Chapter Text
It is raining in Derry, on the day It comes to town.
But Derry, this Derry, is in Northern Ireland, where it is raining as a rule, so It can hardly be credited for the dreary and drizzly atmosphere of the day.
The creature that washes up the mouth of the River Foyle has answered to many names over its millennia of life, and claimed more yet as a means of making itself understood to the peoples it tormented. From the invention of language, the creature observed and adapted to the fears of the people living above Its water-logged caverns.
It cannot remember most of the names It has used. They are built on human fears, fleeting, savoury, and ultimately forgettable to a gluttonous binge-eater like Pennywise.
It remembers this name, carries this name, because ‘Pennywise’ is a relatively new and important hunting strategy. For a while there, It, Pennywise, was haunting the people of the Wabanakik- the name of the land before the settlers. Over many generations, the Wabanaki people developed a kind of science around the creature, finding ways to push it back and keep it crushed to the fringes of their lands. Their children were aware and wary of the danger that awoke and roamed every twenty-seven years.
These methods were so effective, there were some cycles that saw the monster go hungry. It was forced to turn to inferior foods; the shallow fears of wildlife, based in instinct rather than imagination or paranoia that left it thin, hungry, sullen in its underground lairs. Sometimes, It pushed Its thinning body from the caves and hunted down travelers from other nations who didn’t know how to protect themselves. The effort required to hunt and return took up almost as much energy as It got from snaring a few travelers.
For a few generations, it looked as though the Wabanaki might manage to starve the creature entirely.
And then the settlers came.
The Wabanaki were dispersed, their generations of knowledge dismantled and scattered. The settlers who pasted Derry, their town, over the Wabanaki lands did not realise their mistake nor listen to the warnings of the remaining Wabanaki.
The next cycle, when It awoke and found crowds and crowds of new faces on Its stalking grounds, It couldn’t believe Its luck.
It feasted, growing sleek and fat.
The name ‘Pennywise’ came from a cycle in the 1850’s, not too long after Maine became a state. Again, It does not understand more about human cultures than It must know to make an effective hunter. All It understood was that the recent invention of the circus clown was terrifying to many small children, Its preferred food, so ‘Pennywise’ developed from there.
And that fear stuck. Pennywise would sleep for twenty-seven years, arise in Its new form, and find the new crop of children were just as terrified of the swollen white head and the eel-teeth as their predecessors. Great!
Finding a universal fear reduced Its workload. Nor were these children trained to protect themselves the way the pre-settler Wabanaki had been, so they were practically walking into Pennywise’s mouth.
And then something went wrong.
Pennywise has the short, arrogant memory of an apex predator. It remembers what works on the food. It remembers when the food fights back. But It does not understand why or how these things happen, nor why a situation might change against Its favour.
Certainly, It does not understand how to wrest control back from these clever bits of prey. So It gives them up. If this Derry is no longer viable as a feeding grounds, fine then.
Pennywise will find another Derry.
“I’ve seen a clown, mammy.”
“Have you, love?” Sarah McCool, seated in the kitchen, doesn’t look up from her newspaper.
Orla toes her damp shoes off, leaning on the doorjamb for support. “Aye, big pasty man with a swollen head, just standing about. One of his eyes went off the wrong way. He had this great red balloon.”
“Oh, aye. Just standing about, in this rain and all. What was he doing?”
Orla gestures with her umbrella. A sprinkle of rainwater flies off onto the floorboards. “He was waving like this.”
Sarah jumps as though she has been soaked, a hand fluttering up to check her hair. “Ach, Orla, you’ve got water all over the floor!”
Summoned by the sound of a potential mess, Mary can be heard tromping out of the laundry towards the front of the house. Orla drops her umbrella and beats a hasty retreat upstairs. From the way Mary caterwauls, she might have left a sub machine gun. Orla knows better than to look back and finishes the stairs on all-fours. From there, she crawls down the carpeted hall to report the news to her cousin.
Orla bumps Erin’s door open with a headbutt. “I’ve just seen a great demon clown-”
“Christ!” Erin flings the fountain pen to her desk. “Can you not knock? I’m working in here!”
