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
Knowing? But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?
‘I love what you’ve done to the place.’
‘Do you?’ Mrs Kersh said, and poured out. The tea looked dark, muddy. Beverly wasn’t sure she wanted to drink it . . . and suddenly she wasn’t sure she wanted to be here at all.
It did say Marsh under the doorbell, her mind whispered suddenly, and she was frightened.
Mrs Kersh passed her tea.
Thank you,’ Beverly said. The look of it might have been muddy; the aroma, however, was wonderful. She tasted. It was fine. Stop jumping at shadows, she told herself. That cedar chest in particular is a wonderful piece.’
‘An antique, that one!’ Mrs Kersh said, and laughed. Beverly noticed that the old woman’s beauty was flawed on only one score, and that was common enough here in the northlands. Her teeth were very bad — strong-looking, but bad all the same. They were yellow, and the front two had crossed each other. The canines seemed very long, almost like tusks.
They were white . . . when she came to the door she smiled and you thought to yourself how white they were.
Suddenly she was not just a little frightened. Suddenly she wanted — needed — to be away from here.
‘Very old, oh yes!’ Mrs Kersh exclaimed, and drank her cup of tea off at a single gulp, with a sudden, shocking slurping sound. She smiled at Beverly — grinned at her — and Beverly saw that the woman’s eyes had changed, too. The corneas were now yellow, ancient, threaded with bleary stitches of red. Her hair was thinner; the braid looked malnourished, no longer silver shot with bright yellow but a dull gray.
‘Very old,’ Mrs Kersh reminisced over her empty cup, looking slyly at Beverly from her yellowed eyes. Her snaggle teeth showed in that repulsive, almost leering grin. ‘From home with me it came. The RG carved into it? You noticed?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice came from far away, and a part of her brain yammered If she doesn’t knowyou’ve seen the change perhaps you’re still all right, if she doesn’t know, doesn’t see —
‘My father,’ she said, pronouncing it fodder, and Beverly saw that her dress had also changed. It had become a scabrous, peeling black. The cameo was a skull, its jaw hung in a diseased gape. ‘His name was Robert Gray, better known as Bob Gray, better known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Although that was not his name, either. But he did love hi s joke, my fadder.’
She laughed again. Some of her teeth had turned as black as her dress. The wrinkles in her skin now cut deep. Her milk-rose skin had gone a sickly yellow. Her ringers were claws. She grinned at Beverly. ‘Have something to eat, dear.’ Her voice had risen half an octave, but the octave was cracked in this register, and her voice was the sound of a crypt door swinging mindlessly on hinges clogged with black earth.
‘No, thank you,’ Beverly heard her mouth say in a child’s high oh-I-must-be-going voice. The words did not seem to originate in her brain; rather they came out of her mouth and then had to travel around to her ears before she was aware of what she had said.
‘No?’ the witch asked, and grinned. Her claws scrabbled on the plate and she began to cram thin molasses cookies and delicate frosted slices of cake into her mouth with both hands. Her horrid teeth plunged and reared, plunged and reared; her fingernails, long and dirty, dug into the sweets; crumbs tumbled down the bony slab of her chin. Her breath was the smell of long-dead things burst wide open by the gases of their own decay. Her laugh was now a dead cackle. Her hair was thinner. Scaly scalp showed in patches.
‘Oh, he loved his joke, my fadder! This is a joke, miss, if you enjoy them: my fadder bore me rather than my mutter. He shat me from his asshole! Hee! Hee! Hee!’
‘I ought to go,’ Beverly heard herself say in that same high wounded voice — the voice of a small girl who has been viciously embarrassed at her first party. There was no strength in her legs. She was dimly aware that it was not tea in her cup but shit, liquid shit, a little party-favor from the sewers under the city. She had drunk some of that, not much but a sip, oh God,oh God, oh blessed Jesus, please, please —
The woman was shrinking before her eyes, thinning; it was now a crone with an apple-doll’s face who sat across from her, giggling in a high, squealing voice and rocking back and forth.
‘Oh
