Chapter 2: Farewell Under the Moonlight
The plan was simple. That’s what Bill kept saying. Simple. They would meet at the library at noon. Research. Confirm. Then, if they had to, they would go back down. It was all logic and steps, a fortress built against the screaming in their guts.
But the hours between now and then were a yawning chasm. A chasm Richie and Katelyn found themselves standing over on the Kissing Bridge, the water below chattering a mindless, cheerful tune.
The bridge was old, its timber bones silvered by weather. Every inch of the railings was a testament to permanence, or the desperate hope for it: initials carved inside hearts, dates going back decades. J.M. + S.P. 1932. Forever. T.L. loves D.B. Katelyn’s fingers trailed over the grooves as they walked, feeling the history of other people’s certainty.
Richie was quiet. He’d been quiet since Bill’s house, a low-frequency hum of tension replacing his usual broadcast. He stopped near the apex of the bridge, pulling his Swiss Army knife from his pocket. The blade snicked open, a sharp, metal sound in the gentle evening.
“What are you doing?” she asked, leaning against the rail beside him.
“Adding to the archive,” he muttered. He chose a spot less crowded, a patch of wood still smooth from a carpenter’s plane a lifetime ago. He pressed the tip in and began to carve. Not with his usual frantic energy, but with a slow, deliberate care she’d only ever seen him use when fixing the chain on his bike or holding a dying bird they’d found once as kids.
R.T. The letters were blocky, deep. He switched hands, blowing away the tiny curls of wood.
He paused, the knife hovering. His throat worked. Then he carved the plus sign. It looked like a crossroads.
“Richie,” she said softly.
He didn’t look at her. He carved the K. Then the M. R.T. + K.M.
Below it, he started on the date. AUG 1958. The knife slipped on the last curve of the 8, scoring a shallow line across the wood. He stared at it, his shoulders slumping. “Damn it.”
“It’s perfect,” she whispered.
“It’s not.” His voice was thick. He closed the knife, shoving it back into his pocket. He placed his palm over the fresh carving, covering it completely. “It’s just… marks on a board. It doesn’t mean anything. It won’t keep anything safe.”
The dam broke. Not with a sob, but with a quiet, shuddering exhale that seemed to come from the very center of him. He turned and pressed his forehead against the wooden post, his glasses digging into the bridge of his nose. “I can’t lose you, Kat. I can’t. I can’t go down there again knowing it might… that it could…”
He couldn’t finish. He didn’t have to. The image was there, between them, vivid and toxic: not just the clown, but the void it represented. The unmaking.
She moved behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek against the tense muscles of his back. She could feel his heart slamming against his ribs. She held onto the rough cotton of his shirt, her knuckles white. “You won’t lose me.”
“You don’t know that.” He turned in her arms, his face ravaged, eyes magnified and swimming behind his lenses. “None of us know that. That’s the whole fucking point. Bill’s ‘simple’ plan? It’s a suicide note. And I just stood there. I said, ‘What’s the plan, Big Bill?’ Like I was asking about a trip to the movies.”
“We all did,” she said, cupping his face. His skin was warm, damp at the temples. “Because the only other choice is to run. And we can’t run from this. Not really.”
“I would,” he confessed, the words a raw scrape. “For you, I would. I’d pack you in my stupid car and drive to California and never look back. I’m not brave like Bill. I’m just… loud.”
“You’re brave where it counts.” She brushed her thumb over his lips. “You came back for me in the barrens. You stepped in front of me when you saw that… thing. That’s not noise, Richie. That’s you.”
He searched her face, his eyes tracing every freckle, every lash, as if building a map. The fear in his gaze was so profound it was a physical thing, a third presence on the bridge with them. But underneath it, she saw the love, vast and terrified and solid as the earth beneath them.
He kissed her then. It wasn’t like the kiss in the clubhouse, fueled by discovery and a defiance of time. This was different. This was a transfer. A silent, desperate communication of everything words were too clumsy to hold. It tasted of salt and cherry and the sour tang of fear. It was a kiss that said I remember and I’m here and this might be the last thing.
It ignited them.
A sound escaped her, half-gasp, half-whimper, and she clutched the front of his jacket, pulling him closer. His hands came up, cradling her head, his fingers tangling in her hair. The world narrowed to the feel of his mouth, the solid plane of his chest against hers, the cool wooden railing at her back.
