I'll be trying my best to update this weekly, but between finals and the holidays that may not be happening. TBH this may stop at like 4 or 5 chapters, we'll see how much I have to say.
English troops were being deployed to quell unrest, the newspapers said. All that'll do is cause more unrest, Tom said, who do they think they're fooling, and Art looked around nervously and shushed him. Georgie tore through the newspapers for reports of more missing children and ignored the rest. She marked them on a map as if it could show her something, anything. They disappeared in every neighborhood. Some were probably in the IRA, some were probably kidnapped by one side or another for leverage, but some of them didn't have a neat explanation. The kids like Gabriel who walked away one day and disappeared.
Georgie started searching everywhere they'd disappeared. Jacob Connell vanished near Gabriel, next to the decent print shop, two blocks from the shit print shop. She found nothing, and checked her map with a sigh.
Niamh O'Sullivan, last seen just across the river from where she was. In a Protestant neighborhood, one Georgie wouldn't have hesitated to walk through six months ago, but a girl alone wearing a crucifix would be an obvious target.
Georgie sighed and crossed the bridge, standing up taller and straighter with each step. To find Gabriel she'd go anywhere, she told herself when she saw the fresh graffiti on the street signs. Seven blocks to the last spot Niamh O'Sullivan had been seen was nothing.
The alleyway was strewn with rubbish when Georgie looked into it. There was a tarp at the back of it, stretched over something, and a man standing with his back to her, dressed in black. Georgie ducked back around the corner and waited. He didn't emerge. Georgie told herself it would be idiocy to meddle in whatever was happening in that alley, and looked around the corner.
The man was holding a can of spraypaint, putting the finishing touches on an Irish tricolor on the brick wall at the end of the alley. The alley in a British neighborhood where an Irish girl had disappeared two days earlier. Georgie stepped into the alleyway.
"What are you doing?" she called.
The man whipped around. He was young, with a round pimpled face twisted in a grimace.
"I'm armed! Don't come any clos –" His eyes dropped to her crucifix. It was a large, ugly silver thing, a family heirloom that Georgie's mother was very insistent on her wearing. Georgie thought that impressing the Lord by wearing fancier jewelry than other families was against at least one or two of the Commandments, but she had never been more grateful for it than she was then.
"Oh," the man – the boy, really, he looked younger than she was - said. "I lied, I'm not really armed. Don't call the police."
"I wasn't going to," Georgie said, feeling rather insulted. "Why are you here? You have some Provo girl you're visiting?"
"'Course not." The boy spat on the ground and indicated the graffiti. "Do you?"
Georgie wanted badly to say something smart, but the question, and the way he asked it, unsettled her. He meant a Provo boy, surely, but something in the way he looked at her …
"No," she said, at last, for lack of anything better.
"Then why're you still in my way?" He shoved past her, although the alley was wide enough he could have passed by without touching her.
"Next time you commit vandalism, cover your face," Georgie called after him, and he made a rude gesture without looking back at her.
Georgie took hold of the tarp with both hands and pulled it aside slowly. A spot of red turned into a balloon, then another and another, covering the graffiti and rising into the sky, until Georgie stood there with the tarp in her hands looking at an empty patch of ground.
That felt like a clue, Georgie thought, then immediately winced at how juvenile the phrase sounded. Was she one of those aggravatingly precocious girl detectives in a saccharine children's book?
…
The next day, Aisling is reported absent, and Sister Michael doesn't even bother to call her parents. She spends the day in her office, going through her folder until her fingers are black with ink.
They thought they'd killed It. They were wrong. Therefore, someone needs to kill It again in a more permanent way.
Everyone else forgot about the clown and moved away. Therefore, Sister Michael needs to either kill It singlehandedly, or call her old friends and ask them to come back. Both are bad options.
Erin Quinn and her friends are meddling around in Jenny's disappearance. Therefore, Sister Michael needs to make sure they stay out of her way and don't get themselves killed by being idiots.
