Chapter 5: The Betrayal
The slap of the glossy photographs against the warped wood of the table was a sound like a gunshot in the confined space. Everything stopped. The argument, the breathing, the very dust motes dancing in the weak light from the single bulb seemed to freeze.
There were four of them. Black and white, grainy, but unmistakable. Shot through the slightly parted curtains of Katelyn’s bedroom window from the vantage of the large oak tree in the side yard. They showed fragments, but the story was obscenely clear. Bill’s bare back, muscles taut. Katelyn’s hand on his shoulder, her face turned toward the camera in one heartbreaking frame, her expression one of profound, unguarded relief. The intimacy was not pornographic. It was worse. It was private. Sacred. And now it was here, on the clubhouse table, for everyone to see.
Beverly stood breathing hard, her hand still flat on the photos, her eyes blazing not at Katelyn, but at Bill. “You want to know how it gets us?” she spat, her voice trembling with a furious triumph. “It doesn’t need clown monsters or dead birds. It just needs a camera and a little jealousy. My father’s old Rollei. I figured it out last night. If it can make us hate, it wins. And you…” She finally turned her scorching gaze on Katelyn, who had gone as pale as the paper. “You gave it the perfect script.”
Richie’s face underwent a terrible transformation. The protective anger melted, replaced by a blank, uncomprehending shock. He took a step back from the table, as if the photos were radiating heat. His eyes, magnified behind his glasses, darted from the images to Katelyn’s horrified face, to Bill’s stricken one.
“K-Kate?” The word was a ragged thing, torn from him. It wasn’t a question. It was the sound of his world fracturing.
Bill moved. It wasn’t a thought; it was a pure kinetic reaction, a fault line giving way. He lunged across the table, not for the photos, but for Beverly. His fist connected with the side of her jaw with a sickening, wet crack.
The sound was alien in their space. A space built for safety, for secrets whispered against the rain. Beverly’s head snapped to the side. She didn’t cry out. She simply folded, collapsing backward into the dirt floor of the clubhouse with a soft, final thud. She lay there, one hand to her face, staring up at the ceiling made of old boards and wishing, blood already beginning to seep between her fingers.
Silence, thicker and heavier than before.
Eddie was the first to make a sound—a high, wheezing gasp as he fumbled for his aspirator. Ben took a staggering step toward Bev, then stopped, utterly torn. Stan closed his eyes, his lips moving in silent prayer or curse. Mike just looked down, his good hand gripping his sling.
Richie hadn’t moved. He was still staring at the photos.
Bill stood over Beverly, his fist clenched, his entire body trembling. The fury drained from his face as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a cavernous horror. He looked at his own hand as if it belonged to a stranger.
Katelyn found her voice. It was a whisper, stripped raw. “Richie.”
He flinched at the sound of his name from her lips. He finally looked up, his eyes finding hers. There was no anger there yet. Just a profound, drowning hurt. “You and… Bill?” he said, his comedian’s voice flat and dead. “Last night? After… after everything?”
“It wasn’t like that,” she breathed, the words pathetic even to her own ears.
“It’s exactly like that!” Richie shouted, the sudden volume making everyone jump. He pointed a shaking finger at the damning evidence. “It’s right there! You were with him. In your room. After I carried your fucking books home from the library! After I spent all day trying to make you laugh so you wouldn’t look so scared!” His voice broke. “I’m your boyfriend.”
“I know,” she sobbed, tears finally spilling over. “I’m so sorry, Richie. It was… it was the deadlights. I was so lost, and he was there, and it was just…”
“Bill?” Richie turned his shattered gaze on his best friend. “My best friend? You love her? You love her, and you… with her?” The questions were childlike in their devastating simplicity.
Bill’s throat worked. He looked from Richie’s broken expression to Katelyn’s devastated one. His stutter returned, a dam holding back a flood of shame. “I-I… sh-she was f-falling apart. W-we were…”
“Don’t you dare say you were scared!” Richie roared. He swept an arm across the table, sending the photos flying. They fluttered through the air like poisonous leaves, settling on the dirt. “We were all scared! I was scared! But I didn’t climb into her bed!”
“Richie, please,” Katelyn begged, taking a step toward him.
“Don’t!” he barked, holding up a hand. He looked at her, and for the first time, the hurt was hardening into something colder. “You know what the worst part is? In those pictures… you look happy. You look… safe. With him.” He let out a choked sound that was almost a laugh. “All my jokes. All my stupid voices. I was trying so hard to be the guy who made you feel safe. And he just… is.”
