Sexy Pennywise x Reader

✧1✧

Moving out had been a strangely unemotional process.

It wasn't as though you had expected any different, but perhaps you had hoped somewhere deep within that you would feel a little more upon leaving your childhood home behind for good. That and, well, your entire family. They didn't seem too distressed by your departure either, though it was hard to tell exactly how they felt about the whole thing; you weren't sure you had ever considered yourself close to them. Oh, well. Out with the old and in with the new, as they say.

Or, well, semi-new. The house was beautiful, surely, and three stories high to boot—more space than you would ever need, but the rumors surrounding it meant you were able to get a good deal on the place. Most of the furniture inside was dusty, however, neglected and rich with a history you would never know. It had likely stood here for generations, loved and well taken care of until the rumors began to circulate. Over time, the vast majority of the neighborhood was abandoned and the house avoided like the plague, leaving the lawn to grow rampant and the windows dark with grime. It was said to be haunted, cursed, bewitched. At night, you could hear the anguished moans of the dead and the howls of bloodthirsty wolves, or you would find headless bodies stumbling around in the dark, reaching with filthy, desperate hands. If you watched the empty windows long enough, you would see ghostly complexions with wide, fearful eyes and blue lips. Or maybe, if you approached the lawn, something would reach up from the dirt and latch onto your ankle, blackened fingernails digging into your flesh.

None of these things happened. You spent your first couple days cleaning the place up, dusting off furniture and appliances, unboxing your small amount of personal belongings, getting settled in. There were no howls or moans as you slept that night; only the soft ticking of the alarm clock on your nightstand, lulling you into a dreamless slumber. When you woke, you continued where you left off. Nothing was out of the ordinary. By your third day, you had explored and cleaned the first two floors of the house. It was tiresome, but it gave you something to do.

It was around mid-afternoon when you discovered the well. It wasn't much in your nature to question things, especially not when your circumstances had already exceeded your expectations—however, it was undoubtedly a surprise to find such a thing in your new home's basement.

It was old, clearly, and unsurprisingly, a stone structure planted firmly in the center of the room and appearing eerily out of place. Everything else regarding the basement was as it should be; it was, well...a basement. A basement with a well in the middle of it.

There hadn't been anything about an old well in the rumors, though you were certain that if the kids in the next neighborhood over caught wind of this they'd have a field day. There was nothing odder and spookier than an abandoned well in somebody's basement, after all. Though it was, you ultimately determined, harmless as the rest of the house was. Cold to the touch, perhaps a little eerie, but harmless. You dropped a pebble inside and waited for it to hit the bottom, but there was nothing. Cold, eerie, and bottomless.

When you washed your hands in the sink afterwards, some of the water spilling into the drain ran red. Upon closer inspection, the palms of your hands were smeared with a mixture of filth, primarily dirt and dust, but also what appeared to be blood. You wondered, briefly, if you had managed to injure yourself when exploring the basement, but the blood washed off to reveal healthy skin underneath. It must have come from something you touched.

The rumors encompassing this home were instigated by the deaths and disappearances of its inhabitants—surely somebody's blood would have been left behind in the process. The details had always been kept vague, but several people had been recorded as having died here in just the past twenty years, ultimately lowering the value of the home to near extinction. Perhaps one of them had fallen into a well that happened to be located in the basement. It made sense when you thought about it deeply enough, worked out the logic in your mind as you watched the remaining blood swell around the drain. There was nothing to worry about.

Everyone was surely mistaken about the house on Neibolt Street.