Content warning: discussion of suicide.
Sister Michael puts her affairs in order, small as they are. She doesn't have any possessions worth giving away, and the church will handle her funeral. Her main concern is Our Lady Immaculate. She writes seventeen pages of notes about the accounts, and stores them with the account book where even a fool like Sister Patrick will find them. Of the nuns with enough seniority to be considered for her successor, Sister John is eighty and quite senile, Sister Ezekiel can't find her arse with both hands, and Sister Isaac …
Well, she'd best hope the next headmistress is from another parish.
The contents of her manila folder have been put in a large envelope sitting on Sister Michael's desk. It's addressed to Art. If Sister Michael lives through this, she'll put the folder on her shelf for another twenty-seven years. If she doesn't, it'll be found eventually, and sent, and Art will know that It's back. After that, Sister Michael's careful plan breaks down. She loves Art, and she trusts him, but it's been twenty years. She doesn't know if he'll come back.
Art's her best option if she doesn't make it. Her only option, really. Each of her friends left in some final, awful way, but Art could still come back. Sister Michael almost believes that.
She wipes her eyes. She still needs to finish all her half-term progress reports, before some other idiot starts doing her job. Christ, but there's a lot of paperwork involved in dying.
Someone's knocking on the door, and Sister Michael shoves her last will and testament under another stack of papers and calls "come in!"
It's Sister Francis again, and she spends a long time loitering in the doorway uncomfortably.
"Do you have something to say, or are you just enjoying the scenery?" Sister Michael asks eventually.
"Well… James Maguire wasn't in my class again, and I know it's hardly uncommon for children to be tardy but it's the second time this week." Sister Francis wrings her hands.
Sister Francis has the bad luck of being young and utterly spineless, teaching sports at eight in the morning, so half her class arrives tardy. James Maguire isn't one to miss a class, at least not alone; he'll follow Michelle Mallon and those girls around like a puppy, but he's a model student when they're not influencing him.
"Were his friends present?" Sister Michael asks, and Sister Francis nods.
Sister Michael takes a few deep breaths, and dismisses Sister Francis with a wave. James Maguire is probably out sick or involved in some scheme, and all she has to do is find Erin Quinn and her friends and ask them. Then Sister Michael can finish her paperwork and deal with It at a reasonable time of the afternoon.
The corridors are crowded between classes, but they empty out as Sister Michael searches. The girls ought to be near the main entrance, going to French. She finds them ten feet from the entrance, whispering back and forth and heading for the doors.
This is all just a scheme. James Maguire hasn't been taken, he just skived off early and they're all joining him. All's well.
Sister Michael clears her throat, and they turn to look at her very slowly. Sister Michael takes a moment to relish the fear in their eyes and Erin's stuttered attempt at an explanation.
"I believe your classes are in the other direction," she says once she's had enough. They still look very, very afraid. Perhaps more afraid than they should be of a headmistress.
"Oh, aye, of course," Erin says, then lapses into more mumbling. None of them move, not even Clare Devlin, which is frankly out of character for them.
"You're late. Get to class, or I'll be forced to give you all detention."
Clare starts off in the right direction, but Erin grabs her. There's a wild look in her eyes, that seems a little more intense than her French lesson really deserves. Michelle, next to her, has mascara smeared under her eyes as if she's been crying, and even Orla looks less vacant than usual.
"We're not going to class, Sister."
Sister Michael hasn't faced a student rebellion this brazen since '79. She's enforced a strict ban on Pink Floyd ever since then, but the fiery tone of a student determined to take down an unjust educational system with their own two hands is still familiar.
"James is missing. And we're going to find him and take him back," Erin says, calmly. As if she has no idea of what's about to befall her.
Sister Michael gapes at them, and they run. By the time she's gathered her wits about her enough to follow, they're undoubtedly long gone.
James Maguire was taken, and they've pieced together enough to know what happened to him, and they're going to fight for him. It staggers her that children are willing to take on a task as impossible as this.
The girls hardly have a chance, of course. They're young and reckless and inexperienced, and even if they get their hands on real weapons – hardly difficult in a place like Derry – they'll be more danger to each other than they will to It. They may well all die in their quest, and they certainly won't rescue James.
Our Lady Immaculate's accounts will simply be out of order and its midterm progress reports postponed. Sister Michael can't afford to waste a moment more.
…
The next evening, they met on the edge of town at the river. They hadn't planned it. Joe had brought a bottle of whiskey. None of them asked where he got it, and even Art drank, wrinkling up his nose and muttering about germs. He and Aoife sat on the solitary bench while the rest of them sprawled in the grass. Tom slumped into Georgie's shoulder.
"We won," Art said like he couldn't quite believe it.
"Did we?" Georgie said, looking right at the setting sun so she had an excuse for her watering eyes.
"We killed the clown," Art said.
"Aye, and we did save someone," Aoife added.