Today, she is composing an essay about St Patrick, the expulsion of snakes and other manner of varmints from Ireland, and was about to reveal her thesis with a flourish: the English are the new snakes! St Patrick will surely return to drive them off, as he did with the original sinners, the tempters of Eve, the phallic phantom of the first garden-
And now she's lost it because Orla headbutted into her flow.
Summoned by the sound of a potential mess, Mary can be heard tromping out of the laundry towards the front of the house. Orla drops her umbrella and beats a hasty retreat upstairs. From the way Mary caterwauls, she might have left a sub machine gun. Orla knows better than to look back and finishes the stairs on all-fours. From there, she crawls down the carpeted hall to report the news to her cousin.
Orla bumps Erin’s door open with a headbutt. “I’ve just seen a great demon clown-”
“Christ!” Erin flings the fountain pen to her desk. “Can you not knock? I’m working in here!”
Today, she is composing an essay about St Patrick, the expulsion of snakes and other manner of varmints from Ireland, and was about to reveal her thesis with a flourish: the English are the new snakes! St Patrick will surely return to drive them off, as he did with the original sinners, the temptors of Eve, the phallic phantom of the first garden-
And then Orla headbutts right into her flow.
Heedless of her cousin’s protests, Orla picks her way through the bits of uniform and school books strewn across the floor. She grabs the back of Erin’s chair to pull herself up. There is a shriek as the tug takes two of the legs off the ground and wobbles Erin dangerously.
Finally, Orla manages to get upright and looking over Erin’s shoulder. There is a good view of the street from her desk- which is the reason Erin has this room.
Once she decided writing was going to be a passion rather than a hobby, she negotiated herself into the room with the best view for ‘inspiration’. Erin will only have it to herself until the baby Ann ages out of her crib. Meanwhile, Orla shares her room with Grandad.
“Ach, look. There’s your man right there- with the great big head. D’you not see him?”
Erin squints through the rain. “That’s a lamppost, Orla.”
“Just past the post! D’you not see him?”
There is a figure beyond the lamppost. Their shape is distorted by the driving rain, somehow stretched and a little grotesque, too, in the gloom of the early winter afternoon. When Erin blinks, the shape has resolved itself into an ordinary human figure. Just a boy, a neighbour she recognises from the neon colours of his coat, with his head down against the rain.
He moves quickly beneath Erin’s window and disappears around the corner.
Under her long sleeves, the hairs on her arms have stood up.
Orla leans back. “There, so. There he was.”
“What, Jacob Deaney? He’s got a normal head.”
“The thing behind him. The thing that was there before he passed the post. You’ve seen that."
“I didn’t see a thing, Orla.” says Erin. She means to be impatient, but it comes out timid. She can’t understand why she has chills all of a sudden.
Orla’s lip curls in a conspiratorial sort of smirk. “Right, so.”
She claps her cousin on the shoulder, thumbs her nose, and saunters the way she came. Erin tries to go back her writing, but she finds she cannot concentrate until she has shut the curtains tightly.
The body turns up in the morning.
By the time the body is discovered, waterlogged and face down against the grate of a storm-drain missing, Derry has already been aware that Jacob Deaney is missing for the better part of twelve hours.
He didn’t return from football practice. Not being the sort of child who goes off of his own accord without telling his parents, or at least calling them from a friend’s house, his parents are immediately alarmed. This alarm turns to urgency when the nightly curfew comes into effect and Jacob Deaney is still not home.
At that point, the Deaneys feel they have no choice but to contact the police. Of course the police assume the worst: missing curfew, and a young Catholic male at that, the most vulnerable demographic when it comes to being radicalised against Protestant power and neighbours. He could be getting up to any number of things, missing, in the dark, unsupervised.
Half of the people out looking for him have already made up their minds that this kid must be smuggling arms or planting an incendiary device under some vital bit of public infrastructure.
Later, his searchers will discover the Deaney boy did not travel in a way they could have been expected to spot from the street-level. Three and a half kilometers, apparently all through the storm drains and sewers.
He appears to have walked past his own house and to the end of a road, into a sheltered corner, where he was murdered above a storm drain. Bits of him tumbled into the storm drain, leaving faint smears of gore on the pavement which are mistaken for mold or grease, at a glance under torchlight.
From there, Deaney went in to the storm drain and the sewers below. Most of the travelling was done by the mild surges of the stormwater in Derry’s sewers.
