It

by Stephen King

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.

She thought she would explain everything then. She would explain it quietly and logically. How she had thought he was going to die when he was five, and how that would have driven her crazy after losing Frank only two years before. 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. She would tell him that sometimes it was better for a child—particularly a delicate child like Eddie—to think he was sick than to really get sick. And she would finish by talking to him about the deadly foolishness of doctors and the wonderful power of love; she would tell him that she knew he had asthma, and it didn’t matter what the doctors thought or what they gave him for it. She would tell him you could make medicine with more than a malicious meddling druggist’s mortar and pestle. Eddie, she would say, it’s medicine because your mother’s love makes it medicine, and in just that way, for as long as you want me and let me, I can do that. This is a power that God gives to loving caring mothers. Please, Eddie, please, my heart’s own love, you must believe me.

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.

The lightning walked and the thunder talked. No one spoke.

As if in a dream Ben heard Miss Davies, the assistant librarian, reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge? And he saw them, the little ones, the babies, leaning forward, their faces still and solemn, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy-story: would the monster be bested… or would It feed?

Written on the back of Its black-and-orange high-school jacket were the words DERRY HIGH SCHOOL KILLING TEAM. Below this, the name PENNYWISE. And in the center, a number: 13.

What does It really eat, for instance? I know that some of the children have been partially eaten—they show bite-marks, at least—but perhaps it is we who drive It to do that. Certainly we have all been taught since earliest childhood that what the monster does when it catches you in the deep wood is eat you. That is perhaps the worst thing we can conceive. 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?

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. On that one at least, I score a thousand percent: I am frightened. So goddam frightened.

When I die, I guess I’ll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe there’s worse ways.

Eddie became aware, suddenly and effortlessly, that this might be the final act. That was how the day’s silence felt, wasn’t it? The feeling that the whole town had up and left, leaving only the deserted husks of buildings behind.

I guess this is what we mean when we talk about the persistence of memory, this or something like this, something you see at the right time and from the right angle, image that kicks off emotion like a jet engine. You see it so clear that all the things which happened in between are gone. If desire is what closes the circle between world and want, then the circle has closed.

When It woke It would be healed, renewed—but their childhoods would be burned away like seven fatty candles. The former power of their imaginations would be muted and weak. They would no longer imagine that there were piranha in the Kenduskeag or that if you stepped on a crack you might really break your mother’s back or that if you killed a ladybug which lit on your shirt your house would catch fire that night. Instead, they would believe in insurance. Instead, they would believe in wine with dinner—something nice but not too pretentious, like a Pouilly-Fuissé ’83, and let that breathe, waiter, would you? Instead, they would believe that Rolaids consume forty-seven times their own weight in excess stomach acid. Instead, they would believe in public television, Gary Hart, running to prevent heart attacks, giving up red meat to prevent colon cancer. They would believe in Dr. Ruth when it came to getting well fucked and Jerry Falwell when it came to getting well saved. As each year passed their dreams would grow smaller. And when It woke It would call them back, yes, back, because fear was fertile, its child was rage, and rage cried for revenge. It would call them and then kill them.

He had sent George out to die, and he had spent his whole adult life writing about the horror of that betrayal—oh, he had put many faces on it, almost as many faces as It had put on for their benefit, but the monster at the bottom of everything was only George, running out into the receding flood with his paraffin-coated paper boat. Now would come the atonement.

“George, I’m sorry! I never meant for anything b-b-b-bad to huh-huh-happen!” Perhaps there was something else to say, but he could not say it. He was sobbing then, lying on his back with one arm over his eyes, remembering the boat, remembering the steady beat of the rain against his bedroom windows, remembering the medicines and the tissues on the nighttable, the faint ache of fever in his head and in his body, remembering George, most of all that: remembering George, George in his yellow hooded slicker. “George, I’m sorry!” he cried through his tears. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I’m suh-suh-SORRY—” And then they were around him, his friends, and no one lit a match, and someone held him, he didn’t know who, Beverly maybe, or maybe Ben, or Richie. They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.

—I’m the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don’t blame me for it; I had a bellyache.

(Chüd, this Chüd, stand, be brave, be true, stand for your brother, your friends; believe, believe in all the things you have believed in, believe that if you tell the policeman you’re lost he’ll see that you get home safely, that there is a Tooth Fairy who lives in a huge enamel castle, and Santa Claus below the North Pole, making toys with his trove of elves, and that Captain Midnight could be real, yes, he could be in spite of Calvin and Cissy Clark’s big brother Carlton saying that was all a lot of baby stuff, believe that your mother and father will love you again, that courage is possible and words will come smoothly every time; no more Losers, no more cowering in a hole in the ground and calling it a clubhouse, no more crying in Georgie’s room because you couldn’t save him and didn’t know, believe in yourself, believe in the heat of that desire)

“OH SHIT, I BELIEVE IN ALL OF THOSE THINGS!” he shouted, and it was true: even at eleven he had observed that things turned out right a ridiculous amount of the time.

You laugh because what’s fearful and unknown is also what’s funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny… but it is also unknown, full of the unknown’s eternal power.

But God favors drunks, small children, and the cataclysmically stoned;

In time, no one on the Derry City Council could even remember what that glass umbilicus had been for. Perhaps only Ben himself could really have told them how it was to stand outside in the still cold of a January night, your nose running, the tips of your fingers numb inside your mittens, watching the people pass back and forth inside, walking through winter with their coats off and surrounded by light. He could have told them… but maybe it wasn’t the sort of thing you could have gotten up and testified about at a City Council meeting—how you stood out in the cold dark and learned to love the light.

I’m almost done with this diary now—and I suppose a diary is all that it will ever be, and that the story of Derry’s old scandals and eccentricities has no place outside these pages. That’s fine with me; I think that, when they let me out of here tomorrow, it might finally be time to start thinking about some sort of new life… although just what that might be is unclear to me. I loved you guys, you know. I loved you so much.

He sees them as they were, as they always will be in some part of his mind… and his heart breaks with love and horror.

Leaving, leaving Derry, he thinks. We are leaving Derry, and if this was a story it would be the last half-dozen pages or so; get ready to put this one up on the shelf and forget it.

But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back—all the stories say so. Look what happened to Lot’s wife. 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, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

And if you spare a last thought, maybe it’s ghosts you wonder about… the ghosts of children standing in the water at sunset, standing in a circle, standing with their hands joined together, their faces young, sure, but tough… tough enough, anyway, to give birth to the people they will become, tough enough to understand, maybe, that the people they will become must necessarily birth the people they were before they can get on with trying to understand simple mortality. The circle closes, the wheel rolls, and that’s all there is. You don’t have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become. Children I love you. I love you so much. So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away from Derry, from memory… but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.