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
the single practiced blink that would send them tumbling out (and he would spend the next fifteen minutes grovelling myopically for them in the gravel surrounding the bench but Jesus God who gave a shit, right now it felt like there were nails in his eyes), when the pain disappeared. It did not dwindle; it just went. One moment there, the next moment gone. His eyes teared briefly and then stopped.
He lowered his hands slowly, his heart running fast in his chest, ready to blink them out the instant the pain started again. It didn’t. And suddenly he found himself thinking about the only horror movie that had ever really scared him as a kid, possibly because he had taken so much shit about his glasses and had spent so much time thinking about his eyes. That movie had been The Crawling Eye, with Forrest Tucker. Not very good. The other kids had laughed
themselves into hysterics over it, but Richie had not laughed. Richie had been rendered cold and white and dumb, for once with not a single Voice to command, as that gelatinous tentacled eye came out of the manufactured fog of some English movie set, waving its fibrous tentacles in front of it. The sight of that eye had been very bad, the embodiment of a hundred not-quite-realized fears and disquiets. On some night not long after, he had dreamed of looking at himself in a mirror and bringing a large pin up and sticking it slowly into the black iris of his eye and feeling a numb, watery springiness as the bottom of his eye filled up with blood. He remembered — now he remembered — waking up and discovering that he had wet the bed. The best indicator of how gruesome that dream had been was that his primary feeling had been not shame at his nocturnal indiscretion but relief; he had embraced the warm wet patch with his body and blessed the reality of his sight.
‘Fuck this,’ Richie Tozier said in a low voice that was not quite steady, and started to get up.
He would go back to the Derry Town House and take a nap. If this was Memory Lane, he preferred the LA. Freeway at rush-hour. The pain in his eyes was probably no more than a signal of exhaustion and jet-lag, plus the stress of meeting the past all at once, in one afternoon. Enough shocks; enough exploring. He didn’t like the way his mind was skittering from one subject to the next. What was that Peter Gabriel tune? ‘Shock the Monkey.’ Well, this monkey had been shocked enough. It was time to catch some z’s and maybe gain a little perspective.
As he rose his eyes went to the marquee in front of City Center again. All at once the strength ran out of his legs and he sat down again. Hard.
RICHIE TOZIER MAN OF 1000 VOICES RETURNS TO DERRY LAND OF 1000 DANCES
IN HONOUR OF TRASHMOUTH’S RETURN CITY CENTER PROUDLY PRESENTS THE RICHIE TOZIER ‘ALL-DEAD’ ROCK SHOW
BUDDY HOLLY RICHIE VALENS THE BIG BOPPER FRANKIE LYMON GENE VINCENT MARVIN GAYE
HOUSE BAND
JIMI HENDRIX LEAD GUITAR
JOHN LENNON RHYTHM GUITAR
PHIL LINOTT BASS GUITAR
KEITH MOON DRUMS
SPECIAL GUEST VOCLAIST JIM MORRISON
WELCOME HOME RICHIE! YOU ‘RE DEAD TOO!
He felt as if someone had whopped all the breath out of him . . . and then he heard that sound again, that sound that was half pressure on the skin and eardrums, that keen homicidal whispering rush — Swiipppp! He rolled off the bench onto the gravel, thinking So this iswhat they mean by déjà vu , now you know, you’ll never have to ask anybody again —
He hit on his shoulder and rolled, looking up at the Paul Bunyan statue — only it was no longer Paul Bunyan. The clown stood there instead, resplendent and evident, fantastic in plastic, twenty feet of Day-Glo colors, its painted face surmounting a cosmic comic ruff. Orange pompom buttons cast in plastic, each as big as a volleyball, ran down the front of the
silvery suit. Instead of an axe it held a huge bunch of plastic balloons. Engraved on each were two legends: IT’S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME and RICHIE TOZIER ‘s ‘ALL-DEAD’ ROCK SHOW.
He scrambled backward, using his heels and his palms. Gravel went down the back of his pants. He heard a seam tear loose in die underarm of his Rodeo Drive sportcoat. He rolled over, gamed his feet, staggered, looked back. The down looked down at him. Its eyes rolled wetly in their sockets.
‘Did I give you a scare, m’man?’ it rumbled.
And Richie heard his mouth say, quite independently of his frozen brain: ‘Cheap thrills in the back of my car, Bozo. That’s all.’
The clown grinned and nodded as if it had expected no more. Red paint-bleeding lips parted to show teeth like fangs, each one coming to a razor point. ‘I could
