It

by Stephen King

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists. S.K.

Now he had to go back to being himself, and that was hard—it got harder to do that every year. It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.

Only twenty-six miles? Rich thought. Is that all, Carol? Well, maybe it is—in miles, anyway. But you don’t have the slightest idea how far it really is to Derry, and I don’t, either. But oh God, oh dear God, I am going to find out.

The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing at all supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on. Easy. Burn it up or blow it away, then just take a powder.

Maybe that’s why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for… and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.”

Tears had been more than a defense for his mother; they had been a weapon.

Her heart was not breaking; it seemed rather to be broiling in her chest, melting.

“I know you’ve been there ever since. And I’ve been there for you. We’re good in bed. That used to seem like a big deal to me. But we’re also good out of it, and now that seems like a bigger deal. I feel as if I could grow old with you and still be brave.

It’s instinct, babe… and I guess I believe instinct’s the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you’re willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can’t say no to some things. You can’t refuse to pick up your option because there is no option. You can’t stop it from happening any more than you could stand at home plate with a bat in your hand and let a fastball hit you. I have to go. That promise… it’s in my mind like a fuh-fishhook.”

It always comes back, you see. It.

And a good story never dies; it is always passed down.

Buddinger and Ives agree on something else: things really are not right here in Derry; things in Derry have never been right.

Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but.

Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too.

Ben would have been astounded if someone were to ask him if he was lonely; Bill would have been likewise astounded if someone asked him if he was courting death. Of cuh-cuh-course n-not! he would have responded immediately (and indignantly), but that did not change the fact that his runs down Kansas Street to town had become more and more like banzai charges as the weather warmed.

He raced on, bent over his handlebars; he raced to beat the devil.

A silence fell amid the three of them. It was not an entirely uncomfortable silence. In it they became friends.

Both Bill and Eddie burst out laughing this time, and Ben joined them. It hurt his stomach to laugh but he laughed anyway, shrilly and a little hysterically. Finally he had to sit down on the bank, and the plopping sound his butt made when it hit the dirt got him going all over again. He liked the way his laughter sounded with theirs. It was a sound he had never heard before: not mingled laughter—he had heard that lots of times—but mingled laughter of which his own was a part.

A frightening possibility suddenly occurred to him: maybe sometimes things didn’t just go wrong and then stop; maybe sometimes they just kept going wronger and wronger until everything was totally fucked up.

They weren’t all found. No; they weren’t all found.

“You’re… not… real,” Eddie choked, but clouds of grayness were closing in now, and he realized faintly that it was real enough, this Creature. It was, after all, killing him.

“My daddy used to tell me that God loved rocks, houseflies, weeds, and poor people above all the rest of His creations, and that’s why He made so many of them.”

But now he has stopped—or rather the sign has stopped him—and he has awakened to a strange truth: the dream was the reality. Derry is the reality.

Sometimes events are dominoes. The first knocks over the second, the second knocks over the third, and there you are.

Little by little Bill stopped. He still hurt, but this hurt seemed cleaner, as if he had cut himself open and taken out something that was rotting inside him. And that feeling of relief was still there.

Richie looked at the table by the window. Mrs. Denbrough had stood up all of George’s rank-cards there, half-open. Looking at them, knowing there would never be more, knowing that George had died before he could stay in the lines when he colored, knowing his life had ended irrevocably and eternally with only those few kindergarten and first-grade rank-cards, all the idiot truth of death crashed home to Richie for the first time. It was as if a large iron safe had fallen into his brain and buried itself there. I could die! his mind screamed at him suddenly in tones of betrayed horror. Anybody could! Anybody could!

He was feeling good. Going to the movies always made him feel good—he loved that magic world, those magic dreams.

I don’t understand either of them, she thought. Where they go, what they do, what they want… or what will become of them. Sometimes, oh sometimes their eyes are wild, and sometimes I’m afraid for them and sometimes I’m afraid of them.… She found herself thinking, not for the first time, that it would have been nice if she and Went could have had a girl as well, a pretty blonde girl that she could have dressed in skirts and matching bows and black patent-leather shoes on Sundays. A pretty little girl who would ask to bake cupcakes after school and who would want dolls instead of books on ventriloquism and Revell models of cars that went fast. A pretty little girl she could have understood.

Richie thought, I think he really does mean to kill it, if it’s still there. Kill it and maybe cut off its head and take it to his father and say, “Look, this is what killed Georgie, now will you talk to me again at night, maybe just tell me how your day was, or who lost when you guys were flipping to see who paid for the morning coffee?”

You didn’t see him last night, Kay.” “I’ve seen him enough on other occasions,” Kay said, her brows drawing together. “The asshole that walks like a man.”

