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
stuck out his hand and said, ‘Welcome back to Derry, Big Bill.’
Bill ignored the hand and embraced Mike. Mike hugged him back fiercely, and Bill could feel his hair, stiff and kinky, against his own shoulder and the side of his neck.
‘Whatever’s wrong, Mike, we’ll take care of it,’ Bill said. He heard the rough sound of tears in his throat and didn’t care. ‘We beat it once, and we can b-beat it a-a-again.’
Mike pulled away from him, held him at arm’s length; although he was still smiling, there was too much sparkle in his eyes. He took out hi s handkerchief and wiped them. ‘Sure, Bill,’ he said. ‘You bet.’
‘Would you gentlemen like to follow me?’ the hostess asked. She was a smiling Oriental woman in a delicate pink kimono upon which a dragon cavorted and curled its plated tail. Her dark hair was piled high on her head and held with ivory combs.
‘I know the way, Rose,’ Mike said.
‘Very good, Mr Hanlon.’ She smiled at both of them. ‘You are well met in friendship, I think.’
‘I think we are,’ Mike said. ‘This way, Bill.’
He led him down a dim corridor, past the main dining room and toward a door where a beaded curtain hung.
‘The others — ?’ Bill began.
‘All here now,’ Mike said. ‘All that could come.’
Bill hesitated for a moment outside the door, suddenly frightened. It was not the unknown that scared him, not the supernatural; it was the simple knowledge that he was fifteen inches taller than he had been in 1958 and minus most of his hair. He was suddenly uneasy — almost terrified — at the thought of seeing them all again, their children’s faces almost worn away, almost buried under change as the old hospital had been buried. Banks erected inside their heads where once magic picture-palaces had stood.
We grew up, he thought. We didn’t think it would happen, not then, not to us. But it did, and if I go in there it will be real: we’re all grownups now.
He looked at Mike, suddenly bewildered and timid. ‘How do they look?’ he heard himself asking in a faltering voice. ‘Mike . . . how do they look?’
‘Come in a nd find out,’ Mike said, kindly enough, and led Bill into the small private room.
2
Bill Denbrough Gets a Look
Perhaps it was simply the dimness of the room that caused the illusion, which lasted for only the briefest moment, but Bill wondered later if it wasn’t some sort of message meant strictly for him: that fate could also be kind.
In that brief moment it seemed to him that none of them had grown up, that his friends had somehow done a Peter Pan act and were all still children.
Richie Tozier wa s rocked back in his chair so that he was leaning against the wall, caught in the act of saying something to Beverly Marsh, who had a hand cupped over her mouth to hide a giggle; Richie had a wise-ass grin on his face that was perfectly familiar. There was Eddie Kaspbrak, sitting on Beverly’s left, and in front of him on the table, next to his water-glass, was a plastic squeeze-bottle with a pistol-grip handle curving down from its top. The trimmings were a little more state-of-the –art, but the purpose was obviously the same: it was an aspirator. Sitting at one end of the table, watching this trio with an expression of mixed anxiety, amusement, and concentration, was Ben Hanscom.
Bill found his hand wanting to go to his head and realized with a sorry kind of amusement that in that second he had almost rubbed his pate to see if his haur had magically come back — that red, fine hair that he had begun to lose when he was only a college sophomore.
That broke the bubble. Richie was not wearing glasses, he saw, and thought: He probablyhas contacts now — he would. He hated those glasses. The tee-shirts and cord pants he’d
habitually worn had been replaced by a suit that hadn’t been purchased off any rack — B i l l estimated that he was looking at nine hundred dollars’ worth of tailor-made on the hoof.
Beverly Marsh (if her name still was Marsh) had become a stunningly beautiful woman. Instead of the casual pony-tail, her hair — which was almost exactly the same shade his own had been — spilled over the shoulders of her plain white Ship ‘n Shore blouse in a torrent of subdued color. In this dim light it merely glowed like a well-banked bed of embers. In daylight, even the light of such a subdued day as this one, Bill imagined it would flame. And he found himself wondering what it would feel like to plunge his hands into that hair.