A human body is not all that hard to lift when it lies prone on a slippery, stone surface, and so Deaney’s body probably spends most of the night in transit, occasionally snagging a sleeve on a pipe here, or a big of the ragged wound there, until he is finally washed against a storm-grate.
Grates are placed at the mouths of the discharge pipes, just so giant bits of debris like Jacob Deaney’s body won’t get flung out to pollute the countryside’s streams and creeks. And this is where he is found.
It is not the police who discover him, but a delivery driver whose route happens to take him down a more rural lane that passes the storm drain.
On retrieving the body, the general consensus between the military and police is of secrecy: until they can at least identify what kind of a weapon was used against him, Jacob Deaney’s death should not be known.
In another hour and a half, all of Derry is talking of it.
Sister Michael delivers the news with an uncharacteristic sobriety. She used far more euphemistic terms and details than those the girls were exchanging on the bus that morning, hearing from their parents and over-hearing from their neighbours.
But she can tell that her students can tell they are being lied to. There is a good intention behind that lie- some platitude about preserving childhood innocence.
It is a strange contradiction to Sister Michael, she thinks as she is warning the girls not to walk by themselves near dark, that the diocese will jam as much gruesome martyrdom into the curriculum as can fit, but want to soften the real violence happening on their own doorsteps.
This is a hall of Derry girls! They have come up with the Troubles hanging over their heads and occasionally slapping them down. Kidnappings, bombings, murders, beatings, the threat of violence and the tension always thick in the air. The streets are thick with soldiers and police, clogged annually by parades of Protestants pissed off it isn’t legal to burn heretics at the stake anymore.
It is just how they have grown up. They deserve to know the truth. If ever there were a group of girls that could handle the truth, they are in front of Sister Michael now.
Sister Michael does not deviate from the script given to her by a syllable.
“I don’t think it was a human that did that.”
Orla says this confidently, as if this is a conclusion they have all come to already.
No one knows how to challenge that.
Orla continues. “It’s evil is what it is.”
Erin clutches the edges of a sink and stares at herself in the mirror. She is gratified by the dark circles under her eyes, the haunted look of a girl (woman?) who has seen too much.
If only Claire weren’t nervously chewing on a pigtail over her shoulder.
The other girls nod. James, out of sight, also nods. Because they have gathered in the girls’ bathroom, the girls have shut James up in a stall so he can’t ‘perv’ on them.
At the next sink along, Michelle raises a crooked arm above her head, like she is checking herself for B.O. “Whatever did it to him did it savage-like. He was missing a chunk from here.”
Claire smacks her arm. “Don’t do that, Michelle! It’s disrespectful!”
“Aye, it’s downright rude to bite a body-”
“What you’re doing!”
“It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no animal that could do that in one bite. Not in bloody Derry. There’s no animal outside the zoos that’s bigger than a dog.” says Erin.
“Or Ireland, for that matter.” says James. He has put his face right up to the crack between the stall door and wall. “There’s no wolves left in Ireland. There aren’t really bears, either, or predators bigger than foxes, and badgers, unless you want to count the ones that wear fatigues ow-”
Michelle thumps the door with her shoulder.
Erin frowns at the mirror, a sickening jealousy turning in her stomach. Did James just steal her metaphor? She didn’t say the English were wolves, per se, but of the same class of varmints and nasties that St Patrick expelled.
Surely that’s a thought original enough that James can’t reproduce it by himself. Has he been reading her notebooks?
James’ next words are pained and nasal. “Michelle, you’ve hit me in the nose!”
“Stop tryin’ta peep then!”
“I’m not! I’m just participating!”
Michelle shakes her head. “‘The ones that wear fatigues’. God.”
While no one will ever accuse the British military of being kind occupiers, what has happened to Jacob Deaney is just too weird to assume their guilt.
First, attacking an Irish Catholic boy, a school-child without so much as a tardy mark to besmirch his name just doesn’t make sense. When soldiers go out of their heads with power, they usually target someone with a standing in the community so they can bash the whole community’s ego. Or they go for someone with no standing at all, which makes community support and outrage a bit slower and more difficult to rally.
