The storm over Derry didn’t rage; it purred. A low, wet growl of thunder that seemed to sync with the rhythm of the town’s hidden fears. It was in this electric hush that Elara found herself walking home, the kiss of rain on her skin a cold contrast to the memory of her date’s clumsy, wine-stained lips. She’d left him at the restaurant, a decision that now felt both smart and strangely lonely as the streets emptied.
A flicker of movement in the storm drain. Not a rat. Something… fuller. A glint of silver, a flash of garish color. A child’s balloon, a perfect crimson orb, bobbed up from the grate and drifted against the current of the rainwater, coming to rest against her calf.
She smiled, a bemused twist of her lips. How odd. She reached down, her fingers closing not around latex, but something cool and metallic. A silver locket, heart-shaped, dangling from the balloon’s string. It was exquisite, old, etched with filigree that seemed to shift in the dim light.
Come home with me, a voice whispered, not in her ears, but in the base of her skull. It was smooth, a velvet promise. I have such things to show you.
It wasn’t fear that coiled in her stomach, but a hot, sudden curiosity. A thrill. She pulled the locket free, the balloon popping with a sound like a sigh. Clutching the cold metal, she turned not toward her apartment, but toward the old house on Neibolt Street. The voice had given no address, but she knew. Of course she knew.
The door was already open, a black mouth exhaling the smell of wet earth and old copper. Inside, the darkness was absolute, yet she could see perfectly. The hallway stretched before her, the peeling wallpaper pulsing softly, like the inside of a vast artery.
He was waiting in what might have been a parlor. He wasn’t the clown from the news reports, not exactly. His form was… pleasing. Tall, broad-shouldered, clad in a fine Victorian suit that was just a shade too tight. His face was handsome, sculpted, but his eyes were the void of a deep well, and his smile was a terrifying, perfect curve of needle-sharp teeth.
“Elara,” he said, and her name was a caress. “You have a hunger. I can taste it.”
He moved closer, and the air grew thick, sweet with the smell of candy apples and rot. He didn’t touch her, but she felt him—a pressure against her mind, a phantom hand skating up her thigh, cupping her breast. A gasp caught in her throat, part terror, part overwhelming arousal. It was the most intimate violation, a touch that bypassed skin and went straight to the core of her want.
“Let me show you,” he whispered, his lips an inch from hers. His breath was the chill of a long-sealed tomb. “Let me in.”
His real hand, cold and strong, finally touched her jaw, tilting her head back. The kiss was not a kiss. It was an invasion. It was the taste of static and forgotten birthdays, of childhood terror and illicit desire all twisted into one. She moaned against his mouth, her body arching into his, her own hands tangling in hair that felt like silk and spiderwebs.
He pushed her back against a wall that felt like living flesh, his cool fingers working open her blouse. His mouth traveled down her neck, his teeth scraping, not breaking the skin, but promising it. Every nip, every cold kiss, sent a jolt of paralyzing pleasure through her. This was wrong, a primal part of her screamed. This was ecstasy, another part sighed.
“Yes,” he murmured, his voice now a chorus of every lover she’d ever dreamed of. “Give me your fear. It makes you sweet.”
His form began to blur, to soften at the edges. The handsome man melted away, and for a horrifying, glorious second, she saw it—the true It. The Deadlights. A chaotic, beautiful galaxy of consuming light, an eternity of hunger that promised to unravel her very soul in its climax.
It was the most erotic thing she had ever seen.
She cried out, her body convulsing in a pleasure so intense it was indistinguishable from agony. This was it. This was the end and the beginning. She wanted to be devoured, to be unmade in its glorious, terrible light.
And It obliged.
The pleasure peaked, a silent scream in the void, and then the horror began. The sensation didn’t fade. It intensified, twisted. The ecstatic unraveling of her soul became a literal unraveling. She felt her mind stretching, not towards bliss, but into a billion separate, screaming fragments. She was being read, consumed, every memory, every fear, every secret pleasure savored like a fine wine.
She looked down and saw his—Its—mouth unhinge, a cavern of light and teeth. But she wasn’t being bitten. She was dissolving, her body turning to shimmering dust, drawn into that gaping maw like smoke.
The last thing Elara felt was not pain, but the ultimate, terrible climax, drawn out into an infinite second of exquisite, world-ending violation. The last thing she heard was Its voice, a satisfied purr that vibrated through the crumbling house and the endless dark behind its eyes.
“We all float… and you, my dear, tasted divine.”
