It

by Stephen King

Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.

Except that Richie’s mouth was like a half-tamed horse that has a way of bolting for absolutely no reason at all.

Silver flew over the first curbing, and as they almost always did at that point, his feet lost contact with the pedals. He was freewheeling, now wholly in the lap of whatever god has been appointed the job of protecting small boys.

It was not the unknown that scared him, not the supernatural; it was the simple knowledge that he was fifteen inches taller than he had been in 1958 and minus most of his hair. He was suddenly uneasy—almost terrified—at the thought of seeing them all again, their children’s faces almost worn away, almost buried under change as the old hospital had been buried. Banks erected inside their heads where once magic picture-palaces had stood.

That’s what we all should have done, just stayed away. We’ve got no business here. Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there’s nothing left; it can’t be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can’t…

Eddie skirted the building, Gucci loafers crunching in the gravel, to look at the lot where the baseball games had been played when he was a kid—when, it seemed, ninety percent of the world had been made up of kids.

The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you.