Likewise, the other side of the partition are confused. So far it seems like the Catholic paramilitaries are hesitant to launch a revenge campaign because the wounds are so strange. Even though Deaney was soggy and a bit dissolved when they peeled him off the grate, they could tell the wounds were not inflicted by hand, or dog, or, really, by anything short of a shark or a Jaws of Life.
Claire’s voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “It could be the polar bear. Maybe he’s got out again.”
“That’d be on the news, though.”
Orla shakes her head at Erin. “It wasn’t the bear. Besides, if I were a zoo that let me polar bear out twice, I’d lie about it. If they know you can’t keep the bear in, they’ll take it off you.”
But Claire has talked herself out of the theory already. “No, it weren’t the bear. I’ve read that when bears attack humans, they eat the softest bits first. The bum and the stuff in the front.”
“What’s that, Claire?” asks James.
Michelle shakes her head in disgust. “Perverts, the lot of them.”
“I’ve just asked what she said-”
“Not you, James! The bears!”
“I’ve got an idea of what did it.”
“Are we sure there’s no wolves left in Ireland?” says Erin.
“They went extinct in 1786.” says James.
“Yeah, but when was the last time we checked?”
Orla says it again, louder. “I’ve got an idea of what did it!”
Erin whirls around to snap. “No you haven’t, Orla.”
Michelle puts an arm up in front of Erin. “No, no, let her speak.”
Sweat beads Erin’s temples, even as goosepimples stand up on her arms. The girls lean in closer. James does too, on the other side of the door.
“I saw something last night. It looked like a someone, but I could tell it was really a something. I was coming in a bit late. It was raining. I was watching me feet, you know, because wet road is tricky. It’ll take the feet right out from under ye- but I looked up to make sure I wasn’t going to bump into no one every now and then, and when I come up onto our street, I saw this man.”
Claire’s breath catches in her throat. Erin grips the sink for support. The stall door cracks open. James grasps Michelle’s shoulder for comfort.
Orla licks her lips. “He looked at me and I looked at him. He waved. I didn’t wave back, because I’m no waving at strange men. Besides that, I could see he weren’t really a man. He had this great big head and these teeth-”
“Jesus Christ almighty, Orla!” Erin bursts out. “Stop banging on about the feckin’ demon clown again!”
Orla snaps her fingers. “Cousin, I saw him! I saw it! It were a clown! A big feckin’ clown with a big feckin’ head and knife teeth-”
A small riot breaks out: Orla continues, but is drowned out by the other four booing her down at once. In his rage, James comes all the way out of the stall to scold her. Michelle is so moved by Orla’s story, too, she doesn’t even chew James out for breaking his containment.
Undeterred, Orla holds forth, raising her voice to match those trying to drown her out. She describes the clown in veristic detail: its greasepainted skin, the bulbous, almost sensuous of shape of its enormous forehead, the stained and ragged clown-suit it wore, the floppy shoes that were bone dry in spite of being in a puddle. In fact, the clown didn’t look like it was standing in the rain at all. As if the reality it stood in was different from Orla’s.
Orla is just getting the part about how it followed Jacob Deaney around the corner and how Erin also saw it when a nun bursts in and screams at the girls for making such a ruckus. They are dispersed on threat of detention. Even as they scatter in different directions and Erin drags Orla away by the arm, Orla is calling over her shoulder.
“Mark my words!” Orla says, at once casual and grave. “We haven’t seen the last of your man! It’ll be back! It’s coming for us, girls, and it likes that we’re afraid!”
The terror begins at the dark, sinister hour of just past 9 p.m., because it is a school night, and if Pennywise picked a later hour It’d have to wake Its victims up as well as scare them.
As far as Erin is concerned, Orla’s talk of a demon clown is just the latest in a series of madwoman’s ravings that have issued from Orla in an unbroken stream since she learned to talk. True, her ravings are generally a little less gory and grounded. She hasn’t claimed to see a supernatural creature since they were eleven and Orla decided faeries weren’t worth believing in, since they probably wouldn’t believe in her. Ghosts, too, are out of her wheelhouse. Erin has no idea where Orla might have picked up the idea of a demon clown.
Maybe she saw a movie monster at the video rental place? Still, Orla is normally so much more interested in the world of the physical.
