Note: Sorry for the delay in this chapter! December turned out to be a lot crazier than I expected... it's that time of year I guess. Had a bit of time the last few days to finally work on getting the next chapter ready. Big thanks as always to everyone who left a review, I really appreciate it - your support keeps me writing :) really neat to get a review in Spanish this time too :D As always, I apologise for any discontinuities with the universe as presented by the book (which I still have not finished!), you'll see why later in this chapter - it's my take on things based on what I do know :) I hope you like this next installment, and wish you all a great holiday season! But don't look too close down those gurgling drains if you know what's good for you... ;)

I don't want to be afraid
The deeper that I go
It takes my breath away
Soft hearts, electric souls
Heart to heart and eyes to eyes
Is this taboo?
- House of Memories, Panic! At The Disco

The next morning, George woke up and found a simple text message waiting from Mike, presumably mirrored across all of their phones.

Kenduskeag Conference Room - be there ASAP.

He was still a bit groggy from the events of last night, and somewhat anxious when it came to the thought of Stan. Not wanting to delay, he pulled himself out of bed, showered and got dressed, then headed downstairs. The Derry Inn included breakfast as part of the accommodation, so he had a quick bowl of cereal to keep him going and then wandered the hallways until he found the mahogany doors marked with a small golden plaque that said: KENDUSKEAG. Named after the river that crept its way through Derry, and through their old haunt, the Barrens.

A bit apprehensively, George pushed the door open, and stared in shock at the contents of the room.

It was decorated with newspaper clippings, scraps of paper, maps, scrawled notes on lined paper, old faded photographs and more, stuck up around the room in what seemed like a madman's timeline. Bits of red string connected some of the photos and notes, while others just seemed haphazardly scattered. It reminded George a little of the collection Ben had once had in his room, shown to him not long after they rescued him from the sewers to see if anything rang a bell, but by then the memories had already been fading and it was soon after that that Ben had removed everything and stored it in an archive box, no longer remembering why he'd been so obsessed with the dark history of Derry in the first place. It seemed that some of the remnants of that archive box had ended up in Mike's possession.

This room, however, was not as organised and systematic as Ben's had been. It could have equally been the evidence room of a fanatic detective or an insight into the mind of a serial killer, George wasn't quite sure which. And standing in the middle of it all, with a pensive expression on his tired face, was Mike Hanlon. He turned at the sound of the door opening.

"Ah, George," Mike greeted him. George looked around the room, and to his relief saw Stan sitting in one of the maroon armchairs, clad in a warm-looking turtle-neck sweater. His wrist was completely hidden from view, as expected, but he looked overall a lot better than he had last night, if a little pale. Ben was perched on the seat of the bay window, a bemused expression on his face. There was no sign yet of Beverly, Eddie or Richie. George glanced at his watch and saw it was still only quarter to ten.

"What is... this?" George asked, waving his hand at the whirlwind of paper surrounding them. "I mean, I have an idea, but there's a lot here."

"Yeah," Mike admitted sheepishly. "I brought everything I had, got here around 7am and started setting it up. Figured it would make more sense to have it here so you guys could see it too. I've reserved this conference room for as long as needed, in any case."

As long as needed... that rang a bit ominously in the back of George's mind.

"Okay," George nodded, pushing the thought down. "So what have we got?"

"Well, I've been thinking a lot about the memories we're still missing," Mike said. "Most of this stuff here, I can remember. Like Betty Ripsom going missing, and Patrick Hockstetter, and Eddie Corcoran. Ben and I both recall how we traced the recurrence of events to every 27 years or so, like the Black Spot incident or the Ironworks explosion. But some things don't make sense, and maybe those are the key to understanding what we don't remember."

"Yeah, like how we first knew you," Ben said, pointing at George. "All of us were in the same grade at school, but you were five years below us. I remember us all hanging out... especially after we rescued you... but I don't remember when we met, or how we met."

"Same here," agreed Stan. George's brow furrowed, as he searched his own memories. Like the others, he had to conclude that indeed, how he came to know them so well was completely foggy.

"Maybe you guys saved me from the Bowers gang at some point?" George wondered aloud. But whatever the truth was, he couldn't really grasp at it. It seemed that somehow Pennywise had maintained a hold on some of their memories, even now.