Beverly pushed herself up to a sitting position against the wall, wiping blood from her split lip. Her eyes were dull now, the fire spent. “See?” she muttered to no one in particular. “It’s working perfectly.”
“Shut up, Bev,” Mike said, his voice low and weary. He hadn’t looked at the photos.
Richie stared at the one picture that had landed face-up near his foot. He slowly bent down and picked it up. He looked at it for a long, terrible moment. Then, with a deliberate calm that was more frightening than any rage, he tucked it into the pocket of his jeans.
He looked at Bill. “You hit her. You actually hit her.”
Bill had no defense. He just stood there, a statue of guilt.
Richie nodded, as if confirming a terrible theorem. He turned and walked to the hatch. He paused, his back to them. “My whole life,” he said quietly, “I’ve been the one trying to catch up to you, Bill. To be brave like you. To be somebody she could count on. I guess I finally know where I stand.”
He climbed the ladder and pushed the hatch open. The gray afternoon light spilled in, outlining him for a second before he was gone. The hatch fell shut with a soft, definitive click.
The silence he left behind was suffocating.
Katelyn felt the clubhouse walls, which had always felt like a second skin, close in like a coffin. Every friendship, every shared history in this room, was now viewed through the cracked lens of those photographs. Ben wouldn’t meet her eyes. Stan was meticulously brushing dirt from his pants. Eddie was taking sharp, whistling pulls from his aspirator, his face grey.
Bill finally moved. He walked to where Beverly sat and extended a hand to help her up. She looked at it, then ignored it, pushing herself up on her own. He let his hand drop.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” he said, the words hollow.
Beverly touched her swelling jaw. “I’m sorry I took the pictures.” She didn’t sound sorry. She sounded exhausted. “But I was right. It’s using us. It’s using this.” She gestured at the space between him and Katelyn, at the empty spot where Richie had been.
“We have to find him,” Ben said softly, finally speaking. “We can’t let him be alone. Not with… not with Bowers out there.”
“He won’t want me,” Katelyn whispered. The truth of it was a physical ache.
“He won’t want any of us,” Mike said. He looked at Bill, his expression unreadable. “You guys… you blew a hole right in the middle of us.”
Bill turned to Katelyn. His eyes were full of an agony that mirrored her own. “I’ll f-find him. I’ll make him listen.”
“How?” she asked, the word a broken plea.
Before he could answer, the hatch creaked open again. All of them tensed, expecting Richie’s return, or worse, Henry Bowers’ leering face.
It was Eddie. He must have slipped out unnoticed. His face was stark white, his eyes wide with a fresh, immediate terror that momentarily overrode the interpersonal disaster. He clutched his chest.
“The pharmacy,” he panted. “On my way back from… from just now. My mom was talking to Mrs. Black. They found old man McKibbon. The pharmacist. In the back storeroom.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “His head… they said it was twisted all the way around. Like an owl.”
The new horror, crisp and graphic, landed atop the existing one. It didn’t erase it; it layered it, creating a sickening strata of dread.
Stan’s head snapped up. “Owls. They’re birds of prey. They can rotate their heads.”
“It’s another message,” Mike said, his voice hardening. “Another death. It’s not waiting. It’s moving.”
Bill looked from Eddie’s terrified face to the closed hatch through which Richie had vanished, to Katelyn’s tear-streaked one. The leader in him, the part that made plans and charged forward, warred with the guilty friend, the betrayer. The priority split him in two.
“We n-need to stick together,” Bill said, but the old mantra rang hollow now. “Richie f-first. Then we f-figure out the rest.”
Katelyn looked at the scattered photos on the dirt floor. The image of her own face, seeking solace in Bill, stared back. Her fear of holding them back, of being the weakness, was no longer a secret anxiety. It was a reality printed in black and white, and it had just driven the boy she loved out into a town that was literally trying to eat them alive.
As they filed out of the clubhouse into the gloomy afternoon, the group was no longer a circle. It was a ragged line, with silent chasms between each of them. Bill walked ahead, alone, his shoulders hunched. Katelyn followed, but no one walked beside her. The space around her felt frigid and vast.
She touched the tube of cherry red lipstick in her pocket, a habitual gesture of seeking normalcy. It felt like a relic from a different girl’s life. The winning strategy was now a fractured, stumbling thing. They were going to find Richie, but the heart of the Losers’ Club, the trusting, unshakeable bond that had been their only real weapon, was bleeding out in the dirt of the Barrens, betrayed not by a monster, but by their own human, hungry hearts.
