Chapter Text
It happens for the first time when a heavily pregnant Maggie Tozier passes by the Derry Cemetery, though she never makes the connection between the two in her mind.
Little Richie is going to be their first baby. And she and Wentworth have been running themselves ragged reading everything they can get their hands on about what to do, how to prepare, all of the proper steps and procedures. She’s twenty-four weeks along, so they’re supposed to start feeling movement any day now, and the anticipation has been killing them.
One of their books had mentioned that babies are meant to kick more in your stomach when you talk to them. Like - plants, how they grow taller the more you interact with them. And hey, they had figured, where’s the harm in trying? So they’ve spent - God, just hours speaking to him in there, probably making idiots of themselves in their one-sided conversations, but at least having fun doing it.
When that hadn't yielded any results, they'd turned the TV on, played the radio loud - Wentworth warbling along to Bad Moon Rising until Maggie had chucked an orange at his head, told him to pick a different song, that one sounds too much like a bad omen.
Come on champ, Went had begged just half an hour ago, kneeling down to address her stomach before she’d laughed him off, slipping her sneakers on to go out for a quick turn around the neighbourhood. Give us a kick, just a little one. I can’t stand the look on my Maggie-girl’s face when you leave us hanging.
They'd waited, breaths held - but no dice.
But that’s fine. They have time, the two of them, and patience, and what’s more it’s been fun in it’s own way to keep upping the terms of their ongoing bet as to when it’ll finally happen.
It's quiet around Derry today. The air is crisp and the sky bright, but the stillness and hush of the early morning hour must mean that the birds are all still asleep and she hasn't even seen any cars around. It's a relief, the quiet, for Maggie and the chronic headache she's had for weeks already.
That’s what makes it so surprising when she turns onto the sidewalk bordering the local cemetery, and the inside of her stomach feels suddenly like a lineup of Rockettes have taken residence.
*
The cognitive and behavioural developments that characterize the ages of three to five are typically an unremarkable series of happenstances in a child’s life.
These achievements, if they can be called that, might be celebrated by their parents in the way that childhood milestones typically are: in dated baby books, and polaroid photos, and clunky old camcorders. But in the end, every child climbs through these stages, one by one, and comes out on the other side a more aware, competent, and independent little human than they had begun.
This stage of childhood development hits Richie Tozier like a slap to the face.
Richie had always been a chatty baby. Hearing this never comes as any surprise to the people who know him later in life, verbose little trashmouth that he is, and it had been similarly easy for Went and Maggie to dismiss his infant babbling as just one of those personalities. But it’s harder to explain his apparent inclination to speak to thin air when he’s three, four, five, six, and his linguistic development has grown more mature. When he’s able to explain himself, and the answers aren’t what people want to hear.
But even this is quickly brushed off - all kids have imaginary friends, after all. No big deal - the kid will grow out of it soon enough, so why not let him have his fun?
One paediatrician hadn’t wanted to brush off the constant chattering, the restlessness, and the unending activity. He had handed Richie’s Mommy a dull pamphlet, mentioned the words Hyperkinetic Impulse Disorder, words too big for Richie to understand, but he already knows he doesn’t like them by the way the appointment has his Mommy's lips thinning whitely when the man looks balefully over at him and suggests that Richie start to take some ri-tah-lin.
“Is that a medicine?” Richie asks her when the appointment is over, hand held tight in her own as they cross the street to get back to the parking lot where their car waits. “Am I sick? Eddie’s mommy always gives him medicine, and she says I should take some too because I’m dirty and prolly I'm going to infect him someday.”
They’ve gotten to the other side now, and Maggie freezes for a moment before she shakes her head, and bends down to swing Richie into the air and onto her hip amidst his shrieking giggles.
“There’s not a single thing wrong with you, my baby,” she says, and Richie smiles happily, tucking his face into her neck. Now he can tell Eddie that, and Eddie can tell his mom, and then he’ll never get glared at again when he reaches out to touch his friend and Sonia looks like she’s going to hiss at him like that mean old cat he can hear outside his window sometimes. “Adults aren’t always right, you know. And Eddie’s mom is right less often than most.”
Richie climbs into the car so Maggie can buckle him up safe into his carseat. He feels bubbly and light with happiness. He should have just asked his mommy earlier if he was sick so he didn’t have to keep worrying all the time about what would happen if he accidentally hurt Eddie.
“Thanks for telling me ’m not sick, mama,” Richie says, tracing his finger down the window beside him so he can make little patterns in the condensation, little loops and spikes. “Because sometimes me an’ Eddie are playing and his mom sees me and gets angry and she sounds like Mr. Gibson's mean old cat next door. Like - hssssssssss.”
He tries to show her the approximate sound, but the central gap where he lost a front tooth makes it difficult, and he’s not sure the message comes across the way he intends it to.
