It

by Stephen King

It tapped on the yellow hood of the boy’s slicker, sounding to his ears like rain on a shed roof… a comfortable, almost cozy sound.

As for the rest—well, future floods could take care of themselves. The thing was to get through this one, to get the power back on, and then to forget it. In Derry such forgetting of tragedy and disaster was almost an art, as Bill Denbrough would come to discover in the course of time.

Over his head, a grim gust of October wind rattled the trees, now almost completely unburdened of their freight of colored leaves by the storm, which had been this year a reaper of the most ruthless sort.

The disquiet suddenly grew strong in her, and she thought of Carson Lake, where she had gone swimming often as a girl. By the first of August the lake was as warm as a tub… but then you’d hit a cold pocket that would shiver you with surprise and delight. One minute you were warm; the next moment it felt as if the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees below your hips. Minus the delight, that was how she felt now—as if she had just struck a cold pocket. Only this cold pocket was not below her hips, chilling her long teenager’s legs in the black depths of Carson Lake. This one was around her heart.

Eddie Kaspbrak believed in the Boy Scout motto.

What she saw on those occasions was some creature without a face. It had no face, but it did have a name—Authority.

She was afraid the heat from her heart might soon destroy her sanity in fire.

Stuttering’s funny, Audra. Spooky. On one level you’re not even aware it’s happening. But… it’s also something you can hear in your mind. It’s like part of your head is working an instant ahead of the rest. Or one of those reverb systems kids used to put in their jalopies back in the fifties, when the sound in the rear speaker would come just a split second a-after the sound in the front s-speaker.”

I can sense those memories… waiting to be born. They’re like clouds filled with rain. Only this rain would be very dirty. The plants that grew after a rain like that would be monsters.

In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.

And if he ever told Beverly, she would either laugh herself (bad), or make retching noises of disgust (worse).

when love comes before puberty, it can come in waves so clear and so powerful that no one can stand against its simple imperative,

He’s sick, all right, no doubt about that, but it’s not a virus or a phantom fever. He has been poisoned by his own memories.

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.

How she came to understand that you could only protect your child through watchfulness and love, that you must tend a child as you tended a garden, fertilizing, weeding, and yes, occasionally pruning and thinning, as much as that hurt.

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.

But it’s really faith that monsters live on, isn’t it? I am led irresistibly to this conclusion: food may be life, but the source of power is faith, not food. And who is more capable of a total act of faith than a child?

But there’s a problem: kids grow up.

children grow into adults, they become either incapable of faith or crippled by a sort of spiritual and imaginative arthritis?

And now, now that we no longer believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Hansel and Gretel, or the troll under the bridge, It is ready for us. Come on back, It says. Come on back, let’s finish our business in Derry. Bring your jacks and your marbles and your yo-yos! We’ll play! Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all: how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.