It

by Stephen King

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?

And yet again he heard his mouth, but this time it was not his voice, or any of his created Voices, past or present; it was a Voice he had never heard before. Later he would tell the others, hesitantly, that it was a kind of Mr. Jiveass Nigger Voice, loud and proud, self-parodying and screechy.

“I only caught a glimpse of him. Once things got hot, I tended pretty much to my own knittin. I glanced around just once and saw him upstreet beyond them Swedes under the Bijou’s marquee,” Mr. Keene said. “He wasn’t wearing a clown suit or nothing like that. He was dressed in a pair of farmer’s biballs and a cotton shirt underneath. But his face was covered with that white greasepaint they use, and he had a big red clown smile painted on. Also had these tufts of fake hair, you know. Orange. Sorta comical. “Lal Machen never saw that fellow, but Biff did. Only Biff must have been confused, because he thought he saw him in one of the windows of an apartment over somewhere to the left, and once when I asked Jimmy Gordon—he was killed in Pearl Harbor, you know, went down with his ship, the California, I think it was—he said he saw the guy behind the War Memorial.”

Stan’s idea was that nobody else could have seen that bird before Mike told them that story. Something else, maybe, but not that bird, because the bird was Mike Hanlon’s personal monster. But now… why, now that bird was the property of the whole Losers’ Club, wasn’t it? Any of them might see it. It might not look exactly the same; Bill might see it as a crow, Richie as a hawk, Beverly as a golden eagle, for all Stan knew—but It could be a bird to all of them now. Bill told Stan that if that was true, then any of them might see the leper, the mummy, or possibly the dead boys.

Twenty-seven years later, sitting in the Derry Public Library and remembering his first look into Mike’s father’s album, he realized he had felt the way a hunter might feel, coming upon the first fresh spoor of an old killer tiger.

“Can’t stop me, I’m the dead boys!” “No!” Stan Uris screamed. His eyes bulged above bruised-looking crescents of skin—shockflesh, Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space (otherspace) where the good words come from sometimes.

Because maybe It’s scared of us… really scared for the first time in Its long, long life.

Would he never be able to express his own terror, lest the fragile welds that made them into one thing should let go?

The force of the memory sweeps through him like a tide, turning him alternately hot and cold, and he suddenly understands why these memories have come back one at a time. If he had remembered everything at once, the force would have been like a psychological shotgun blast let off an inch from his temple. It would have torn off the whole top of his head.

“I got an i-i-i-idea,” Bill said. “Simpler. But only if Beh-Beh-Beverly—”

“If Beverly what?” “Neh-hever mind.” And Bill would say no more on the subject.

Richie held his hand out, and although Mike was on the far side of this enormous room he felt those strong brown fingers close over his wrist. Oh and that was good, that was a good touch—good to find desire in comfort, to find comfort in desire, to find substance in smoke and smoke in substance—

Grownups are the real monsters,

It believed.

The voice from the moon spoke to him—it whispered like the spring wind which is warm with a cold blade buried somewhere in its middle, it buzzed like a paper nest full of roused hornets,

was thinking of them because I was ashamed. It was my father who made me ashamed, I guess, and maybe that was Its doing, too. Maybe.

Is this what her father was afraid of? Well he might be! There was power in this act, all right, a chain-breaking power that was blood-deep. She feels no physical pleasure, but there is a kind of mental ecstasy in it for her.

They have to be talked into it, this essential human link between the world and the infinite, the only place where the bloodstream touches eternity. It doesn’t matter.

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…

began