It

the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell.
The clown held a bunch of balloons, all colors, like gorgeous ripe fruit in one hand.
In the other he held George’s newspaper boat.
‘Want your boat, Georgie?’ The clown smiled.
George smiled back. He couldn’t help it; it was the kind of smile you just had to answer. ‘I sure do,’ he said.
The clown laughed. ‘»I sure do.» That’s good! That’s very good! And how about a balloon?’
‘Well . . . sure!’ He reached forward . . . and then drew his hand reluctantly back. ‘I’m not supposed to take stuff from strangers. My dad said so.’
‘Very wise of your dad,’ the clown in the stormdrain said, smiling. How, George wondered, could I have thought his eyes were yellow? They were a bright, dancing blue, the color of his mom’s eyes, and Bill’s. ‘Very wise indeed. Therefore I will introduce myself. I, Georgie, am Mr Bob Gray, also known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Pennywise, meet George Denbrough. George, meet Pennywise. And now we know each other. I’m not a stranger to you, and you’re not a stranger to me. Kee-rect?’
George giggled. ‘I guess so.’ He reached forward again . . . and drew his hand back again. ‘How did you get down there?’
‘Storm just bleeeew me away,’ Pennywise the Dancing Clown said. ‘It blew the whole circus away. Can you smell the circus, Georgie?’
George leaned forward. Suddenly he could smell peanuts! Hot roasted peanuts! And vinegar! The white kind you put on your french fries through a hole in the cap! He could smell cotton candy and frying doughboys and the faint but thunderous odor of wild –animal shit. He could smell the cheery aroma of midway sawdust. And yet . . .
And yet under it all was the smell of flood and decomposing leaves and dark stormdrain shadows. That smell was wet and rotten. The cellar-smell.
But the other smells were stronger.
‘You bet I can smell it,’ he said.
‘Want your boat, Georgie?’ Pennywise asked. ‘I only repeat myself because you really do not seem that eager.’ He held it up, smiling. He was wearing a baggy silk suit with great big orange buttons. A bright tie, electric – blue, flopped down his front, and on his hands were big white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.
‘Yes, sure,’ George said, looking into the stormdrain.
‘And a balloon? I’ve got red and green and yellow and blue . . . . ‘
‘Do they float?’
‘Float?’ The clown’s grin widened. ‘Oh yes, indeed they do. They float! And there’s cotton candy . . . . ‘
George reached.
The clown seized his arm.
And George saw the clown’s face change.
What he saw then was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke.
‘They float,’ the thing in the drain crooned in a clotted, chuckling voice. It held George’s arm in its thick and wormy grip, it pulled George toward that terrible darkness where the water rushed and roared and bellowed as it bore its cargo of storm debris toward the sea. George craned his neck away from that final blackness and began to scream into the rain, to scream mindlessly into the white autumn sky which curved above Derry on that day in the fall of 1957. His screams were shrill and piercing, and all up and down Witcham Street people came to then — windows or boiled out onto their porches.
‘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 rain-slicker, 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