It

by Stephen King

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

Can an entire city be haunted? Haunted as some houses are supposed to be haunted? Not just a single building in that city, or the corner of a single street, or a single basketball court in a single pocket-park, the netless basket jutting out at sunset like some obscure and bloody instrument of torture, not just one area—but everything. The whole works. Can that be? Listen: Haunted: “Often visited by ghosts or spirits.” Funk and Wagnalls. Haunting: “Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget.” Ditto Funk and Friend. To haunt: “To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost.” But—and listen!—“A place often visited: resort, den, hangout . . .” Italics are of course mine. And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and it’s the one that really scares me: “A feeding place for animals.”

Although the last of the daylight had struck a rosy glow across the ice of the Canal, the clown cast no shadow. None at all.

Although none of them would remember doing so later, all of them looked up at the exact moment Eddie Corcoran died . . . as if hearing some distant cry.

And if you put your ear to that door, you could hear the winds of madness blowing outside.

“It’s a monster,” Richie said flatly. “Some kind of monster. Some kind of monster right here in Derry. And it’s killing kids.”

We’ve had a good life here, and if there are nights when I dream about that fire, well, there isn’t nobody that can live a natural life without having a few bad dreams.”

“In nightmares we can think the worst. That’s what they’re for, I guess.”

sides. 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.

He doesn’t know that he doesn’t always,

I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life, he would tell the others. It wasn’t what I thought it would be at all. It didn’t put an end to me as a person. I think . . . it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain.

Maybe, he thought, there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends—maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

Bill thought And whatever walked in Community House, walked alone.

Then, bending forward slightly against the rush of the current, Bill Denbrough led his friends into the dark where the boat he had made for his brother had gone almost a year before.

Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around—and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again,