"I've realized that..." he started, then took a shaky breath. "Earlier today, when Stanley pulled you aside... seeing you two so close and secretive, I hated it." The words tumbled out in a rush. "I don't like how others make you smile..." He traile...
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°•°Vanessa's POV°•°
"This is where it hid," Mike announced, his voice a low tremor in the oppressive silence. The cavern was a gallery of horrors. A massive, petrified form of some obsidian substance, jagged and cruel, dominated the space. It was a nest of nightmares, littered with the skeletal remains of its countless victims. The air was thick with the smell of ancient dust and forgotten death.
"So, all this has been under Derry, like, forever?" Eddie asked, his voice tight as he tried to mask the terror that made his hands shake.
"Not forever. Just a few million years," Mike replied, as if that was a comfort. My mind recoiled at the thought, at the unimaginable scale of suffering this thing had caused.
Mike led us to the heart of the monstrous structure and shrugged off his backpack. He withdrew the tribal artifact, the one he'd been so possessive of, and placed it reverently on a flat rock.
"It can only be attacked in its true form. The ritual will show us that," he declared, his eyes gleaming with a fervor that bordered on fanaticism.
"And what is its true form?" Ben asked, the question we were all thinking.
"I hope it's a puppy, like a Pomeranian or... I'll shut up," Richie muttered, earning a series of grim stares. His humor, usually a lifeline, fell into the abyss around us.
"It's light. A light that must be snuffed out by darkness," Mike intoned. He splashed a liquid-oil or gasoline-into the artifact's basin. The match he struck flared, and then he dropped it in. Fire roared to life, casting dancing, monstrous shadows on the walls. "Your artifacts. Place them in the fire. The past must burn with the present."
One by one, we offered our tokens to the flames.
Bill went first, his voice thick with emotion. "This is the boat that I built with Georgie." He let the small wooden vessel fall into the fire, a piece of his grief finally released.
"It's my inhaler," Eddie said simply, taking one final, symbolic puff before tossing it in. It was his fear, his crutch, given up.
"Come on, dude," Richie sighed, but I was already stepping forward.
I held four small, folded pieces of paper. "It's something that made me never give up, even in the toughest of times." My letters. The promises of a future. I saw Eddie watching me, his eyes soft with understanding and love.
"Something that I wish I had held on to," Beverly whispered, clutching a postcard to her heart for a moment before committing it to the flames.
Ben held up a tattered page. "This is from my yearbook. Only one person signed it. I kept it in my wallet for 27 years." His gaze flickered to Bev before he let it go.