"We killed one clown," Georgie said. "There's still soldiers in the streets and bombs and –"
"Things will get better," Tom said, sitting up. "We killed It. They have to."
"I'm with Georgie," Joe said. "There's worse in Derry than just the clown."
"Christ, you lot are a riot when you're drunk," Tom said. Georgie rolled her eyes and he laughed and swayed into her.
They didn't talk about It after that. They drank the rest of the whiskey and laughed and looked up at the stars, and Georgie felt some of the fear ease. Art dropped off quickly, and none of them wanted to wake him from what was likely his first sleep in days.
"You too good for the ground?" Joe asked, flailing his hands at Aoife. "Too good to mix with us common folk?"
"I don't want to get my dress dirty!" Aoife giggled. Her pale, freckled cheeks were flushed red.
"Come on!" Georgie laughed, grabbed her hand and tugged, gently enough that Aoife could resist if she wanted. She didn't, and overbalanced and tumbled down on top of Georgie.
Georgie stopped laughing. Aoife was breathing in soft gasps against Georgie's collarbone, her hair spread out over Georgie's chest, one thigh next to Georgie's hip. She still had a grip on Georgie's hand.
"I've never been this drunk before," Aoife said with a laugh, rolling off of Georgie into the grass.
"Most drunk you've ever been before is Communion," Joe said. Georgie barely heard him, or Aoife's retort. She felt far too sober, and cold, and afraid. Aoife's arm was still touching hers.
Tom dozed off, and Joe wandered into the next field over to take a piss, and suddenly it was just her and Aoife. Georgie sat up, and Aoife sat up too.
"Do you think we'll stay friends?" Georgie asked. Her voice sounded small and scared and she hated it. "When we grow up, leave school, get married. Will we still talk?"
"We will," Aoife said. Like there was no other possibility. "We killed the Devil together. I won't just forget about you."
Georgie kissed her.
It was transcendent. Kissing Aoife felt like coming home, to a place with none of the pain and struggle of Derry, somewhere the way home was supposed to be. This couldn't be a sin.
For a long, wondrous moment, Aoife kissed her back, one hand on Georgie's chin, and then she pulled away.
"Georgie, we can't."
"Why not?" Georgie whispered. She was holding Aoife's hand, and she clutched it like a rosary.
"My father would kill us both."
Aoife meant it, she could tell, and all the world rushed back around her. Killing It hadn't changed Derry. It hadn't changed anything.
"I love you," Georgie said, desperately, and Aoife took her hand out of Georgie's and turned away.
Georgie didn't cry in front of Aoife. She shook Tom awake.
"We'd best be getting home," she told him, and he nodded wearily and walked with her, and didn't say a word about her tears. Georgie lost Aoife first, as quickly as she found her.
…
St. Joseph's Church has been abandoned for twenty-seven years. There's a bit of graffiti on the stones, and a few panels of the stained-glass windows have been broken, but there's no murals. It hasn't been broken into or used as a hideout for a partisan group or a smuggler. Something about the church and what's underneath it keep people away.
She brought bolt cutters, but there's no lock on the doors. The boards covering them have been ripped away and piled in a trampled spot of grass. The girls got here first.
They do at least know how to get to It. That's almost reassuring. Sister Michael would have preferred if they didn't and were off wandering on the other side of the river, but she didn't really expect that. They're not fools, and if they know what It is and that It took James, they know where to go.
The stained-glass window above the door warps and ripples as she approaches, until it resolves into the grinning face of a clown, eight feet wide. Sister Michael meets its gaze and waits.
"Is that all?" she asks. Taunting It is hardly wise, but every moment It is focused on her is one where the girls are safer.
The red of the clown's hair drips down its face until the whole window is one blood-red panel, then clears to reveal Tom, sitting at a table. His face is one featureless pane of glass, but the rifle resting next to him is rendered in every minute detail. Sister Michael's hands close around the same gun.
It's been some perverse comfort to her all these years, knowing that she had a way out. If the world got bad enough, she could just follow Tom.
"Then why don't you, Georgie?" It says in Tom's voice.
Sister Michael stumbles back, her heel catching on a rock. Tom's glass face cracks across the center, into the shape of a grinning mouth.
"It'd be so easy," It says. "No more worries, no more pain. And you'd get to see me again, Georgie."
"That's not my name," Sister Michael says. She picks up the rock and hurls it through the stained-glass window. It shatters into colorful fragments. Nothing more than glass.
The door of the church opens easily, and the sunlight is pouring in. Glass crunches under her feet.
Wherever Tom is, he's not here. It couldn't kill him, and It doesn't have his soul. It won't be getting hers either.
Setting notes:
In November 1979, Pink Floyd released the third-best album ever made, The Wall. One of the singles, "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" became one of their top hits. It's a scathing rebuke of the British education system of the '60s and '70s, and became a rallying point for students expressing their individuality and opposition to their schools. Judging by Sister Michael's in-show attitude towards students singing just about anything, she probably took a pretty dim view of the song.