Who: The Losers Club What: This isn’t okay. This isn’t okay at all. Where: The House on Neibolt, Derry Maine. When: Length of the Halloween Plot.
What the fuck were they doing? The last time Richie’d tried going through the doors had been with Eddie and it’d been a goddamned mess — a whole load of Wrong, complete with twin murder ghosts and blood oh my god there’s blood everywhere and — yeah. It’d been bad. Not at all the sexy naked get away that Richie had been hoping for.
And now he wasn’t even — he wasn’t even hoping for that because they had Stan with them and naked wasn’t on the list of things he was planning on with a third Loser in the group. But Stan was new and the Doors were fucked up, but pretty important because there was stuff behind them. Stuff they could gather and use and it seemed like Stan ought to know how to navigate the things.
Even if there was no real navigating, because it was all by chance. Everything in this fucking town was by chance and Richie was a pretty play it by ear type of guy usually and even he hated it. He couldn’t imagine how Stan was going to feel. But he could imagine how Eddie felt, because his — person— was ready and willing to bitch at any given moment about just about everything.
“Okay,” he said, staring through the door at what looked to be the inside of a department store. And wouldn’t that just be nice? Clothes and curtains and furniture and whatever else? “You all see what I see, right? That’s like — I dunno. A Kohl’s right?” And while he had his nerve — a good deal of it, in fact, he stepped through without either of them because if it was gonna be a horror show, Richie really didn’t want to subject Eddie and Stan to it again.
It didn’t even feel like the shock it should have been when he ended up somewhere else and the door closed behind him. “Mother fucker,” he said, adjusting his glasses and a feeling of dread before he turned to look around at the fresh hell he’d stepped into this time.
And oh. It was. It was really hell, but not fresh so much as familiar.