A/N: It has been ... slightly longer than a week. Whoops. I got distracted by writing future chapters and forgot about this one. Enjoy.
Georgie's hand left a smear of blood on the phone box's door, and more as she dropped coins into the slot, fumbling in her pockets for change. She'd known Art's phone number from memory for years, but her fingers still shook and hesitated.
"Brennan Surgical Practice, how may I help you?" The housekeeper picked up after two rings, sounding bored.
"I need to talk to Art," Georgie said, clutching at the phone like a lifeline.
"Who is this?"
"It's Georgie." The phone beeped – time almost up – and she scrambled to feed another coin into it. "Please, it's important. Tell him –" She faltered. What could she say?
"I'll get him," the housekeeper said. Georgie waited, rocking back and forth on her heels. She'd forgotten her jacket rushing out, and the glass phone box didn't do much to stop the wind. After an eternity, the static cleared.
"Georgie –" Art started, and she cut him off.
"We need to go kill It," she told him. "Now."
"Tonight?"
"No, when I said now I meant it could wait til tomorrow," Georgie snapped, and Art sighed.
"What's so urgent that we can't get some sleep and make a decent plan before charging in?"
"It took Sarah," Georgie said.
Wee Sarah MacCool, Gabriel's friend. Georgie didn't know her well – she was eight, after all, and thus barely sentient – but knowing her at all meant something. She'd watched Sarah playing hopscotch on the pavement outside, making up her own rules each time she lost. Braided Gabriel's hair, then Mary's, then Sarah's, so they'd all match for school. Shouted at the MacCool girls to get back inside, it was practically dark and did they want to worry their poor mother like that? And she was gone. Dead, most likely, but she hadn't been gone for long and that meant there was a chance.
"Who's Sarah?" Art asked.
"She lives at the corner, that's not the point. Art, she's only been gone for a day. She might still – she might not –"
Georgie couldn't shape the words. If she said that Sarah could still be alive, it meant admitting that the rest of the children were dead. It meant acknowledging that Gabriel was gone.
"You think we could find her," Art said. Georgie nodded. He was probably weighing every possibility in his head, figuring the risk involved, but Georgie didn't think like that. Sarah MacCool could be alive, and Georgie would find her.
When Georgie slipped back into the house, to get a light and a weapon and anything that might get her through alive, Mrs. MacCool was gone and her mother was dozing in a parlor chair. Georgie thought about writing a note for her, in case she didn't come back, but it would waste precious time.
She just about battered down Tom's door, explained it to him as best she could, took him with her. The details are lost in a blur of adrenaline to Sister Michael, but Georgie felt every moment ticking away.
A man, taller than Georgie with hard lines around his mouth, answered Joe's door.
"Hello," Georgie said. Tom was behind her and wasn't being much help, but she could handle adults. "We're friends of Joe."
The man scowled at them, and Georgie kept talking.
"We're here to see him. We were planning to go to Midnight Mass just now, so if you could tell him we're here –"
"Joe doesn't go to Midnight Mass," the man said, each word like a stone falling into a lake. "He's got work to do."
Someone moved into the shadowed room behind the man, about the right height to be Joe.
"If we could just talk to him for a moment –" Tom tried, going for the open door hopefully. The man didn't move an inch.
"You're Jacky Darragh's boy, the queer one, aren't you," he said. Tom flinched back. "Joe won't be talking to you."
He shut the door in their face. Tom sat down on the step and didn't look at her. Georgie wanted to offer comfort, but her hands were shaking with the anticipation of the fight and her mind was a red wash and she knew by now that she wasn't the sort who comforted the afflicted anyway.
Georgie knocked hopefully again. There was no answer, only raised voices from inside the house that she couldn't identify.
"We should go," she said. Tom shook his head.
"Joe will come with us," he said, with a quiet confidence that it didn't even occur to her to question.
After a long time, the door opened and Joe stepped out, closing it quickly behind him, although Georgie saw porcelain shards on the floor through the gap. He looked like hell, with the skin around one eye puffing up and a smear of blood across his knuckles.
"We're going to kill It, aren't we?" he asked. When Georgie nodded, he grinned, showing a chip newly taken out of his front tooth.