The rational part of her mind, the one that listened for footsteps, whispered about propriety, about being on a public bridge as dusk settled, flickered and went dark. There was no public. There was no future. There was only this hunger, this need to fuse together, to create a single, unbreakable entity before the world could tear them apart.
He understood. His hands slid down, gripping her waist, then her thighs, and he lifted her as if she weighed nothing. She wrapped her legs around him, her skirt bunching, her back against the carved initials of a hundred other ghosts. The rough wood caught on her blouse.
“Here?” he breathed against her neck, his voice ragged with want and a question.
“Yes.” It was all she could manage.
There was no tenderness in it, not the kind from storybooks. It was fierce, and messy, and driven by a current of pure desperation. It was armor. It was a prayer. It was the only language they had left that felt true.
He fumbled with his belt, with the barrier of their clothes. The chilly evening air hit her skin, then the burning heat of him. When he pushed inside, she cried out, not in pain, but in a savage kind of recognition. You. Me. Here. Now. She bit down on the shoulder of his jacket, the thick canvas bitter against her tongue, muffling the sounds that wanted to tear out of her.
He moved, and each thrust was a punctuation mark against the silence of the coming dark. A declaration. A defiance. A memory being hammered into their very blood. The bridge creaked, a gentle, rhythmic companion to their rhythm. Below, the river kept chattering, indifferent.
Her climax was a wave that pulled her under, a silent, convulsive shattering that left her blind and clinging to him. He followed a moment later, his whole body locking, a broken sound of release and anguish gasped into the hollow of her throat.
They stayed like that, locked together, trembling as the sweat cooled on their skin. The smell of damp wood, of river, of their own bodies, filled the air. Gradually, the world expanded. A car horn echoed from town. A bird called from the trees.
He slowly let her down, her legs unsteady. They leaned against the railing, shoulders touching, putting themselves back together in clumsy, intimate silence. Her lipstick was gone, thoroughly. His glasses were skewed. They were a disaster.
He reached out, his hand finding hers on the sun-warmed wood. His thumb rubbed over her knuckles.
“I’m scared,” he said, simply.
“I know.”
“Whatever happens tomorrow…”
“Don’t,” she interrupted, squeezing his hand. “Don’t say it. Just look at our initials.”
He turned his head. In the fading blue light, the fresh carving stood out, pale and deep. R.T. + K.M. AUG 1958. A record. A witness. However temporary the wood, however permanent the fear, they had made a mark.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, the kind that comes after a long cry. He straightened his glasses. “We should get you home. Your mom’ll be wondering.”
She nodded, not moving. The thought of her quiet house, her normal bedroom, felt like stepping onto a different planet. “Will you stay? Just… on the porch? For a little while?”
“I’ll stay as long as you want,” he said. He let go of her hand only to shrug out of his jacket and drape it over her shoulders. It smelled like him, like smoke and Impulse cologne and the cold sweat of fear. It smelled like now.
They walked off the bridge, leaving their carved promise behind them in the gathering dark. They didn’t look back. The river’s voice followed them for a while, a distant, relentless whisper, until it was swallowed by the first, lonely barks of downtown dogs and the deeper, more familiar silence of Derry at night, a silence that was never really silent at all.
The river’s voice followed them for a while, a distant, relentless whisper, until it was swallowed by the first, lonely barks of downtown dogs and the deeper, more familiar silence of Derry at night, a silence that was never really silent at all. Richie’s jacket was a warm shield around Katelyn’s shoulders as they walked, their fingers knotted together so tightly the bones ached. They didn’t speak. The memory of the bridge, of the carving and what followed, was a live wire between them, too potent for words.
He stayed on her porch swing until her bedroom light flicked on upstairs. The creak of the chains was the only sound for an hour.
The Derry Public Library at noon was a cathedral of dust and dread. Sunlight strained through high, grimy windows, illuminating nothing but the motes dancing in the beams. It smelled of aging paper and floor polish, a sterile mask over the organic rot they knew waited beneath their feet.
They were all there, clustered around a heavy oak table in the local history section. The air was thick with unspoken apologies and fraying nerves.
“Okay,” Bill said, his voice low. He spread a hand-drawn map on the table, holding the corners down with books. It was a child’s sketch of the Derry sewer system, amplified by memory and nightmare. “We st-st-start at the main culvert on W-W-Witcham. The one we used before.”
