It

Praise for
IT

“The indisputable King of Horror.”

—TIME

“A mesmerizing odyssey of terror . . . King writes like one possessed, never cheats the reader, always gives full measure. . . . He is brilliant. . . . dark and sinister.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Vintage King . . . a magnum opus of terror . . . just a glance at the first few pages, and you can't put this novel aside.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“A great scary book . . . a nightmare roller coaster . . . packed with more chills than a Frigidaire . . . 'It' turns out to be the monster-dread in us all, the one that refuses to go away.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Epic . . . gargantuan . . . breathlessly accelerating suspense . . . King is our great storyteller. . . . I imagine him as a possessed figure rocking over a smoking word processor, hunting for a beat his sentences can dance to, pounding the shocks and scares like a rock organist laying down the power chords.”

—Los Angeles Herald Examiner

“A ghoul's delight . . . a good old-fashioned chill and shiver fest . . . as creepy as the finest of that genre.”

—The Kansas City Star

“King's most ambitious project . . . reads as if written in a white heat!”

—San Jose Mercury News

“
IT
exhibits the potato chip syndrome—quite simply, you can't read just one page and stop. . . . It is in this novel that King comes out of the closet, a closet jammed and crowded with his own monsters.”

—Houston Chronicle

“Compulsively readable.”

—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“King's most mature work.”

—St. Petersburg Times

“Chock-full of spooky stuff . . . a sprawling scare-fest that defines King's recurring themes and adds a new set of ambitions to the mix.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

EPIGRAPH

PART 1: THE SHADOW BEFORE

1. After the Flood (1957)

2. After the Festival (1984)

3. Six Phone Calls (1985)

Derry: The First Interlude

PART 2: JUNE OF 1958

4. Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall

5. Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil (I)

6. One of the Missing: A Tale from the Summer of '58

7. The Dam in the Barrens

8. Georgie's Room and the House on Neibolt Street

9. Cleaning Up

Derry: The Second Interlude

PART 3: GROWNUPS

10. The Reunion

11. Walking Tours

12. Three Uninvited Guests

Derry: The Third Interlude

PART 4: JULY OF 1958

13. The Apocalyptic Rockfight

14. The Album

15. The Smoke-Hole

16. Eddie's Bad Break

17. Another One of the Missing: The Death of Patrick Hockstetter

18. The Bullseye

Derry: The Fourth Interlude

PART 5: THE RITUAL OF CHÜD

19. In the Watches of the Night

20. The Circle Closes

21. Under the City

22. The Ritual of Chüd

23. Out

Derry: The Last Interlude

EPILOGUE: BILL DENBROUGH BEATS THE DEVIL (II)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This book is gratefully dedicated to my children. My mother and my wife taught me how to be a man. My children taught me how to be free.

NAOMI RACHEL KING, at fourteen;

JOSEPH HILLSTROM KING, at twelve;

OWEN PHILIP KING, at seven.

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

S.K.

“This old town been home long as I remember

This town gonna be here long after I'm gone.

East side west side take a close look 'round her

You been down but you're still in my bones.”

—The Michael Stanley Band

“Old friend, what are you looking for?

After those many years abroad you come

With images you tended

Under foreign skies

Far away from your own land.”

—George Seferis

“Out of the blue and into the black.”

—Neil Young

“They begin!

The perfections are sharpened

The flower spreads its colored petals

wide in the sun

But the tongue of the bee

misses them

They sink back into the loam

crying out

—you may call it a cry

that creeps over them, a shiver

as they wilt and disappear. . . .”

—William Carlos Williams,

    Paterson

“Born down in a dead man's town.”

—Bruce Springsteen

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

The boat bobbed, listed, righted itself again, dived bravely through treacherous whirlpools, and continued on its way down Witcham Street toward the traffic light which marked the intersection of Witcham and Jackson. The three vertical lenses on all sides of the traffic light were dark this afternoon in the fall of 1957, and the houses were all dark, too. There had been steady rain for a week now, and two days ago the winds had come as well. Most sections of Derry had lost their power then, and it was not back on yet.

A small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat. The rain had not stopped, but it was finally slackening. 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. The boy in the yellow slicker was George Denbrough. He was six. His brother, William, known to most of the kids at Derry Elementary School (and even to the teachers, who would never have used the nickname to his face) as Stuttering Bill, was at home, hacking out the last of a nasty case of influenza. In that autumn of 1957, eight months before the real horrors began and twenty-eight years before the final showdown, Stuttering Bill was ten years old.

Bill had made the boat beside which George now ran. He had made it sitting up in bed, his back propped against a pile of pillows,
while their mother played
Für Elise
on the piano in the parlor and rain swept restlessly against his bedroom window.

About three-quarters of the way down the block as one headed toward the intersection and the dead traffic light, Witcham Street was blocked to motor traffic by smudgepots and four orange sawhorses. Stencilled across each of the horses was
DERRY DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS
. Beyond them, the rain had spilled out of gutters clogged with branches and rocks and big sticky piles of autumn leaves. The water had first pried fingerholds in the paving and then snatched whole greedy handfuls—all of this by the third day of the rains. By noon of the fourth day, big chunks of the street's surface were boating through the intersection of Jackson and Witcham like miniature white-water rafts. By that time, many people in Derry had begun to make nervous jokes about arks. The Public Works Department had managed to keep Jackson Street open, but Witcham was impassable from the saw-horses all the way to the center of town.

But everyone agreed, the worst was over. The Kenduskeag Stream had crested just below its banks in the Barrens and bare inches below the concrete sides of the Canal which channelled it tightly as it passed through downtown. Right now a gang of men—Zack Denbrough, George's and Bill's father, among them—were removing the sandbags they had thrown up the day before with such panicky haste. Yesterday overflow and expensive flood damage had seemed almost inevitable. God knew it had happened before—the flooding in 1931 had been a disaster which had cost millions of dollars and almost two dozen lives. That was a long time ago, but there were still enough people around who remembered it to scare the rest. One of the flood victims had been found twenty-five miles east, in Bucksport. The fish had eaten this unfortunate gentleman's eyes, three of his fingers, his penis, and most of his left foot. Clutched in what remained of his hands had been a Ford steering wheel.

Now, though, the river was receding, and when the new Bangor Hydro dam went in upstream, the river would cease to be a threat. Or so said Zack Denbrough, who worked for Bangor Hydroelectric. 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.

George paused just beyond the sawhorses at the edge of a deep ravine that had been cut through the tar surface of Witcham Street. This ravine ran on an almost exact diagonal. It ended on the far side of the street, roughly forty feet farther down the hill from where he now stood, on the right. He laughed aloud—the sound of solitary, childish glee a bright runner in that gray afternoon—as a vagary of the flowing water took his paper boat into a scale-model rapids which had been formed by the break in the tar. The urgent water had cut a channel which ran along the diagonal, and so his boat travelled from one side of Witcham Street to the other, the current carrying it so fast that George had to sprint to keep up with it. Water sprayed out from beneath his galoshes in muddy sheets. Their buckles made a jolly jingling as George Denbrough ran toward his strange death. And the feeling which filled him at that moment was clear and simple love for his brother Bill . . . love and a touch of regret that Bill couldn't be here to see this and be a part of it. Of course he would try to describe it to Bill when he got home, but he knew he wouldn't be able to make Bill
see
it, the way Bill would have been able to make
him
see it if their positions had been reversed. Bill was good at reading and writing, but even at
his
age George was wise enough to know that wasn't the only reason why Bill got all A's on his report cards, or why his teachers liked his compositions so well.
Telling
was only part of it. Bill was good at
seeing.