They found him at the old arcade on Center Street, but he wasn’t playing. He was slumped in a hard plastic booth in the back, near the broken Asteroids machine that hummed a dead tone. The photo was on the table in front of him, next to a sweating, untouched Coke. He had his glasses off, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.
The place smelled of burnt wiring and stale popcorn. The frantic beeps and bells of the games were a cruel parody of conversation.
Bill saw him first and stopped dead in the entryway, his broad shoulders blocking the neon light from the sign. Katelyn peered around him, and her breath hitched. He looked younger somehow, defenseless without his glasses, his famous mouth a flat, miserable line.
“Let me,” she whispered to Bill, touching his arm. He flinched, then nodded, stepping back into the shadow of a pinball machine. The others hung back by the prize counter, a scattered cordon of anxiety.
She slid into the booth opposite him. The vinyl seat was cracked and caught at her jeans. He didn’t look up, but his hands fell to the table. His eyes were red-rimmed and raw.
“Richie.”
“Go away, Kate.” His voice was thick, clogged. “Just… go be with Bill. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. Nothing is fine.” She didn’t touch the photo. She focused on his face, the freckles she’d counted on lazy summer afternoons, the familiar cowlick at his crown. “What we saw… what it showed me in the lights… it was emptying me out. I was a shell. I couldn’t feel the ground.”
He finally looked at her, groping for his glasses. Once they were on, the vulnerability was half-hidden again behind the lenses. “So you felt him instead.”
“Yes.” She didn’t sugarcoat it. The lie would be an insult. “I needed something real to weigh me down. It was selfish. It was weak. It was the most scared I have ever been, and I reached for the thing that has always been my anchor. And I broke your heart. I am so sorry I broke your heart, Richie.”
A tear escaped, tracking a clean line through the grime on his cheek. He swiped at it angrily. “Do you love him?”
She held his gaze. “I have always loved Bill. You know that. It’s a different love. It’s in my bones. But you…” Her own tears came now, hot and fast. “You are the laugh in my chest. You are the surprise. You are the guy who makes me roll my eyes and feel lucky at the same time. What I did doesn’t change that. It just proves I’m a mess.”
“We’re all a mess,” he muttered, looking down at his hands. He flicked the corner of the photograph. “He’s my best friend.”
“And he’s devastated. He’s over by the pinball machine right now, probably wishing a meteor would hit the arcade.”
A faint, wet snort escaped Richie. It wasn’t a laugh, but it was something. He was quiet for a long time, listening to the digital explosions and race car whines. “The pharmacist,” he said finally, changing the subject because the other pain was still too acute. “Eddie told me when I passed him on the street. Head twisted around. That’s new.”
“It’s not waiting,” Katelyn said, leaning forward. “It’s picking us off, and we’re sitting here in pieces. It doesn’t care about our hurt feelings, Richie. It feeds on them.”
He looked past her, to where Bill stood, a tall, guilty silhouette. Then to the others—Ben’s concerned frown, Stan’s meticulous posture, Eddie’s jittery energy, Mike’s steady, bruised resolve. His family. Even Beverly, lingering near the door, her face already purpling where Bill’s fist had landed.
“So what’s the plan?” he asked, his voice drained. “We all hug it out and go home? Pretend this didn’t happen?”
Bill approached then, his steps slow. He stood at the end of the booth, not sitting, making himself small. “Th-there’s no p-plan without you,” Bill said, the stutter stark. “And I’m n-not asking you to pretend. I’m asking you to be p-pissed at me. Hate me. But d-don’t leave us. Don’t leave her unprotected. I f-failed you. I will never not have f-failed you. But I am b-begging you, let me fail you while we’re f-fighting the real thing.”
Richie stared up at him. The anger was there, a hot coal in his gut, but it was smothered by the vast, chilling fear of what was out there. Of being alone with it. He thought of Mike, cornered with a tire iron. Of Katelyn, blank-eyed and floating in those awful lights. Of a dead man with a spun-around head.
“You’re a real asshole, Denbrough,” Richie said, but the heat was gone. It was just a statement of fact.
“I know,” Bill whispered.
Richie picked up the photograph. He didn’t tear it up. He folded it once, carefully, and tucked it back into his pocket. A artifact of the hurt. “Okay,” he said, to the table. “Okay. So we fight. What’s the move?”
The decision, once uttered, seemed to pull the air from the arcade. The games sounds became distant, irrelevant. They clustered around the booth, a loose and wounded circle once more.