“You’ll float down here with your friends, Beverly, we all float down here, tell Bill that Georgie says hello, tell Bill that Georgie misses him but he’ll see him soon, tell him Georgie will be in the closet some night with a piece of piano wire to stick in his eye, tell him—”

Then he only stood there for a moment in what she would always think of as “his” way of standing, perhaps of being: bent slightly forward, hands plunged deep—to above the wrist—in his pockets, the bright blue eyes in his mournful basset-hound’s face looking down at her from above. In later years, long after she stopped thinking about Derry at all, she would see a man sitting on the bus or maybe standing on a corner with his dinnerbucket in his hand, shapes, oh shapes of men, sometimes seen as day closed down, sometimes seen across Watertower Square in the noonlight of a clear windy autumn day, shapes of men, rules of men, desires of men: or Tom, so like her father when he took off his shirt and stood slightly slumped in front of the bathroom mirror to shave. Shapes of men.

The calliope music had gotten louder yet. It drifted and echoed down the spiral staircase. There was nothing cheery about it now. It had changed. It had become a dirge. It screamed like wind and water, and in his mind’s eye Stan saw a county fair at the end of autumn, wind and rain blowing up a deserted midway, pennons flapping, tents bulging, falling over, wheeling away like canvas bats. He saw empty rides standing against the sky like scaffolds; the wind drummed and hooted in the weird angles of their struts. He suddenly understood that death was in this place with him, that death was coming for him out of the dark and he could not run.

You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It’s offense you maybe can’t live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there’s a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I’d scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn’t look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

I thought that was the end, that we had finished the job of burying him with those late tears. But who knows how long a grief may last? Isn’t it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled… perhaps not even in death?

His dying scared me and enraged me, but it embarrassed me, too; it seemed to me then and it seems to me now that when a man or woman goes it should be a quick thing. The cancer was doing more than killing him. It was degrading him, demeaning him.

We grew up, he thought. We didn’t think it would happen, not then, not to us. But it did, and if I go in there it will be real: we’re all grownups now.

It didn’t matter, really. The seventh was there, and in that one moment they all felt it… and perhaps understood best the dreadful power of the thing that had brought them back. It lives, Bill thought, cold inside his clothes. Eye of newt, tail of dragon, Hand of Glory… whatever It was, It’s here again, in Derry. It. And he felt suddenly that It was the seventh; that It and time were somehow interchangeable, that It wore all their faces as well as the thousand others with which It had terrified and killed… and the idea that It might be them was somehow the most frightening idea of all. How much of us was left behind here? he thought with sudden rising terror. How much of us never left the drains and the sewers where It lived… and where It fed? Is that why we forgot? Because part of each of us never had any future, never grew, never left Derry? Is that why? He saw no answers on their faces… only his own questions reflected back at him.

The clown was gone. The vampire was gone. But tied to the low wrought-iron railing which surrounded the landing was a balloon. Written on its bulging skin were the words: HAVE A GOOD DAY! TONIGHT YOU DIE!

She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.

Scaly scalp showed in patches. “Oh, he loved his joke, my fadder! This is a joke, miss, if you enjoy them: my fadder bore me rather than my mutter. He shat me from his asshole! Hee! Hee! Hee!”

“You always talk into the sewers, mister?” the boy asked. “Only in Derry,” Bill said.

It was faint but unmistakable. A smell of corruption; a whiff of the underside.

Who is that battered woman who looks like the ones who drag themselves to a women’s shelter after they finally get frightened enough or brave enough or just plain mad enough to leave the man who is hurting them, who has systematically hurt them week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out?

Once something heavy begins to roll, it can’t be stopped; it’s simply going to roll until it finds a flat place long enough to wear away all of its forward motion. You can stand in front of that thing and get flattened… but that won’t stop it, either.

“Hi,” Mike said uncertainly. His heart was beating a little too hard, but he was determined to go on with this. He owed his thanks, and his father had told him that you always paid what you owed—and as quick as you could, before the interest mounted up.

They told him, one by one: the clown on the ice, the leper under the porch, the blood and voices from the drain, the dead boys in the Standpipe. Richie told about what had happened when he and Bill went back to Neibolt Street, and Bill spoke last, telling about the school photo that had moved, and the picture he had stuck his hand into. He finished by explaining that it had killed his brother Georgie, and that the Losers’ Club was dedicated to killing the monster… whatever the monster really was.

use. It was no big deal; it didn’t go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that’s the scary part. How you don’t stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown’s trick balloons with the Burma-Shave slogans on the 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. You could go on wearing bluejeans, you could keep going to Springsteen and Seger concerts, you could dye your hair, but that was a grownup’s face in the mirror just the same. It all happened while you were asleep, maybe, like a visit from the Tooth Fairy. No, he thinks. Not the Tooth Fairy. The Age Fairy.

And almost idly, in a kind of side-thought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought. It was no big deal, not a thought that came in a revelatory flash or announced itself with trumpets and bells. It just came and was gone, almost buried under the stronger, overriding thought: I want my aspirator and I want to be out of here.