Chapter Text
There were better ways to do this. The idea of making a fiction podcast out of the death of a loved one seems cheap, but after four decades of bad “Your Mom” jokes, Richie has settled into his niche of cheap well. Besides, it’s not like Eddie can curse him from beyond the grave if he’s still here.
Bill first learns about the upcoming podcast via a tweet on Richie’s main account. Richie expected him to be mad. Who makes a drastic career change to become a fiction writer and lets their friend, specifically their award-winning author friend, find out over Twitter? Richie apparently. But he isn’t. Instead, Bill calls congratulating him on the new project and offering help if he gets stuck on any plot lines. “Writer’s block’s a bitch,” and Bill is more than willing to help out.
That is, until he read the description. For the rest of that day, Richie blocks Bill’s calls. Then all the Losers call. The four of them agree: he needs to let this go. Richie won’t—can’t, they have to know that. But Richie assures them that he’s gone through all the stages of grief and made it out to acceptance just fine. Years of going out on stage every night talking about the hot girlfriend he fucked every night—you know, the one who caught him masturbating to her friend’s Facebook page—prepared him well. He’s been lying his whole life, one phone call means nothing.
“Everyone heals differently,” he starts. “I don’t know. People who aren’t us in place that weren't Derry going through the same shit. I don’t want that but it’s the idea. They had to forget this shit to, its not just us, and it just feels less fucking lonely that way. Eddie’s gone.” He chokes on that line. “I know I can’t save him, but maybe I can save this one guy, in this one story. Is that so bad? I’m just trying to heal.” Lying to his friends, It’s as easy as saying he fucked all their moms.
“If you think it’s going to help you.” “We’re here for you.” “You can heal, we all will.” “Yeah, that’s right. You can make it through this, Richie.” They all say.
They believe him more than they did as kids, every time he said he fucked their moms. Maybe he’s gotten better with age.
“As long as you know it’s not real,” none of them say.
After receiving his greenlight from the Losers, Richie goes back to working on the podcast. The process would be easier with an actual writer to check his script or a librarian to help with the research or someone who knew what the fuck may be going on. But they couldn’t know.
---
For a period, Richie watched T.V. every day, never changing the channel. He sat, and he laid, letting it wash over him. There was a time, specifically beginning at the advent of the iphone, in which Richie never made it through a movie without checking his phone at least once, if not on it the entire time. As it turns out, one learns a lot when actually watching. For example: infomercials get their name for a reason. They truly provide so much information.
Around two o’clock pm on a Wednesday, Richie woke up on the couch to reports of an accident on Fox. An earthquake took out part of a school, not the whole thing, just two classrooms. A support beam cracked and the roofs fell. Richie’s face scrunched up in horror, his mouth open but taking in no air. Thirty-two children died, but that’s not what horrified him. In the background, watching, was Eddie, so far in the back that Richie barely saw.
What the hell was Eddie doing there? What possible reason could Eddie be in, he checked the banner at the bottom, Emporium, Pennsylvania? How the fuck did he even get there, why would he be there, what was he thinking? His face wasn’t in focus enough for Richie to even see the look on it. All of that crossed Richie’s mind before he even thought to ask, “How is Eddie alive.”
For three days, Richie stayed up. He bought Direct TV so he could watch on his laptop, brought his office desktop into the living room, unmounted the screen in his bedroom to put in front of the couch. Three news reports going live at all times, and the living room TV, the one meant to be there, perpetually stuck on Fox. He watched all of them, even when Fox stopped playing the news, as if Eddie could find his way into a Simpsons episode. If anyone could... But maybe he could materialize in a commercial.
Eddie made no appearance. At first, Richie thought the lack of sleep answered why he couldn’t see him. Day two-point-five, as he marked it, still brought nothing, making it the first time Richie realized that all this could be a waste of time, an idiotic way to work out trauma. Crack of dawn on day three, and he remembered how small the man was in comparison to the screen, his features barely picked up by the HD. For Richie to even assume the man to be Eddie was presumptuous. He was just a random observer in the background not even in focus of the shot. Even if it was Eddie, there was no way Richie would be able to tell.