Eddie stared at the map like it was a venomous snake, his inhaler clutched in a white-knuckled fist. “My medicine cabinet is not prepared for this. It is objectively not prepared. The bacterial profile alone—”
“We’ll have flashlights,” Ben said, his large hands smoothing a corner of the map. His voice was calm, but his eyes kept darting to Beverly, who was methodically tearing a paper napkin into thinner and thinner strips. “And we stay together. No splitting up. Not for anything.”
“What’s the objective, Bill?” Stan asked. He stood a little apart, his arms crossed. His question was cool, analytical. “Confrontation? Observation? We need a parameters.”
“It spoke to us,” Katelyn said. Her voice cut through the clinical planning. She hadn’t taken Richie’s jacket off. “It knows we’re remembering. It’s not just lurking down there anymore. It’s inviting.” She looked at each of them, her blue eyes fierce. “The balloon trail was an invitation. Yesterday was a… a greeting. We go down to answer it.”
A cold quiet followed her words. It was the truth they’d been papering over with logistics.
Richie, slumped in a chair, finally spoke. He hadn’t done a voice since the bridge. “So we’re RSVP-ing ‘yes’ to the creepy clown’ garden party. Fantastic. Do we bring a casserole, or is it a byob-blood kind of thing?”
No one laughed. Beverly reached over and stilled his jiggling knee with her hand.
“We f-f-finish it,” Bill said, his jaw tight. His stutter vanished under the weight of the statement. “This time, we finish it.”
The entrance to the culvert was a black mouth, exhaling a breath of damp, mineral-rich cold that smelled of wet earth and something older. The sound of water trickling in the darkness echoed up, a distorted cousin to the river under the Kissing Bridge.
One by one, they dropped down into the dark.
The world narrowed to the shaky circles of their flashlight beams. The tunnel was brutally familiar: the curved walls of slick brick, the rusted iron pipes, the thin channel of filthy water snaking down the center. Every scuffle of a shoe, every hissed breath, bounced off the walls and came back multiplied. Katelyn walked behind Richie, her hand fisted in the back of his shirt. The memory of the clubhouse, of their sweat on the old cushions, felt like a dream from another lifetime.
They walked for what felt like miles, descending deeper. The air grew colder, thicker. The sense of being watched was a physical pressure on their skin.
“It’s different,” Ben whispered, his flashlight beam trembling over a graffiti tag that hadn’t been there in ’58. “It’s… rearranged itself.”
Then they found the first balloon. A single red one, tied to a protruding pipe. It was dull under the flashlight, the color of a dying heart.
“Don’t touch it,” Eddie wheezed, already puffing on his inhaler.
They passed it, a silent funeral procession. The tunnel began to widen, opening into a larger chamber where several pipes vomited their contents into a wide, shallow stream. The space was littered with debris—a child’s bicycle tire, a moldering doll, bones that might have been animal.
And there, across the chamber, was a pile of brightly colored clothing.
It was a clown’s costume, satin and ruffles, laid out neatly as if for inspection. The sleeves were arranged, the pants legs straight. The head was a pale, deflated ball beside it.
“It’s a shell,” Stan said, his voice hollow.
A giggle spun through the chamber, light and merry. It came from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing off the wet bricks. It was the same laugh from the woods.
“Welcome back,” the warm, friendly voice boomed, echoing. “I’ve been rehearsing for you! A new number!”
The pile of clothing didn’t move. But from a dark side-tunnel, something else did.
It was Georgie Denbrough. Or a photograph of him, given wet, shuddering life. He stood in his yellow slicker, one arm gone, his face pale and smiling. “Hi, Bill,” it said in Georgie’s voice.
Bill made a sound like he’d been gutted.
The thing that was not Georgie raised its remaining hand and pointed a dripping finger at Katelyn. “She’s the prettiest. I want her to join the show.”
The lights went out. All of them. The darkness was absolute, a suffocating velvet. Screams erupted—Eddie’s high panic, Richie’s furious shout. Katelyn felt a rush of frozen air, and then a hand, not human, not flesh, but composed of a thousand brittle, skittering things, clamped over her mouth and yanked her backward. She was pulled off her feet, dragged into the side-tunnel. Her fingernails scrabbled against brick as Richie’s terrified cry for her echoed and then was swallowed by the black.
The thing held her in a grip of pure cold. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t scream. Its presence poured into her, not through her ears or mouth, but through the pores of her skin, flooding her mind with a psychic ice that froze her thoughts, her fears, her very self. It filled the spaces where her love for Richie lived, where her loyalty to Bill resided, where her own quiet identity thrived. It pushed her down, down, under a black, starless water.
