My Life is Horrific Chapter 15 — Pennywise more like Pennydies (Patreon)

The tunnel swallowed the daylight within twenty feet, and the smell hit me right after. Wet rot, something dead, something worse than dead and my boots splashed through ankle-deep sludge that I really did not want to think about.

"You absolute fucking moron," I muttered to myself as I waded deeper. "You complete and total dipshit. You walking advertisement for natural selection. Eighteen years of life, two of them with full memories, and this is what you do with it. Walk into a sewer. In Derry. In nineteen eighty fucking eight."

The tunnel curved and I kept going.  "You knew. You fucking knew. You wrote it on your little homeroom list, James, remember? Watch out for Pennywise. Stay away from sewers. And what are you doing right now? Strolling through his goddamn living room like you came to drop off a fruit basket. Hi Mr. Clown, sorry to bother you, just here to steal your lunch, mind not eating my face? You absolute brain donor."

I kicked a chunk of something hard and refused to look down at what it had been. "Walking dinner. That's what you are. A six-foot ribeye in jeans. He's probably already plating you. Probably already setting the table. Probably already invited his clown friends. James Mitchell, served rare, with a side of dumbass."

I sighed loudly, the sound bouncing back at me off the stone. It wasn't that I had a hero complex. Honestly. I would have happily peeled out of that parking lot, gone home, cracked a beer, and let Bill Stuttering Denbrough handle his own field trip. I was not built for capes. But there was something about knowing I was probably the only person within five miles who could help, and still choosing to drive away while a kid got eaten in a sewer, that just would not sit right.

So here I was. Idiot.

Besides, what was the worst Pennywise could really do to me? I healed. I had powers. I had a gun. I had—

Actually don't answer that.

Of course he could do something to me. He was a fucking interdimensional eldritch horror that ate children and had been doing it since before America was a country. Of course he could end me. He could turn me inside out and use my spine as a flute. What was I thinking!

Nope. Stop. Focus. Find the redhead. Find the fat kid. Get the fuck out.

I pushed forward, the flashlight beam shaking just slightly in my hand. The tunnel split and I took the left because the air smelt slightly less like a graveyard down that way. Pipes ran along the ceiling, and the walls were slick with something brown that I refused to identify.

That was when the giggling started.

Childlike. Coming from somewhere ahead of me, or maybe behind, or maybe both. The sound bounced off the walls until it seemed to come from inside my own skull.

Just ignore it... keep walking.

A children's toy boat, paper, drifted past my boot in the sludge. I did not look at it I just ignored it. A few yards later a balloon bumped gently against the ceiling, just floating there with no string. I did not look at that either, in fact it may as well have not been there at all. 

"They all float down here, James." A childlike voice whispered from behind me. 

"Fuck off," I said flatly while keeping my eyes forward. 

More giggling. Louder this time. Layered, like three or four kids laughing at the same joke. 

The joke being me.

"I said fuck off!" I shouted into the dark, but the giggles only got louder, echoing and folding back on themselves until it sounded like a whole playground was down here with me.

I gritted my teeth and kept moving, rounding another bend where my flashlight skipped over the wall and caught something at the far end of the tunnel that made me stop dead.

A shape. Man-shaped. Standing perfectly still in the middle of the passage maybe forty feet ahead, just at the edge of where my beam died. I squinted and pointed my gun up. "Hey," I called out loudly. "Hey, you down here? Bowers, if that's you I swear to God—"

I lifted the flashlight higher and steadied the beam, when I did a hockey mask caught the light. Cracked and stained black around the eyeholes. Connected to that hockey mask was a huge silhouettet, I pointed my light down just enough to see the long curve of a machete hanging at his side. 

Jason Voorhees.

No fucking way.

"No no no no no no—" I was already turning, already moving, my boots skidding in the sludge as I broke into a dead sprint back the way I came. "What the fuck what the fuck WHAT THE FUCK—"

He was dead. I killed him. I cut him into pieces with a rusty axe and burned the pieces and buried his goddamn head in the woods a hundred yards from the lake house. He was charcoal. He was fucking compost.

Behind me the footsteps started to follow me. Slow at first. Then faster. The wet THUD THUD THUD of those massive boots hitting the water, I could hear getting closer with every second.

I ran. I ran like my legs belonged to someone else, the flashlight beam jumping wildly across the walls, my breath sawing in and out, the gun bouncing in my grip. I took the first turn I came to, then another, then another, no plan, just away from the immortal maniac with a machete. 

I splashed through a knee-deep stretch of black water, slipped, caught myself on a pipe that came away and kept running. The tunnel sloped down but I still followed it down. Another split. I went right. Another. I went left. I had no idea where I was anymore, no idea how far from the entrance, no idea if I was running toward Beverly or away from her or in a circle.