“What?” Maggie laughs, checking her rearview windows as they pull out of the parking lot and onto the road again. “Mr. Gibson's cat died before you were born, silly. But I see what you mean. I’ll try to have a talk with her honey.”
Richie screws his face up, but he’s already beginning to crash from his high energy day, and his eyes are starting to droop. Oh well. He can let his mommy know later that she’s wrong, that sometimes the cat next door is so loud it keeps him up all night.
But all of this will be years down the road. Before he even knows Eddie, before he grows old enough to express himself in any meaningful way and thus start raising questions about his strange mannerisms, all anybody can say for sure is that Richie Tozier happens to be a particularly loud baby.
And at that time, Wentworth sticks his head in to check on him every night in his nursery. He does the usual parental check: present, safe, breathing, sleeping. Check, check, check… sometimes check, but more often than not still awake and making it known.
And every night without fail, as soon the door snicks quietly shut behind him, Wentworth comes out laughing. He shakes his head, absolutely bemused by that son of his, as he makes his way over to Maggie where she sits waiting for him on their living room couch.
“You’d think there’s a whole damn jamboree going on there, way he’s babbling on.” He says to his wife, collapsing onto the couch next to her. Maggie reaches over to tuck a strand of curly hair behind his ear and laughs quietly, tucking herself into his side. “Never seen a baby so chatty in my life, I swear.”
Maggie just laughs, dropping her head backwards to meet his eyes, and grins at the feigned outrage she finds there.
“Just you wait until he starts learning real words,” she says warningly, always fondly. “We’re never going to have a second’s peace.”
But that’s for later too, and it’s quiet between them now, in these moments after Richie’s been put down for the night.
Went pulls Maggie’s legs over his lap, tugging down the crochet throw from over the back of the couch to cover them. That’s when she draws her face up from where it rests in the dip between Wentworth’s shoulder and face, palms pressing into the sides of his face, and brings their lips together. Went smiles against her mouth, bringing an arm up to tug over her shoulders and bring her closer, closer, closer.
Or, at least that is until the sounds of Richie’s renewed babbling become clear even through the thick hardwood of the door.
“Christ,” Wentworth groans, pulling back from a laughing Maggie and throwing his head back to rest on the hard part of the couch, screwing his eyes up so he can’t see the ceiling above him. “Loud enough to wake the dead, that kid is.”
*
Richie is six years old when he stops just talking back to the people he hears, and begins trying to actively imitate them instead.
He’s got an ear for the different cadences, always has, and his imitations tend to garner him laughs often enough when he tests them out that he’s moved to put a concerted effort into improving them. This, more than anything, is a source of extreme confusion for his parents - there isn't exactly an abundance of different dialects to be found around Derry, and Richie has already managed to catalogue hundreds.
Over time they become his Voices, and in that way they start to become less scary. When he can make them his own and pretend that they’re just around to help him become funnier so he can grow up to be like - like Flip Wilson, or Bob Newhart, or something.
Just for practice. Educational. No different from watching Reading Rainbow, if Reading Rainbow was narrated by ghosts.
Because that’s another thing that Richie accidentally figures out at six.
It happens just outside the drug store one day. Richie’s mom has gone inside to pick up - he doesn't know, some boring stuff, and she’d told him to wait outside while she went in, it’ll only take a minute. So Richie plunks himself down on the curb, kicking his feet out with his face balanced on the palms of his hands, fingers tap-tap-tapping restlessly over his cheekbones.
His mom is taking forever, and she promised him that they'd get ice-cream after. But he knows the hands on the clock, and he knows the ice-cream shop will close if they don’t get there soon.
He nearly topples over onto the rough gravel when he hears the screams.
Luckily Richie catches himself right before he hits the ground with the heels of his palm. Unluckily, they’re scraped to all hell, and the sharp stinging sensation has tears springing to his eyes before he can help it. But even then it only takes him a second before he’s scrambling back up to whip his head around and try to figure out where the sound is coming from, hands cradled protectively to his chest.
It's giving him a headache. After it's screams, it's just loud voices, and then it's dead silence. Then the screams start again, and the cycle continues. And all of it sounds like it's coming from the alleyway behind Keene’s. He can't see anyone there, but it is dark and it's obvious that people must be, otherwise - well otherwise nothing. They're there, he can hear them.
He takes a small step forward, but just as immediately steps back again. He doesn’t want to just stand here if people are in trouble, but the emotion behind the sounds have his body shaking with adrenaline and fear, and he thinks he should maybe just wait until an adult arrives to fix it.
He’s frozen there, stuck in his indecision when elderly lady walks right by the mouth of the alley, humming thoughtlessly to herself. Richie stares at her, waiting for her to notice the shouting and do something about it, but she doesn’t even pause once in her route. She turns the corner and disappears behind the library, and not once does she indicate that she's noticed anything out of the ordinary.
Three more people pass obliviously by the alleyway before Richie feels like there’s no choice but to go look for himself.
