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
He wore a baggy suit with big orange-pompom buttons; on his hands were cartoon gloves.
‘If you need help, Don,’ the clown said, ‘help yourself to a balloon.’
And it offered the bunch it held in one hand.
‘They float,’ the clown said. ‘Down here we all float; pretty soon your friend will float too.’
12
‘This clown called you by name,’ Jeff Reeves said in a totally expressionless voice. He looked over Hagarty’s bent head at Harold Gardener, and one eye drew down in a wink. ‘Yes,’ Hagarty said, not looking up. ‘I know how it sounds.’
13
‘So then you threw him over,’ Boutillier said. ‘Bum’s rush.» ‘Not me!’ Unwin said, looking up. He flicked the hair out of his eyes with one hand and stared at them urgently. ‘When I saw they really meant to do it, I tried to pull Steve away, because I knew the guy might get banged up . . . . It was like ten feet to the water . . . . ‘ It was twenty-three. One of Chief Rademacher’s patrolmen had already measured. ‘But it was like he was crazy. The two of them kept yelling «Bum’s rush! Bum’s rush!» and they picked him up. Webby had him under the arms and Steve had him by the seat of the pants, and . . . and . . . ‘
14
When Hagarty saw what they were doing, he rushed back toward them, screaming ‘No! No! No!’ at the top of his voice.
Chris Unwin pushed him backward and Hagarty landed in a teeth-rattling heap on the sidewalk. ‘Do you want to go over, too?’ he whispered. ‘You run, baby!’
They threw Adrian Mellon over the bridge and into the water then. Hagarty heard the splash.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Steve Dubay said. He and Webby were backing toward the car.
Chris Unwin went to the railing and looked over. He saw Hagarty first, sliding and clawing his way down the weedy, trash-littered embankment to the water. Then he saw the clown. The clown was dragging Adrian out on the far side with one arm; its balloons were in its
other hand. Adrian was dripping wet, choking, moaning. The clown twisted its head and grinned up at Chris. Chris said he saw its shining silver eyes and its bared teeth — great big teeth, he said.
‘Like the lion in the circus, man,’ he said. ‘I mean, they were that big.’
Then, he said, he saw the clown shove one of Adrian Mellon’s arms back so it lay over his head.
Then what, Chris?’ Boutillier said. He was bored with this part. Fairy tales had bored him since the age of eight on.
‘I dunno,’ Chris said. ‘That was when Steve grabbed me and hauled me into the car. But . . . I think it bit into his armpit.’ He looked up at them again, uncertain now. ‘I think that’s what it did. Bit into his armpit.
‘Like it wanted to eat him, man. Like it wanted to eat his heart.’
15
No, Hagarty said when he was presented with Chris Unwin’s story in the form of questions. The clown did not drag Ade up on the far bank, at least not that he saw — and he would grant that he had been something less than a disinterested observer by that point; by that point he had been out of his fucking mind.
The clown, he said, was standing near the far bank with Adrian’s dripping body clutched in its arms. Ade’s right arm was stuck stiffly out behind the clown’s head, and the clown’s face was indeed in Ade’s right armpit, but it was not biting: it was smiling. Hagarty could see it looking out from beneath Ade’s arm and smiling.
The clown’s arms tightened, and Hagarty heard ribs splinter.
Ade shrieked.
‘Float with us, Don,’ the clown said out of its grinning red mouth, and then pointed with one of its white-gloved hands under the bridge.
Balloons floated against the underside of the bridge — not a dozen or a dozen dozens but thousands, red and blue and green and yellow, and printed on the side of each was I ¤ DERRY!
16
‘Well now, that surely does sound like a lot of balloons,’ Reeves said, and tipped Harold Gardener another wink.
‘I know how it sounds,’ Hagarty reiterated in the same dreary voice.
‘You saw those balloons,’ Gardener said.
Don Hagarty slowly held his hands up in front of his face. ‘I saw them as clearly as I can see my own fingers at this moment. Thousands of them. You couldn’t even see the underside of the bridge — there were too many of them. They were rippling a little, and sort of bouncing up and down. There was a sound. A funny low squealing noise. That was their sides rubbing together. And strings. There was a forest of white strings hanging down. They looked like white strands of spiderweb. The clown took Ade under there. I could see its suit brushing through those strings. Ade was making awful choking sounds. I started after him . . . and the clown looked back. I saw its eyes,
