown out as ‘bait,’ unwilling to let him succumb to the fate that awaited him in the videos. But Georgie was insistent, and none of the others could think of another way. With his idea, they knew where and when Pennywise could appear. And thus they planned ahead accordingly. They set up base near that terrible storm drain, held onto their makeshift weapons, and waited for it to come.
It took on the form of the clown. It’s favorite shape, a mockery of the human form. The shape appealed to children. When it last fed, the children, excited by memories of television shows and circuses, ran to him. It was so easy to turn the screw, to chew into those smiling faces until there was nothing but bone. It would lure this next dogsbody in so he could feed.
“Hiya Georgie! What a nice boat. Do you want it back?”
The boy was confident and mostly secure, but there was a trickle of fear he could exploit. “Uh… yes please.”
“You seem like a nice boy. You must have a lot of friends.”
It talked. It painted pictures of circuses, candy, popcorn, and warmth and happiness. It reeled the boy closer to the decay. And it held up the boat before the child. The lure.
Georgie lowered his hand toward the maw that would consume it.
Then, in a flash, the fear evaporated, replaced with something else.
It froze, confused.
The boy’s hand shot forward and grabbed the clown by the ruff. With a great yank fueled by simple belief, he pulled it right out of the sewer. Pennywise landed on the wet street with an unceremonious thud.
It felt something new that moment, at the hands of Georgie Elmer Denbrough. Fear.
Ironic.
“I got him, Billy!” they heard Georgie shout. “I got him!”
The dam was broken.
Bill was first, running faster than he had ever run in his life, the other losers scrambling after him (“GO GO GO GO GO!!!!” Eddie shouted). This was his first time encountering the clown in real life, but he was more than ready. He had seen this thing drive one of his best friends to suicide, had seen it impale another, had seen it kill innocent children. He had seen it kill his baby brother.
A scream of pure rage tore through his throat as he slammed a bat down on the clown’s skull. Pennywise emitted a scream of agony and terror as it sunk into its head.
“FUCK THIS CLOWN UP!!!!” Richie bellowed as the rest of the losers caught up and the beatdown began.
It twisted away from Bill and managed to dodge his next strike, only to be met by Stan and a fencepost that was promptly forced into its stomach. It changed its face to that of the woman in the painting, the boy’s deepest fear, and snarled, showing off rows of teeth. But Stan didn’t even flinch. With a shout of “Screw you asshole!” the usually measured boy kicked it right in the face with incredible ferocity. Beverly, Richie, and Eddie, all wielding shovels and bats, surrounded the clown and began to wail on it, the others circling and stabbing it back into the midst of the violence. Even Georgie, unwilling to abandon his brother, stabbed the clown in the wrist with a knife he had taken from the kitchen.
The clown’s arms and legs changed, becoming spider-like, lined with columns of sharp fangs, and the kids jumped back. The clown-thing reared up on all fours and snarled at the losers club. “I am the eater of worlds - “
“You’re the eater of shit!” snarled Mike, who walked right up to the monster and fired the bolt gun into its forehead without hesitation. The clown convulsed, alien limbs reverting to their human counterparts. It jumped towards the sewer grate with inhuman speed, and for a moment it seemed like all would be lost. But Ben jumped in its way and tackled it to the ground in a leap that would make an olympian raise an eyebrow. The clown’s head became skeletal and began to wrap rotted bandages around the boy’s head, but he was unfazed. “IS THAT ALL YOU'VE GOT?” he shouted.
“YEAH BEN!” Eddie shouted. “LET’S KILL THIS FUCKING CLOWN!”
Bill and Beverly pulled it off their friend, and Stanley charged at it with a shovel held out like a jousting pole. “BEEP BEEP, MOTHERFUCKER!”
He plunged it into the clown’s chest, impaling one of the stupid pom poms on the shovel’s tip. The blood floated up into the sky.
“That’s all that’s gonna float today, fuckface!” Richie snarled, pointing at the gushing liquid as it drifted to the clouds. “Mike! The gun!”
The boy ran forward, reloading the bolt gun, and shot the clown in the forehead again, causing the charred hand reaching from its mouth to fall limp. “It’s loaded this time,” he hissed.
“We’re destroying it!” Ben cheered. “FUCK YEAH!”
“HOW DOES IT FEEL?” Bill shouted as he pummeled it with his bat. “IT’S YOUR TURN!”
Penywise roared and caught the bat, but this time it was Georgie who stepped in. With a belief-fuelled kick, he broke the clown’s arm. “That’s our Georgie!” Beverly cheered.
