<€Pennywise Through the Glass €>

He had not meant to stop. He had been passing through the alley behind the Falcon Club the way he passed through every alley in Derry,

taking inventory of the town’s fear like a farmer walking his fields, and the window had simply been there — fogged at the edges, lit gold and red from inside, throwing a smear of color onto the wet brick. He should have kept walking. There was a boy two streets over who was afraid of the dark in a particularly rich,

untouched way, and Pennywise had been saving him for later. Instead he stopped, because something in that smear of light was moving in a way that didn’t belong to Derry’s usual grammar of fear. She was twenty-three. He knew this the way he knew most things —

by tasting the air around her, the residue of birthdays and hospital paperwork and a mother’s voice saying be careful — and twenty-three was, by his standards, ancient. He preferred them young.

Young fear was unspoiled, simple, a clean note. Grown fear was muddied with shame and rationalization, harder to enjoy.

But she wasn’t afraid at all. She was dancing. Not for him — she didn’t know he was there, face pressed to glass like some grotesque child at a bakery window —

but for the room, for the music, for some private arrangement she’d made with her own body that had nothing to do with the men watching from the tables. He’d seen a thousand years of human movement: prayer, panic,

the particular stumbling run of something being chased. He had never seen anyone move like she was simply glad to be inside her own skin. Something in him — something old, patient, accustomed to being the only thing in any room that mattered —

went click, like a key finding the one lock it was always going to fit. He did not eat anyone that night. He stood in the rain until the club closed and the gold light went out, and he told himself, in the small reasoning voice

he kept for emergencies, that this was simply curiosity. He had eaten dancers before. He had eaten queens. There was no reason a body that moved well should taste any different going down. He almost believed it.

He came back the second night already lying to himself, and by the fourth, he’d stopped bothering.

He never went inside. Inside was for men with cover charges and shame they were paying to forget; he preferred the window, the alley, the cold brick at his spine while she turned gold and red and gold again

on the other side of the glass, utterly unaware that something with a thousand faces had started rearranging its hunger around the shape of her. He told himself, each night, that tonight was the night he’d take her. It would be easy. She left alone, always,

down the same unlit stretch of Canal Street, humming something under her breath that had nothing to do with the music inside. He had killed in worse light for less reason. He simply — didn’t. On the seventh night he made the mistake of letting her see him.

She came out the back instead of the front, cigarette already lit, and there he was in the alley wearing the face Derry feared, white paint catching what little light the bulb above the door allowed

She didn’t scream. She looked at him the way she might look at a stray dog that had wandered somewhere it didn’t belong, faint surprise, no real alarm, and said, “Rough night, sweetheart?” like he was just another lost thing the city had spit out.

What he wanted, he came to understand with the dawning horror of a creature discovering an unfamiliar organ in its own body, was not to eat her at all.

What he wanted was to be let in — not through the back door, not past the bouncer, but past the unbothered, professional calm she wore the way she wore the sequins, the thing she’d built specifically so men like the ones at the front tables could look and look and never once actually see her.

He wanted, God and the deadlights help him, to be the one she stopped performing for. So he did the only thing his long memory had ever taught him about

getting close to something without devouring it: he made himself small. Not literally — nothing about him was capable of smallness — but he came to her quieter, fewer teeth in his smile, more questions than declarations

. He learned that she danced because her body was the only thing she’d ever owned outright, that she dreamed sometimes of a stage with a roof that didn’t leak and an audience that clapped for the dance and not for what they imagined was owed to them afterward

He learned she was lonelier than her composure let anyone clock, in a town that had decided to forget her the same way it forgot its missing children, just slower. He found he could listen to all of this without once calculating how it would taste.

The night he finally asked her to stop dancing for strangers and start existing, simply, for him, he came to the alley without the paint. Without any borrowed face at all

— just the version of himself that was oldest and least certain how to want anything that wasn’t a meal

He brought a balloon. It was, he was aware, a pathetic gesture from a creature who had eaten kings. Red, heart-shaped, bobbing on its string above his fist like something that had escaped a chest cavity and

didn’t know where else to go. He had no metaphors clever enough to explain why he’d chosen it. He only knew that it was the truest thing he had — round and red and entirely too soft for what he was — and he wanted to give her the

truest thing he had. “This is new,” she said, looking at the balloon, and then at him — not the smile, not the paint, just him — with something that wasn’t fear and wasn’t quite recognition either. Something gentler than both.

“I don’t want to eat you,” he said. It came out cracked, almost shy, a confession with no good shape to hold it. “I know,” she said. “You’ve had a hundred nights to.”

“I want to keep you instead.” She didn’t laugh, and she didn’t run, which by now didn’t surprise him as much as it should have. She took the string from his hand the way she might take anything offered without

obligation attached — carefully, like she still wasn’t sure she believed it was hers to take — and looked at the balloon instead of him while she said, “Keep me how?”

He didn’t have an answer yet. He had outlived glaciers and never once needed one.

“However you’ll let me,” he said, and for the first time in longer than Derry had a name, the old hunger in him went quiet and stayed that way, content, for once, simply to be standing in the dark holding something out to someone and being allowed to wait for her answer