Strange as IT Seems

Chapter 51: Unanswered

Will swallows. He'd almost completely forgotten about that drawing. The one that made him do a double take when he'd been in Bill's house the first time. It made him have flashbacks and the fear that Eleven had not killed it. The crayon image scribbled on the paper looked like a Demogorgon, just done by a child and called the Shadow Monster. But when Bill had said that it was something his brother had had a nightmare about and nothing else, he'd slowly let it drift from his mind once more focusing on more important things like school and the graphic novel he was planning. Now... now he had to take it seriously.

"Holy shit..." Max says, echoing Dustin's words.

Eleven steps closer and looks at both images. Her entire body tenses up and she can feel the urge to use her powers come over her.

"When... when did he draw this?" she asks him, needing more information.

"A-A-A few w-weeks a-ago," Bill replies, trying to get his emotions back into check. The guilt inside of him had maximized tenfold. All this time, Georgie had seen something, and no one would believe him. He'd done what his parents and all the grown-ups in Derry had about Pennywise. He knew how that felt. How helpless you were when no one would believe you. "B-but he'd been s-seeing it s-since we moved in..."

"Where?"

...

The entire group stands outside Georgie's room. No one wants to make the move to go any further. All the information that they'd shared with each other still weighed heavy on them, but the most pressing matter is what Bill's little brother had seen in the house.

The leader of the Loser's Club's lip is trembling. His entire body was tense and wracked with guilt and fear. Whatever this... Demogorgon was, it had killed before. How had it not attacked any of them before this? Will had escaped with his life from it, but what if others weren't so lucky?

Beverly reaches forward to open the door but Dustin grabs her hand.

"Are you crazy?!" he hisses.

"What? It's just a door."

"You can't just... you can't just go in there!" he whispers.

"Why not?"

"Shh!"

"Why are we whispering?" Ben asks.

"SHH!" the curly-haired teen insists. "We don't want it to hear us."

"Dustin is right," Will says in a soft voice. "We can't let it hear us."

While putting on a brave face, the one who'd entered the Upside Down before is trembling. He doesn't want to see this creature again... not even in pictures and yet here they are again.

"You guys don't know what this thing is and what it does," Dustin continues. "Its face opens with teeth to eat you. It has long claws to grab you and it also has psychic powers."

"What do you mean psychic powers?" Beverly says.

"It can move between our world and the Upside Down," Will explains. He'd heard his mom and brother talking about the thing coming through the wall. "And it can move stuff with its mind." He remembers the lock on the door moving when he'd tried to hide from it.

"That's not possible," Bev says, shaking her head.

"You've met a shapeshifting demon clown that eats children and another monster moving stuff with his mind is impossible?" Max retorts skeptically.

"Max..." El calls her out.

"I'm sorry, but if that kind of shit exists, why can't psychic powers?"

Eleven swallows. She wishes that her friends stopped mentioning psychics and powers. While they never directly said she had them, they're leaning pretty close to it; she just didn't want anyone else to know right now. For their safety and for her own. She knew that she might have to if the Demogorgon was really in Bill's brother's closet, but for now, she wanted to appear normal.