“You’re just a clown! Just a stupid clown!” Stan chanted, kicking at it as it tried to scurry away. It desperately sought an opening, but every direction it turned there was a child of the losers club ready to send it back with a strike. There was no pipe to scurry down, no abandoned house to hide in. Just the road, the rain, and the losers.
“Clown!” Richie shouted. “JUST A ROTTEN DOLL!”
“Shall I tell them your secret, Richie?” it tried to hiss confidently, taking on Eddie’s visage. “They’ll never love you.”
“I’m gay, you homophobic tool,” Richie announced casually. “Big fucking deal. Now stop using his face so I can kill you!”
It leapt at him, not-Eddie’s mouth open wide and filled with teeth, but the real Eddie brought its face to the asphalt with the slam of a bat. It took on the clown's face again. “The world will always hate you,” it taunted.
“Like I give a shit!” Eddie spat before bludgeoning the clown again. Its arm twisted into that of the Paul Bunyan statue in miniature, holding its farm tool, and lashed out at the boy, but Beverly caught it in one hand. It turned to her with her father’s face.
“You’ll always be my little girl,” it drawled, expecting the girl’s confidence to falter and her belief to crumble.
Instead, she looked it dead in the eyes and snarled a furious “No!” Ben and Richie grabbed hold of the creature on the other side, so when Beverly pulled, the entire arm was torn off its socket. The resulting scream was almost deafening.
Now that it was immoble and splayed out, twitching and starving, the losers beat it ferociously. They kicked it, whipped it with chains, stabbed it, pummeled it, bludgeoned it, animated by their anger at what it would have taken from them. Bill thought of that skateboard kid from the future and added a bit of extra force to his next strike. And as they beat it, they screamed at it.
“FUCK YOU!”
“You’re done!”
“Who’s scared now?”
“Not so big when you aren’t attacking babies, huh?”
“Coward!”
“Just a mean bully!"
“You’re fucked, asshole!”
“T-this is how it f-f-feels!”
At last the clown was crumpled, twitching, its body shrunken to a diminutive size and caved in in places. The losers club stepped back panting, but Bill stayed, looming over the clown’s shriveled head. He stared into the hateful yellow eyes, and growled, “This is for Georgie.”
And Bill Denbrough brought the bat down onto the head of the Eater of Worlds.
It cracked like an egg, gushing blood that floated into his face. He jumped back and joined the other losers in admiring their handiwork.
“...Holy shit,” Richie gasped. “I think we killed it!”
“Careful,” Stan warned. “It turned into black stone when it died in the videos. It’s still kinda normal now.” Sure enough, they saw a gloved finger twitch. “Called it.”
Beverly was quick to stomp on it. “It’s weak. If we’re gonna pull out its heart, we gotta do it now.”
“Where do we grab it? It’s chest?” Eddie stammered. “It’s swiss cheese now!”
The others looked at one another, but Georgie remembered something from the video. “Didn’t you listen to grownup Mike? You need to believe!”
“T-the hell do you mean - stay the fuck away from it!” Bill hissed, grabbing his little brother back.
“I get it!” Ben gasped. “We just need to think of it, and it appears there! Like a weakness! By thinking of a heart, we gave it a killswitch!”
Georgie stepped forward and reached to the clown’s chest. Its remaining hand, weak and pathetic, desperately reached at the boy, trying to stop him, but Mike and Bill were quick to beat it down. With pure, childish faith, the same thing that it exploited, Georgie conjured its heart in its ruined chest. He tore it out and held it up to Bill. One by one, the losers club put their hands on it. Pennywise, broken and mangled, gazed at the children in disbelief. Only minutes ago it was a god, and now it was on death’s door. A final word escaped its lips.
“H-how?”
They looked down at the murderer, cold stares making sure it knew its fate, as Bill answered.
“Fuck you. That’s how.”
All at once, they crushed it. Pennywise’s mouth opened in a scream, but little sound came out. At last, it wailed, its voice disturbingly young. Almost like an infant. After torturing them and killing them for so long, the Eater of Worlds died like a helpless child.
The clown’s body blackened, tarnishing and turning to a stony material. Its mouth peeled open, cracking, and inside they just barely saw three lights fade away into nothing. They let their hands go, and the chunks of heart, more liquid than solid, drifted away.
The rain began to subside a little.
It was over.
