A/N: I do not own any of the characters listed below, nor the town of Derry, nor the concept behind "It". This is all the property of Stephen King and is written, as Annie Wilkes might say, "out of fan love, which is the purest love there is". I do indeed love the novel "It", and although I have no illusions that this little tale will live up to the grandeur of King's giant masterpiece, I hope that it will entertain those who, like myself, just couldn't get enough of Derry, Maine, and the darkness that lurks beneath it. --Sikar

ONE OF THE MISSING:

ANOTHER TALE FROM THE SUMMER OF 1958

The only way he could ever describe it – not that he had anyone to describe it to – was that Derry just felt wrong. This was not something he could see or hear. Rather, it was a gut reaction; visceral, ephemeral. It had that quality which odd nightmares sometimes have – dreams in which everything existing between Senses 1 and 5 is normal, but in which that sixth Sense, buried deep (six feet, say?) in the consciousness, does a slow roll of churning horror.

Ricky LaJoie stood up from his theater seat and looked around for Steve Grogan. Steve had been very strange since the death of his sister, Veronica, earlier this summer. Sometimes he would get up in the middle of the movie and just walk out. When that happened, Ricky wouldn't see him again for two, sometimes three days. Today's feature had been a couple of horror pictures, and Ricky had a feeling that he wasn't going to find Steve in the lobby.

"Hey Rick-Rack, get the fuck outta my way!"

Ricky didn't even turn around, but instead melted out of the aisle and back into the seating row from whence he had come. It was Bowers, of course. He would've recognized that voice anywhere. Henry's voice had the quality of a man on a mission, and Ricky had no desire to get in the way of that mission. He had learned early on that if he left Bowers alone, Bowers was usually inclined to do the same to him. Calling him "Rick-Rack" was a slight exception to this, but Henry couldn't really be blamed for that one. After all, he hadn't made it up. That particular moniker had come as a result of his one-time effort to be nice to his little cousin Bobby.

Bobby was border-line retarded, at least to Ricky's way of understanding. His M.O. was to play out on the front sidewalk of his family's house, wearing a coonskin cap backward, so that the tail hung down into his face. And the one time Ricky had tried to help him – tried to show him the proper way to wear the hat – Denny Pangborn had spotted him as he rode by on his bike. Stricken suddenly by the wit which sometimes falls on young antagonistic kids, Denny had yelled out: "Hey, Ricky Raccoon! Hey, Rick-Rack!" He had pedaled off, laughing so hard he'd nearly fallen off his bike. By noon of the next day, everyone in Derry Elementary was familiar with Ricky's new name, and most of them had since adopted it. He didn't especially mind it anymore. After all, he sometimes called people names, too. Why, there was old Mrs. "Liver-Lips" Cole at the ticket counter. She was a prime example.

Bowers and Company brushed past, clearly in a hurry. Ricky waited for them to go by, started to leave, then remembered something. He reached down next to his seat, and cadged the rest of Steve's popcorn. No sense letting it go to waste.

He came out of the Aladdin, and was struck immediately by the harsh disparity that has always existed between a beautiful day's sunlight, and the cozy darkness of a movie theater seat. He squinched his eyes down to slits, waiting for them to adjust to the bright Maine day. He wondered where Henry Bowers and his clan had gotten off to, since, like Steve Grogan, he hadn't seen them in the lobby.

As if this were a mental cue to the goings-on of the world, he heard the sound of scuffling from around the side of the building. Curious, he strode toward the intersection of Center and Macklin Street, and stopped just short of Nan's Luncheonette, edging around the Aladdin to peer into the alley. Sure enough, he saw Henry Bowers; that is to say, he saw the leather jacket, and the duck's-ass haircut that signified the presence of Henry Bowers. He didn't know the names of the other boys in Henry's entourage, but he knew enough to stay out of their way. Apparently, the three kids on the far side of the Aladdin did not.

"Say goodbye, fuckface," Henry said to one of them, and suddenly he was running at them. Ricky watched with gape-mouthed horror for a second, but then decided that he really didn't want to see a murder after all. He scurried across the alley, then made himself walk the rest of the way to the intersection. He crossed Macklin Street between bouts of mild summer traffic, and was on his way. It was none of his business, that was all. Even if he could have done something to stop it – which he couldn't have – it was simply none of his business. And if there was one thing his ever-lovin papa had told him in his life that stuck, it was that you were to mind your own business.

