Chapter Text
Freezing cold concrete was the first thing Bill Denbrough felt when he awoke. His half naked body was laying in the middle of a familiar street, his front door visible from where he sat. His head was pounding as he attempted to crawn out of the fetal position he found himself in, he got on his hands and knees, suddenly feeling like the world was slanted sideways when he struggled to get up without sliding the opposite direction from the one he intended to go towards. Gripping the floor like he was climbing a mountain, his feet weighing a thousand pounds, the young boy managed to get up on his feet. The floor rotated back into place once he did, he wondered if it was even tilted in the first place.
The fog that seemed to come out either the sewers or the floor itself combined with his Bill’s disassociated, blurry vision added to his confusion. The white houses repeated themselves into infinity on the seemingly never-ending street, but a flash of yellow stood out against the muted colors of the simple, typical neighbourhood.
With broad steps, almost unnatural in the way the moved both faster and slower than his surroundings, like he was inside of a car, going faster than any human could, on some type of high-speed chase. The small yellow object was closer, Bill could now make out the shape of a tiny, childlike body standing near a specific house, one colored in much darker colors than any other, the housed seemed like it was in black and white, blurriness gone as he was suddenly stood in front of it, it was straight out of a 1930s vampire movie he would rent to watch late at night. The roof was rotting, holes caving into the thin layer of protection that coved the inside of mansion, the windows lacked the glass, covered only in light pieces of wood, messily cut, as if they were there for the sole purpose of sticking splinters into the hands of whoever dared to crawl inside. The door suddenly sprung open, the sound booming through the silence he’d grown accustomed to. He thought the housed kind of looked like a face, the door was its mouth, the two windows above were like a pair of sleepy eyes, completed with vines coming down onto the roof of porch, like a funny looking mustache.
A tug on the thin fabric of his pajama pants brought him out of whatever rabbit hole his fuzzy mind was leading him into, practically pulling him into the doorway of the strange house. He turned around to meet a pair of sweet, warm, big brown eyes staring back at him. Georgie.
He looked different. His face was covered in burns and all types of boil, they were wet like he had been sweating for years, the pus was the worst part, yellow goo drooling out of the red gashes on his little brother’s face. One of the sleeves of his adorable little yellow raincoat was practically empty, an arm clearly missing and a paper boat, his paper boat, peaking out the small pocket on his chest. All he did was stare.
All he wanted to do was grab him, he wanted to shake him awake out of whatever state the little boy was in, all dead eyed and lifeless. He wanted to pick him up and run, get him back home, back to safety, back to him. But something about this whole thing made his blood freeze, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t even try to stutter out anything to someone he loved so much, all he could do was stand there, like his feet were nailed to the concrete below them.
“Bill.” His heart shriveled up inside his chest, pain trailing down from there onto every single part of his body. “Billy let’s go home.” Georgie’s voice was sweet as always, every single bit of it hitting his ears like a stab into Bill’s frail heart.
He had the sudden urge to run. He took a step back, slowly back away, closer to the house. Georgie’s remaining hand came up from behind his back and Bill hadn’t even realized he was hiding it until then. Sharp, long, claw-like nails stuck into a brown leather glove was now inches away from his face, but the thing seemed to want to play his him a little more before he cut in.
Bill keep walking backwards, keeping his eyes stuck onto the creature before him, terrified that if he looked away for even a second it would somehow move to his side. He couldn’t run yet, he had to make sure it wasn’t him, he had to make sure. The claw came up near the boy’s face and Bill flinched, but never blinked. The gloved hand pulled off the hood of his brother’s raincoat, revealing a gross mix of a bald head, covered in the same burns he’d seen before, and small tuffs of thin brown hair, sticking to the thing’s head like it would to a rotting skull. The thing pulled out a hat, seemingly out of nowhere, and rested it on its won pus covered head. His heart was beating faster than it had ever before, he was convinced he was about to die from it before it could kill him. It walked towards him, reaching his little arms, making them stretch unnaturally, metal dragging against a nearby streetlamp making that ungodly noise, like thousands of nails on a chalkboard at once.
His feet started sinking into the floor, he tried to get out, but it seemed like the concrete has turned into bubble gum like substance, sticking his bare feet down to the ground, and Bill regretted not having ran before. The thing was getting closer, it looked into Bill’s eyes, his own suddenly not the heavenly warm, honey brown Bill had grown to love since the day he was born, but instead a deep blood red. “Georgie” maintained eye contacted and uttered, in a voice so deep it couldn't possibly be his:
“This.” He motioned to his claw “is God.”
Bill’s vision went white.
The first thing he felt was the ringing in his ears, reminding him of the sound of the nails, putting it back into his brain. He hurried to sit up, looking around his room, checking if it was real, if it was fuzzy and foggy like the street before. It seemed to be real this time. His body was grimy, covered in a thick layer of sweat, his throat burned, as if he’d been screaming for hours, which he likely had, and he chose to ignore the pool of pee staining the front of his pants.
He opened the first drawer of his bedside table, pulling out his underwear until he got to what he was looking for. He grabbed his lilac, lock and key diary, and started writing, he wrote every detail he managed to remember just like he had every night for the past week since the nightmares started. Nightmares about Georgie, about that face he hadn’t seen in years, and the face of a tall, burnt man, wearing a dark brown hat.