"I think it's important," Mike affirmed with certainty. "Whatever we're missing is important enough that Pennywise doesn't want us to remember, which means we should do all we can to figure it out."

They all looked up as the door opened, to see Eddie and Beverly enter. Eddie looked a little bit worse for wear, with faint bags under his eyes that made him seem older. Bev meanwhile looked fairly cheerful, her eyes bright with curiosity at the sight of Mike's decorations.

"Wow Mike," she said, a little awed. "You've been busy."

"Busy is an understatement," remarked Ben, shaking his head. "You make my past room look positively sparse, Mike."

Mike shrugged it off. "We need all the information we can get to go up against Pennywise, and if we can figure out what he is hiding from us buried in all this, then all the better."

"You really think it's something to do with me?" George asked uncertainly, walking closer to the strange paper collection with no small degree of apprehension. He didn't like the way Betty Ripsom's eyes stared at him out of the old yellowed paper.

"I'm not sure," Mike admitted. "But it seems like a good place to start. Maybe we knew you for another reason, something to do with Pennywise. In that case, maybe it is also connected to the bicycle and to what you were saying when you encountered Pennywise near Jackson. That perhaps you weren't meant to be here."

"George!" exclaimed Bev, apparently rather horrified that he would think that.

"I'm not being emotional about it, Bev," George assured her. "It's just what Pennywise implied when I saw him. There's something in that, Mike's right."

There was a short silence while they all contemplated the situation. Naturally, Richie chose that exact moment to burst in.

"Hello, Losers!" he shouted in an exuberant voice. "What's going on in..."

He trailed off as he noticed Mike's masterpiece decorating the walls, and let out a low whistle.

"Well, shit," he finished. He walked over to stand next to George at the poster of Betty Ripsom, cocking his head to the side as he inspected it. "Man, I remember the day we went in that cursed house and saw the ghost of her... or Pennywise's illusion, whatever it was."

"You do?" Eddie asked, speaking for the first time. He looked confused. "You saw her when I got separated from you?"

"Yeah, me and..." The rest of the sentence, for some reason, did not come, and instead a puzzled expression fell across Richie's face.

"That!" exclaimed Mike suddenly, pointing at Richie. "Exactly that!"

"Exactly what, Mike?" Ben didn't sound like he followed Mike's enlightenment. He hopped off the bay window seat and approached the group, standing next to Stan's chair.

"Not the missing poster, Ben," Mike said dismissively. "Richie has a gap in his memory of that day, too. He and Eddie were with someone else in the house, and we've forgotten who. This is part of it."

"Another missing kid?" Eddie wondered aloud, scratching his head.

"Or maybe..." Bev's voice came, quietly and a bit pained. "Maybe one of... us?"

"Us?" Richie repeated, dumbfounded.

"Not us here... maybe someone who was with us back then? But why have we forgotten who they were?" Bev looked to Ben, who only shrugged helplessly. But Mike, meanwhile, nodded fervently.

"Yes, that's a good point, Bev!" he said. "That could be it. Someone else might have been with us back then, so we just have to figure out who. It's gotta be buried somewhere in here in Derry."

George didn't voice what he was thinking, because he wasn't really sure what to make of it himself. But if Bev was right, and there was someone else who'd been with them back then, then what was their connection to him? Why did he feel such an odd feeling when he saw that rusty old bike, and why was Pennywise hiding whoever it was from their memories?

"We should investigate this lead further," Mike continued, a little fervent in his enthusiasm. "I was thinking about where we should look this morning while I waited for you all."

He wheeled a small whiteboard over to in front of them, and flipped it to reveal a rather abrupt map of Derry. Mike had circled three main locations that he obviously thought were important to investigate: the Barrens, the public library and the house on Neibolt Street.

"Bags not that damned house," said Richie, with a dramatic shudder. "Not again."

"Realistically, I think it's our best shot," said Bev levelly. "I'll go."

George glanced over at Ben, not surprised to see his eyes trained on Bev. But there was a look of apprehension on his face at the mention of the house.

"Great," Mike agreed. "Someone else should go with you, though - anyone?"

There was an awkward silence, which Bev filled with a laugh.

"Well, this is familiar," she joked. "You're all still a bunch of scaredy cats, I see!"