"Keep yuhself to yuhself, ayup," Trevor LaJoie would always say, slinging that downeast twang so hard it nearly hurt the ears. Of course, Ricky hadn't really known his father long enough to have gleaned much of his wisdom, if indeed there had been any to glean. Trevor had been killed in a fire seven years before, up in Jerusalem's Lot. Up until that fateful day in 1951, the entire LaJoie family had lived three miles outside of the town, which was sometimes called 'salem's Lot, or just The Lot. Trevor had been a member of the volunteer fire department, and had died inside of a house which had collapsed while he was trying desperately to get the last member of the Angston family – their cat Mitsy – out in time.

Shortly after losing his Daddy, six year-old Ricky LaJoie found himself uprooted from the only home he ever knew. His mother Margaret, unable to sustain the farm that Trevor had left behind, or unable to deal with living in the house she had shared with her deceased husband – or both – had informed little Ricky that they were going to move up to Orono, and stay with his Aunt Cathy and Uncle Jim Kitteridge for a while. And they had, for about three months.

But Uncle Jim had been a very strange man, with very strange tastes. Often, he would come home from a hard day's work (he was a groundskeeper for the University of Maine), drunker than a skunk, and he would want to talk to Ricky. Most of the time, Ricky couldn't make out what the old man was saying, much less what he meant. Usually, they would just sit out under the stars in the sprawling back yard of the Kitteridge hacienda, and Ricky would listen while Jim philosophized. But sometimes Uncle Jim did other things; sometimes he would put an arm around Ricky and…well, hug him, after a fashion. It wasn't so much the arm he minded, as it was the hand, which would sometimes rove around of its own accord.

This had all come to a crashing halt when Margaret had caught the old man in the act of fondling her son. Uncle Jim had made the mistake of getting drunk too early on a Friday afternoon, and had been practicing his usual "hug" in dusky daylight.

Two days later, they had left the Kitteridge place, and had ended up here in Derry. At first, they had lived with Aunt Millie and Uncle Eustace – his cousin Bobby's parents – but after a month or so of his mother working as a secretary at the Derry Department of Public works, they had moved out and had begun renting their own apartment on lower Main Street.

That reminded Ricky of something he had seen. One of the kids that had been about to meet their doom back in the alley…had that been Beverly Marsh? He thought it might have been. He didn't know her personally; he was a year ahead of her in school, and although they lived in the same part of town, they had never spoken. But he thought he recognized her hair. That was a silly thing, he supposed, but casting his memory back…no, he couldn't think of another girl in Derry – at least, of the ones that he knew – who had that same fiery red-auburn hair.

Still not my problem, he thought. And his dead father spoke up in an agreeable tone in his mind. Keep yuhself to yuhself, ayup!

He walked on until he came to Witcham Street, then turned left on it. He wished that Steve Grogan hadn't run off. He supposed that he could understand Steve's reasons for not wanting to watch a horror film, especially after the terrible way his sister had been murdered. But the guy could have at least said something to him, instead of just vanishing off into thin air. The thought of going to Steve's house arose, but he knew that that was no good. Steve's mother would come to the door wearing the same dazed look that she always seemed to wear these days, and would tell him that Stephen didn't feel well, or Stephen wasn't in, or Stephen needs to clean his room. If he had known the future, he might have preferred it if she would just say: Stephen is experiencing the beginnings of a mental breakdown. For right now, all it means is that he will come home to get the comfort he needs and will be denied that comfort. It will not take its full effect until he's halfway through college, at which time he will take a lethal dose of sleeping pills, slit his wrists and jump out of a sixth-story window as if to say "yes, I really mean it".

So going over to Steve's wasn't an option. He wondered just what exactly the hell he was supposed to do with the rest of his day. He supposed he could go down and throw rocks into the canal. That was about as boring as a pile of dogshit, but it was better than nothing. And after all, hadn't he just had about as much fun as a boy of thirteen could rightfully expect to have on a summer's day? He had seen two awesome horror flicks – one of them a werewolf film, at that. No, he supposed he didn't have any real reason to complain.