She is more attracted to the kind of things she could conceivably replicate herself: martial arts and stunts and swordplay. Erin has seen Orla reenact fight sequences from up to a dozen different movies, working herself to the point of exhaustion in the mudroom, swinging a stick or a mop, making herself hoarse with battle cries. Drives the rest of the house spare with her carrying on.
That this fresh crop of nonsense has apparently drawn inspiration from real-world violence is upsetting too. And Orla knew to point to Jacob Deaney before anything had happened to him. How did she do that, honestly?
The fact that she pointed out something behind their neighbour, maybe minutes before his death, and the fact that Erin did see an oddly shaped shadow. But it belonged to Jacob Deaney, didn’t it? Or someone following him very closely.
No, it belonged to Deaney. There was no one following him. It was just a trick of the light and the rain.
But Erin hasn’t been able to open her curtains since.
It just seems safer to have them shut.
In fact, Erin has avoided her desk entirely and writes a journal entry on her bed, although she hates laying on her stomach to write.
The whole day was pretty much a wash. No one could talk about anything but Jacob Deaney’s murder. It unsettled the girls and teachers alike, so that even the strictest of the nuns allowed the girls to whisper and gossip when they should have been working silently. In the last class of the day, Jenny Joyce went to the front of the classroom to lead everyone in a prayer for the Deaney’s. Erin didn’t actively hate her in that moment.
When Jenny raised her head with tears on her cheeks, Erin even loved her for a moment, in the naked, embarrassing way between people whose pain and fear are shared.
The grey pall over school was the same at home. Nobody ate well at tea. Most everyone picked at their food, and for once Mary didn’t fuss at them about wastage.
Mary didn’t say much, apart from telling Erin and Orla about the curfew going into effect that night. Everybody in their own houses by 7p.m., unless they are working through the night, say, at a hospital like Michelle’s parents.
Most businesses will be operating at reduced hours and there has already been talk of shutting down some of the schools.
Erin pauses and scratches out the last line. Maybe she should write down some more of what they spoke about at tea? She wants to remember this day as clearly as possible. This is one of those formative experiences most great writers have- the stories they recall on talk shows and book tours.
Grandad said something that sounded wise and quotable about the shortness of life during dinner, but Erin was too distracted by Orla mouthing ‘clown’ across the table at her to pay attention.
Bloody Orla.
Erin re-reads the last few paragraphs and frowns at what she sees. It feels too dry. Too clinical, journalistic. That’s not what she is going for. She wants to convey some of the feeling of community loss and fear- when one Derry-ite dies, it is like all Derry-ites have died, or is that too cliched?
And paranoia! There was definitely a thick, thick atmosphere of paranoia radiating from her parents and Auntie Sarah. Like Jacob Deaney’s death means all of the children in Derry are at risk- especially the girls, because girls are always the most at-risk when situations like this arise.
Perhaps they are. The murder did happen near their street. But Erin cannot imagine what kind of a killer would want to hunt her and Orla down. Surely they wouldn’t be satisfying murder victims. Erin knows herself to be a shrieky, shrill person, as close to banshee as ever existed among mortals, which is bound to put off an attacker.
For her part, Orla puts off the same kind of aura as a small predatory animal that must make up for its smallness by being completely fucking crazy, like a badger or a stoat.
She cannot imagine anything that would make them attractive targets to a killer, if this guy does indeed turn out to be a serial killer and does attack them, the killer will quickly discover they picked the wrong targets.
Now that Erin is out of her writing rhythm, she is forced to acknowledge how much pain she is in. Her shoulders and back are cramped up from leaning on them for so long. Feels like her shoulder blades are full of needles, her lower vertebrae kinked into aching knots. Earlier, Erin tried to lay all the way down with her journal near her chin, but it felt like her tits were going to go concave into her ribcage.
She should get up and stretch. Erin has been facing away from the window since she started to write. Earlier, she did her homework on the floor.
Orla has gotten into her head. Erin couldn’t make herself sit down at the desk and face the window which Jacob Deaney walked under last night.
It is not that she is afraid, she tells herself. It is just easier to concentrate with the curtains shut over the window, and facing away. Erin cannot shake the fear that she won’t resist the temptation to lift the curtains if she acknowledges them- just a corner, just for a peek…
At which point she will see an utterly mundane Derry outside and feel stupid for allowing Orla to poison her mind.
