Play with Me

Derry, Maine – January 9, 1985 – 6:03 a.m.

The sky is the color of old pewter, the last hour before true dawn. Snow has piled in soft, deceptive drifts along the curbs of West Broadway. The town is beginning to stir—car engines coughing to life, porch lights clicking off, the distant scrape of shovels on concrete.

Mike Hanlon is already awake.

He has been for hours.

The Derry Public Library is still closed—the sign on the front door reads OPEN 10 AM – 6 PM in faded gold lettering—but Mike has his own key. He always has.

He’s been here since 4:45, sitting alone in the small research room at the back of the second floor. The room smells of old paper, lemon furniture polish, and the faint metallic tang of the ancient radiator that never quite stops hissing.

The table in front of him is covered.

Notecards. Photocopied newspaper clippings from 1740–43, 1851, 1877–78, 1904–06, 1929–30, and the full run of summer 1957–58. A yellow legal pad filled with his small, precise handwriting—dates, names, patterns circled in red ink, every 27-year gap measured and mourned. A stack of Polaroids he took himself: storm drains with fresh claw marks gouged into the concrete, a red balloon caught motionless in the branches of the kissing bridge, a child’s sneaker left upright and alone in the middle of a quiet side street last week.

In the center of it all: one of the new Punywise comics.

He found it taped to the library’s back door when he arrived.

The paper is cheap, the colors garish.

Punywise being melted by spit, chased, humiliated.

The blue clown—Periwinkle—shoving the monster aside, hopping away with a child in its arms.

Mike’s fingers rest on the page.

He has not turned it over yet.

He is staring at the black-and-crayon drawing of the blue clown’s smirking face, the way the eyes are just a little too bright, a little too knowing.

His breathing is slow.

Deliberate.

He knows this is new.

Not It.

Not exactly.

But something wearing a clown suit, something playing with the same toys, something that has decided to interfere.

Mike reaches for his old thermos of coffee—black, no sugar, still hot—and takes a careful sip.

His eyes never leave the comic.

Outside the window, the snow keeps falling.

A single red balloon drifts past the glass—slow, almost casual—then vanishes upward into the gray.

Mike does not flinch.

He turns the comic over.

On the blank back page, someone (or something) has written in the same purple crayon, in big careful letters:

The show is changing, Mike.
Want a ticket?

He exhales through his nose.

A small sound—almost a laugh, but not quite.

He sets the thermos down.

Pulls the yellow legal pad closer.

Writes one new line at the bottom of the last page:

Unknown entity (Periwinkle?). Purpose: unknown. Interference pattern: protective? Taunting? Both?

He caps the pen.

Leans back in the wooden chair.

The radiator hisses.

Then the old black-and-white CRT television in the corner—dusty, forgotten, usually used for grainy microfilm projections or the occasional educational reel—flickers to life.

No remote. No button pressed. The screen simply wakes, static crawling across the glass like insects before resolving into saturated color. A jaunty, warped calliope tune begins, laced with the rhythmic clap of playground hands.

Purple crayon letters melt slowly down the frame like dripping wax:

PUNYWISE ORIGINS

(subtitled in smaller, shaky white text: “How the Monster Stole the Smile”)

Mike freezes.

The music began gentle—almost sweet. A slow, nostalgic calliope waltz, the kind played at the close of a long circus night when the lights dimmed and the audience went home tired and happy.

Scene one: a bright, sunlit big top. A human clown—tall, thin, kind-faced—performed with his daughter. She was small, blue-haired, blue-suited, laughing as she juggled glowing orbs while he balanced on a unicycle and tossed her invisible balloons that appeared in mid-air. Cartoon families with big round heads clapped and cheered.

The clown lifted his daughter onto his shoulders. She waved, beaming.

Text bubble from the father clown:

“We’re the best team, Periwinkle!”

The music swelled, warm.

Then the light changed.

The big top darkened.

Shadows crawled up the canvas walls like fingers.

