"..."
Time seemed to stop and distort.
Pennywise remained motionless, his brain unable to process the immediate data: he had been wounded... And not by a ritual or a collective will, but by a human girl who barely reached his knee.
The pain was not immediate, but the humiliation was instant.
"AAAAGGGGHHHH!"
A shriek that did not belong to any biological throat exploded from his open mouth, a sound of overlapping frequencies that hit the girls like a physical shockwave. The rotten planks vibrated violently and the glass of the upper window burst.
From the destroyed eye, a viscous and luminescent substance, similar to yellow pus, began to flow from the wound.
Emma did not stay to admire her work and retreated quickly, sliding to place herself behind Lillith.
Pennywise covered the destroyed socket with a hand, while his other eye fixed on the three figures in front of him.
Rage.
Confusion.
And, for the first time in a long time, a pinch of unease grew inside him.
He could feel it.... Without their fear anchoring him... he couldn't.
He needed fear!
With a crunch of bones, he threw his right arm forward. The limb ignored human anatomy; it stretched and elongated like rubber, crossing the distance in a blink, passing over the other two girls, with the intention of catching the girl who had wounded him.
The fingers of the white glove burst, revealing black and hooked claws that sought to close around the girl's jugular.
"Your fear...! GIVE IT TO ME!" he howled with his jaw unhinging. "I am going to make you float in your own nightmares! You are going to see what really lives in the darkness!"
The claw was centimeters from Emma's neck…
Clack
The monstrous arm had been intercepted.
A tiny hand, pale and delicate, had closed around the clown's wrist.
It was Lillith.
She did not even seem to be exerting force. She was planted on the ground, and her grip, like a trap closed over the flesh.
!
Pennywise's limb tensed, vibrating from the effort of advancing, but could not move even a millimeter more.
Lillith raised her head slowly and under the shadow of the red hood, her face maintained that angelic smile of a good girl, but her eyes... her eyes had changed.
They had turned completely black...
"It is my turn to play, little clown," she said with a voice that did not belong to a girl. "No one skips the line."
"THEN I WILL START WITH YOU!"
Upon seeing the girl who had interrupted his meal, Pennywise focused his mental strength on Lillith.
Immediately the scene around her dissolved. The gloomy house vanished, replaced by an ethereal and blinding void.
"..."
Lillith was no longer in the entrance, she was trapped in a space wrapped in a white light that was not warm, but purifying and scorching.
And a familiar figure appeared before her: Lief.
But from this Lief emanated a pure light from his whole body, warm for anyone.... But for Lillith, that light was more scorching and painful than the most incandescent fire.
He was the living symbol of justice and demonic eradication.
In the hands of the apparition, two pistols, one black, one silver, aimed toward her chest and in the muzzles of the weapons a bluish glow pulsed.
"Lillith..."
Lief's voice resonated with the finality of a death sentence.
"Your existence has always been a mistake, a tumor. Now... give me back my true sister."
This was the only scene, the only cosmic scenario, hidden deep within Lillith's being, that could make her feel something akin to displeasure or vulnerability.
The possibility of being completely erased by that man was the only ending she would actively seek to avoid.
Meanwhile, Pennywise waited.
He expected the scream, the emotional collapse, he craved to drink that sweet, intimate, and deep fear that he was sure to have provoked.
However, Lillith merely tilted her head. She fixed her gaze on the figure in front of her without her expression altering in the slightest.
"Fake," she stated with a flat tone, tinged with boredom. "The scent of purification of the real Lief is ten thousand times more intense than this cheap imitation."
Accompanying her mockery, she raised her hand and gave a soft snap with her finger against the air, pointing directly at the figure.
Clack
Reality did not resist.
The radiant Lief, the weapons, and the sacred light shattered into a thousand pieces instantly, vanishing into nothingness like a bubble that has just been popped.
She was back at the entrance of the house, with the stench of sewer in the air.
"..."
In Pennywise's intact eye, incredulity was revealed.
How was it possible...? How had she overcome her fear? She had no fear!
She had manifested and verbalized her greatest fear, and even so, she had not feared it!
His mind blocked, unable to comprehend anything of what was happening in front of him.
A growl escaped from his throat, and for a moment, a being beyond the costume was seen, desperate and hungry.