Three things to balance along with the work of a headmistress. She could call out sick, she supposes, but leaving the accounts to Sister Patrick will result in a mess almost as bad as letting It rampage about.
Every conclusion is straightforward and obvious, but it's just so fecking inconvenient. And Sister Michael is afraid. It kills her to even think it, but she's afraid.
Five of them defeated It by the skin of their teeth, and didn't even manage to kill it. What chance does Sister Michael alone, twenty-seven years older and slower, have against It?
Can It even be killed? They were so sure the first time.
…
"Hiya, Georgie."
The voice just about made her jump out of her skin. She'd thought she was alone. Cable Street was dark and rain-slick, the one working streetlight casting long shadows. Georgie turned in a full circle and saw no one.
"Who's there?" she asked.
"It's me, Georgie." The voice was sleek and unsettlingly familiar, coming from a storm drain at one side of the road. Georgie approached it carefully.
"Are you in the storm drain? What happened?" she asked. The drain was probably too narrow to let a man through, but who knew.
"I'm stuck down here, Georgie, can you help me?" There were a pair of blue eyes shining out of the storm drain, but she couldn't see anything else.
"Aye, I'll run down to the firehouse and get help. Don't worry."
"No!" the man snarled. "There's so much water down here, Georgie, I'm up to my neck. I'll drown here before you get back."
It wasn't raining that much, some part of Georgie thought, but she'd seen a drowned man once and had no desire to see another. She had to help the man.
"All right," she said, bending down. She could see someone in the storm drain now, just a silhouette with those staring blue eyes. "Grab my hand, I'll pull you out."
"I can't reach," the man said, and he was right there, she could see the whites of his eyes, but he sounded tired, and desperate, and Georgie couldn't let him drown. She braced herself and shoved one arm into the drain, as far as it'd go.
Something grabbed her. It didn't feel like a hand. Georgie tugged, and felt a pain like thousands of needles sinking into her skin. She set both feet against the curb and yanked with all her might, and whatever was down there let go with a jerk.
Her arm was bleeding, Georgie noticed as she backed up. She wrapped her jacket around it as best she could and went home. Her mother was at work at the hospital, so she didn't have to answer any questions about just what had happened to her.
In the light, the wounds in her arm looked like teeth marks.
…
She met Art at the corner. His eyes widened when he saw the bandages on her arm.
"Georgie, what happened?"
She told him. By the time she was halfway done, Tom had joined them, and she had to start again.
"Can I see the marks?" Tom asked. He'd fainted at the sight of blood more than once, but he was queer about injuries, so Georgie slowly unwrapped the bandages, wincing when they stuck to her wounds, and Tom looked at them very closely.
"Did you put some antibiotic cream on it?" Tom asked. She hadn't, but she nodded, and Tom knew she hadn't, but he didn't press the issue. Georgie had been getting hurt around Tom for ten years, and he'd gotten used to her.
"Something like that happened to me," Art said, turning over his hand to show them a long scrape across his palm. Tom extended his hand expectantly, and when Art put his hand on Tom's, began looking at the scrape intently. "It wasn't a man in the sewers, though. I was studying, looking through Dad's old textbooks, and there was one photo of a man who'd died of leprosy that was just creepy."
"I suppose you got a paper cut on it?" Georgie asked. Art sighed at her and pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose.
"No, when I turned around the man from the photo was there. He –" Art shuddered. "He didn't have any eyes, and his whole face was just an open sore. I ran, and he grabbed at my hand but he didn't catch me. I told my dad and he said I was telling stories, and when we went back, the man was gone."
Georgie did her best to nod and keep the skepticism off her face.
"I'm not crazy," Art said. "I know it sounds impossible, but so does your story. You said so, a man wouldn't be drowning in that much water, and he couldn't have fit in the storm drain anyway."
"The balloons," Georgie breathed. By the time she was done explaining, they'd arrived at the gates of Our Lady Immaculate. Georgie was already late, so she didn't bother going in. This was far more important.