Except, that was bullshit. Richie knew him through blurry eyes with his glasses kicked off; knew him through quiet footsteps as he took running start to tackle Richie into the dirt; knew him through laughter hidden behind longwided, disapproving lectures; through silence when Eddie just breathed next to him. Knew him as he stopped breathing.
Two o’clock struck. On the tiny laptop screen, standing in the background, a news broadcast showed Eddie again. Kanab, Utah this time. Three kids got lost hiking, and their phones ran out of battery. Richie didn’t want to hear the rest, just wanted to see Eddie, but he needed to know. With thousands of miles between Pennsylvania and Utah, no possible reason existed for this to be any kind of coincidence. Too full of the image—Eddie, there, breathing, alive—to look away and get a pen, Richie committed everything to memory. Beneath the tragedy playing out, Richie savored every pixel, every fraction of a second the network allowed this story airtime.
The report cut back to the newscaster, and Richie snapped out of it, running to get something to write with. No time for mourning the loss of Eddie from sight, Richie penciled everything to paper, then thought. Richie’s epoch of misery ended then. For the first time in days, he stopped being a passenger and thought. 2,137 miles, 32 hours by car, 25 with Eddie behind the wheel, no direct flights. Richie forgot to factor in sleep. Tragedy connected them, nothing else. Scratch that, small towns, both reports took place in small towns. The fact that they were even covered by big networks seemed improbable. Still, the connection worked.
Despite being founded in only 1998, Google remained one of Richie’s closest and oldest friends, sans Losers of course. Fuck. The Losers. They’d gotta hear about this. They needed to know. But dragging them back, giving hope with no proof, that would be cruel. Instead, Richie went back to googling. He’d call later, with proof, and he would find proof.
The sentence “Small town child death” looked bad in any search history. Being a comedian, and therefore technically a writer, excused many an odd google. Still, he may want to clear his search history. Regardless, “Small town child death” garnered results in myriads. Every link with a youtube attachment, every clip on an article, every photo of every tragedy Richie searched.
Eddie was there, in North Dakota. An electrical fire killed four, and he stood there in the background of the shot. As the reporter talked, he just watched the camera. Missouri, Oklahoma, California. He watched. A car was dug out of a river, a mother and daughter drowned inside. A small town, again, and death. Eddie watched.
Richie bookmarked every video.
---
Two months left before the podcast launched, Richie still had a “shit ton” of research to do. Basic outlines were drawn, the episode was good enough, but where to go from there stuck high in the air. He researched the same way Mike did but, you know, without stealing indigenous property and relics. What the fuck, Mike. But he runs out—only so many books on dead clowns and histories of murdered children. Especially without Mike to help with resources.
In searching, and Richie doesn’t tell Bill this, he reads his books. In fact, he reads all of them. Every book is the same; each time, a group of children hide together, each time, people come together to fight a monster, each time, the endings suck. Richie debates telling Bill that last point, but that would mean copping to the fact that he read the books. As far as Bill is concerned, Richie doesn’t know how to read.
Even without his memories, without even knowing the Losers existed, Bill wrote them. Somehow, somewhere, strange things must be happening. It can’t only be them; someone else must have forgotten. So Richie buys a fucking kindle and camps out in a library and singlehandedly keeps the LA Barnes & Noble alive and kicking.
Richie reads more than a few books before working his way to some YA book. So what if it’s a book made for tweens? Richie’s a college drop out. Let it go.
He only makes it through one chapter, until he comes across haunting words.
“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit… Either you’re his true love, or you killed him.”
Richie shuts the book.
He doesn’t know what he expected out of it, but Jesus Christ. Even Bill’s books aren’t that cheesy, and he has not-Bev fall for his obvious self insert. That is just bad writing. Still perturbed, Richie moves on to another book, then another, just looking to find something more.
As he investigates, as he writes, as he connects the literal dots with pink yarn, he names it podcast research, and he christens it fiction. He could never tell the Losers, not again.
----
Four months and thirteen days ago, Richie called them. He called them, one after another, only saying one thing before hanging up: “Eddie Isn’t Dead.”
It would have been helpful to have Mike come. All twenty-three years after the first Loser left, he studied text after sacred text in that Library. If anyone knew what to do, it was him. But Mike was in Michigan looking at the Great Lakes, and Ben and Bev were closer.