And from her mouth, a new voice emerged. It was her vocal cords, her lips shaping the words, but the cadence was all wrong. It was a singsong, nursery-rhyme lilt, sweet and utterly empty.
“All of the tunnels are underground,” Katelyn sang, her body held upright by the darkness, her blue eyes open and glazed like marbles. “Where none of the children will ever be found.”
A flashlight beam found her. Richie stood at the mouth of the side-tunnel, his face a mask of primal horror. “Kat?”
She smiled, a warm, wide, loving smile that had never belonged to her. “They wandered away to join the show, and lost their way in the world below.”
“No,” Richie whispered, stepping forward. “No, no, no, Katelyn, you fight it, you fight it, baby, please—”
“They joined the circus and left the town,” she crooned, taking a graceful, swaying step toward him, a parodic ballet. “Now they live down with the clown.”
The other flashlights converged, illuminating the nightmarish tableau. Bill, stricken. Beverly, hand over her mouth. The thing that sang with Katelyn’s voice.
“Down with the clown,” she chanted, her head tilting.
“Down with the clown.”
“Down with the clown.”
Her voice dropped to a intimate, sharing whisper, her eyes locking on Richie’s shattered gaze. A whisper that carried through the silent sewer.
“Down with the clown.”
A pause, a final, smiling inhalation.
“Now they live down there. Down here with the clown.”
The voice stopped. Katelyn’s body went utterly still for one second, two. Then her head snapped toward Richie, the warm smile still plastered on her face, her piercing blue eyes now holding only a vast, hungry amusement.
The smile on Katelyn’s face was a grotesque sculpture. It used her familiar features, the curve of her lips that had just whispered his name on the bridge, to construct something utterly foreign. The blue eyes he loved were twin wells of static, buzzing with a intelligence that was ancient and devoid of anything resembling her.
Richie’s breath stalled in his chest. The world shrank to the space between them, six feet of filthy concrete. “Kat?” The word was a dry leaf, crumbling on his tongue.
Her head tilted, a birdlike jerk. “Richie,” the thing said, and it was her voice, but filtered through a rotten filter. It sounded like a recording played in an empty room. It took a step forward, its movement liquid and wrong. “You carved our names. That was sweet. It gave me such a clear picture of where to find you. Of what to take.”
Behind him, he heard the others. A sharp intake of breath from Bev. The frantic clicking of Eddie’s inhaler. The shuffle of feet on wet stone. They were statues, trapped in the beam of his flashlight which shook violently in his hand.
“Let her go,” Richie heard himself say. His voice was low, a animal growl he didn’t recognize. “You get the fuck out of her.”
“But I’m in the heart,” it sighed through her, a mockery of contentment. One of her hands—its hand—drifted up to rest over the faded fabric of his jacket, the one she still wore. “I’m wrapped up in all the warm, sticky parts. The parts that love you. The parts that are afraid she’ll float away.” It chuckled, a sound like gravel in a tin can. “She’s not floating, Richie. She’s sinking. And I’m the water.”
Bill took a step forward, his flashlight joining Richie’s, illuminating the terrifying placidity of Katelyn’s face. “F-f-fight it, Katelyn.” His voice broke. “You’re stronger than it is.”
The thing that was not Katelyn blinked. Slowly. “Bill Denbrough. Still giving orders. Still leading your little friends into the dark.” Its gaze slid back to Richie. “He can’t save her. You can’t joke this away, Trashmouth. What’s the punchline here?”
Richie’s mind was a white-hot void. Every instinct screamed to rush forward, to grab her, to shake her until his Katelyn fell out of those dead eyes. But the intelligence gazing back at him was a predator in a perfect trap. It was using his love as the bait and the snare.
Mike Hanlon, who had been hanging back, his face a knot of anguish, moved closer to Richie. He didn’t look at the thing wearing Katelyn. He looked only at Richie, his eyes wide and desperate in the gloom. His voice was a bare, breathless scrape, meant only for Richie’s ear, but it echoed in the terrible silence.
“Richie, I know this sounds crazy, but you’re going to have to kill her.”
The words didn’t compute. They were nonsense syllables.
Mike’s hand gripped his forearm, hard. “It’s not really her. It’s wearing her. It’s using her. If we try to pull it out, it’ll tear her apart on its way. But if the vessel… if it’s gone…” He couldn’t finish. A tear cut through the grime on his cheek.