They stood there, panting, struggling to process that it was all over. No more interdimensional time loops. No ancient monsters stalking them, no struggles of cosmic scale. They were kids again, and all they would have to worry about were bad test grades. Stan wouldn’t kill himself, Eddie wouldn’t die, Georgie and the other victims would live past childhood…
Their lives were normal again. As it sank in, every single one broke down into sobs. They all hugged each other, glad to let the rain slowly eat away at Its corpse. Bill embraced Georgie as he wept, so grateful that they would be able to grow old together.
“Guys… We look crazy,” Richie eventually observed, tears gradually subsiding. They looked at each other, soaked to the bone and crowded on a road in the middle of a rainstorm, carrying makeshift weapons.
All of a sudden, they heard a voice nearby. Stan jumped on instinct, still on edge after waiting for the clown to strike for days on end. But it was just an elderly woman on her porch. “What are you kids doing?”
They all looked at her for a moment and broke into hysterical laughter. Georgie ran up to the porch and apologized innocently, and the woman ordered them to go back home lest they catch their death of cold. Right. They only had to worry about stuff like that. No more murder.
“We should probably go,” Stan eventually said. “She’s right about the cold.”
“Hell no!” Richie replied. “We just killed a fucking demon!”
“Yeah!” Beverly agreed. “We’re gonna party all night!”
“No bedtime?” Georgie gushed.
“No b-bedtime,” Bill confirmed with a grin.
“We really did it!” Eddie cheered, hugging Richie around the waist. “We really fucking did it! I can’t get over this!”
“Me neither!” said Mike. “I can go to Florida!”
“Looks like Stan'll have some competition,” Richie joked, earning a playful punch.
The sound of a bike reminded them that they were on earth. They turned around and saw none other than Betty Ripsom riding by. Noticing them, she stopped the bike, baffled.
“What are you doing out here - Jesus Christ what is that?!” she exclaimed, pointing at the blackened mass on the street.
“It’s dead, is what it is,” Ben replied curtly, eliciting more laughter.
“I - what - What? Why don’t you have raincoats? What is that thing?”
“She has a point,” Stan agreed authoritatively. "Come on guys. Let’s go and celebrate elsewhere.”
“You didn't answer my question!” Betty spluttered.
The word question sparked something in Bill’s mind. “Oh. Guys, w-we’ve got a t-t-test on monday!”
“Oh yeah. That test,” Beverly sighed. “Were any of us paying attention in class at all?”
“Nope!” Richie replied, and everyone else nodded, even Stan (albeit a bit reluctantly).
“Can someone please tell me what that is?” Betty begged.
“It’s, um… it’s a l-long story,” said Bill. “We'll tell you later. W-w-wanna meet after school some day?”
“I… uh… Sure. I’ll, um… I’ll see you around.”
With one last confused look at the thing, Betty hopped back on her bike and rode off. They watched her recede into the distance, and burst into laughter again.
“Nobody’s studying for no test tonight,” Richie drawled in one of his voices, and was met with a chorus of agreement.
“She’s right though. We’ll freeze here.”
“We’re not gonna split up. Not like in that video,” Beverly declared, and everyone nodded.
“Look guys! It's melting like the wicked witch!” Georgie shouted. Sure enough, the rain was slowly melting the dead clown. It looked like a bath bomb dissolving.
Eddie watched the clown-water mixture run into the drain, and something occurred to him. “Who’s floating now?”
The losers and Georgie, all smiling uncontrollably, kicked the body to a mush. They flipped it off together as it trickled into the sewer drain. Soon, there was no trace. It was finally erased from Derry.
All around town, things shifted and changed, as if the creature's death sent a cleansing ripple through the land. The Neibolt house and what little was left of Kitchener Ironworks collapsed pretty much instantly. The bullet-riddled remains of a car, rotting on the edge of the scrapyard since 1935, all of a sudden broke into pieces, the metal flaking into rust and blowing away in the wind. Dirt shifted slightly in the forest as the long-buried walls of a stone house from 1741 finally fell apart. A rush of water tore through the sewers, and a flood of missing posters, small clothes, toys, and bodies were dragged from the depths, parting from Derry solemnly as they drifted out to sea. The town was cleansed, the despair washing away with the water. Victims since time immemorial were avenged, and the monuments to their deaths could finally fall away.
“What an asshole,” Ben casually noted. “Anyway, where are we gonna go now?”
“Losers,” Bill announced in a dramatic voice, “TO THE CLUBHOUSE!”
In the whirlwind of the past few days, they forgot that Ben actually hadn't built the clubhouse yet, and all that waited for them in the barrens was a dirt-filled hole. But it was fine.
They retrieved their raincoats from behind the house and set off on the adventures a group of kids were supposed to have.