A shape—black, shapeless, endless—slid under the tent flap.

It was not a monster with claws or fangs.

It was simply absence. A hole in the world that hungers.

The father clown saw it first. He pushed his daughter behind him.

The monster surged.

One instant the clown stood.

The next, he was gone—swallowed whole.

Only his skin remained, crumpled on the sawdust like discarded clothes.

The monster slipped inside it.

The skin stretched.

The face rearranged.

White greasepaint smeared itself on.

Red balloons appeared in its hands.

The smile… the smile was the last thing to form.

It stretched.

And stretched.

And never stopped.

Periwinkle—small, frozen—stared up at what used to be her father.

The thing that wore his skin looked down at her.

The deadlights flickered on behind the stolen eyes.

It spoke in the father’s voice at first—warm, familiar—then the voice cracked and deepened:

“Now… let’s keep the show going.”

The music warped—calliope notes bending backward.

Montage: the stolen clown chased cartoon children through Derry streets, through sewers, through the Barrens. They ran. They hid. He caught some. They floated. He tired—suit sagging, smile drooping, balloons deflating. He sat in the dark for a long time. Then he stood again. Chased again. Tired again. Over. And over. And over.

Final scene: the monster-clown sat alone in the empty circus ring. The bleachers were dust. The big top was rotting. Periwinkle was gone—long gone.

The clown looked straight at the camera.

The deadlights flared.

The smile tore wider.

Text appeared in slow purple crayon, letter by letter:

He wears the skin.

He wears the smile.

But he’s still hungry.

The show never ends.

The screen holds on the final frame for seven long seconds—long enough for the words to sink in—then snaps to black.

Mike’s hand trembles as he reaches for his legal pad again. He writes, fast and jagged:

Punywise Origins – aired realtime. Targeted at me. Entity revealing Its history?

The television stays dark.

Mike exhales shakily.

He knows the game has changed.

He knows he is being watched.

The quiet gathers around him like a second skin.

Somewhere in the corner of the research room the pages of an open book flutter, though the window is closed and there is no breeze.

Mike Hanlon is thirty-seven years old.

His hair is still dark, though the first threads of silver have begun to appear at the temples. His shoulders are broad from years of carrying boxes and shelving books, and his hands are steady—steady enough to hold a flashlight in the dark when the rest of the world pretends nothing is wrong.

But his eyes are the same eyes they have always been.

The eyes of the kid who stayed behind, who kept the fire burning when everyone else left town and tried to forget.

He sits very still for a long moment.

Then he reaches for the comic again, folds it once, twice, and slips it into the inside pocket of his coat.

He stands.

The chair creaks under the sudden absence of his weight.

Outside, the snow continues to fall, soft and relentless.

Mike Hanlon turns off the desk lamp.

The room goes dim, lit only by the weak gray light coming through the window.

He walks to the door, pauses with his hand on the knob, and looks back at the table one last time—the notecards, the clippings, the empty space where the comic used to be.

He picks up the phone.

The rotary dial felt heavy in his hand. He’d memorized these numbers decades ago, hadn’t needed to call them in years, but they were still there—etched in muscle memory like old scars.

He dialed the first number. The clicks and whirs of the mechanism filled the quiet room.

Bill answered on the third ring, voice thick with sleep and confusion. “Hello?”

“Bill. It’s Mike. Mike Hanlon.”

A long pause. Then, uncertain: “...Mike? From... Derry?”

“Yeah. From Derry.”

Another pause, longer. Mike could almost hear the gears turning on the other end—rusty, reluctant.

“Jesus. It’s been... God, twenty-seven years? More? What... why are you calling?”

“It’s back, Bill.”

Silence.

Mike pressed on, gentle but firm. “The clown. The thing in the drains. The one that took Georgie. It’s back. Kids are disappearing again. And there’s something else now—something new, wearing a different suit, interfering. We made a promise. All seven of us. You remember the promise?”