Kill her. Kill Katelyn. The girl from the clubhouse. The girl on the bridge. The heart.
The thing smiled wider, as if it had heard. It took another step, now within arm’s reach. It smelled like her cherry lipstick and the river and, underneath, the sour, sweet stench of a long-sealed grave.
“He’s right, you know,” it whispered, her breath fogging in the cold air. Her hand lifted, reaching for his face. He flinched back. The smile faltered, replaced by a pout that was a masterpiece of cruel mimicry. “Don’t you want to kiss me goodbye, Richie? Like on the bridge? It’s still me in here. I’m just… clearer now.”
Its fingers brushed the collar of his shirt. The touch was ice.
A memory detonated behind his eyes: not the bridge, but the clubhouse. Her teeth sinking into his shoulder to muffle her cry. A moment of pain marking a threshold. A choice.
His hand went to his pocket. The shape of the Swiss Army knife was a cold, familiar rectangle. The same knife that had carved their promise into wood.
“See?” the thing cooed, watching his hand. “You know what to do. You love me enough to do it. That’s what love is, isn’t it? A killing kind of thing.”
Richie’s fingers closed around the knife. The metal bit into his palm. He looked past the smiling horror to the eyes. Somewhere, miles down, under the black water, was she watching? Was she screaming? Was she hoping he’d be strong enough to do the unthinkable?
Bill was muttering a denial, a continuous, shattered “no.” Bev was crying silently. Stan had turned his face away.
Richie pulled the knife from his pocket. The sound of the blade snicking open was the loudest thing that had ever happened.
The thing wearing Katelyn’s face looked at the blade. Its expression shifted. The amusement flickered. For a fraction of a second, something else peered through—not Katelyn, but the entity beneath, curious and vast and impatient with the game. It wanted the pain. It wanted the rending.
It leaned in, her mouth brushing his ear. “Do it,” it breathed, a lover’s secret. “Let me taste how much it hurts you.”
Richie’s arm trembled. He raised the knife. The small, sharp blade caught the flashlight beam. He saw his own reflection, distorted and monstrous, in the metal.
He saw the freckles on her nose.
He couldn’t.
He wouldn’t.
A different memory. Her voice in the library, clear and certain: “There is no normal without you guys.”
His arm lowered. He didn’t put the knife away. He shifted his grip. He wasn’t looking at the thing’s eyes anymore. He was looking at his jacket, the one she wore.
“You’re wrong,” Richie said, his voice suddenly, terribly calm. “Love isn’t a killing thing.”
He moved fast. Not with the knife aimed at her heart, but at the sleeve of his own jacket. He grabbed the canvas and sawed at it, a brutal, jagged motion. The fabric, tough from years of wear, resisted, then tore with a loud, ripping shriek.
The thing stumbled back, confusion flattening its stolen features. It looked at the torn sleeve, then at him.
Richie dropped the knife. It clattered on the stone, a tiny, insignificant sound. He stared at the ragged strip of canvas in his hand, the familiar plaid lining exposed like a wound.
“It’s a keeping thing,” he said, meeting its gaze again, his own eyes filled with a defiant, blazing certainty. “You don’t get her. You don’t get us. You can drown in your own fucking water.”
For a moment, there was only the drip of the sewer and the ragged sound of their breathing. The thing’s expression of amused hunger dissolved into something pure and blank. Then it contorted, a ripple of fury passing through Katelyn’s frame like a poison seizure.
Her mouth opened. A sound emerged that was no single voice, but a chorus of every voice it had ever stolen—children, adults, animals—a sonic blast of rage and denial that shook dust from the bricks. The flashlight beams danced madly.
In that second of shattered attention, Bill lunged. He didn’t go for Katelyn. He slammed his shoulder into Richie, sending them both sprawling into the icy channel of water as a writhing, taloned thing that was no longer shaped like a hand swiped through the space where Richie’s head had been.
The thing that was not Katelyn howled. It turned, its form blurring at the edges, and vanished into a side tunnel, taking her with it. The last thing Richie saw, from the filthy water, was the flash of his own torn jacket disappearing into the dark.
The echoing scream faded, leaving a silence so complete it pressed on their eardrums.
Richie pushed himself up, gasping, water streaming from his hair. He stared into the empty black tunnel. His hand, numb with cold, still clutched the torn strip of his jacket.
Mike’s instruction hung in the air, unanswered.
He had chosen a different path.
Now he had to follow it.