He got near the canal, but didn't immediately go down to it. There was a green park bench off to his left, and he went over to sit on it in the shade for a while. The grass was tall, and he had to practically wade through it to get to the bench. Cockle-burrs stuck to his pantlegs and shoe laces as he walked, and he looked down at them with irritation. Now he would have to spend twenty minutes picking those off.

He sat down to do just this chore, and a bolt of pain shot up his ass. He yelped, jumping back up and turning around to see if he'd been shot in the hindquarters. There was nothing on the bench. He reached a tentative hand around to his ass, and his fingers were suddenly pricked by the cockle-burr that had been placidly resting on the bench, waiting for him. With a flush of anger, he reached back and pulled out the burr, flinging it at the bench. Then he kicked the bench, hard enough that it fell backward into the tall grass.

"Fuck you!" Ricky said, and decided that he would just leave the damn thing there. He stalked off toward the canal, his temper cooling bit by bit, so that by the time he actually got down to the canal, he was laughing at himself.

He had kicked over the bench, but it wasn't the bench's fault. It was the fault of whoever was in charge of keeping the grass mowed around here. He would plink rocks at the canal for a while, and on his way out, he would set the bench to rights. What a silly baby thing to do!

He sat for a long time, his wounded butt finding some solace in the cool muddy surface of the rock he sat on at the canal's edge. There weren't very many rocks down here to throw; probably other kids had beaten him to the idea long ago, and had used up all the good ones. So he plucked cockle-burrs off instead, flinging them into the water. They produced a much less satisfying result, but it was something to do.

The sun was westering when the first wrong thing happened.

He had been sitting on the rock, his ass now numb and cold, near dozing, when he heard a voice that had previously – at least, for the past seven years – only been audible in his head.

"Keep yuhself to yuhself, ayup!" the voice had said. It had been faint, almost a whisper of the breeze, but it had caused Ricky's head to lurch up from the droopy position it had been occupying. He looked around. No one in sight. He waited, and it came again.

"Riiiiiicckkkkyyyyyyy…"

It sounded faint still, but he got a sense of the direction. It was coming from…but no, that couldn't be. It seemed to be coming from the canal. He had a sudden image of his father, badly burned but somehow still alive, clinging to the rock wall of the canal and begging for help. That was ludicrous, though. He remembered his father's funeral, if only vaguely.

But they wouldn't let you look inside the casket, would they?

No, but his mama had told him that that was because his daddy had been too badly burned to have an open casket.

"I wasn't really in there, son," his father's voice said from the canal. This time it was unmistakable. Seven years' time, and only a limited exposure in the first place, were not enough to erase the memory of his voice from Ricky's mind. It was his father down there. He got up off the rock and walked toward the edge of the canal, trembling with excitement and fear.

Why fear? It's your dad!

But what if it wasn't?

"Help me, Ricky! I got away from the fire in 'salem's Lot, but I've been swimming in this canal ever since, and I haven't been able to get out. Help me get out, son."

Incredibly, despite his age, the first thing that popped into Ricky LaJoie's mind at this was: what an incredible story. Who would've believed that someone could survive for seven years in the water, especially water as filthy as that in the canal. He wondered, as he peered over the edge of the canal wall and saw the face, how his father had managed it.

As if in answer to his thought, the face of his father spoke. It did not speak easily or fluidly; it was too badly burned for that. The hair was gone. The eyebrows were gone. The skin of his face had drawn back into a sickly, scarred white mass that barely covered his skull, and didn't in some places. The fleshy part of the nose was gone, burned away to the bone. The teeth were flame-scorched and black. Most of the tongue was gone.

"I survived by floating," he said simply, and the skin of that face stretched back even further, into a grin. The head began to rise, and with it the body of his father, once strong and tall, now charred and mangled in his Jerusalem's Lot Volunteer Fire Department uniform. In his stunned, horrified state, Ricky had time to notice one thing about that uniform. Along its front was something that had never been there before: a row of orange pom-pom buttons.

"And when you're down here, Ricky, you'll float too!"

***

About two hours later, while what remained of Ricky LaJoie was heading down the canal toward the Penobscot River - his head on one side of the canal, his chewed body on the other, that was - the park bench he had kicked over caused the death of another young resident of Derry; one Eddie Corcoran.

And, for the second time that day, It began to feed.