A foot the size of a house, and he’s enraptured. Starry-eyed, David stares up and up and up, past thighs the length of an office building, a chest the width of a city block, to a head you could fit all of city hall into. He’s never seen anything so powerfully erotic.

The streets are lit with the fires tearing through the city, a guttering light licking against the unnatural darkness that swept through town when the power plant exploded, soft as candleglow against that titanic hide. He picks his way determinedly through rubble in Its gargantuan wake, trailing the siren song of screaming destruction.

As he gets closer, the streets empty of everyone except soldiers. He gives up trying to explain himself after a well-meaning but mildly alarmed corporal insists on personally escorting him back to the lines. They can’t understand, and it doesn’t really matter.

In the final block he rams a garbage can through a plate glass window and climbs 70 flights of stairs to the roof, barely keeping his feet as the building shudders and jumps. At the top he’s barely up to Its shoulder, and he has a frisson of vertigo as he climbs over the edge and curls his toes into nothing. Heart in his mouth, he leaps, out and down, betting everything on love.