When he answered the door, after the original comfort of just seeing them left, he noticed Ben’s face drop. Bev had always been better at hiding her emotions. It struck Richie that he forgot to clean. When he turned around, he saw what they saw. His apartment was dark with two TV’s and a desktop and a laptop arranged at all angles of the coffee table and milk crate he brought in to fit what he couldn’t on the table. The stacked pizza boxes weren’t a good look, nor was the blanket falling off the couch. Even worse was the nasty bong on his living room chair that spilled out its water onto the rug long ago and the bottles hidden precariously through the house. Most hadn’t made it into the trash can just yet. Or the recycling. Hey, Richie recycled.
Understanding the face Ben made, he cringed slightly. Again, not a good look. But he ushered them inside telling them not to mind the mess. And then he explained it. A lot of small information needed to be crammed into a large story, but he managed to convey it alright. Out with the story came an air of hope, each one of them hoping beyond hope that Eddie could be alive. But buried in all that was concern, and that concern bled doubt. They didn’t believe him, yet.
It was okay. Richie knew that would happen. That's why he had proof, fourteen videos and news reports bookmarked. He ran to his laptop bringing it to the entryway where Ben and Bev still stood. He clicked the first link, but nothing popped up. The internet was just slow. It happens. He took it off the wifi, reconnected, “connection failure”.
That was okay also. Richie planned in case that happened. That was why he had them all bookmarked on his desktop, too. Sure, the three of them on the couch as he crouched over trying to connect made for an awkward squeeze . ABC news wouldn’t load. One sight had been taken down; Kanab was a tourist town, so they didn’t want it on their site. The youtube video got taken down for copyright infringement. This always fucking happened. Richie’s hands started to shake, and he went to his history page searching for one last anything.
He heard Bev suck in a breath. Yeah, yeah it looked bad. But one picture was still up.
“Look. Look. It’s him.” Richie pointed to the screen. “That’s Eddie, right there.”
“Richie,” Ben said.
“Ben,” Richie said back.
“Richie, look at me.”
“No. No. You need to look at the screen, not me. He’s there. I’m telling you he’s there.” Richie didn’t turn his head, but he knew Ben wasn’t looking.
Fine, they didn’t believe him. He got it. It’s hard to believe with just one photo, but he had one video saved to his computer. He didn’t want to show it. Eddie... he didn’t look good in it.
Kent, Connecticut. Two boys hung themselves in the dorm. That report was from October, the oldest report Richie found. Eddie’s cheek was still swollen, red where the wound made its best effort to close. His blue polo was stained a wet brown right by the chest. He was crying. Obviously, Eddie had freaked out before: yelled, screamed, whispered, but Richie had seen Eddie cry twice in his life. And even then, if he ever crossed him with puffy eyes, Eddie would yawn and rub them away saying he couldn’t sleep. Eddie wouldn’t want to be seen like this.
“Richie,” Bev said, so softly he almost didn’t hear it.
“No.”
“Richie,” Bev started to say something else.
“No. Eddie is right there.” he argued back, talking over her. “Right there. Don’t you see him?” He was yelling now, didn’t notice it until half way through, but he couldn’t stop.
“He’s not,” Ben said.
“Come on, Haystacks, use your fucking eyes. Right there,” He pointed at the screen. “Right there between the blonde chick and the dude with the glasses.”
“He’s not there,” Ben said more firmly this time, and Richie couldn’t handle it.
He smacked the table, finally turning around. Fine, he’d look at them. “How can you not see it? Do you just not want to see Eddie, is that it?”
Beverly didn’t say anything.
Where Beverly was quiet, Ben started to raise his voice, not loud, not yelling, just enough for Richie to hear over the pounding behind his ears. “Richie. He isn’t there.” He touched the screen, putting a hand on Richie’s back to ease him back to facing front.
“Don’t touch me.” Richie smacked his hand away. But Richie looked and Eddie was so small standing there, just like the faces of the parents. There was no way he should be able to see Eddie crying from there. Eddie’s face was all but blurred out on the monitor. “Fuck.” Richie stood up, pacing.
“Richie, we loved him, too,” Ben continued.
“Shut up.” He wouldn’t stop.
“He’s dead. Eddie is dead.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Richie punched a wall.