"I'll go," George offered in a lighthearted tone. "I don't even know the house, so how could I be scared of it?"

"Oh, pretty easily," Eddie said nervously, breathing heavily and his hand around something in his pocket. He shook his head, looking thoroughly disturbed at the thought of the Neibolt house.

"Okay, Bev and George will go to Neibolt. Ben and Stan, can you check out the library? And Richie and Eddie, you guys scout out the Barrens. I'll stay here, and try to piece together this all a bit clearer and see if I can make any links."

They all solemnly agreed on Mike's plan, and got ready to go their separate ways. George wasn't really sure about his bold statement about the Neibolt house, in the end. It had always been that creepy house, something he would cycle past faster if he happened to be nearby, and certainly that area of town was one that his parents had always been keen for him to avoid even as he got older. But he'd never been inside like the others had, at least not while conscious, and so didn't know what it was like to face off against the clown on its own territory.

Who knew, maybe they would get lucky and Pennywise wouldn't be home when they stopped by.

"You're a chicken, you know?" Stan's voice was deliberately provocative.

"What?" Ben asked, a bit taken aback by his friend's words as his eyes scanned across the history section.

"Did you ever deal with that stuff with Bev? Down in the sewers, you kissed her, and you're the one who sent the postcard, aren't you?"

"You know about the postcard?" Ben was a bit unnerved, he knew she'd been confused about the sender but he hadn't thought she had discussed it with anyone. Stan didn't reply at first, but then nodded.

"Bev asked me about it, a couple days after she got it. She wasn't sure who had left it in her bag and she knew it had to be one of us. She suspected someone, I can't remember who now, and she wanted to know my thoughts. I barely knew her then, I don't know why she asked me. But when I saw the handwriting, I recognised it from your room. I knew it was yours. Honestly, I was surprised she didn't make the connection herself."

"You told her?"

Stan laughed at the panic in his voice.

"Of course not. I said I had no idea."

"Oh," Ben said, pulling a book from the shelf. He recognised the title, and sure enough, when he opened the inside cover he saw his name written neatly on the check-out slip, dating back to the summer of 1989.

"But she knew, right?" Stan prompted. "In the sewer, you kissed her. I saw the look you guys shared. What happened?"

"We... never spoke about it..." Ben said, idly flipping through the pages. He was pretty sure this was the same book that Pennywise had tortured him with, showing him the close-up of the head of the boy from the Ironworks explosion before sending the headless body after him in the library basement.

"Never?"

"No. We just kind of pretended it never happened. I always had a feeling her heart was somewhere else anyway."

Even though he was saying the words nonchalantly, Ben still felt the pain in his chest as he said them. It had been all these years, and he'd been with many women in that time (never for long, though), and yet the moment Beverly Marsh walked through that door at Jim's, he was as head over heels in love with her as he'd been back in school.

"Who?"

"Who what?"

"Who do you think she liked back then?" Stan asked, sounding curious, reshelving a book he'd removed and flicked through. "One of us? Someone else?"

Ben paused, not really sure. On the one hand he felt like back then, he'd known for sure who she liked (and it wasn't him), and he had felt the pangs of watching whoever it was return her affections. But he couldn't for the life of him remember who that person had been. So maybe it had just always been that it wasn't him.

"I dunno, maybe Richie or something," he muttered. "I can't remember."

Stan looked at him through narrowed eyes, trying to discern whether Ben refused to disclose the truth or whether he truly didn't remember. It seemed odd, but then again maybe Ben had never known who was competing with him for Bev's affections. Or maybe this was connected to Mike's conspiracy theory?

"This page," Ben said suddenly, showing the open book to Stan. "This is the one he showed me."

"Ugh," Stan said, blanching upon realisation that he was looked at the severed head of a small child lodged in a tree.

"Yeah," Ben said thoughtfully. "Then there was a trail of smoking Easter eggs, leading into the basement."

"And you followed?" Stan said in disbelief. "You're crazier than Mike."

"Curiosity, you know. And back then I hadn't encountered Pennywise before... I didn't realise what I was dealing with. Until he was chasing me and calling me 'Fat Boy' as I ran for my life down the aisles..."

He shut the book.

"But this isn't helping. If there was some other person involved with us back then, we're not going to find them in a book about the history of Derry."

