Kills Georgie

'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 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.

Chapter 1