A moment passed, then pain. All he felt was pain. Fuck, he probably broke his hand. No longer feeling like talking, no longer feeling like screaming, he turned around and saw them. Ben was standing, too, looking on the verge of crying, and Bev was sitting on the couch, stock still.
“Bev.” She just sits there, face purposely blank, a mask made impenetrable. “Bev, I’m sorry. Shit, I’m sorry.” Richie turns. “Ben, I’m…” The words don’t come.
Ben makes his way to him, first slowly, hands out a little like walking to a scared dog.
“I’m-”
And in a moment, Ben is there, holding him steady.
“I’m-” It comes out wobbly.
“I know.” He pats his back, once. “I know.”
All Richie could think about was how it was so nice that Ben is 6’1, same as him. He didn’t have to crouch, didn’t have to fall, just stood there and be held. He felt cold.
By the time he was done crying, Bev was there, taking him out of Ben’s arms with the couch blanket in her hands. Richie thought about how weird it was for him of all people to have a specifically “couch blanket.” Afghan , he thought. Like, sure he was rich, but still, who would have expected him of all people to own a couch blanket. It’s out of character. As Bev led him back to sit down, he didn’t not think about what it meant that he slept with only a couch blanket, not a comforter, not even a full length blanket, for so many nights.
---
There’s a reason he never tells the Losers. Not because they won’t believe him—not in a thousand years for that excuse—but because when he looked back at trying to tell them, he only sees Bev.
----
When he woke up, Ben was gone, most likely asleep in the guest bed. He had driven the whole way to Richie’s. Bev was still up though, stroking his hair knowing he still wasn’t ready to get up.
“You’re not the only one, you know,” she said.
“What do you mean?” asked Richie.
“We all have to heal,” Bev explained, sage but hard to believe.
“You’re healing?”
“I’m healing.”
“What are you doing? Like therapy?”
“Yes.” She said, matter of fact. “It’s helpful.”
“So you’re telling me you went to see a therapist.”
She nodded.
“You just walked in and went, ‘So an alien clown killed two of my friends recently. It’s almost okay because we killed it back, but it also killed a shit ton of people when we were kids, and that childhood trauma is really sticking with me.”
“Yes, Richie, that’s exactly what I did.”
“And they didn’t lock you up in a loony bin?
Bev just gave him a look. “I didn’t tell my therapist about a killer clown. Just the basics. I lost two friends recently, and I was reminded of a childhood trauma that I forgot. And that childhood trauma has followed me throughout my whole adult life.”
“Okay, so how did you explain the two decades of memory loss?”
“I kinda skirted around that topic.”
“Okay, what did the therapist say?” asked Richie, waving his hands above his face as he looked up at her. “Just give me the recaps. This is like free therapy.”
Beverly looked at him with her lips pursed in an attempt to keep from smiling. “You’re rich. You know that right? I need you to know this.”
“That money can dry up at any time,” Richie explained, no longer blinking away sleep, “Never know when the next economic collapse may hit.”
“I promise.” Beverly said sincerely, “When you have to live in a box because you wasted all your money on therapy, I’ll come help you decorate.”
“Thanks for the offer, but don’t worry. I’m like a cockroach. I’ll survive eating twinkies from a dumpster behind the factory. Wait, you didn’t offer to feed me.” Bev laughed for the first time since he’d seen her. “Okay, I’ll take you up on the interior design offer.” He smiled at her. “But actually, what did your therapist say? I’m not kidding about the free therapy.”
And so she told him. At night sometimes, she got up just to flush the toilet, not go pee or anything, just flush. “We’re in a drought, Bev.” In that case, sometimes she flushed it twice. At night, the sound felt so much louder. At first, it was terrifying, being so loud. It might wake Ben up. But then, nothing happened, and she flushed it again. She goes on. Last week, she set the microwave for one minute and thirty-one seconds, and she let it go the entire time and didn't even open it when it beeped.
When Richie joked about wasting water and electricity, Bev shot back, “Save yourself or save the world, Rich.” Like so many things that pass between them, it was only half a joke.
While he had slept they called Mike and Bill letting them know what happened. As they told it, Eddie was still dead, and Richie just had a breakdown. Been there, done that; all of them. Ben and Bev left two days later.
