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
popularized by Fess Parker in the Disney movie about Davy Crockett, perched on its head. In one hand it held a bunch of balloons. In the other it held the leg of a child like a chicken drumstick. Written on each balloon was the legend IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE.
‘Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race,’ it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the porch steps after her. ‘The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women . . . rape all the men . . . and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!’
It began to do a mad shuck-and –jive, balloons in one hand, severed, bleeding leg in the other. The clown costume writhed and flapped, but Beverly felt no wind. Her legs tangled in each other and she spilled to the pavement, throwing out her palms to take up the shock, which went all the way to her shoulders. The woman pushing the grocery cart paused and looked back doubtfully, then hurried on a little faster.
The clown came toward her again, casting the severed leg aside. It landed on the lawn with an indescribable thud. Beverly only lay sprawled on the pavement for a moment, sure somewhere inside that she must wake soon, this couldn’t be real, had to be a dream —
She realized that wasn’t true a moment before the clown’s crooked, long-clawed fingers touched her. It was real; it could kill her. As it had killed the children.
‘The grackles know your real name!’ she screamed at it suddenly. It recoiled, and it seemed to her that for a moment the grin on the lips inside the great red grin that had been painted on and around them became a grimace of hate and pain . . . and perhaps of fear as well. It might only have been her imagination, an d she certainly had no idea why she had said such a crazy thing, but it bought her an instant of time.
She was on her feet and running. Brakes squealed and a hoarse voice, both mad and scared, yelled: ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going, you dumb quiff!’ She had a blurred impression of the bakery truck that had almost hit her when she bolted into the street like a child after a rubber ball, and then she was standing on the opposite sidewalk, panting, a hot stitch in her left side. The bakery truck went on down Lower Main.
The clown was gone. The leg was gone. The house still stood there, but she saw now that it was crumbling and deserted, the windows boarded up, the steps leading up to the porch cracked and broken.
Was I really in there, or did I dream it all?
But her jeans were dirty, her yellow blouse smeared with dust.
And there was chocolate on her fingers.
She rubbed them on the legs of her jeans and walked away fast, her face hot, her back cold as ice, her eyeballs seeming to pulse in and out with the rapid thud of her heart.
We can’t beat It. Whatever It is, we can’t beat It. It even wants us to try — It wants to settle the old score. Can’t be happy with a draw, I guess. We ought to get out of here . . . just leave.
Something brushed against her calf, light as a cat’s questing paw.
She jerked away from it with a little shriek. She looked down and cringed, one hand against her mouth.
It was a balloon, as yellow as her blouse. Written on the side of it in electric blue were the words THAT ‘S WIGHT, WABBIT.
As she watched, it went bouncing lightly up the street, urged by the pleasant late-spring breeze.
4
Richie Tozier Makes Tracks
Well, there was the day Henry and his friends chased me — before the end of school, this was . . .
Richie was walking along Outer Canal Street, past Bassey Park. Now he stopped, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking toward the .Kissing Bridge but not really seeing it.
I got away from them in the toy department of Freese’s . . .
Since the mad conclusion of the reunion lunch, he had been walking aimlessly, trying to make his peace with the awful things which had been in the fortune cookies . . . or the things which had seemed to be in the cookies. He thought that most likely nothing at all had come out of them. It had been a group hallucination brought on by all the spooky shit they had been talking about. The best proof of the