But still the footsteps were getting closer.

I could hear his breathing now. That thick, wet, animal sound that I remembered coming through his mask.

My lungs were burning. My side had a stitch like a knife. I rounded another corner, stumbled, caught myself against the wall and then it hit me.

Wait.

Wait wait wait.

I stopped as my brain finally caught up to my legs.

Jason was dead.

I made sure. I made sure twice. I made sure he was in pieces and ash and a hole in the dirt. There was no version of reality where Jason Voorhees was walking through a sewer in Derry, Maine, two months later, looking for me specifically. None. Zero. He had no reason to be here. He had no way to be here.

But something that fed on fear, something that wore faces, something that lived in these tunnels and giggled in your ear and floated balloons for you to find, that thing absolutely had a reason. That thing was probably laughing its asshole off right now watching me sprint blindly through its tunnels.

I straightened up slowly. "You're such a dumbass..." I muttured as I wiped the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve. 

The footsteps were still coming. THUD. THUD. THUD.

I turned around and raised the pistol the moment Jason emerged from the dark, the huge body filling the tunnel almost wall to wall. He stopped maybe twelve feet away.

"Nice try, asshole," I said. "I already killed this one. So get a new costume."

I squeezed the trigger.

The shot cracked through the tunnel like a bomb going off, the muzzle flash strobing the walls white. The bullet punched right through the eyehole of the mask and snapped his head back hard.

For a second nothing happened. He just stood there, machete twitching in his hand.

Then he dropped.

The whole massive body folded forward and hit the sludge with a splash. But it didn't end there. I watched as the corpse started to move in a way no corpse should. His shoulders rippled. His chest swelled and collapsed like a lung. The skin under his clothes began to bubble and shift, black veins crawling across the exposed neck, his fingers stretching too long and then snapping back too short.

Then he burst.

Black-red blood and dark fluid sprayed up from the body in a fountain that hit the ceiling and rained back down in drops that sizzled where they landed. The clothes collapsed empty into the puddle. 

For a second there was just gore, just a steaming spread of red and black across the tunnel.

Then it started to pull itself back together.

The blood crawled.... It dragged itself inward, gathered, stacked, climbed. A leg formed first, then another, then a torso. Arms unspooled from the puddle like ropes. 

The head rose last, lolling forward, and then snapped upright with a wet crack.

The face that grinned at me was painted white with two long red lines cutting up from the corners of its mouth. Tufts of orange hair sprouted in patches over a tall round forehead. Yellow eyes, slit-pupiled, locked onto mine. Pennywise straightened up to his full height and rolled his shoulders like he was settling into a new suit.

"Ohhh, Jamesy," he sang, as he took a step forward, his bare feet padding through the puddle of his own birth. "Are you sure you're not afraid? Hmm? Not even a little? Not just a teeeeeeny tiny bit?"

He tilted his head, his grin stretching wider, splitting his face nearly ear to ear.

"Because you smell like fear, Jamesy. You smeeeeeeellll delicious."

I shot him in the face.

The bullet hit him right between the eyes, his head snapped back and he came apart, the whole body bursting into a cloud of brightly colored confetti that drifted down in glittering spirals.

"Oh, you fucking carnival-ass clown motherfucker—" I lowered the gun. "Cute. Real cute."

A giggle drifted out of the dark somewhere behind me. Then another from up ahead. Then one from directly above, like he was crawling on the ceiling. The sounds layered and overlapped until it was a choir of children laughing at me from every direction at once.

"Yeah yeah, hilarious," I muttered, already moving as I picked a tunnel and started walking. "Laugh it up, sparky. I've got a redhead to find." The giggles followed me but did not get closer. Whatever the rules were down here, he was playing with me, not killing me. Yet. That was almost worse.

I pushed deeper, calling out now in between checking corners. "Beverly! Ben! Anybody! It's James, the guy from school, we aren't really friends, but I'm here to save you anyway!"

Nothing. 

"Beverly! Ben! Kids, come on—"

Then I heard it, it sounded a little faint but there was no doubt about it. A boy's voice, panicky, and a girl's voice trying to shush him.

"—just stay behind me, just stay behind me, if it comes back I'll—"

"Ben, quiet, something's coming—"

I broke into a hard run, the flashlight beam jumping wildly across the curved walls while my boots sent up sheets of black water with every step, the voices grew clearer with every yard I covered, the boy's panicky muttering and the girl's shushing layering together until I was nearly on top of them. The tunnel I was in suddenly opened up into a much larger chamber, a kind of underground junction where four or five smaller pipes fed into one massive central passage, the ceiling arching up high enough that the flashlight beam barely caught the brickwork at the top. 