After, though, the Losers called him constantly, each at least once a week. Sometimes he answered the phone to one of them everyday. Somewhere in these phone calls, he could have asked Mike. Two decades in a library, he had to know something, but he didn’t. All he accomplished from telling them would be worrying everyone and scaring his friends. Fuck. He wouldn’t scare Beverly again. He saw the way she froze when he punched the wall, and he would never be the reason she had to flush a toilet twice, just proving that she could.
So for three months, he worked alone, reading everything the same way he assumes Mike did.
----
While he writes, Richie attempts to pepper in just enough truth to remind anyone of the cause. Each place he plans to visit, circled on the seventeen maps decorating his walls, Richie attempts to find a new name for, but needs to keep the truth. The fine line between fact and fiction, which starts with the hiding of Eddie, needs to end with only those who have never been made to forget thinking it’s fiction.
Richie diffuses the ugly bits by changing a few names, keeping the stories so close to identical he balks at his lack of creativity. He fills his planner with town names where children’s mottle his backlogs of calendars. Where he writes Afton, Oklahoma, he highlights “Ledington” underneath to keep the names straight. Two fires hit Afton six months ago, and only one reached the papers. eight months ago a flood hit. Richie’s life wasn’t the best example, but he assumed catastrophes couldn’t strike so sequentially in nature.
He has a whole list of towns like Afton, small and cataclysmic, all lined up. Each week of his planner holds one town, miles plotted out carefully and allowing for sleep. Between the towns Richie marks libraries and museums on the maps. After killing a man in a library museum hybrid, one would expect him to be adverse, but execute a clown and a man is nothing.
The first museum planned occupies only nine hundred square feet. It acts as a monument to the Marvelwood School. As Richie knows, anything about a boarding school feels haunted. After watching Dead Poets Society once, he learned that. Horror aside, that is Kent, Connecticut, where Eddie first appeared.
Saved on his desktop, Richie plays and replays the clip of Eddie standing there, studying the blood clinging to his shirt. Richie practically read a first year Medical textbook trying to date how long it took until a stab wound mended to the degree of Eddie’s in the broadcast. Now at the point where he discerns the difference in each color of brick on the school's facade, Richie is ready to drive there. All that’s left is recording the first episode.
---
Three days into his research, Richie had come to a realization. Writing a book just wouldn’t cut it. First off, the concept of himself sitting down and busting out 300 pages was ludacris. The idea’s bare bones contained value: write what he does, and maybe someone would remember. Those who forgot like Bill had, knowing only in subconscious flashbacks that they committed to word could read, too.
Back in Richie’s two semesters and a summer in college, Richie read far too much Star Trek meta. The fanboard authors dug pages in hypothesising what came next and providing fanlore for every one-off detail. When the ideas ran out, some weirdo on the internet with somehow more time on their hands than Richie could be his saving grace.
He had to hope those people like Bill, who wrote what their memories missed, wrote meta too. Hopefully not pon farr meta, but real analysis of his real story and figure it out. That means Richie needs to read shitty fan theory of his own trauma, but anything would be better than playing on a roulette board of guesses when all his research finally ran out.
The other problem was that he needed immediate results, not a year’s wait of publishing drama then another six months for people to actually read it then three for fan communities to pop up. Instead, he settled on what every other B list comedian out of a job does: make a podcast.
Richie’s manager loved the idea of him doing a podcast, loved the idea of him doing something, anything. Of course Steve would, Richie joked to him; Richie would finally be making him money again. Over the phone, Steve paused, then let out a sigh. An almost cruel joke to those who almost love you. He hadn’t seen Richie in months, but his signature sigh never changed.
Despite his original appreciation, the more Richie explained, the more Steve disapproved. Driving cross country to locations and documenting the journey, all researching for the podcast. As Richie described it, the approach was a new performance art creating a realism behind the story. He could never jump the shark if he was always moving.
Steve described it more as a midlife crisis than innovative writing, but he eventually agreed. After years of touring, Richie knew the lazy boredom of the road, and sitting at home, as he’d been doing post stage-fright panic attacks, lacked the healing touch everyone originally expected. Getting back in action, burying himself in work could be just what he needed. Despite how crass it sounded, Richie lost a lot of money refunding all those tickets when he lost it. He could do with earning some back.