"Is it my turn?"
Esther took a step forward.
Instinctively, Pennywise turned his golden gaze toward her.
This girl, her soul was not a void... It was full of palpable anxiety, of fear of being discovered and sent back to the psychiatric hospital.
Excellent!
Reality deformed with a sound, as if someone had torn a page from a magazine.
For Esther, the stench of rotten wood from the house evaporated instantly.
In its place, the air filled with that clinical smell.
She had returned to the hell of her past: the Saarne Institute, in Estonia.
The walls were of that white she knew by heart, illuminated by fluorescent tubes that buzzed like trapped flies.
She felt the cold touch of the linoleum under her feet and, worse yet, the familiar restriction of straps biting her wrists and ankles.
She was tied to the bed.
And in front of her, the door opened with a squeak, giving way to a tall man, with an immaculate coat and his face partially hidden by a mask, he entered pushing a metal cart.
He was not just any doctor... he was an amalgamation of all the psychiatrists who had tried to "cure" her throughout the decades.
The doctor took a glass syringe, the size of a forearm, with a thick and rusty needle that dripped a milky liquid.
"Leena... little and twisted Leena," hissed the doctor. "You are a mistake, a monster who should never have left her cage. Did you think you could play house in America forever? It is time for your medicine and this time, we will put you to sleep forever."
This was Leena Klammer's recurring nightmare.
But Pennywise had made a fundamental miscalculation.
The girl tied to the bed did not scream.
She did not struggle. She simply tilted her head to one side, and a smile lacking any childlike warmth was drawn on her face.
Immediately the illusion flickered for a second, like a television signal losing its antenna.
"Is that all you have?" she asked.
She looked the "doctor" directly in the eyes, golden eyes that barely disguised the true form of the "Doctor."
"Poor thing..." she continued speaking with condescension. "Your investigation is pathetic. It is as if you had read my file from ten years ago and skipped the important chapters. That version of me... that scared Leena who only knew how to run... no longer exists. You are late."
She relaxed into the straps, and in doing so, the straps turned into smoke. The illusion of helplessness broke because she refused to feed it.
"I have a family now. I have a purpose. And frankly..." Standing up, she lifted the imaginary dress she was wearing, while the hospital setting began to crumble, revealing the walls of the Derry house behind the white walls. "...your script is derivative and boring. You are not even scary, you are just pitiful."
She did not attack him physically. She looked at him with genuine pity... A disdain that was a poison more potent than any ritual.
The world flickered violently. The visual static roared and the Saarne Institute dissolved into nothingness.
Pennywise staggered backward, bringing a hand to his chest.
He felt a void in his stomach, a voracious hunger that turned into pain.
The meat was supposed to be salted by fear.
They were supposed to scream... now without fear, his power was as fragile as a cobweb.
His tricks felt ridiculous in front of these girls.
Their souls were neither soft nor chewable, they were barbed wire, they were concentrated darkness.
They did not run away from monsters because, deep down, they recognized those of their own species...
"Now it's my turn, right?"
Emma's voice cut the stagnant air. She had been so quiet, so motionless, that Pennywise had almost forgotten she was there.
He turned his head with an unnatural movement and his eyes focused on the girl.
Emma took a step forward.
"Let me see..." she said with the corner of her lips curving upward. "What can you do to me?"
Cornered and hungry, Pennywise decided to bet everything.
If he couldn't scare them with tricks, he would break them with the truth.
He opened his jaws, unhinging his jaw to reveal the endless rows of teeth and, beyond that, a light.... the pure madness of the macroverse.
He tried to project his essence directly into Emma's mind, looking for any crack: a trauma, a fear of loneliness, a remorse for someone she might have killed.
He entered her mind.
And then, he screamed.
But it was not an attack scream. It was a cry of confusion.
What he saw inside Emma was not darkness, because darkness implies that something is hiding the light. What he saw was... nothing.
A static void.
There was no love for her father. There was no hatred for her victims. There was no joy, nor sadness, nor guilt. Nor was there fear. It was an emotional desert, a plain of infinite ice where nothing could grow and nothing could survive.
It was a psychological black hole.
Pennywise, an entity made of emotions and that fed on them, felt himself sucked in.
