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
too. Where they had stood there was now a twenty-foot-high plastic statue of Buddy Holly. He was wearing a button on one of the narrow lapels of his plaid sportcoat. RICHIETOZIER ‘s ‘ALL –DEAD’ ROCK SHOW, the button read.
One bow of Buddy’s glasses had been mended with adhesive tape.
The little boy was still crying hysterically; his father was walking rapidly back toward downtown with the weeping child in his arms. He gave Richie a wide berth.
Richie got walking
(feets don’t fail me now)
trying not to think about
(we’ll play AAALLLL THE HITS!)
what had just happened. All he wanted to think about was the monster jolt of Scotch he was going to have in the Derry Town House bar before he went up to take that nap.
The thought of a drink — just your ordinary garden-variety drink — made him feel a little better. He looked over his shoulder one more time and the fact that Paul Bunyan was back, grinning at the sky, plastic axe over his shoulder, made him feel better still. Richie began to walk faster, making tracks, putting distance between himself and that statue. He had even begun to think about the possibility of hallucinations when the pain struck his eyes again, deep and agonizing, causing him to cry out hoarsely. A pretty young girl who had been walking ahead of him, looking dreamily up at the breaking clouds, looked back at him, hesitated, then hurried over.
‘Mister, are you all right?’
‘It’s my contacts,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘My damned contact le — oh my God thathurts!’
This time he got his forefingers up so quickly he almost jabbed them into his eyes. He pulled down the lower lids an d thought, I won’t be able to blink them out, that’s what’s going to happen, I won’t be able to blink them out and it’s just going to go on hurting and hurting and hurting until I go blind go blind go bl — But one blink did it as one blink always had. The sharp and denned world, where colors stayed inside the lines and where faces that you saw were clear and obvious, simply fell away. Wide bands of pastel fuzz took their place. And although he and the high-school girl, who was both helpful and concerned, searched the paving of the sidewalk for almost fifteen minutes, neither could find even a single lens.
In the back of his head Richie seemed to hear the clown laughing.
5
Bill Denbrough Sees a Ghost
Bill did not see Pennywise that afternoon — but he did see a ghost. A real ghost. So Bill believed then, and no subsequent event caused him to change his mind.
He had walked up Witcham Street and paused for some time by the drain where George met his end on that rainy October day in 1957. He squatted down and peered into the drain,
which was cut into the stonework of the curbing. His heart was beating hard, but he looked anyway.
‘Come out, why don’t you,’ he said in a low voice, and he had the not-quite-mad idea that his voice was floating along dark and dripping passageways, not dying out but continuing onward and onward, feeding on its own echoes, bouncing off moss-covered stone walls and long-dead machinery. He felt it float over still and sullen waters and perhaps issue softly from a hundred different drains in other parts of the city at the same time.
‘Come out of there or we’ll come in and g-get you.’
He waited nervily for a response, crouched down with his hands between his thighs like a catcher between pitches. There was no response.
He was about to stand up when a shadow fell over him.
Bill looked up sharply, eagerly, ready for anything . . . but it was only a little kid, maybe ten, maybe eleven. He was wearing faded Boy Scout shorts which displayed his scabby knees to good advantage. He had a Freeze-Pop in one hand and a Fiberglas skateboard which looked almost as battered as his knees in the other. The Freeze-Pop was a fluorescent orange. The skateboard was a fluorescent green.
‘You always talk into the sewers, mister?’ the boy asked.
‘Only in Derry,’ Bill said.
They looked at each other solemnly for a moment and then burst into laughter at the same time.
‘I want to ask you a stupid queh-question,’ Bill said.
‘Okay,’ the kid said.
‘You ever h-hear anything down in one of these?’
The kid looked at Bill as though he had flipped out.
‘O-Okay,’ Bill said, ‘forget