Bill’s voice cracked. “Georgie... I... I don’t... look, Mike, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I dream sometimes—bad dreams, about water, about a yellow raincoat—but it’s all fuzzy. Like trying to grab smoke. My wife thinks I should see someone. I don’t even remember... Derry feels like a story someone told me once.”

Mike closed his eyes. “You do remember. Somewhere under all that fog. The paper boat. The storm drain. The summer we fought it. You have to come back. Hanlon farmhouse. January 13th, evening. Give yourself a few days to get here, to think, to feel it coming back. Bring the others if you can reach them. They won’t remember either—at first. But they’ll feel it. The pull.”

Bill laughed once—short, brittle, scared. “This is... this is crazy. I write horror stories for a living, Mike. I make this stuff up. If you’re pulling my leg—”

“I’m not. It’s real. You’ll feel it when you cross the town line. Like something waking up in your head.”

A long exhale on the other end. “If this is real... God help me, if this is real... I’ll come. But I don’t know what good I’ll be. I don’t even know what I forgot.”

“You’ll remember when you’re here. We all will. Together.”

The line went quiet for a beat. Then, softer: “January 13th.”

Mike hung up.

The next calls followed the same pattern: confusion, denial, flashes of dread that felt like half-remembered nightmares. All of them resisted. All of them agreed—reluctantly, fearfully—because something deeper than memory was pulling. They would arrive by the 13th.

Mike set the receiver down gently.

The research room felt colder.

By morning, the Punywise Origins comics had appeared across Derry.

Taped to playground fences. Slipped under apartment doors. Tucked into coat pockets left on hooks at the laundromat. Pinned to community bulletin boards. Caught beneath windshield wipers on Main Street. Same crude crayon style. Same brutal simplicity.

Panel one: happy father-daughter act.

Panel two: the black shape.

Panel three: skin-suiting.

Panels four through eight: endless chase, endless tiring, endless rising again.

Last panel: Punywise sitting in the empty ring, staring out. A tiny cyan silhouette stood far in the background—watching.

The town woke to them.

The show was changing.

And the ticket had been offered.

Derry, Maine – January 9, 1985 – 6:30 a.m.

Deep beneath the town, in one of the oldest chambers of the ancient sewer network, the darkness had pooled for centuries. The cavern was roughly spherical, perhaps twenty-five feet across, its ceiling swallowed by dripping black. The floor was a shallow, stagnant basin of water so dark it reflected nothing—not light, not movement, not even the faintest suggestion of color—except for the unnatural orange glow that leaked from the clown’s eyes.

Pennywise sat cross-legged in the exact center of the pool. The filthy hem of the red-and-white suit trailed in the water. The posture was almost meditative: spine unnaturally straight, head tilted forward so the conical hat cast an even deeper shadow across the greasepaint face. The fabric of the suit clung wetly to a form that was never quite solid, never quite liquid; it seemed to breathe in slow, shallow pulses, digesting the gloom around it. The ruff at the neck hung torn in several places, the crimson pom-pom blackened and limp. Old blood and fresher ichor streaked from the corners of the mouth, mingling with the running white makeup into shifting, abstract patterns.

The smile was present, but small. Tight. The corners split and weeping. Behind the mostly closed lips, too many teeth glinted—sharp, restless, refusing to hold a fixed arrangement.

The deadlights burned wide open. Steady. Unblinking. Twin cones of sickly orange pushed the darkness back in slow, reluctant waves rather than truly illuminating anything.

No red balloon floated nearby. The last one had been left on the surface, deflated and discarded. None had taken its place.

The gloved hands rested palm-up on the knees, fingers splayed and impossibly long, twitching once every few minutes in perfect, metronomic rhythm. The only sounds were the eternal drip-drip-drip from somewhere far above and the low, subsonic purr that vibrated continuously in the clown’s chest—neither breath nor growl, but something between anticipation and slow digestion.

Pennywise was not wounded. Not in any mortal way. Yet the air around It hung thicker tonight, heavy with the aftertaste of interrupted feasts, thwarted hunts, and the sharp new tang of interference.

It waited. Patient. Ancient. Utterly still.

And very, very interested.

Then the black water rippled once—soft, almost apologetic—as though the darkness itself had chosen to inhale.

She manifested behind him.

Not with fanfare or light. Simply there.

A pristine Periwinkle-blue suit stood out against the ancient filth. Crisp ruffles. Lavender accents catching the faint orange glow like frost under moonlight. Her arms slid around the clown from behind—gentle, slow, inescapable. One gloved hand flattened over the sodden ruff at his chest; the other curled across the opposite shoulder, fingers remembering every torn stitch. Her chin came to rest lightly against the back of the conical hat, greasepaint brushing greasepaint.

Her voice poured into the silence, high and lilting, achingly sweet—the same voice that had once filled circus tents with delighted laughter.

“Daddy… I’ve missed you. I’ve missed playing with you… performing together.”

The words fell like warm honey into cold oil.

Pennywise did not move. Not a twitch. The deadlights continued their steady burn. The purr in his chest held its rhythm.

But the water around his crossed legs began to tremble—tiny concentric rings spreading outward too quickly, as though something inside the ancient thing was fighting not to react.

The rows of teeth behind the painted smile shifted once—slow, deliberate, like tumblers in an ancient lock finding a new alignment.

Very slowly, the head began to turn. Not all the way. Just enough. Enough for one deadlight to find her face over his shoulder.

The orange glow washed across her pristine blue suit, across her own mirrored deadlights, across the impossible smile that matched his in shape but never in flavor.

The purr deepened. Grew wetter. Almost… questioning.

“…Periwinkle.”

The name was not spoken tenderly. It was tasted. Rolled across rows of teeth. Savored like the first forbidden bite after centuries of hunger.

A single gloved finger twitched on his knee—curling inward, then relaxing.

The embrace held for one perfect, frozen heartbeat.

Then—less than a blink—her painted mouth opened.

The grin that bloomed was not Periwinkle’s cheerful crescent.

It was older. Wider. Wider than the face should allow. Wider than the skull beneath should contain. The corners tore upward in impossible arcs, splitting greasepaint, splitting air, splitting the very geometry of the chamber for the briefest instant.

Reality buckled around the edges of that smile: the black water rippled in reverse, the dripping ceiling bent downward, the orange deadlights flickered as though the universe had been switched off and then hastily switched back on.

It was not a smile meant for comfort. It was a tear in the fabric. A glimpse of the thing that wore smiles like stolen coats.

Pennywise’s body locked rigid in her arms—every unnatural joint seizing at once. The purr skipped, caught, became a single sharp, grinding rasp.

And then she was gone.

No sound. No swirl of smoke or glitter. Simply absence.

The space behind him stood empty again. The arms that had held him vanished as though they had never existed.

The chamber snapped back into stillness. Water settled. Drips resumed their patient rhythm.

Pennywise remained seated in the center of the pool. Cross-legged. Unmoving.

But the head was now turned fully around—180 degrees—staring at the place where she had stood.

The deadlights no longer burned steady. They pulsed—slow, then faster, then slow again—like a heart discovering a new, dangerous rhythm.

The painted smile had torn further at the corners. Black ichor dripped in slow beads down the chin and into the water, spreading in thin, oily rings.

The purr returned, but altered. Deeper. Hungrier. Almost… amused.

A single gloved finger lifted from the knee. It traced the air where her arms had been—slow, deliberate, feeling for the ghost of an embrace.

Then the finger curled.

The clown spoke to the empty dark, voice soft, layered, tasting every syllable:

“…We’ll play again soon, little star.”

The deadlights flared once—bright, blinding—then narrowed to slits.

The water trembled, just once.

And the thing in the clown suit settled back into perfect, expectant stillness.