And there, in the middle of all that, were the two of them. 

Ben was the first thing I saw because he was the first thing that moved, planted in front of his friend with his fat round face streaked with dirt and tears, his  brown hair plastered flat to his forehead with sweat, his striped t-shirt soaked dark from the chest down where he must have been wading in the deeper water for hours by now, and his pudgy fingers wrapped white-knuckled around a length of rusted pipe that he was already lifting up over his head as I came barrelling through the entrance.

Behind him sat Beverly, and even in the grime and the half-light of that horrible place she was the kind of pretty that made you stop for half a second, with that fire-bright red hair tangled wet around her face, big green eyes shining out from her pale skin and a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. M She was wearing a thin white vest that had gone almost translucent where the water had soaked through it, and a pair of cut-off beige trousers. 

Her legs disappeared into the shallow dark water in front of her where a huge slab of broken concrete, part of an old collapsed section of the ceiling by the look of it, had pinned her right calf and ankle m against the floor of the chamber. 

The slab was massive, easily three feet across and probably another foot thick, the kind of weight that two grown men with a pry bar would struggle with, and now I understood exactly why Bill and the others had run for help instead of trying to lift it themselves.

Ben was already moving by the time I had taken all this in, roaring out a war cry as he charged me with the pipe swinging down in a hard overhead arc that he clearly intended to plant in the top of my skull. I ducked sideways at the last second, the rusted iron whistling past my ear close enough that I felt the wind of it brush my hair, and on his backswing I stepped in and clamped my hand around the pipe just below his grip, twisting it out of his fingers with a yank that nearly took him off his feet.

"Hey, hey, hey, calm the fuck down, kid, I am here to help you, alright, I am on your side—"

He did not listen to a single word of it. His face crumpled into something between fury and absolute terror and he came at me anyway, swinging both his small fists in wild untrained haymakers that I caught easily on my forearms while I tried to back up enough to give him room to think. 

"It's him, it's him, it's another trick, it's another trick, get away from her, get away from her—"

"Ben! Ben!" Beverly's voice cut through the chamber, loud enough to make him freeze with one fist still cocked back. She had pushed herself up on her hands as far as the pinned leg would let her, leaning forward into the light until her eyes were locked on my face.

"Ben, stop, stop, I know him, he goes to our school, he's, he's a senior, he's the football guy, the quarterback, James, James Mitchell."

Ben stayed frozen for another long second, his chest heaving and snot running down his upper lip, his eyes flicking back and forth between me and Beverly while his brain tried to catch up to his body. Then, very slowly, he let his fists fall to his sides, and took a half step back from me. 

I let out a long sigh and dropped the pipe into the water at my feet. "Jesus Christ, kid. You almost split my head open with that thing." I held my hands out to the sides, palms open, and made my voice as steady as I could. "I get it. I get it, alright. But listen to me I am a regular eighteen-year-old asshole who is in this sewer because your dumbass friends dragged me down here to fish you two out."

Ben's whole face crumpled with relief and he half-collapsed forward, planting his hands on his knees while he tried to catch his breath.  "They, they're okay? They're really okay? Where are they, where are the others I thought they might not have managed to escape, are they hurt—"

"They're fine, your friend Bill swallowed about half a river, but they're upright and breathing and waiting for you."

I crouched down at the edge of the deeper water where Beverly was stuck, set the flashlight on a dry ledge of brick and shook my head once at the pair of them. "And for the record, you two should not have been playing around down here in the first place. These tunnels are not a clubhouse, alright, they're an actual deathtrap, the ceilings come down, people drown in flash floods, kids fall through old grates and snap their necks. Whatever you were doing, it was not worth this."

Beverly opened her mouth right away, the words tumbling out fast and shaky like she had been holding them in for hours. "We weren't, we weren't playing, we came down here looking for, for, it's hard to explain, but Ben and I got separated from the others and then there was this noise behind us and we ran and the water got deeper and a piece of the ceiling came down right on top of me, I tried to pull free, I tried so hard, but my leg was stuck and Ben tried to lift it but he couldn't, the others came and they tried as well but they couldn't so—"

I grabbed her hand gently. "Hey, hey, slow down, breathe. You can tell me the whole story when we are out of here, alright. Right now I just need you to tell me how you're feeling. Any dizziness, any nausea, any spots in your vision, any sharp pain anywhere besides the leg?"

She blinked at me, thrown a little by the question, "I, no, I don't, I don't think so, I'm cold, I'm really cold, but my head is okay, It's just, my leg, it really hurts, it's like a deep ache, and my foot has gone kind of numb, I can't really feel my toes anymore."

