𝐆𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐄𝐍 𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐃

𝕚. 𝕨𝕙𝕖𝕟 𝕚 𝕤𝕒𝕪 𝕚'𝕞 𝕠𝕟 𝕞𝕪 𝕠𝕨𝕟

there's a place/
where we go to die
- mystery jets, "radlands"

/

When Richie was nine, though he's wont to admit it, he was petrified of the dark. Not that it was an unusual fear; Bill and Stan had readily admitted to dreading the night hours, too. But he was Richie, always too proud. He was scared of nothing, of no one, and he hated the way the shadow-soaked earth and the soft creaking of the house as it settled in the early hours of the morning were always enough to send him scurrying into his parents' room, seeking refuge. They'd turned him away, usually, and Richie would slump back to his bedroom, all defeat and darting eyes. One morning over breakfast he'd asked his papa when the dark would stop being so scary.

"Never," Wentworth Tozier had told him with a straight face. Richie's toast had gotten stuck in his throat and his father went back to reading the paper.

And yeah, up until now Richie was always sure that was just his dad being an asshole. But as he bikes through the trees with not a trace of light to be found, the familiar feeling of unease is niggling at the back of his mind. Stan had swore up and down that this was a shortcut home from the Aladdin, but with every second that passes the foliage is getting thicker and the path is getting harder and harder to make out, like no one has ever even bothered to wander this way and Richie is really pretty sure Stan is a lying sack of shit.

No, Richie thinks. He's not really afraid of the dark itself anymore, not of the midnight creatures he'd cooked up in his head as a child, werewolves and the bogeyman and all sort of fantastical, ugly things. What he's afraid of now is the people who hide in the shadows, people who are crueler and uglier than his imagination could have ever come up with.

There's something blocking the trail up ahead, and instead of slowing Richie squints into the dark and tries to make out what it is. If he keeps at it with enough speed, he figures he can probably just hop right over it. He just wants to know what it is, is all. Mentally, he can see Stan shaking his head. You're an idiot, Imaginary Stan huffs.

"Yeah, well...maybe if you hadn't sent me into this fuckin' maze I wouldn't have to be!" Richie snaps back to the voice in his head. His eyes adjust to this new level of darkness, and suddenly the shape in the dark takes on a familiar form, albeit not one Richie's ever seen in real life.

It's a deer. Or at least it was.

Now the mess on the ground sort of resembles a deflated pinata post-birthday party beatdown, only with a lot more blood. The whole thing looks strangely flat, as if its insides have all been sucked out with a vacuum. Which is true, at least in part - half of its innards are lying on the surrounding ground. Intestines here, kidney there, both dusted with a generous coat of squirming maggots. Its fur is matted and crunchy with blood, head torn mostly away from its body. Richie doesn't like dead animals at the best of times, but seeing one taken apart like a child's half-finished art project on the forest floor is something else entirely.

And yet he can't look away.

At the last second he cuts his wheel, and the front tire hits something sharp. Richie stumbles forward, legs tangling in the frame of a bike that's too small for him after his freshman year growth spurt and bringing it down with him. His glasses go flying. A loud hiss escapes the punctured tire.

"Fuck me!" Richie yells, exasperated, into the empty blackness around him. He flops onto his back and closes his eyes. The things he can see with them closed versus what he can see without his glasses is nearly identical, so he kneels with another irritated huff and begins feeling around in the dirt for them, wary of the dead deer in close proximity. He really can't wait for the day he gets contacts and can finally stop being a living, breathing parody Velma fuckin' Dinkley.