“Ben’s map,” Mike said, his voice low. “The nerve centers. We hit one. Not to wait. To burn it.”
“With what?” Eddie asked, his fingers tapping a frantic rhythm on his aspirator. “We don’t have silver bullets or holy water. We have… rocks. And a bad attitude.”
“We have what we’ve always had,” Stan said, his voice cleaving through the doubt. He looked at each of them in turn—Katelyn, Richie, Bill. “We have seven. It hates that. It works to divide seven. Our number is our weapon. Our belief in it.”
“So we go back down,” Beverly said from the edge of the group. Her jaw was swollen, her words slightly slurred. She wasn’t apologizing. She was stating a tactical fact. “Together. Before it finishes designing a special nightmare for each of us.”
A collective shiver passed through them. They thought of dead birds in circles, of little brothers lost and found and lost again, of parents who weren’t parents, of faces in drains, of a voice from a moon made of a giant, watching eye.
Richie took a deep, shuddering breath. He looked at Katelyn. “You sure you can do this? Go back down there?”
“No,” she said honestly. “But I can’t stay up here knowing it’s down there, either. Not anymore.”
Bill placed a hand on the table. One by one, the others added theirs—Ben’s broad palm, Mike’s with its nicks and calluses, Stan’s clean and precise, Eddie’s small and trembling, Beverly’s with its bitten nails. Richie looked at the pile of hands, then slowly placed his on top. Katelyn put hers last, completing the stack.
The unity was fragile, spider-webbed with fresh cracks. But it held.
They left the arcade as the streetlights buzzed on, casting long, skeletal shadows down Center Street. They moved with a new purpose, a grim gravity pulling them toward the Kenduskeag. The air grew damper, cooler, smelling of wet stone and rotting vegetation.
They stopped at the same storm drain near the Old Cape. The iron grate was like a familiar, hated mouth. The darkness below exhaled a chill, cavernous breath.
Richie snapped the head off a nearby weed and tossed it into the blackness. They didn’t hear it land. “Home sweet home,” he said, and the old bravado in his voice was a thin veneer over pure terror.
Bill looked at Katelyn. She gave a single, tight nod. He took the crowbar from Mike’s bag, the metal scraping with a cold, final sound.
He wedged it into the grate.
Metal shrieked against metal as the grate gave way with a reluctant groan, revealing the gullet of darkness below. The smell was immediate: wet earth, ancient rot, and something else, a faint, sweet-decay odor like forgotten fruit in a long-sealed cellar. It rushed up to meet them, wrapping around their ankles.
“Ladies first,” Richie mumbled, his eyes fixed on the hole.
Katelyn shook her head, her mouth a tight line. “Together.” She took Bill’s free hand on one side, and after a heartbeat of hesitation, Richie’s on the other. His fingers were cold. He didn’t look at her, but he didn’t let go.
Bill went first, dropping down into the blackness with a soft crunch of gravel. His flashlight beam carved a wobbly yellow cone in the oppressive dark. “Cl-clear,” his voice echoed up, thin and stretched.
One by one, they dropped down after him—Ben, then Stan, then Mike, his sling a pale blur. Eddie passed his aspirator to Beverly, took a deep breath of the comparatively clean air above, and lowered himself with a whimper. Beverly followed, then Richie.
Katelyn was last. She crouched at the edge, the dank air cooling her face. She thought of the deadlights, that screaming color. This darkness felt like its opposite, a solid, waiting silence. She pushed off.
Her feet landed in shallow, icy water that immediately seeped through her sneakers. The shock of the cold was a sharp, grounding pain. They were in a large concrete conduit, the walls weeping with mineral streaks that glistened in the flashlight beams. The ceiling was lost in shadow.
“Which way?” Ben whispered. His voice was swallowed by the tunnel.
Bill played his light down the two branching paths. Left, the tunnel appeared to shrink, the ceiling dipping lower. Right, it seemed to open slightly. “The m-map,” he said. “The line from the standpipe. It should b-be… right.”
“Should be,” Eddie echoed, his voice trembling.“Great. Fan-fucking-tastic.”
They moved in a tight cluster, their shuffling steps and the gentle slosh of water the only sounds. The beam of Bill’s flashlight caught something ahead—a pale shape on the tunnel floor. He froze.
It was a child’s sneaker. A Keds, small and mud-stained, lying on its side as if casually kicked off.
No one breathed. They all knew whose it was, or a perfect, horrible copy of it. Georgie Denbrough’s shoe. Bill made a sound like he’d been gut-punched. He took a stumbling step toward it.