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
movie. He had thought he was forgetting that, but apparently he had been fooling himself because now he could see those cuts whirling up Billy’s fingers. If he hadn’t pulled Bill back —
Incredibly, Bill was grinning. Actually grinning. ‘Y-Y-You wuh-wanted m-me to take y-you to luh-luh –look at a p-picture,’ he said. ‘N-Now I w-want to t-take you to l-look at a h-house. Tit for t-tat.’
‘You got no tits,’ Richie said, and they both burst ou t laughing.
‘T-Tomorrow muh-muh-morning,’ Bill said, as if it had been resolved.
‘And if it’s a monster?’ Richie asked, holding Bill’s eyes. ‘If your dad’s gun doesn’t stop it, Big Bill? If it just keeps coming?’
‘Wuh –wuh-we’ll thuh-thuh-think of suh –homething else,’ Bill said again. ‘We’ll h-h-have to.’ He threw back his head and laughed like a loon. After a moment Richie joined him. It was impossible not to.
They walked up the crazy-paving to Richie’s porch together. Maggie had set out huge glasses of iced tea with mint-sprigs in them and a plate of vanilla wafers.
‘Yuh-you w-w-want t-t-to?’
‘Well, no,’ Richie said. ‘But I will.’
Bill clapped him on the back, hard, and that seemed to make the fear bearable — although Richie was suddenly sure (and he was not wrong) that sleep would be long coming that night.
‘You boys looked like you were having a serious discussion out there,’ Mrs Tozier said, sitting down with her book in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other. She ol oked at the boys expectantly.
‘Aw, Denbrough’s got this crazy idea the Red Sox are going to finish in the first division,’ Richie said.
‘M-Me and my d-d-d-d-dad th-think t-they got a sh-shot at t-third,’ Bill said, and slipped his iced tea. T-This is veh-veh-very go-good, Muh-Mrs Tozier.’
Thank you, Bill.’
‘The year the Sox finish in the first division will be the year you stop stuttering, mush mouth,’ Richie said.
‘Richie!’ Mrs Tozier screamed, shocked. She nearly dropped her glass of iced tea. But both Richie and Bill Denbrough were laughing hysterically, totally cracked up. She looked from her son to Bill and back to her son again, touched by wonder that was mostly simple perplexity but partly a fear so thin and sharp that it found it s way deep into her inner heart and vibrated there like a tuning-fork made of clear ice.
I don’t understand either of them, she thought. Where they go, what they do, what they want . . . or what will become of them. Sometimes, oh sometimes their eyes are wild, and sometimes I’m afraid for them and sometimes I’m afraid of them . . .
She found herself thinking, not for the first time, that it would have been nice if she and Went could have had a girl as well, a pretty blonde girl that she could have dressed in skirts and matching bows and black patent-leather shoes on Sundays. A pretty little girl who would ask to bake cupcakes after school and who would want dolls instead of books on ventriloquism and Revell models of cars that went fast.
A pretty little girl she could have understood.
12
‘Did you get it?’ Richie asked anxiously.
They were walking their bikes up Kansas Street beside the Barrens at ten o’clock the next morning. The sky was a dull gray. Rain had been forecast for that afternoon. Richie hadn’t gotten to sleep until after midnight and he thought Denbrough looked as if he had spent a fairly restless night himself; ole Big Bill was toting a matched set of Samsonite bags, one under each eye.
‘I g-got it,’ Bill said. He patted the green duffel coat he was wearing.
‘Lemme see,’ Richie said, fascinated.
‘Not now,’ Bill said, and then grinned. ‘Someone eh-eh-else might see, too. But l-l-look what else I bruh-brought.’ He reached behind him, under the coat, and brought his Bullseye slingshot out of his back pocket.
‘Oh shit, we’re in trouble,’ Richie said, beginning to laugh.
Bill pretended to be hurt. ‘Ih-Ih-It was y-your idea, T-T-Tozier.’
Bill had gotten the custom aluminum slingshot for his birthday the year before. It had been Zack’s compromise between the .22 Bill had wanted and his mother’s adamant refusal to even consider giving a boy Bill’s age a firearm. The instruction booklet said a slingshot could be a fine hunting weapon, once you learned to use it. ‘In the right hands, your Bullseye Slingshot is as deadly and effective as a good ash bow or a high-powered firearm,’ the booklet proclaimed. With such virtues dutifully extolled,