I nodded and began to go through the options. Numbness in the foot meant the pressure had been on long enough to start cutting circulation, which was bad but not catastrophic yet. The deep ache rather than a sharp focal pain suggested the slab was distributing the load across the calf rather than crushing one specific point, which meant a clean break was less likely than a sprain or a hairline. The fact that she had no other complaints, no neck pain, no abdominal tenderness, meant the falling concrete had probably only caught her on the way down and not landed on anything more vital.

I slid one hand into the cold water and ran my fingers carefully along the visible edge of the slab where it met her leg, feeling for the contour, working out where the weight was sitting and how it would shift when I lifted, mapping the angles in my head before I tried anything that might grind broken bone against soft tissue. 

The slab was sitting mostly flat on her, with the bulk of the mass on her calf rather than directly on her ankle joint, which was about the best news I could have hoped for. Lifting it straight up and slightly back toward me would clear her leg without dragging the rough underside across her shin.

"Okay, good news," I said, while my fingers found a decent hand-hold on the underside of the slab. "I think you got lucky. I'm not feeling any obvious deformity, the slab is sitting flat instead of pinching, and you're not telling me anything that worries me about your bones or your insides. When we get this off you, I'll have a proper look, but I'm pretty sure we're talking about a nasty sprain, maybe a hairline crack at worst, and not a full break."

Beverly's whole body sagged a little at that, and then her eyes flicked back up to me. "How, how do you, why are you, I mean, why are you even here? Like, why you, of all people? You don't even know us."

"I was driving through town to run an errand, minding my own business, when Henry Bowers and his merry band of inbred shitheads came tearing out of the trees chasing your buddies. I pulled over and intervened and when I was done your buddies told me you two were stuck down here, and here we are."

She was quiet for a moment. "Are they, are they okay, Bill and the others, did Henry, did he hurt them?"

"They're fine. A little banged up, but fine. By the time I got there Henry had his hands on Bill, but I sorted him out pretty quick."

I shifted my grip on the slab, getting both hands set, and grinned over at her without quite meaning to.

"Long story short, I made bowers piss his pants."

A startled laugh punched out of Beverly before she could stop it, surprised and half-hysterical, she clapped a hand over her mouth like she could not quite believe she had made the noise. "He didn't, you're, you're making that up, Henry Bowers does not wet himself."

"Cross my heart. Ask Bill, he had a front-row seat. Turns out he's a lot less tough when someone bigger plays his own game back at him."

"No way!" Beverly laughed again. 

She was still laughing, when Ben cut in from where he had been hovering anxiously at my shoulder. "Could, could we maybe, sorry, I don't want to be rude, but could we maybe hurry, please, I really, really want to get out of here, like right now?"

I glanced up at him and smiled. "Hey. Take a breath, kid. That clown isn't gonna bother us right now, I promise. As long as you two aren't shitting yourselves, he's not getting much of a meal out of you, and he tends to back off when the snack bar closes. So just stay calm and breathe and we'll be out of here in five minutes."

The two of them went very, very still at the same time. Beverly's mouth had fallen open a little, and Ben had gone the other way, his lips pressed into a thin pale line, both of them staring at me like I had just casually announced that I knew their bank pins.

"You, you know about IT?" Beverly whispered. "You know about the clown?"

"Yeah, yeah, I know about it. I know more than I'd like to know about it, honestly." I shook my head while I adjusted my grip on the slab again. "Stupid fucking carnival reject, popping up out of every drain in town like he owns the place, I swear to god if I see one more goddamn red balloon today I'm going to lose my entire mind."

Ben was still staring at me in amazment. "I, I didn't, I didn't think any of the adults knew about it. Like, at all. Bill's been trying to tell his parents since Georgie and they just, they just look right past him, like the words don't even land—"

"Kid, I am eighteen years old. We literally go to the same school. I am barely an adult, alright, I just got my licence two summers ago, ease up on the adults thing."

Beverly's voice cut in before either of us could keep going, l "Guys, guys, I love this, I really do, but can we please, please talk about all of this when there isn't a giant rock on my leg, please?"

I huffed out a laugh under my breath and ducked my head a little. "Yeah, yeah, you're right, sorry. Got distracted." I sank both hands deeper into the cold water, settling my grip properly along the underside of the slab, feeling the rough concrete bite into my palms while I tested the weight a couple of times with small lifting motions to make sure I had a balance point I could actually hold. After a few seconds of fiddling I felt the slab shift in the way I wanted it to and I knew I had it as good as I was going to get.

"Okay. Ben. Listen up. I'm gonna lift this thing on three, and the second I do, I need you to grab Beverly under the arms and pull her straight back toward you, away from the rock. Don't yank her, don't twist her, just slide her clear. You got that?"

Ben nodded quickly, kneeling down behind Beverly and bracing his sneakers against the curve of the floor, sliding both his hands gently under her armpits and getting himself set.

"One. Two. Three."

I drove up through my legs and heaved.

The slab was even heavier than I had thought it would be, a dead, stupid weight that dragged at my shoulders and burned through my back and arms the second I tried to move it, and for a horrible second I felt it shift maybe an inch and then stick like it had decided it lived there now. 

I planted my boots wider in the water, let out a low strained growl through clenched teeth, and pushed harder, every muscle from my calves up through my neck lighting up at once, the veins standing out on my forearms while I forced everything I had into raising it. 

The slab gave another inch, then another, then suddenly came up off her leg. 

"Now! Now, Ben, go!"

Ben pulled and Beverly slid backward through the shallow water, her trapped leg dragging clear of the gap with a wet scrape that made her hiss through her teeth. The second her ankle was past the edge of the slab I let the whole thing drop, and it hit the floor with a heavy slamming splash that sent water sheeting up the walls and soaked the bottom of my jeans.

I stood there for a second sucking in air with my hands on my knees, while Ben dragged Beverly up onto a higher dry shelf of brick and helped her sit upright with her back against the wall. 

Then I shook out my arms and waded over to crouch down in front of her. "Okay. Show me the leg. Slowly, just lift it up onto my knee, that's it, easy." She winced as she eased the leg up across my thigh, I supported her ankle gently in one hand while I rolled the wet hem of her trousers up out of the way and bent in close to look. 

The skin all the way around her calf was an angry red, already starting to mottle into the early purple of a serious bruise. There was a clear line of indented marks running across the muscle where the edge of the slab had pressed in. I ran my fingers very carefully along the length of the bone, watching her face for the tell, pressing in small increments along the tibia and the fibula, then around the ankle joint itself, asking her with each press whether it was a dull pain or a sharp one. 

Her ankle was already starting to swell, but when I rotated it a few careful degrees in each direction she could move it without screaming, which told me almost everything I needed to know.

"Alright. Good news mostly. You've got a nasty sprain to that ankle, I'd put money on it, and there's maybe, maybe, a hairline fracture somewhere along the calf where the edge dug in, but I'm not seeing or feeling any sign of a clean break. You'll need x-rays and you'll need to stay off it for at least a couple of weeks, but you're going to be fine, Beverly. You got incredibly lucky."

Her face crumpled, but not with relief this time, with a kind of high panicked horror that I had not been expecting, her hand flew up to grip my forearm hard enough to leave marks. "No, no, no, I can't, I can't go to a hospital, you don't, you don't understand, my dad, my dad is going to kill me, oh my god, he's going to lose it, I'm not supposed to be out, I'm not supposed to be anywhere, if he finds out I was, he'll, he'll, oh god, oh god—"

"Hey. Hey, hey, hey. Beverly. Look at me." I caught her eyes and held them. "We will figure all of that out later, alright. Later. Right now, the only thing on the agenda is getting your ass out of this sewer, into daylight, and somewhere safe. Whatever's waiting at home, we'll deal with it when we get there. One problem at a time. Okay?"

She nodded shakily, biting down hard on her lower lip, I could see her trying to swallow the panic back down for now.

I shifted my weight and slid one arm carefully under her knees and the other around her back, then stood up smoothly out of the water with her cradled against my chest in a clean bridal lift, mindful of the bad leg. 

She made a small startled sound and I felt her whole body go stiff against mine for a heartbeat, and then a deep, hot blush bloomed across her cheeks and crawled all the way down to her collarbones, while she tucked her face down against my shoulder like she was trying to hide it.

"Sorry," I muttered. "Faster this way. Ben, take the flashlight off the ledge there, point it forward, and stay right behind my left shoulder. Let's get the hell out of this hole."

Ben grabbed the flashlight, fumbled with it for a second, and then fell into step at my heel, the beam bouncing in front of my boots while we picked our way out of the chamber and back into the narrower tunnel I had come through. I kept my pace as quick as I could without jostling her leg. 

After a while of walking in silence Beverly's spoke softly into my shirt. "Thank you. For coming down here."

"Don't worry about it. It was on my way," I joked. 

