A promise made twenty-eight years ago calls seven adults to reunite in Derry, Maine, where as teenagers they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city’s children. Unsure that their Losers Club had vanquished the creature all those years ago, the seven had vowed to return to Derry if IT should ever reappear. Now, children are being murdered again and their repressed memories of that summer return as they prepare to do battle with the monster lurking in Derry’s sewers once more.
Авторы: King Stephen Edwin
Eddie laughs at this — not much of a sound, just a snort, but the sound of it startles him into a real laugh. He laughs seldom these days, and he certainly did not expect to find many chucks (Richie’s word, meaning chuckles, as in ‘You had any good chucks today, Eds?’) on this black pilgrimage. But, he supposes, if God is dirty-mean enough to curse the faithful with what they want most in life, He’s maybe quirky enough to deal you a good chuck or two along the way.
‘Had any good chucks lately, Eds?’ he says out loud, and laughs again. Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds . . . but he had sort of liked it, too. The way he thought Ben Hanscom got to like Richie calling him Haystack. It was something . . . like a secret name. A secret identity. A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents’ fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldn’t do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was for creeps like them to sometimes be different people .
Eddie glances at the change lined up neatly on the ‘Dorado’s dashboard — lining up the change is another of those automatic tricks of the trade. When the tollbooths come up, you never want to have to dig for your silver, never want to find that you’ve gotten in an automatic –toll lane with the wrong change.
Among the coins are two or three Susan B. Anthony silver dollars. They are coins, he reflects, that you probably only find in the pockets of chauffeurs and taxi-drivers from the New York area these days, just as the only place you are apt to see a lot of two-dollar bills is at a race-track payoff window. He always keeps a few on hand because the robot tolltaker baskets on the George Washington and the Triboro Bridges take them.
Another of those lights suddenly comes on in his head: silver dollars. Not these fake copper sandwiches but real silver dollars, with Lady Liberty dressed in her gauzy robes stamped upon them. Ben Hanscom’s silver dollars. Yes, but wasn’t it Bill who once used one of those silver cartwheels to save their lives? He is not quite sure of this, is, in fact, not quite sure of anything . . . or is it just that he doesn’t want to remember?
It was dark in there, he thinks suddenly. I remember that much. It was dark
in there.
Boston is well behind him now and the fog is starting to bum off. Ahead is MAINE, N.H., ALL NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND POINTS. Derry is ahead, and there is something in Derry whichshould be twenty-seven years dead and yet is somehow not. Something with as many faces as Lon Chaney. But what is it really.’ Didn’t they see it at the end as it really was, with all its masks cast aside?
Ah, he can remember so much . . . but not enough.
He remembers that he loved Bill Denbrough; he remembers that well enough. Bill never made fun of his asthma. Bill never called him little sissy queerboy. He loved Bill like he would have loved a big brother . . .