"About damn time."
Art and Aoife met them by St. Joseph's church, close enough to halfway between their neighborhoods to serve as a landmark. The building looked taller than usual, and the colors of the stained glass in the moonlight were dark and strange.
"What happened to you?" Aoife asked. "Did you …"
"Wasn't It that did this," Joe said. Aoife looked at him for a long time, and there was something similar in their expressions that Georgie couldn't make out in the moonlight.
Even then she felt the knowledge that she couldn't save them, couldn't save a child from their own family. But she had to try.
As they gathered around the manhole in the center of the road, Georgie put a hand on Aoife's shoulder tentatively. Aoife cringed away.
"You're bleeding," she said. The shoulder of her cardigan was stained with it.
"It's nothing, I broke a teacup. Are you alright?"
Aoife set her jaw, though it didn't stop her shaking.
"Yes."
Georgie almost believed her. With a grunt of triumph, Joe wrenched the manhole cover free and set it aside. They entered the sewer quickly, more afraid of hesitation than of the thing that awaited them.
…
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," Sister Michael says half-heartedly. She's not much for begging forgiveness from a priest, of all people, but confession is as good a place as any to discuss the details of morality.
"Welcome, my child."
Sister Michael very nearly gets to her feet and leaves right then.
"Oh, Christ, it's you," she says instead.
"I don't know what you mean," Father Peter says, sounding immensely hurt. "This is fully anonymous, Sister."
Thursdays are Father Thomas' day to listen to pensioners list their woes, and she doesn't like Father Thomas but he can be counted on to be half-asleep in a haze of whiskey, which is what she needs, not some young overzealous tosser who is probably absolutely thrilled to solve her problems for her.
"Right," Sister Michael says. "I'm not here to confess."
The shadow on the other side of the screen nods tentatively.
"Well, Sister, this is –"
"Shut up for a minute and let me speak, will you?"
He shuts up. Sister Michael tries to marshal her thoughts into something that'll make the least bit of sense to anyone.
"I have a moral question. Though you won't be much help with that." Father Peter doesn't respond to that jab, and she almost wishes he would.
The first time, it hadn't even felt like a choice. Georgie was young and reckless and more scared than she'd ever admit, and she had never hesitated.
"If…" Sister Michael struggles for a way to phrase this that won't get her committed. "If there were someone harming people – harming the students, perhaps – and I were able to stop them, would I have a moral duty to do so?"
"Well, that's quite a general question," Father Peter says. "The answer might be complicated."
"It's not that complicated," Sister Michael mutters. "If people are dying, and I could save them, I have to, aye?"
"We all have our own part to play," Father Peter says. "Ours is to save souls. Would someone else be better suited to helping in this case?"
"No. No, it –" Sister Michael's voice breaks, and she coughs into her hand. "It has to be me." She's the only one left.
"That's quite a specific situation," Father Peter says, delicately. Like he thinks she's crazy. "In that case, I would say that you do have a duty to help others, if it doesn't come with risk to yourself."
"What if it does?" Sister Michael asks. "If helping them might kill me, do I still have a duty to them?"
Father Peter is silent for a while. Judging by how his shadow moves, he's looking incredulously through the screen. Trying to tell if she's having him on, most likely.
"Well, Sister, that makes it more complicated." More silence.
"I don't need you to tell me that. I want a yes or no."
"Are you going to listen to me? I don't mean to be rude, but in the past you haven't always treated me as if you appreciate my opinion …"
"Because I don't," Sister Michael says automatically, then sighs. "Yes, this one time, I'm asking for your thoughts."
"Very well. Sister Michael, are you sure that you can save them?"
Sister Michael's heart drops. It's here, It's following her, and she left her weapons outside the church. She lunges at the screen anyway, ripping it out of its frame. She won't let It speak to her and get the upper hand the way It did last time.
Father Peter blinks up at her. Just him, no clown. Sister Michael clears her throat and sets the screen down.
"I don't know if I can save them," she admits. "I don't know if I can save anyone." They saved one child all those years ago, and even that was luck as much as anything else.
"But I have to try."
The words surprise her even as she says them. For the slim chance that even one child could survive, she will face It again.