That got a tiny startled giggle out of her, muffled into my shoulder, I felt the small puff of her breath through the wet cotton of my shirt. When she lifted her face again her green eyes were shining up at me from inches away, and the look in them had shifted into something I recognised immediately, something soft and dazzled and a little bit lost, the kind of look a sixteen-year-old girl gets when she has decided in the space of about four minutes that the boy carrying her out of a literal nightmare is the most incredible thing she has ever seen in her short, terrible life. 

Her lips were parted just slightly, her hand had crept up to rest against the front of my shirt, and her whole body had gone soft and pliant in my arms in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with her injured leg.

Oh, Christ.

I clocked it immediately, the puppy-eyed full-blown crush blooming on her face in real time, and I pretended very hard that I had not, keeping my eyes fixed straight ahead on the tunnel and my expression as flat and neutral and big-brotherly as I could manage. 

Last thing I needed in my life right now was a sixteen-year-old developing feelings for me on top of everything else, especially this particular sixteen-year-old, whose home situation I knew enough about to want absolutely no part of. 

Eyes forward, James. Eyes forward. Just keep walking.

Ben's voice piped up from behind my shoulder, mercifully breaking the moment. "Hey, um, James? Can I, sorry, can I ask, you said you knew about, about it. Do you, do you know anything else? Like, where it came from, or what it actually is, or how to, you know, how to make it stop?"

I let out a long, tired breath through my nose. "Honestly, kid, the best advice I can give you is the same one I'm trying to follow myself, which is stay the hell away from him. He is a giant, ancient, bottom-of-the-food-chain asshole, and trying to fight him is a great way to end up as a smear on his molars. The good news is, if the pattern holds, he's going to crawl back into whatever hole he sleeps in pretty soon and stay there for another twenty-seven years. So you sit tight, you don't go looking for trouble, and you let him put himself to bed."

Ben's footsteps slowed for a second behind me.

"How, how do you know all that? Mike has been reading every book in the library and even he—"

I opened my mouth with absolutely no idea what I was about to say, when from somewhere up ahead in the tunnels, came the sound of multiple young voices shouting.

"—run, run, run, don't look at it—"

"—Bill, Bill, get behind me, no wait get in front of me—"

"—oh god oh god oh god—"

I had never been so grateful in my life for an interruption. "Ben, keep up." I broke into a run without waiting for him, Beverly clutching at my collar with a m gasp as the motion jostled her leg, the flashlight beam swinging wildly behind me as Ben struggled to keep pace at my heels. 

I rounded the last corner at a dead sprint and skidded to a stop in the entrance of another wide chamber.

The Losers' Club was scattered across the far end of it, backed up against a brick wall with no clear way out, all five of them clinging to each other in a line. 

Bill was at the front with his arms thrown out to the sides like he was trying to shield the others, his soaked hair plastered to his forehead and his face a sheet of white. 

Mike had picked up a chunk of broken pipe and was holding it like a baseball bat in his shaking hands. Stan was pressed flat against the wall with his eyes squeezed shut, his lips moving in what looked like prayer. Eddie had his inhaler out and was sucking on it in while clinging to Richie's shirt with his free hand. Richie himself, was staring at the thing in the middle of the chamber with his mouth hanging open in pure wordless terror.

And in the middle of the room, towering over them on its hind legs with its knuckles dragging through the water, was a thing that was wearing a very loose interpretation of a great ape. 

Its body was the wrong shape, the proportions stretched and pulled out, with arms that were too long even for an ape and too many joints in them. It had a barrel chest matted with greasy black fur that was patchy in places and showed dead-pale skin underneath, and a sloping head that ended in a face that was almost right and somehow much worse for it. 

The mouth was full of yellow shark-teeth in too many rows and the eyes were the same slit-pupiled yellow I had seen back in the tunnel, the whole thing reeked like something that had drowned a long time ago and never quite finished rotting.

"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me."

I dropped to one knee fast and set Beverly down as gently as I could against the wall just inside the entrance, her hand fisting in the front of my shirt for a panicked second before I gently pried her fingers loose.

"Ben. Ben, look at me. Take Beverly. Get her out of here. Do not stop, do not turn around, do not look back, just go, do you understand me?"

Ben was already moving dropping down beside Beverly and getting his arms around her and helping her up.

I straightened up, drew the 9mm from the holster at my back, brought it up in a two-handed grip, and started walking across the chamber straight at the thing in the middle, squeezing the trigger as I moved. 

The shots cracked off the walls in a deafening rolling roar and the rounds punched into the ape-thing's chest and shoulders one after another. It rocked back with each impact, more from surprise than from damage by the look of it, and let out a screeching howl that was half lion and half train whistle. 

It staggered backward a few steps, its long arms thrown up to shield its face, the yellow eyes narrowing into furious slits.

