Excerpt from “IT” by Stephen King, page 411He wanted to tell them that those dead boys who had lurched and shambled their way
down the spiral staircase had done something worse than frighten him: they had
offended him.
Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would
laugh – they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to
be. They offended any sane person’s sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos build their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He had said: in effect: “Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a train whistle suddenly drops it’s the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn’t the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about half way up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there’s blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.”
You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but
for a long, long time. It’s
offense you maybe can't live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are living things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down in that dark, and after a while you think maybe there’s a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I’d scream and scream and scream.
Because it wouldn’t look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.