"Maybe we're going about this the wrong way," Stan mused, staring pensively at an Annual of Derry 1957 book. He got to his feet, and nodded his head towards the section which chronicled journals, articles and yearbooks.

"I think we should try the Derry yearbooks."

Ben wasn't sure what he meant, but got to his feet all the same and followed Stan towards the yearbook section of the library, hoping he was right that they would find something useful there.

George patiently waited until they had walked 15 minutes from the inn, and then turned to Bev, who eyed him with an unsurprised look on her face.

"I know what you're going to ask," she said, a little glumly.

"Of course I'm going to ask," he said. "No one's here now, so no more excuses. What happened?"

She grimaced, only the faintest hint of her swollen cheek visible now as a very light bruise on her cheekbone. Refusing to meet his eyes, and only looking straight ahead in the direction they were walking, she sighed.

"One thing you should know first, George," she said reluctantly. "I'm actually married now."

George's stunned silence was enough to make her blush, somewhat uncharacteristically.

"Oh, don't look so surprised," she laughed. "It's been a lot time since anyone's called me Smelly Marsh or Beaverly. I actually get hit on fairly regularly in my line of work, you know."

"I'm not surprised that people are attracted to you," George said honestly. Ben's lovesick face floated in the back of his mind. "I'm just surprised you got married. And you didn't tell any of us last night?"

He stopped walking, suddenly worried. "And what does that have to do with your cheek?"

"Well... Tom didn't really want me to come," Bev admitted, also stopping. "He's a bit possessive..."

"Wait, he hit you?" George said, angrily. "Who is this guy?"

"He's the CEO of my fashion company... and one of the more persistent suitors. He's not an awful person really... but there are elements of him that are..."

"Abusive," George finished for her, knowing that probably wasn't the word she would choose to use. The thought of Bev's rather terrifying father crossed his mind. He'd only been five when he'd come across the towering man in the supermarket, after getting separated from his mother. Even at that age, he had known there wasn't something right in the man's eyes when he asked if George was lost. And watching him pull his daughter roughly by the arm after him as they left the store later had only confirmed his mistrust of the man, parent or not. Back then, Alvin Marsh had been one of the only adults to scare George Denbrough. Until he met Pennywise, of course.

"Bev... was it a one-off? Or does he..."

Her averted eyes, a little guilty, told him all he needed to know. He weighed his words in his head, knowing that he couldn't keep them to himself.

"This whole situation... it's all pretty messed up, you know," he said finally. "I don't know what comes after this... this showdown with Pennywise. Maybe nothing. Maybe this is the end of us. But if there is an after... if we make it somehow... don't go back to him, Bev. Believe me when I say you can do better. That there are people out there who love you and won't hurt you like that. Just... just think about it, okay?"

She nodded, her eyes a little shiny, managing a small smile. Before George knew it, she had enveloped him in a hug, pulling him tight towards her. He was amazed again at how much taller than her he was now, he only remembered her being a head taller than him when they were younger. She'd left for Portland only months after the encounter with Pennywise, having stayed with Stan's family until moving to live with her aunt. He hadn't kept touch with her after that, but he remembered hearing from Stan about her early successes in design and fashion.

"Thanks George," she said softly. "I forget how much good there was in our little Losers Club. The real world is kind of shit sometimes... I often wish I could have stayed a kid forever."

They broke apart, and then continued in a comfortable silence through the town, a silence which grew increasingly uncomfortable the closer they got to the Neibolt house. It was as if the air in the vicinity of that house was thicker, heavier, darker. George couldn't deny the feeling of doom that began to grow in his chest, nor the anxiety of not knowing what they would find when they walked through the doorway.

Finally, the two of them were standing outside the house, looking through the rusty gate at the overgrown garden and rotting wooden planks of the old rundown house. It used to be known as the place where crackheads would congregate, but even that had died down over the years. No one dared go near the house anymore, and it was pretty clear why, when standing out the front. The whole place exuded darkness, to an extent that almost seemed visible. It would have been less foreboding if someone had stuck a "DANGER DO NOT ENTER" sign out the front.

"Well," George said, glancing sideways at Bev. "You've done this before right?"

"More or less," she said, her eyes fixed on the dark upper windows of the house. Despite her calm exterior, George could see in her eyes that she was a bit wary about entering the house. There was the faintest flicker of fear on her face. He reached out and grabbed her hand, reassuringly.