"Get behind me! Now! All of you, move, get the fuck out of here!"

The Losers came peeling off the wall all at once in a stumble, Bill grabbing Stan by the wrist and dragging him forward, Mike sweeping Eddie up and shoving him toward the exit, Richie tripping over his own feet and barely catching himself.

"Why the fuck are you down here?" I snarled at them as they scrambled past me. "I told you, I told you, all of you, to stay outside, what part of stay outside sounded like a fucking suggestion to you?"

Richie, naturally, opened his mouth as he ran past.

"I mean, technically, you said it kind of like a suggestion, you didn't, you didn't write it down or anything, there was no contract—"

"I swear to god—"

Bill skidded to a stop next to me. "We, we w-w-wanted to help, we couldn't j-just sit up there, we c-c-couldn't—"

"Help? You wanted to help? Bill, you are a wet fifteen-year-old with no weapon and no plan, you aren't helping, you are giving him a goddamn buffet, get to Beverly, get her out, all—"

I never got to finish the sentence.

The ape-thing exploded forward in a single bound that covered the entire length of the chamber in less than a second, and a long forearm cracked across my chest like a steel pole. The impact lifted me clean off my feet and threw me backward across the room in a tumbling arc, the gun spinning out of my hand and clattering away into the dark, I slammed into the brick wall behind me with a sickening crunch that drove every bit of air out of my lungs in one strangled grunt before I crumpled down into the shallow water at its base in a half-conscious heap.

Somewhere very far away I heard the kids screaming.

"Oh shit, oh shit, James, James get up, get up—"

"Oh d-d-d-dear god—"

"He's, he's, he's getting up, it's coming, it's coming—"

The ape-thing turned its head slowly toward the cluster of kids by the entrance, the yellow eyes fixing on them

"Oh, Billy. Little Billy Denbrough. Did you bring me a snack? You shouldn't have. Truly. You shouldn't have brought your little friends down here, Billy. They float, they all float, and when you're down here with me, Billy, you'll float too—"

I groaned lifting my head off the wet stone, blinking blood out of my eye where I had split my forehead open on the brick. My ribs were screaming at me, at least two of them broken by the feel of it, and my whole back was one long bruise from shoulders to tailbone. I slumped my hand down flat against the brick wall behind me. 

And I pulled.

The Osmosian DNA woke up immediately under my palm and the wall began to flow into me. Reddish-brown brick and grey mortar dragged themselves up my arm in a crawling sheet, spreading across my skin over my clothes like a second layer, hardening as it went, plating my ribs and my shoulders and my chest and my arms and my throat in a fitted suit of dense, rough stone. 

The ape-thing was already moving, lunging forward across the chamber with one  arm reaching for Eddie, the closest one, the smallest one, the one whose inhaler had fallen and was bobbing in the water at his feet while he stood frozen in pure terror.

I exploded up off the floor and across the chamber like a sprinter off the blocks, my stone-plated shoulder hitting the ape-thing in the centre of its ribs at full speed. The impact felt like running into a parked truck, but it felt worse for the ape-thing, which was launched sideways off its trajectory with a high screeching howl and slammed into the far wall hard enough to crater the brick around it, the two of us crashing through the surface of the water in a tangle of limbs, stone and matted fur.

"GET OUT! ALL OF YOU! GET OUT NOW!"

That finally did it. I heard the splashing of small running feet behind me and the sound of them all retreating through one of the tunnels.

Then the ape-thing was on me.

It came off the wall with a roar, and the first thing it did was sink its yellow shark-teeth deep into the meat of my shoulder, the jaws clamping down so hard that I felt the stone armour crack under the bite. 

I bellowed and drove my right hand straight up under its jaw in a brutal uppercut that snapped its head back with a wet crack, and as it reeled I stepped in close and hammered three more punches into its midsection, each blow connecting with a meaty heavy thud that I felt in the bones of my hands even through the armour. Greasy black blood sprayed out from its mouth in ropes, and for a single shining second I thought I had it.

Then it hit me back.

The first claw raked down the front of my chest in a four-fingered slash.  I heard the stone armour grind and split under the points all the way through to the meat underneath. The second blow was an open palm to the side of my head that detonated against my temple like a bomb going off making the world went sideways and blue-white for a second. The third was a knee driven up into my stomach that lifted me off the ground for the second time that day and folded me forward over its leg.

I came back swinging anyway, because what the fuck else was I going to do.

I drove the heel of my stone palm up into the underside of its chin, feeling the satisfying crunch as something gave in its lower jaw, then hooked an arm around its neck and dragged it down into a clinch, planting both my hands on the back of its skull and driving knee after knee up into its ribs and chest, each one connecting with the dull boom of a sledgehammer hitting a side of beef. 

