Стивен Кинг: It

“They float,” it growled, “they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too—”

George’s shoulder socked against the cement of the curb and Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat that day because of the flood, saw only a small boy in a yellow rainslicker, a small boy who was screaming and writhing in the gutter with muddy water surfing over his face and making his screams sound bubbly.

“Everything down here floats,” that chuckling, rotten voice whispered, and suddenly there was a ripping noise and a flaring sheet of agony, and George Denbrough knew no more.

Dave Gardener was the first to get there, and although he arrived only forty-five seconds after the first scream, George Denbrough was already dead. Gardener grabbed him by the back of the slicker, pulled him into the street . . . and began to scream himself as George’s body turned over in his hands. The left side of George’s slicker was now bright red. Blood flowed into the stormdrain from the tattered hole where the left arm had been. A knob of bone, horribly bright, peeked through the torn cloth.

The boy’s eyes stared up into the white sky, and as Dave staggered away toward the others already running pell-mell down the street, they began to fill up with rain.

4

Somewhere below, in the stormdrain that was already filled nearly to capacity with runoff (there could have been no one down there, the County Sheriff would later exclaim to a Derry News reporter with a frustrated fury so great it was almost agony; Hercules himself would have been swept away in that driving current), George’s newspaper boat shot onward through nighted chambers and long concrete hallways that roared and chimed with water. For awhile it ran neck-and-neck with a dead chicken that floated with its yellowy, reptilian toes pointed at the dripping ceiling; then, at some junction east of town, the chicken was swept off to the left while George’s boat went straight.

An hour later, while George’s mother was being sedated in the Emergency Room at Derry Home Hospital and while Stuttering Bill sat stunned and white and silent in his bed, listening to his father sob hoarsely in the parlor where his mother had been playing Für Elise when George went out, the boat shot out through a concrete loophole like a bullet exiting the muzzle of a gun and ran at speed down a sluiceway and into an unnamed stream. When it joined the boiling, swollen Penobscot River twenty minutes later, the first rifts of blue had begun to show in the sky overhead. The storm was over.

The boat dipped and swayed and sometimes took on water, but it did not sink; the two brothers had waterproofed it well. I do not know where it finally fetched up, if ever it did; perhaps it reached the sea and sails there forever, like a magic boat in a fairytale. All I know is that it was still afloat and still running on the breast of the flood when it passed the incorporated town limits of Derry, Maine, and there it passes out of this tale forever.

CHAPTER 2

After the Festival (1984)

1

The reason Adrian was wearing the hat, his sobbing boyfriend would later tell the police, was because he had won it at the Pitch Til U Win stall on the Bassey Park fairgrounds just six days before his death. He was proud of it.

“He was wearing it because he loved this shitty little town!” the boyfriend, Don Hagarty, screamed at the cops.

“Now, now—there’s no need for that sort of language,” Officer Harold Gardener told Hagarty. Harold Gardener was one of Dave Gardener’s four sons. On the day his father had discovered the lifeless, one-armed body of George Denbrough, Harold Gardener had been five. On this day, almost twenty-seven years later, he was thirty-two and balding. Harold Gardener recognized the reality of Don Hagarty’s grief and pain, and at the same time found it impossible to take seriously. This man—if you want to call him a man—was wearing lipstick and satin pants so tight you could almost read the wrinkles in his cock. Grief or no grief, pain or no pain, he was, after all, just a queer. Like his friend, the late Adrian Mellon.

“Let’s go through it again,” Harold’s partner, Jeffrey Reeves, said. “The two of you came out of the Falcon and turned toward the Canal. Then what?”

“How many times do I have to tell you idiots?” Hagarty was still screaming. “They killed him! They pushed him over the side! Just another day in Macho City for them!” Don Hagarty began to cry.

“One more time,” Reeves repeated patiently. “You came out of the Falcon. Then what?”

2

In an interrogation room just down the hall, two Derry cops were speaking with Steve Dubay, seventeen; in the Clerk of Probate’s office upstairs, two more were questioning John “Webby” Garton, eighteen; and in the Chief of Police’s office on the fifth floor, Chief Andrew Rademacher and Assistant District Attorney Tom Boutillier were questioning fifteen-year-old Christopher Unwin. Unwin, who wore faded jeans, a grease-smeared tee-shirt, and blocky engineer boots, was weeping. Rademacher and Boutillier had taken him because they had quite accurately assessed him as the weak link in the chain.

“Let’s go through it again,” Boutillier said in this office just as Jeffrey Reeves was saying the same thing two floors down.

“We didn’t mean to kill him,” Unwin blubbered. “It was the hat. We couldn’t believe he was still wearing the hat after, you know, after what Webby said the first time. And I guess we wanted to scare him.”

“For what he said,” Chief Rademacher interjected.

“Yes.”

“To John Garton, on the afternoon of the 17th.”

“Yes, to Webby.” Unwin burst into fresh tears. “But we tried to save him when we saw he was in trouble . . . at least me and Stevie Dubay did . . . we didn’t mean to kill him!”

“Come on, Chris, don’t shit us,” Boutillier said. “You threw the little queer into the Canal.”

“Yes, but—”

“And the three of you came in to make a clean breast of things. Chief Rademacher and I appreciate that, don’t we, Andy?”

“You bet. It takes a man to own up to what he did, Chris.”

“So don’t fuck yourself up by lying now. You meant to throw him over the minute you saw him and his fag buddy coming out of the Falcon, didn’t you?”

“No!” Chris Unwin protested vehemently.

Boutillier took a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and stuck one in his mouth. He offered the pack to Unwin. “Cigarette?”

Unwin took one. Boutillier had to chase the tip with a match in order to give him a light because of the way Unwin’s mouth was trembling.

“But when you saw he was wearing the hat?” Rademacher asked.

Unwin dragged deep, lowered his head so that his greasy hair fell in his eyes, and jetted smoke from his nose, which was littered with blackheads.

“Yeah,” he said, almost too softly to be heard.

Boutillier leaned forward, brown eyes gleaming. His face was predatory but his voice was gentle. “What, Chris?”

“I said yes. I guess so. To throw him in. But not to kill him.” He looked up at them, face frantic and miserable and still unable to comprehend the stupendous changes which had taken place in his life since he left the house to take in the last night of Derry’s Canal Days Festival with two of his buddies at seven-thirty the previous evening. “Not to kill him!” he repeated. “And that guy under the bridge . . . I still don’t know who he was.”

“What guy was that?” Rademacher asked, but without much interest. They had heard this part before as well, and neither of them believed it—sooner or later men accused of murder almost always drag out that mysterious other guy. Boutillier even had a name for it: he called it the “One-Armed Man Syndrome,” after that old TV series The Fugitive.