Or she will see something. A tall shadow with a bulbous head. Something that looks like a someone, standing under the lamplight to show her with a smile that it does, indeed, have the type of teeth that could take a ragged scoop out of a human body.
Goosebumps again. Erin gives herself a shake. Stupid Orla and her stupid, vivid imagination.
Flipping onto her back, Erin holds the journal above her head and re-reads the entry. God, this is a long one. There are like, six paragraphs of scene-setting and a sort of genealogical passage about the who the people of Derry are- a miserable mix of Catholics and Protestants, united across the barricade by mutual mistrust and general miscreancy.
Surely the people who will read Erin’s work in the future will have educated themselves on the Troubles and Derry’s unique position within it?
Erin expects to be the representative of this era for many people, her books a gateway to the world of mass and mass conflict for future generations of Protestants and non-Irish Catholics. Derry’s most famous resident!
Former resident, of course, she expects the royalties of her first bestseller will pay more than enough to move to a writers’ enclave somewhere in the world. Where do they have those, these days? It used to be everybody wrote out of Paris or Harlem- Erin wouldn’t mind Harlem. There are lots of Irish in New York, so she might not get all that homesick.
A flicker of movement. Erin looks over the edge of her journal, at the curtains. They stir as if in a light breeze- which they shouldn’t be, because the windows are shut. Very tightly shut against the Irish damp.
She frowns and focuses on the page again. This is too much padding. Way too much padding. She should get to the point.
One of the curtains bulges outwards, suddenly, so suddenly that the fabric knocks a mug of pens onto the carpet. Erin jumps. Her heart beats in her mouth.
The curtain bulges taut for a few long seconds, like a sail full of wind. The other stays still beside it. A tiny slice of dark window behind them is visible, black and menacing.
Erin clutches the journal to her chest. She watches the curtain deflate and sink back to stillness beside its mate. Her pulse has just begun to slow when the other curtain bulges outwards.
The shape of it is different this time- not bulging from wind, no, that was a natural-ish movement just to make sure it had Erin’s attention, so she was watching for this next part.
A hand is pushing the curtain outward. A large hand with the silhouette of gnarled, long fingers, groping against the curtain. It opens and shuts as it reaches over Erin’s desk, the way Erin reaches for the lamp switch in the morning. Reaching for her.
A pile of books tumble from the desk.
The noise brings Erin back to reality with a jump. She blinks, and it is still happening. The hand is now well over the desk and reaching much farther into the room than any regular-sized arm has business reaching.
Erin squeaks. She slides off the edge of her bed, pressing her back to the wall, and makes for the door.
Erin starts to pray under her breath. It isn’t even a real prayer. It is a combination of three of four different prayers and hymn lyrics smashed together, and it does nothing to slow the hand, which is now just ludicrous in its proportion. The arm it is attached to has to be four foot long now. Erin would be laughing if her throat hadn’t constricted from fear to the size of a pence piece.
Metal door hinges scrape her back. Without looking away, Erin grabs the doorknob and, horrifyingly, cannot make it turn. Firstly, her hands are shaking so hard she cannot get a grip. Secondly, it just won’t move. Erin might as well be trying to turn a bit of the wall- she can’t even make the lock click.
At last, desperation makes Erin drop her journal and turn around. She grabs the doorknob with both hands and throws every kilogram of her bodyweight into turning it. The doorknob does not budge.
There is a humid breath on the back of her neck. Every muscle in Erin’s body seizes up at once.
A body jostles against Erin. A body that is all sharp angles and musty smell and freezing cold, like old people’s hands, and swampy-warm, like baby’s hands, at the same time.
She cannot see anything, although she knows there is someone behind her. She cannot even see a shadow, although she knows this person must be looming over her.
And then it just gets weird.
“‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’,” rasps a squeaky, hoarse, American-accented voice so close to Erin’s ear that it wets her eardrum.
“‘That floats on high o'er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd’.” continues the voice.
Erin jiggles the doorknob again. Nothing new.
The voice drops suddenly into a deep, bass rasp. “Do ya like poems, Erin? Do you like Wordsworth? Do ya think you’re better than him, secretly?”
A squeal of mortification issues from Erin’s whitened lips. Even so, the little, pragmatic bit of her in the back of her head is trying to judge from the depth of the voice if this entity is a man or a woman. Do demons have gender, for that matter?