The ape-thing wailed and thrashed and tried to get its arms inside mine to break the hold. It bit me again, on the upper arm this time, and I head-butted it square in the face with my stone-plated forehead, splitting its already split head wider open and rocking it back. I drove a third punch into the joint of its shoulder hard enough to feel something dislocate. I was doing real damage to it now, I could tell, it was bleeding from a dozen places and one of its arms was hanging strangely, and for one wild moment I thought I might actually be winning this.

Then it stopped trying to hit me and just grabbed me.

Both of those long arms wrapped around my torso in a python-tight bear hug, pinning my own arms down to my sides and lifting me clean off the floor, and the ape-thing carried me three lurching steps backward across the chamber to where the water deepened, and without breaking stride it drove me down into the channel face-first and held me there.

Oh fuck me...

The icy filthy water closed over my head. 

I bucked. I thrashed. I tried to twist sideways to get one arm free, tried to drag my knees up to my chest to kick out at it, tried to pull the stone armour into a spike and drive it back into the thing's chest, and none of it worked. The grip around my torso was crushing, locked, immovable, and I could feel the cold pressure of an enormous palm planted flat between my shoulder blades pressing me down into the muck at the bottom of the channel. 

My lungs were already burning. My mouth opened on instinct and the freezing dirty water rushed in and flooded my throat, I choked on it and tried to cough but only sucked in more.

Above me, I could hear it laughing. "Oh, Jamesy. Oh, sweet little Jamesy. Did you really think? Did you really, truly think? You taste so afraid right now, Jamesy. So sweet. So afraid. You should have stayed in your nice big house and drunk your beers and let the children float. But you came down to play, didn't you? You came down to play, Jamesy. And now you get to float."

I screamed into the water, most of what came out was bubbles and the rest was the rest of the air in my lungs. My vision was starting to go, dark spots blooming and spreading at the edges, the burn in my chest turning into a deep thudding pain that was somehow worse than the burn. 

The healing in me was fighting against the drowning, trying to claw oxygen out of nothing, but there was nothing to heal. My limbs were getting heavy. My thrashing was getting weaker. I could feel myself starting to slip, my consciousness narrowing down to a small tunnel.

No.

No.

Not like this. Not in a goddamn sewer. Not from a fucking clown.

GET THR FUCK OFF ME!!!

The telekinetic blast came out of me in a single ragged scream that I could not even hear, an unfocused shockwave that erupted in every direction at once and turned the water around me into an instantaneous spray of mist. 

The ape-thing was hurled off me like a rag doll caught in a hurricane. It smashed across the chamber and into the far wall hard enough to bring a section of the ceiling down on top of itself.

I lurched upward out of the channel on hands and knees, hacking and choking, vomiting black water onto the stones, my whole body wracked with deep heaving coughs that brought up more water and a thin string of pink blood. Every breath felt like swallowing broken glass. Blood was pouring freely out of my nose and my ears and I could feel something warm and wet trickling out of the corner of my left eye too.

I stayed on my knees for a long second, wheezing, and lifted my head to look across the chamber.

Nothing.

The ape-thing was gone. Just gone. There was a deep crater of broken brick in the wall where it had hit, and a settling cloud of dust hanging in the air, and a rough scraped trail through the standing water leading off down one of the side tunnels, but the thing itself had vanished.

"You fucking, you fucking—"

I tried to push myself up onto my feet and my legs gave out under me and dropped me right back onto my hands and knees in the water, and for a minute I just stayed there, head hanging, blood dripping off the end of my nose in a patter onto the stone, my whole body shaking with a rolling tremor I could not stop.

That had been close. 

That had been so close. 

If that telekinetic blast had not come out of me when it did, if I had blacked out even five seconds earlier, I would have drowned right there with that thing's hand on the back of my neck and the whole town would be papering its lampposts with my photograph and the word MISSING by Monday morning. 

Fuck. Fuck this town. Fuck this sewer. Fuck that clown.

I dragged in another ragged breath, and forced myself up onto one knee, then the other, then up onto my feet, swaying badly. The stone armour crumbled off me in chunks and powder as I willed the connection to release, settling back into the rubble at the floor. 

I spat one more mouthful of black water out across the stones, wiped the back of my hand across my bleeding nose, and started walking, then jogging, then running for the tunnel the kids had escaped through

I did not look back. Not once. I did not slow down. I did not stop.

I just ran for the daylight.

(AN: So James first encounter with Pennywise has happened and it's not good, even with his armour Pennywise is more than a match for him. Fear practically makes him invulnerable or that's my theory anyway. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)