"Something magic's happening," Tom said decisively. "Do you think it's related to the children?"
"It must be," Georgie said. "The man in the storm drain – he was trying to drag me down with him, I think."
Tom blanched.
"So you two are next, then?"
"Christ, I suppose so," Georgie said after a long time.
"Please refrain from such foul language, Miss Michael," someone snapped, and Georgie turned to see Aoife O'Kelly, her year's prefect, clattering down the steps in her shined-up shoes. "And shouldn't you be in class?"
Art checked his watch.
"You should," he said. Georgie ignored him.
"We have to find out what's happening quickly. Before anyone else goes missing."
"Everything we've tried is a dead end," Art said. "Just because we saw our fears doesn't mean –"
"Our fears," Georgie repeated. "That means something, doesn't it? Someone, or something, is trying to make us afraid."
"You really shouldn't be loitering here," Aoife's strident voice added, and Georgie winced.
"We'll be on our way," Art said hastily. "Come on, Tom, we'll be late too."
"We can't just split up and leave all this 'til tomorrow!" Georgie insisted, but Art was already two metres away.
"What's so important you need to miss class to discuss it?" Aoife asked, and Georgie told her.
It came out of her mouth in a rush, so fast she could barely understand what she was saying. Aoife gasped, and looked at Georgie like she was afraid of her, or in awe.
She'd seen blood pouring down her walls the previous night, that had vanished in the morning. She didn't say why it scared her so much, but Georgie could read into it. Georgie wasn't scared of storm drains or men with glowing eyes, after all. She was scared of drowning, of the water sweeping her away, or worse, taking someone else while she could do nothing to help. Aoife hadn't just seen a bit of blood.
None of them bothered going to school that day. They sat at the riverbank under the old bridge and talked in circles until the sun went down.
"What do we do?" Aoife asked, after they'd gone over their stories for the fifth time.
"We keep looking for the wains," Georgie said. "If we find them, we'll find whatever's doing this." She'd meant to say whoever, but it caught in her throat.
"We've searched all of Derry," Art said. "I don't think they're here any more."
"We haven't searched all of it." Tom said. Georgie turned toward him, and he was already looking at her, eyes glinting. "You said the man tried to drag you into the sewers. What if the wains are down there?"
In that moment, Georgie could have kissed him. She settled for nodding vigorously.
"They might be," she said. Art and Aoife grimaced exactly the same way.
"Exploring the sewers. Lovely way to spend this weekend." Art didn't say no, though. When Georgie got her mind set on something, the boys followed her. Aoife was new, unknown, but she didn't hesitate to go along as well.
"If children are disappearing, if I might get taken, I have to do something," she said. She seemed very different from the fussy, rule-following girl Georgie knew and mostly avoided. Her hair was blowing out of its neat plaits, there was a smear of mud on one side of her shoe, and Georgie liked her immensely.
They walked back to their own neighborhood slowly, looking in alleyways and into sewer grates. As the last rays of sun vanished over the council houses, Aoife turned to Tom and said,
"Does It, whatever's taking the children, know about you? Is It trying to scare you too?"
"It hasn't done anything yet," Tom said. He wasn't looking at any of them. "Nothing I've noticed, at least."
"It could, though," Art said. Georgie shivered at the thought of it; she could handle herself just fine, but Tom wasn't made for fighting. "What would It do? What are you afraid of?"
Tom was silent for a long time.
"Clowns," he said, eventually.
Tom was lying, and Georgie let him. She didn't have the words for the secret Tom was keeping, and she wasn't sure he did either. In Derry, some secrets were life and death.
Setting notes:
I spent way too long trying to figure out if you could buy topical antibiotics over the counter in Northern Ireland in the 90's, and eventually gave up and left the throwaway line in. The internet says you can get certain topical antibiotics over the counter in the UK nowadays, which I'm calling close enough.
I literally just now realized that nuns usually take new names when they enter a novitiate. I'm dumb. There will totally be a plausible explanation for why she didn't change her name, trust me.