“I know ya write poems, Erin.” the voice, the speaker is somehow closer to her now than ever before. Like, if it were any closer, it would be standing inside of Erin. “Read me some of your poems.”
The last part becomes a chant. Every time it repeats “read me some of your poems”, its voice raises in pitch.
Erin once read a story called The Masque of the Red Death, a good, classic Poe story that sees the protagonist, Prince Prospero, killed by the sheer fright of seeing the story’s monster. She thought that was one of Poe’s weaker endings, even if it was meant to be as allegorical as the rest of the story and concept.
Being so afraid that your eternal soul just gives up and ejects itself from your body?
Yeah, right. Pull the other one, Poe.
Except it is true. Edgar Allen Poe was right; people can die of sheer fright and Erin knows this to be true because she is about to keel over.
The voice has risen to the screaming pitch of a tea-kettle ready to come off the stove. Erin’s heart is so far into her mouth that its panicked beats thump against the back of her teeth. Her vision swims.
And then the door opens. Into her.
Erin is knocked sprawling. As she falls back, she expects at least a glimpse of her tormentor. But there is just empty space. Erin is alone.
Except now there is Orla, triumphal, red-faced from adrenaline, and brandishing a large stick like a claymore.
Erin surprises herself with a scream. Orla replies with a strangled sort of battle-cry and swings the stick in the air above Erin.
“Curtains!” Erin manages, in between breathless screams. Now that she has got started she cannot seem to stop.
Having her freedom of movement back, too, is a relief. Erin kicks her legs at the air and flails her arms across the carpet, just to be sure she isn’t about to freeze up again.
While she flops about like a fish on a hook, Orla bounds over her and leans over Erin’s desk to attack the curtains. She lays into them with the stick and the fury of a hunter who senses her quarry has just escaped her after a long night of laying in wait.
Amidst all of this noise and chaos, Erin is faintly aware of Mary, downstairs, smacking the handle of the broom into the ceiling (or the floor of Erin’s room) and telling the girls to pack it in.
Erin begins to pull herself together. There are still other people in the house! The real world is right out there! This is still her house with her family in it- her cousin, tangled in the curtains like an angry Madonna.
She lurches to her feet, just as Orla tears the curtains off their rod. Orla raises a corner up and puts her hand through a rent in the fabric, waggling it at Erin.
“It’s torn through them.” Orla shows her another tear, this one big enough to put her head through. “Bloody clowns. No respect.”
“Oh God. Oh Jesus. It was talking to me-”
Orla nods and begins to open the window. The street outside is dark and empty, thanks to the curfew. Not so much as a nan having a chat on her stoop. Certainly no demon clowns with giant arms and clawed hands.
“I heard your man from my room. I asked Grandad if he heard that, but he said he couldn’t. I reckon it doesn’t truck with adults.”
Even through her terror, Erin cannot help but feel a bit stung by that. “Orla, we’re fifteen! We’re adults!”
“If we’re at an age where we would still go all spare and stabby like them lads in that flies book, we’re not adults. We’re pubescents, Erin. We’re still vulnerable.”
Wow, listen to her go. Vulnerable and pubescent in the same sentence. Those are the two longest words Erin has ever heard her cousin say.
With the window jimmied open, Orla shoves the curtains over the sill. “I’ll help you hang a bedsheet up.”
“I’m no sleeping in here tonight!”
“Right you are.” Orla tucks the stick under her arm, and gestures for Erin to grab her pillow. “You can bunk with me.”
“I-but what was that?”
“I told ye, we saw it together. It was the thing behind Jacob Deaney.”
Erin’s throat is dry from a combination of fear and screaming. “How do you know? What makes you so sure?”
“I’ll tell ye in the morning. You and the other girls. I think we need to have a serious talk about all this.”
Ordinarily Orla is impossible to argue with, and that is when she is wrong about something. When she is right about something, which Erin senses she is, Orla is unshakeable, and refuses to explain herself until she is good and ready.
Erin will find out tomorrow. For now, she just wants to feel safe, and being near to Grandad will go a fair ways to helping her with that.
Erin grabs her pillow and journal, and steers her cousin by the shoulder out of the room.