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
I really don’t know if I can face all of that, Richie thinks. I mean, let’s tell the truth here, folks. I just don’t know if I can.
The whole previous night has passed in a dream for him. As long as he continued travelling, moving forward, making miles, the dream went on. But now he has stopped — or rather the sign has stopped him — and he has awakened to a strange truth: the dream was the reality. Derry is the reality.
It seems he just cannot stop remembering, he thinks the memories will eventually drive him mad, and now he bites down on his lip and puts his hands together palm to palm, tight, as if to keep himself from flying apart. He feels that he will fly apart, and soon. There seems to be some mad part of him which actually looks forward to what may be coming, but most of him only wonders how he’s going to get through the next few days. He —
And now his thoughts break off again.
A deer is walking out into the road. He can hear the light thud of its spring-soft hoofs on the tar.
Richie’s breath stops in mid-exhale, then slowly starts again. He looks, dumbfounded, part of him thinking that he never saw anything like this on Rodeo Drive. No — he’d needed to come back home to see something like this.
It’s a doe (‘Doe, a deer, a female deer,’ a Voice chants merrily in his head). She’s out of the woods on the right and pauses in the middle of Route 7, front legs on one side of the broken white line, rear legs on the other. Her dark eyes regard Rich Tozier mildly. He reads interest in those eyes but no fear.
He looks at her in wonder, thinking she’s an omen or a portent or some sort of Madame Azonka shit like that. And then, quite unexpectedly, a memory of Mr Nell comes to him. What a start he had given them that day, busting in on them in the wake of Bill’s story and Ben’s story and Eddie’s story! The whole bunch of them had damn near gone up to heaven.
Now, looking at the deer, Rich draws in a deep breath and finds himself speaking in one of his Voices . . . but for the first time in twenty-five years or more it is the Voice of the Irish Cop, one he had incorporated into his repertoire after that memorable day. It comes rolling out of the morning silence like a great big bowling ball — it is louder and bigger than Richie would ever have believed:
