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
Prince Albert in a can? . . . You do? . . . Better let the poor guy out!» «Pardon me, ma’am, is your refrigerator running? . . . It is? . . . Then hadn’t you better go catch it?'»
The clown on the landing threw its head back and shrieked laughter. It roared and echoed in the dome of the rotunda like a flight of black bats, and Ben was only able to keep from clapping his hands over his ears with a tremendous effort of will.
‘Come on up, Ben,’ Pennywise called down. ‘We’ll talk. Neutral ground. What do you say?’
I’m not coming up there, Ben thought. When I finally come to you, you won’t want to see me, I think. We’re going to kill you.
The clown shrieked laughter again. ‘Kill me? Kill me?’ And suddenly, horribly, the voice was Richie Tozier’s voice, not his voice, precisely, but Richie Tozier doing his Pickaninny Voice: ‘Doan kill me, massa, I be a good nigguh, doan kill thisyere black boy, Haystack!’ Then that shrieking laughter again.
Trembling, white-faced, Ben walked across the echoing center of the adults’ library. He felt that soon he would vomit. He stood in front of a shelf of books and took one down at random with a hand that trembled badly. His cold fingers flittered the pages.
‘This is your one chance, Haystack!’ the voice called from behind an d above him. ‘Get out of town. Get out before it gets dark tonight. I’ll be after you tonight . . . you and the others. You’re too old to stop me, Ben. You’re all too old. Too old to do anything but get yourselves killed. Get out, Ben. Do you want to see this tonight?’
He turned slowly, still holding the book in his icy hands. He didn’t want to look, but it were as if there were an invisible hand under his chin, tilting his head up and up and up.
The clown was gone. Dracula was standing at the top of the lefthand stairway, but it was no movie Dracula; it was not Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee or Frank Langella or Francis Lederer or Reggie Nalder. An ancient man-thing with a face like a twisted root stood there. Its face was deadly pale, its eyes pur plish-red, the color of bloodclots. Its mouth dropped open, revealing a mouthful of Gillette Blue –Blades that had been set in the gums at angles; it was like looking into a deadly mirror-maze where a single misstep could get you cut in half.
‘KEEE-RUNCH!’ it screamed, and its jaws snapped closed. Blood gouted from its mouth in a red-black flood. Chunks of its severed lips fell to the glowing white silk of its formal shirt and slid down its front, leaving snail-trails of blood behind.
‘What did Stan Uris see before he died?’ the vampire on the landing screamed down at him, laughing through the bloody hole of its mouth. ‘Was it Prince Albert in a can? Was it Davy
Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier? What did he see, Ben? Do you want to see it too? What did he see? What did he see?’ Then that shrieking laughter again, and Ben knew that he would scream now himself, yes, there was no way to stop the scream, it was going to come. Blood was pattering down from the landing in a grisly shower. One drop had landed on the arthritis-bunched hand of an old man who was reading The Wall Street Journal. It was running down between his knuckles, unseen and unfelt.
Ben hitched in breath, sure the scream would follow, unthinkable in the quiet of this softly drizzling spring afternoon, as shocking as the slash of a knife . . . or a mouthful of razor-blades.
Instead, what came out in a shaky, uneven rush, spoken instead of screamed, spoken low like a prayer, were these words: ‘We made slugs out of it, of course. We made the silver dollar into silver slugs.’
The gentleman in the driving-cap who had been perusing the de Vargas sketches looked up sharply. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. Now people did look up; someone hissed ‘Shhh!’ at the old man in an annoyed voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said in a low, trembling voice. He was faintly aware that his face was now running with sweat, and that his shirt was plastered to his body. ‘I was thinking aloud — ‘
‘Nonsense,’ the old gentleman repeated, in a louder voice. ‘Can’t make silver bullets from silver dollars. Common misconception. Pulp fiction. Problem is with specific gravity — ‘
Suddenly the woman, Ms. Danner, was there. ‘Mr Brockhill, you’ll have to be quiet,’ she said
