CHAPTER TWELVE
The first glimpse I saw, I saw eternity. I stared and watched, maybe the first person to ever be able to wrap my mind around the concept of forever. I physically stopped moving, also. The others stopped, and I tried to explain. I suppose that I must have made myself understood somehow, but I don't remember how. I closed my eyes, letting myself better see.
I reluctantly shoved off my knowledge, letting myself fall back into the ignorance of humanity. To do otherwise would to become trapped. To let the others float forever. For a brief, cold moment, I didn't care at all. I had found something greater. But some part of me, something I couldn't quite control, stepped forwards enough to shove off these harmful ideas.
I continued to seek them out. I heard something, something that echoed and rippled, as though I was hearing through water. I listened, wandered, drew closer, almost found them-
"Stan! Stan!" Beverly shouted.
I snapped back, whipped around, held up my bow, and saw that Stan was already gone.
'He won't last,' my mind said to me. 'Not in the Deadlights. He's going to go crazy…or die. Something. We need to work fast.'
"Wh-Wh-We're going about th-this the r-r-ruh-wrong way," Bill said after a long few minutes of silence. I saw a spark of understanding in his eyes; a spark that I knew would let him create for the rest of his life. Maybe let him become a screenplay writer or a novelist. "W-We don't n-nuh-need to do this."
"What are you talking about?" Beverly asked, sounding very scared, very young.
"W-W-We're doing this th-the same way th-that we did b-b-before," he explained. "W-We have the s-s-silver, and we're l-l-looking f-for ih-It's lair. L-Like we did last time."
"Well, it worked last time," I pointed out.
"It d-d-did," he said, nodding. "B-But it was a l-lot more work. Wh-What we d-did before…n-none of it m-m-mattered. It was a-all just t-t-t-to get to It's muh-mind."
"Sure," Beverly said. "Chüd."
"Sh-sure," Bill agreed. "Th-That's the oh-only thing that r-r-really mattered. We c-c-can d-do that from here, though. S-Sara was j-just doing it."
Bill, when he was talking, sounded surprising like Richie (all stuttering aside). I did not know at this point that when Richie was proposing in idea while simultaneously figuring out what he meant, he sounded almost exactly as Bill did now.
"Do we try?" I asked. "Are we going to do it now?"
Was it madness to think about doing something like this when we were so vulnerable? I wondered this at first, but it was quickly followed up by another thought: It was madness to be down here anyways. Really, what made this any worse?
Bill linked hands with Beverly and me, and then Beverly grasped my hand. It was a triangle, and I wondered if it would work the same as the circle had. There weren't enough of us here, not really even enough to try. But where would we be if we didn't? We had to do something, even if it was only to pass the time before each of our capture.
I reached out for Bill and Beverly first, found their minds. And then, we reached out as one to find It; to find the Deadlights. We had combined somehow; our thoughts were open to one another. I openly wondered if we would have been able to do this will all of us hear, and decided that we probably could have.
Bill and Beverly had their own thoughts, Bills an uncustomary jumble of confusion and fear, Beverly's strangely serene, or maybe it was just trust or understanding.
And so we went. Together. Off to find the Deadlights. Off to save our friends. Off to defeat It once and for all.