He tried to bite, but there was no flesh. He tried to scare, but fear had nowhere to anchor.
It was like screaming into the abyss and realizing that the abyss did not even bother to return the echo.
Emma looked at him from the outside, blinking slowly, while the cosmic entity writhed on the ground, unable to comprehend a creature that was biologically alive but spiritually empty.
"Boring," whispered Emma.
Pennywise's survival instincts began to howl in his mind. For the first time since the arrival of the Turtle, he felt that his immortality was not a fact...
Those three things in front of him were not girls, they were apex predators...
Fear, that condiment that he had always devoured and enjoyed from his victims, now saturated his own muscles, paralyzing him.
"Are you leaving already?"
Lillith's sweet voice resonated, with a smile that widened, revealing too many teeth for a human jaw. "But the party is just starting! Leave those 'sweets' where they belong."
The hand with which she held Pennywise's arm applied force suddenly, sinking her small fingers into the physical reality of the costume.
!
For the first time in the history of Derry, Pennywise bled.
It was not red blood, but a luminous and thick ichor that hissed upon touching the air.
"Ahhh! Let me go!" He shrieked, a sound that oscillated between the voice of a child and the roar of a wounded beast. "What are you?!"
Lillith did not answer immediately, she simply pulled him closer, ignoring the clown's claws that tried to scratch her uselessly.
"We only came to collect the toll, little clown..." she whispered and just upon finishing the sentence, she opened her mouth.
Her jaw unhinged completely, and from her throat emerged instantly an intense suction force.
!
Pennywise felt a violation in the deepest part of his being. Something was being ripped from him violently...
But it was not flesh... It was his reserve. Centuries of cultivated terror, every scream of every human being, every nightmare he had orchestrated with such patience... everything was being sucked toward the outside.
"No-No-No! It is mine! IT IS MINE!" he howled, clinging to the floor while his fingers left deep grooves in the planks.
But it was useless.
A torrent of a kind of black gray smoke, full of agonizing faces and silent screams, gushed from his mouth and eyes, flowing directly toward Lillith's jaws.
It was a river of pure distilled panic, aged in the darkness.
For Pennywise, it was his lifeblood. For Lillith, it was a Buffet.
She closed her eyes, savoring the flow. Her cheeks blushed with a vivid and healthy color.
"Mmm... how intense," she murmured between gulps. "It has body... notes of deep despair, although the aftertaste is a little dirty. Definitely an old vintage. Too bad you mixed it with so much cheap fear, it ruins the texture a little."
Pennywise's body began to collapse on itself. Without the fear that sustained him, his physical form could not maintain cohesion.
His clown face melted like hot wax.
For a second he was the Mummy, with bandages falling to the floor, then he blinked and turned into the Werewolf with the high school jacket, howling soundlessly, then a giant spider with legs that broke under its own weight.
It was a carousel of failed horrors, a slideshow of nightmares that no longer scared anyone.
"All... will float..."
Finally, the physical matter evaporated. Only a pulsating sphere of light remained, the famous "Deadlights," floating a few inches from the ground. They were no longer a blinding cosmic fire, but a dying light bulb about to burn out.
Lillith took one last deep inhale, and the light went out.
Silence fell over the house on Neibolt Street with the heaviness of a tombstone.
The atmospheric pressure changed instantly.
That underlying buzz of malice, that psychic static that had plagued the town for centuries, simply vanished.
"Buurrp!"
A loud and totally inelegant burp broke the silence. Lillith patted her stomach, satisfied.
"Sorry," she said without seeming sorry at all.
By her side, Emma took out a handkerchief, cleaned the blade of her knife and folded it with a dry click before putting it in her pocket.
Meanwhile, Esther walked toward the broken window, brushed aside a cobweb with the back of her hand and gazed at the outside.
The street was immersed in absolute calm and in the distance, a car drove by, totally oblivious that, under that same asphalt, a fear eating monster had just been defeated by three girls.
The sun was beginning to descend, bathing the streets of Derry in a light that, for the first time, did not seem to hide any threat.
Esther filled her lungs with fresh air, exhaled with relief and turned toward her sisters, giving them a genuine smile.
"Good," She said, "The work is done. Let's go home."
________
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