He creeps closer and closer to the dark entrance, looking behind him to make sure his mom hasn’t come out to find him yet. He can still see her through the front window display and she’s not yet at the counter to check out, so he’s still got some time if he wants to be back where he was told to stay before she comes looking for him.
The voices are getting louder the further in he gets, but they sound like they’re coming from all around him at once, and Richie doesn’t know where to look.
Help us God help us, please, we are innocent The Devil has come to take us, has come into our homes, has eaten our children, our prayers are going unanswered, what are we to do what are we to do in this terrible time, this apocalyptic hour have we left home for this?
May God have mercy on our souls.
May God have mercy on our souls.
May God have mercy on our souls.
Richie slams hands down over his ears, humming loudly to tune it all out. His head feels like it's going to explode. And he doesn't even see anybody. But further down in the alley, past a pile of broken crates and smashed beer bottles, a dull shine of brass shines faintly on the wall behind generations worth of dirt and grime.
His eye is caught by it.
So he runs forward, hands still pressed tight over his ears. When he reaches up to swipe it off, there are letters underneath and Richie screws his face up to sound them out, still trying to filter out the loudness around him.
His daddy had practiced his letters with him for weeks and weeks, watching him write out shaky sentences and handing him books to read out loud before Richie realized with excitement that he was now able to do it all by himself. He reads out everything he sees now, carelessly shouting out the words as he encounters them, which makes his parents laugh, but more often than that gets him in trouble when his teachers catch him at it and tell him he needs to work on being less "disruptive".
These words look different from any of the ones he usually tries, but it's the only thing he's seen in here and he thinks he should at least try.
COMMISSIONED IN MEMORY OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND MORE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS OF THE SETTLEMENT OF DERRY, MAINE, WHO DISAPPEARED FOREVER WITHOUT A TRACE IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1715. MAY GOD HOLD THEM CLOSE AS HE SPIRITS THEM TO THEIR HEAVENLY REST.
The words send a chill down Richie’s spine, even if he doesn’t fully understand what they mean together. But...three hundred is a big number, and he’s not stupid, he knows what ‘disappeared’ means.
“Disappeared.” Richie repeats to himself, hugging his scraped arms tighter to his chest, even as it worsens the stinging of the wounds.
He’s never thought of it before, that people could disappear. Or - at least not forever. Socks disappear from his room all the time, and the flowers disappear when it snows, and sometimes his mommy will laugh at his daddy, say Where did you disappear off to? when he’s out in the garage for too long, but he never disappears forever. Just like when Eddie’s mom grabs his arm and tells him it’s time to go home now, and Richie feels like Eddie disappears for days and days until they can play together again. But he always comes back, and every time it's like he never left.
But this sign says that all of these people disappeared forever. They didn’t come back home to their sons, or their wives, or their best friends after a little bit of time away.
Could that happen to him? Could he disappear forever one day?
Would his parents remember him? Would Eddie, and Stan, and Bill? Would he be important enough for a brass plaque on a wall?
He hates it. It’s scary, the thought of going missing. All of a sudden, it makes him want to cry.
Yes, disappeared, they say, a voice says mournfully, quieter and more close to his ear than any of them have been yet. But all this time we have been here, dragged under the ground by the Devil himself.
Richie whips around and runs.
He runs and runs and runs and runs and runs and runs until he’s barreling into his mommy’s legs, and she stumbles back, startled, before catching him around his shoulders and asking him what’s wrong.
But how could he tell her? He understands it all now, and it’s like in Scooby-Doo. They’ll only believe you about the ghosts if there’s a mask to rip off.
*
So Richie gets used to it.
It’s not like he has a choice - the voices have been around him just as long as he can remember, and it doesn't seem like they’re going anywhere. He lets his mommy and daddy think they’re his imaginary friends, and he practices his Voices, and he tries to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach when he thinks about how what he hears are the voices of the dead. He doesn’t think he can call them ghosts - because, well, he never sees anything. It’s only ever the voices.
And only ever audible in the place where they’re buried. These are the rules.
Those scared, religious people in the alley. Mr. Gibson's screeching cat. The disembodied, enveloping voices of the cemetery. If he turns them into jokes, they can’t be scary.
As Wentworth is tucking Richie in that night, he decides to test out a new one on him.
“Night Rich,” Went whispers, leaning down to press a kiss to his forehead and pull up the blankets to his chin. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed-bugs bite.”
“Hey, don’t sell me a dog,” Richie whispers back, “Yer off your kadoova if you think that’ll scare me into sleeping.”
His father lets out a startled laugh, fixing Richie with a confused stare, eyebrows raised. He opens his mouth to speak, but closes it, shaking his head and laughing again. He presses one last kiss to Richie’s head before he turns around to leave.
“Where the hell does he get it from?” Richie hears Wentworth ask his mother fondly as the door closes behind him. “He doesn’t even watch that much TV, and he’s out here sounding like a whole damn United Nations conference.”