“The whole time on the road, you’re going to keep in touch, right?” he asked, more serious than a guy like Richie could handle. That’s why he hired him in the first place. He needed a man who could give a conclusive yes or no to anyone, including him.
“Yeah man, of course. I’ll call.” Richie said, trying to sound committal.
“We both know that’s a lie.” replied Steve, somehow not sounding exhausted in the way Richie knew he was.
“Woah, way to call a man out. Not nice, Steve.” He was right, but still.
“You didn’t hire me to be nice. When I call, you answer.” There was a pause. “Promise me, Richie.”
“Yeah, I promise.” He said it quietly, the way he did when forced into sincerity.
“Good. You’re coming in Wednesday. I’d tell you to clear your calendar, but I know for a fact you don’t have one.”
“Haha. I have a calendar.” And it’s true, Richie did, all nice and adorned with the dates of child deaths. Felt just like being a kid again, surrounded by the knowledge of small town children dying.
But Steve knew him differently. “I mean one from this year, Rich,” he said, in a way only someone who hadn’t watched a clown die could.
And that was it. On Wednesday, Richie went in, and they planned, sat down together and wrote and wrote. It was the first time in years Steve read any of his writing, the first time in years Richie wrote anything to be read.
The process was strange, and watching Steve read it even stranger. As a manager, Steve was used to reading fuck all in front of people, but Richie, as a flop comedian who told other people’s jokes, rarely watched anyone read his. To Steve’s credit, he didn’t tell Richie to fuck off and stop staring. To Richie’s, well, he gets no credit.
He had a lot of notes, nitpicks on grammar, slight changes to increase sentence variance, and a question: “Are you okay?”
“I mean it, Rich. Are you okay? I know you lost a friend, and something weird happened when you left that you refuse to tell me about.” Richie tried to shrug it off, but Steve kept going. “I’m not going to pry because I know you’ll just make some joke and brush it aside, but I need to know right now, are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fuck, I’m fine,” Richie exhaled.
“You can tell me if you aren’t. I don’t want you disappearing off the face of the Earth again.”
“I’m not going to,” he said in an honesty that felt foreign. “I’m gonna answer when you call, every time while I’m on the road.”
“If someone asks you what all this is about, the podcast, the traveling, everything, are you gonna be able to answer?” Back to business with Steve. Richie liked that about him, only so long he would put Richie on the spot before going back to a comfort zone.
“I’ll figure something out.” Even back to business, that was the best Richie got.
“Okay. No interviews, no explanations, we’re playing this straight. You remember how they advertised The Blair Witch Project? ”
“Yeah. That was fucking sick. I was so stoked to see that.” And, indeed, at twenty-three he was.
“Good. Play it like that, and you don’t have to answer any questions. Also, don’t fucking touch Twitter.”
---
“Eddie Isn’t Dead: a fictional story about small towns and places where bad things happen.”
The messages are out, the label set, the creative license paid for. Fuck, he’s even got a logo, which luckily a freelance graphic designer made and not him. Everywhere he touched it said it: “Eddie Isn’t Dead.”
For accuracy purposes, Richie decides to record the first episode on his kitchen table. The episode acts as exposition, leaving the actual start of his journey for the next. Here he is, talking in riddles about Derry.
On the first recording, he cries. He says the word Eddie and sobs. It took him days to plan the script, send it to his manager for approval, get the go ahead. In all that time, it hadn’t prepared him to say his name.
Two takes, and he gets not two sentences in before his voice wobbles, breath hitches, throat closes. He can’t say it. Even off microphone, he’s too scared to try. Instead, he changes the name to “Aaron.”
Pausing the microphone and sighing, he thinks about Bev going to a therapist and healing. Just a few days ago, what he told the Losers when he explained the podcast was accurate. As he lied to them, he said “everyone heals differently.” But same as a joke, with every lie, a foundation of truth needs to stand behind it and stop it from being transparent. At least some of those movies are right, Richie hopes, when they say talking about stuff helps. So he begins, telling the world all of his truths as he reads them like a lie. Who knows, if all ends, if he doesn’t find anything, if he hallucinated everything in an alcohol fueled craze and a detox stupor, if there was no Eddie, then maybe Arron can live.