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
The voice broke up in a series of choking hiccups and suddenly a bright red bubble backed up the drain and popped, spraying beads of blood on the distained porcelain.
The choking voice spoke rapidly now, and as it spoke it changed: now it was the young voice of the child that she had first heard, now it was a teenaged girl’s voice, now — horribly — it became the voice of a girl Beverly had known . . . Veronica Grogan. But Veronica was dead, she had been found dead in a sewer-drain —
‘I’m Matthew . . . I’m Betty . . . I’m Veronica . . . we’re down here . . . down here with the clown . . . and the creature . . . and the mummy . . . and the werewolf . . . and you, Beverly, we’re down here with you, and we float, we change . . . ‘
A gout of blood suddenly belched from the drain, splattering the sink and the mirror and the wallpaper with its frogs-and –l i l y –pads pattern. Beverly screamed, suddenly and piercingly. She backed away from the sink, struck the door, rebounded, clawed it open, and ran for the living room, where her father was just getting to his feet.
‘What the Sam Hill’s wrong with you?’ he asked, his brows drawing together. The two of them were here alone this evening; Bev’s mom was working the three-to-eleven shift at Green’s Farm, Derry’s best restaurant.
‘The bathroom!’ she cried hysterically. ‘The bathroom, Daddy, in the bathroom — ‘
‘Was someone peekin at you, Beverly? Huh?’ His arm shot out and his hand gripped her arm hard, sinking into the flesh. There was concern on his face but it was a predatory concern, somehow more frightening than comforting.
‘No . . . the sink . . . in the sink . . . the . . . the . . . ‘ She burst into hysterical tears before she could say anything more. Her heart was thundering so hard in her chest that she thought it would choke her.
Al Marsh thrust her aside with an ‘O-Jesus –Christ-what-next’ expression on his face and went into the bathroom. He was in there so long that Beverly became afraid again.
Then he bawled: ‘Beverly! You come here, girl!’
There was no question of not going. If the two of them had been standing on the edge of a high cliff and he had told her to step off — right now, girl — her instinctive obedience would almost certainly have carried her over the edge before her rational mind could have intervened.
The bathroom door was open. There her father stood, a big man who was now losing the red-auburn hair he had passed on to Beverly. He was still wearing his gray fatigue pants and his gray shirt (he was a janitor at the Derry Home Hospital), and he was looking hard at Beverly. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not chase after women. I got all the women I need at home, he said on occasion, and when he said it a peculiar secretive smile would cross his face — it did not brighten it but did quite the opposite. Watching that smile was like watching the shadow of a cloud travel rapidly across a rocky field. They take care ofme, and when they need it, I take care of them.
‘Now just what the Sam Hill is this foolishness all about?’ he asked as she came in.
Beverly felt as if her throat had been lined with slate. Her heart raced in her chest. She thought that she might vomit soon. There was blood on the mirror running in long drips. There were spots of blood on the light over the sink; she could smell it cooking onto the 40-watt bulb. Blood ran down the porcelain sides of the sink and plopped in fat drops on the linoleum floor.
‘Daddy . . . ‘ she whispered huskily.
He turned, disgusted with her (as he was so often), and began casually to wash his hands in the bloody sink. ‘Good God, girl. Speak up. You scared hell out of me. Explain yourself, for Lord’s sake.’
He was washing his hands in the basin, she could see blood staining the gray fabric of his pants where they rubbed against the lip of the sink, and if his forehead touched the mirror (it was close) it would be on his skin. She made a choked noise in her throat.
He turned off the water, grabbed a towel on which two fans of blood from the drain had splashed, and began to dry his hands. She watched, near swooning, as he grimed blood into his big knuckles and the lines of his palms. She could see blood under his fingernails