"For the sake of our memories," he said, squeezing gently.

"For our memories," Bev whispered, scared of what those memories might reveal. About herself, about the others, and about the past that they'd long forgotten. But both she and George knew that finding out the truth was vitally important, regardless of how much it might hurt. And somewhere, deep down, she knew it would hurt.

Together, they stepped through the gate towards the shadowed front door of 29 Neibolt Street.

"I always liked this place," Eddie said in a faraway voice, sitting on the edge of a mossy log while Richie kicked at the water-darkened stones. "It's funny really, because it was probably the place we were closest to the clown... and yet somehow I always felt safe here."

Richie didn't respond, just scanned the area again as if to try and bring a purpose to their time in the Barrens. They'd been here half an hour already, and there was literally nothing offering them any clues as to their shrouded past. The area was just as green and overgrown as it had ever been, the shallow river bubbling through the stones as it passed by. There were some traces that kids still played down here occasionally, in the scattered unnatural stacks of stones and some half-hearted attempts at dams. Nothing like Ben's monstrosity though, which had easily flooded this entire area way back when.

"I guess I agree," Richie said at last, looking back at Eddie. "This place does have a certain peacefulness about it. Weird that a gateway to hell sits just over there."

He cast his gaze to the sewer entrance, which always seemed shadowed in more darkness than was reasonable. They both didn't say the thought that crossed their minds then: here was an obvious place they should look that they hadn't yet. Neither of them wanted to go too close to the sewer though, for fear of accidentally stumbling across something they didn't want to. Or even worse, across Pennywise himself.

"You really gave up all your fake meds, huh?" Richie asked, changing the subject quickly. Eddie looked at him, a little startled.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "I still have the inhaler... but it's mostly just to keep me calm. Somehow having it there is comforting in a way I can't properly explain."

"A safety blanket, duh," Richie said, shrugging. "It's not that complicated."

"Maybe." Eddie's hand closed around the inhaler in his pocket. He looked at the forest behind them. "It seemed so much thicker when we were kids, huh? The trees were taller... the forest was bigger. I almost don't believe we're in the same place sometimes."

He got to his feet, and headed for the edge of the forest, near where Ben had led the assembly of his impressive dam. Richie watched him go, thinking to himself that perhaps Eddie had made the most progress of all since their childhood. None of them had ever expected that he would give up his health-related hang-ups imposed upon him by his crazy mother, and yet here he was with only an inhaler to show for it. It seemed that standing up to his mum on the day they left to save Beverly, and throwing the "gazebos" on the ground, had really been a turning point for Eddie Kasprak. It was probably only consolidated by the death of his mother a few months later, from nothing other than a good old-fashioned heart attack thanks solely to her sedentary lifestyle and excess weight.

"Richie," Eddie's voice came sharply. "Come here."

Richie broke out of his memory and saw Eddie looking at him expectantly, pointing at the trunk of a particular tree. He walked over quickly, avoiding the pooling water nearby, to investigate what had Eddie so worked up. It looked to be a carving in the tree, around their shoulder height. But near to thirty years ago, when the old tree was shorter, the carving would have been easily at kid height.

The carving Eddie had found was circular in shape, etched in deeply by a knife a long time ago. In the centre was an ornately-carved "LC" in calligraphic style.

"Loser's Club," Eddie pointed out. He only had the vaguest recollection of this carving. He couldn't even remember when they had done it, but he knew they had. Underneath were some block letters spelling out "LUCKY SEVEN". Then, around the words were initials, each with their own style and characteristics, each engraved by a different child. Richie ran his hand across each of them, reading out the initials aloud as he went.

"BH, BM, EK, RT, MH, SU..." he paused, his eyes blurry for a moment, as if he had dust in them, and then suddenly clearing up. His fingers rested on the last set of initials, arguably the most intricately carved of them all. "WD?"

Eddie stared at him in shock. "That wasn't there a second ago. That was what I thought was weird... it said Lucky Seven but there were only six sets of initials. What the hell, Richie? What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything," Richie said resentfully. "It was just there when I looked. Maybe you're the one who needs glasses, not me..."

"This is really weird," Eddie mused, already turning back to the carving. "Who is WD?"

"Walt Disney, obviously," Richie joked. "He was my best buddy in school, don't you remember?"

"Seriously, Richie. WD? I don't have the faintest idea who that could be."

"Sorry, Eds, neither do I..."

Richie pulled his mobile phone from his back pocket, and took a photo of the carving.

"Ah, the age of digital technology," he grinned at Eddie. "We can show this to the others when we get back, I've got zero signal out here. What a backwater..."

"Some things never change," Eddie smiled back. "Well, at least we found something."

They both looked at each other, and then back to the sewer entrance.

"We're going to have to look, aren't we?" Richie said, a sense of dread creeping into his tone.

"Yeah..." Eddie said faintly. But nonetheless, he made a start towards the sewer entrance, despite being clearly nervous. Sighing, Richie pocketed his phone again and followed Eddie towards the sewer, really hoping that Pennywise wasn't going to greet them as they entered.

Both everywhere and nowhere, from afar and very close, the Turtle watched against its will. As it did with all of creation, it followed the pathways and choices of the self-declared Losers Club over time. But unlike the others, it found itself particularly drawn to their plight, found itself constantly at the edge of interfering where it had sworn never to. Found itself watching them a little too closely.

The latest incident was just one of a number of slip-ups. If the Turtle was being honest with itself, it had never been entirely happy with how the dark one interfered to no end on Earth, while it had kept to its vow of interfering as little as possible. It believed that the choices of the humans should be their own, as with the fates that followed those choices. And yet it found itself growing more and more resentful of how the Other harmed the humans, of the pain it inflicted on them and the joy it took from that pain.

The fate of Bill Denbrough pained the Turtle in a way it never thought possible. The light of that particular human had shone so brightly, so much so that the Turtle had guided Bill where it could, always subtly but always in whatever way it felt was within the bounds of its self-imposed distance. If it had been able to stop the clown from taking Bill's brother, it would have. But then, the purity of Bill's heart in searching for his younger brother had made his light shine all the brighter. He had brought the children together, and they'd gotten so close to defeating the Turtle's enemy. So very close... The Turtle had truly hoped that Bill would lead the Losers Club to victory against the creature, and the nearest thing the Turtle had to a heart had broken a little bit when Bill sacrificed himself for George.

But the fate of the humans was their own, after all. The Turtle had decided that, and to that truth it must cling. And yet, here it was, peeling back a little of the fog from the memories of Bill's friends, trying in vain to lead them to a conclusion that would inevitably present itself anyway. But there was a reason for pressing the old wounds, for lifting the fog as soon as possible. The fate of Bill Denbrough was uncertain, and the darkness in his heart was worrying. It would reach a tipping point soon, when the flickers of light remaining might not be able to stop the darkness from overflowing.

By then, it might be too late.

The Turtle had hoped this chain of events might finally be the right one. That Bill's sacrifice was, in some way, necessary to save the others that might be lost otherwise along the path to the end. It had watched with interest as George Denbrough changed the fate of Stanley Uris, not once now, but twice. It saw some of the same light that Bill possessed in the younger Denbrough, which reassured the Turtle a little. Despite itself, it worried for the fate of the Losers. The creature that called itself Pennywise the Dancing Clown was stronger than ever, the Turtle could sense this. The delicate balance of the universe was under threat, as the dark one's power grew and grew. There was so much fear in the world now, and so much potential for chaos.

For the Turtle, which had always represented peace and joy and order, it was a worrying time indeed. The clown's power had grown so much that the Turtle could not have lent Bill enough magic to escape over the last few decades, although it had tried. Bill's strength of heart had responded to the Turtle's power, and yet combined it was not enough. So the Turtle would do what it could in the meantime, and provide whatever small assistance to the remainder of the Losers Club, in the hope that they combined might be able to save Bill, and fight back against Pennywise.

It looked mournfully at the fatelines of the Losers, and George. The children had never deserved any of this. They had deserved an innocent childhood, and the brightest of memories to look back fondly upon.

Maybe it was finally time for the Turtle to take a more active role in preserving the balance. Maybe the way it had always played out had never been fair at all, and by abiding by its own moralistic rules, it had been all too responsible in producing the current imbalance.

Maybe, together with the noble intentions of the now-grown-up children, it could help stave off the darkness... at least for a little while.