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
in one hand and dreamily picking the seat of his chinos out of his ass with the other. Heart pounding hard, Richie had walked quietly across the playground and was most of the way down Charter Street before Belch turned his head and saw him. He yelled for Henry and Victor, and since then the chase had been on.
When Richie reached the toy department it had been utterly, horribly deserted. There wasn’t even a sales clerk hanging out — a welcome adult to put a stop to things before they got entirely out of hand. He could hear the three dinosaurs of the apocalypse closing in now. And he simply couldn’t run anymore. Each breath produced a deep hurting stitch in his left side.
His eye fixed on a door which read EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY\ ALARM WILL SOUND! Hope kindled in his chest.
Richie ran down an aisle crammed with Donald Duck jack-in-the –boxes, United States Army tanks made in Japan, Lone Ranger cap pistols, wind-up robots. He reached the door and slammed the push-bar as hard as he could. The door opened, letting in cool mid –March air. The alarm went off with a strident bray. Richie immediately doubled back and dropped to his hands and knees in the next aisle over. He was down before the door could settle closed again.
Henry, Belch, and Victor thundered into the toy department just as the door clicked shut and the alarm cut off. They raced for it, Henry in the lead, his face set and intent.
A sales clerk finally appeared, coming on the run. He wore a blue nylon duster over a plaid sportcoat of excruciating ugliness. The rims of his spectacles were as pink as the eyes of a white rabbit. Richie thought he looked like Wally Cox in his Mr Peepers role, and he had to slam his traitor mouth into the fat part of his forearm to keep from screaming out gales of exhausted laughter.
‘You boys!’ Mr Peepers exclaimed. ‘You boys can’t go out there! That’s an emergency exit! You! Hey! You boys!’
Victor glanced at him a little nervously, but Henry and Belch never turned from their course and Victor followed them. The alarm brayed again, longer this time as they charged into the alley. Before it stopped clanging Richie was on his feet and trotting back toward ladies’ lingerie.
‘You boys will be barred from the store!’ the clerk yelled after him.
Looking back over his shoulder Richie squealed in his Granny Grunt Voice, ‘Did anyone ever tell you you look just like Mr Peepers, young man?’
And so he had escaped. And so he had finished up almost a mile from Freese’s, in front of City Center . . . and, he devoutly hoped, out of harm’s way. At least for the time being. He was spent. He sat down on a bench just to the left of the Paul Bunyan statue, wanting only a little peace while he got himself back together. In a bit he would get up and head home, but for now it felt too good to just sit here in the afternoon sun. The day had opened in a cold drizzly gloom, but now you could believe spring might actually be on the way.
Farther up the lawn he could see the City Center marquee, which on that March day bore this message in large blue translucent letters:
HEY TEENS!
COMING MARCH 28TH
THE ARNIE «WOO-WOO’ GINSBERG ROCK AND ROLL SHOW!
JERRY LEE LEWIS
THE PENGUINS
FRANKIE LYMON AND THE TEENAGERS
GENE VINCENT AND THE BLUE CAPS
FREDDY ‘BOOM –BOOM ‘ CANNON
AN EVENING OF WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT!!
That was a show Richie really wanted to see, but he knew there wasn’t a chance. His mother’s idea of wholesome entertainment did not include Jerry Lee Lewis telling the young people of America we got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn. Nor, for that matter, did it include Freddy Cannon, whose Tallahassee lassie had a hi-fi chassis. She was willing to admit that she had done her share of screaming for Frank Sinatra (whom she now called Frankie the Snot) as a bobby-soxer, but, like Bill Denbrough’s mother, she was death on rock and roll. Chuck Berry terrified her, and she declared that Richard Penniman, better known to his teen and subteen constituency as Little Richard, made her want to ‘barf like a chicken.’
This was a phrase for which Richie had never asked a translation.
His dad was neutral on the subject of rock and roll and could perhaps have been swayed, but Richie knew in his heart that his mother’s wishes would rule on this subject — until he was sixteen or seventeen, anyway — and by then, his mother was firmly convinced, the country’s rock and roll mania would have passed.
Richie thought Danny and the Juniors were more right on that subject than his mom — rock and roll would never die. He himself loved it, although his sources were really only two — American Bandstand on Channel 7 in the afternoon and WMEX out of
