Stephen King - It

The Engstroms” cocker lasted the longest. In spite of the single-number cold, it was still alive when Patrick came back for the third time in as many days, although it had lost all of its original friskiness (it had been wagging its tail and lapping his hands frantically when he originally hauled it out of the box and stuffed it into the refrigerator). When he came back a day after putting it in, the puppy had damn near gotten away. Patrick had to chase it almost all the way to the dump before he was able to jump it and get hold of one rear leg. The puppy had nipped Patrick with its sharp little teeth. Patrick didn’t mind. In spite of the nips, he had taken the cocker back to the refrigerator and bundled it back in. He had a hard-on when he did it. This was not uncommon.

On the second day the puppy had tried to get out again, but it moved much too slowly. Patrick shoved it back in, slammed the Amana’s rusty door, and leaned against it. He could hear the puppy scratching against the door. He could hear its muffled whines. “Good dog,” said Patrick Hockstetter. His eyes were closed and he was breathing fast. “That’s a good dog.” On the third day the puppy could only roll its eyes toward Patrick’s face when the door opened. Its sides were heaving rapidly and shallowly. When Patrick returned the next day, the cocker was dead with a cake of foam frozen around its mouth and muzzle. This made Patrick think of coconut Popsicles, and he laughed quite hard as he hauled the frozen corpse from his killing-bottle and threw it in the bushes.

The supply of victims (which Patrick thought of, when he thought of them at all, as “test animals’) had been thin this summer. Questions of reality aside, his sense of self-preservation was well developed, his intuition exquisite. He suspected he was suspected. By whom he was not sure: Mr Engstrom? Perhaps. Mr Engstrom had turned around and given Patrick a long speculative look in the A amp;P one day this spring. Mr Engstrom had been buying cigarettes and Patrick had been sent for bread. Mrs Josephs? Maybe. She sat in her parlor window with a telescope sometimes and was, according to Mrs Hockstetter, a “nosy parker.” Mr Jacubois, who had an ASPCA sticker on the back bumper of his car? Mr Nell? Someone else? Patrick didn’t know for sure, but his intuition told him he was suspected, and he never argued with his intuition. He had taken a few wandering animals from among the rotted tenements in the Half-Acre, picking only those that looked thin or diseased, but that was all.

He discovered, however, that the refrigerator near the dump had gotten an oddly powerful hold over him. He began to draw pictures of it in school when he was bored. He sometimes dreamed of it at night, and in his dreams the Amana was perhaps seventy feet tall, a whited sepulchre, a ponderous crypt iced in chilly moonlight. In these dreams the giant door would swing open and he would see huge eyes staring out at him. He would awake in a cold sweat, but he found he could not give up the joys of the refrigerator entirely.

Today he had finally found out who had suspected. Bowers. Knowing that Henry Bowers held the secret of his killing-bottle in his hands left Patrick as close to panic as he was ever apt to get. This was not very close at all, in truth, but he still found this-not fear exactly, but mental unrest-oppressive and unpleasant. Henry knew. Knew that Patrick sometimes broke the rules.

His latest victim had been a pigeon he discovered on Jackson Street two days ago. The pigeon had been struck by a car and couldn’t fly. Patrick went home, got his box out of the garage, and put the pigeon inside. The pigeon pecked the back of Patrick’s hand several times, leaving shallow, bloody digs. Patrick didn’t mind. When he checked the refrigerator the next day, the pigeon had been quite dead, but Patrick hadn’t removed the corpse then. Now, following Henry’s threat to tell, Patrick decided he better get rid of the pigeon’s body right away. Perhaps he would even get a bucket of water and some rags and scrub out the interior of the refrigerator. It didn’t smell very good. If Henry told and Mr Nell came down to check, he might be able to tell that something-several somethings, in fact-had died in there.

If he tells, Patrick thought, standing in the grove of pines and looking at the rusty Amana, I’ll tell that he broke Eddie Kaspbrak’s arm. Of course they probably knew that already, but they couldn’t prove anything because all of them said they had been playing out at Henry’s house that day and Henry’s crazy father had backed them up. But if he tells, I’ll tell. Tit for tat.

Never mind that now. What he had to do now was get rid of the bird. He would leave the refrigerator door open and then come back with the rags and the water and clean it up. Good.

Patrick opened the refrigerator door on his own death.

At first he was simply puzzled, unable to cope in any way with what he was seeing. It meant nothing to him at all. It had no context. Patrick merely stared, his head cocked to one side, his eyes wide.

The pigeon was nothing but a skeleton surrounded by a ragged fall of feathers. There was no flesh left on its body at all. And around it, stuck on the refrigerator’s inner walls, hanging from the underside of the freezer compartment, dangling from the wire shelves, were dozens of flesh-colored objects that looked like big macaroni shells. Patrick saw that they were moving slightly, fluttering, as if in a breeze. Except there was no breeze. He frowned.

Suddenly one of the shell-like things unfurled insectile wings. Before Patrick could do more than register the fact, it had flown across the space between the refrigerator and Patrick’s left arm. It struck with a smacking sound. There was an instant of heat. It faded and Patrick’s arm felt just like always again… but the shell-like creature’s pale flesh turned first pink, and then, with shocking suddenness, rose-red.

Although Patrick was afraid of almost nothing in the commonly understood sense of the word (it’s hard to be afraid of things that aren’t “real’), there was at least one thing that filled him with wretched loathing. He had come out of Brewster Lake one warm August day when he was seven to discover four or five leeches clinging to his stomach and legs. He had screamed himself hoarse until his father had pulled them off.

Now, in a deadly burst of inspiration, he realized that this was some weird kind of flying leech. They had infested his refrigerator.

Patrick began to scream and beat at the thing on his arm. It had swelled to nearly the size of a tennis ball. At the third blow it broke open with a sickening squtt sound. Blood-his blood-sprayed his arm from elbow to wrist, but the thing’s jellylike eyeless head held on. In a way, it was like a bird’s narrow head, ending in a beaklike structure, but this beak was not flat or pointed; it was tubular and blunt, like the proboscis of a mosquito. This proboscis was buried in Patrick’s arm.

Still screaming, he pinched the splattered creature between his fingers and pulled it off. The proboscis came out cleanly, followed by a watery flow of blood mixed with some yellowish-white liquid like pus. It had made a painless dime-sized hole in his arm.

And the creature, although exploded, was still twisting and moving and seeking in his fingers.

Patrick threw it away, turned… and more of them flew out of the refrigerator, lighting on him even as he groped for the Amana’s handle. They landed on his hands, his arms, his neck. One touched down on his forehead. When Patrick raised his hand to pick it off, he saw four others on his hand, trembling minutely, turning first pink and then red.

There was no pain… but there was a hideous draining sensation. Screaming, whirling, beating at his head and neck with his leech-encrusted hands, Patrick Hockstetter’s mind yammered: It isn’t real, it’s just a bad dream, don’t worry, it’s not real, nothing is real -