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
But before that, on the bank of the Kenduskeag, he hadn’t been sure what to say — what did they want him to say? What did he want to say? He remembers looking from one face to the next — Ben’s; Bev’s; Eddie’s; Stan’s; Richie’s. And he remembers
music. Little Richard. ‘Whomp-bomp-a-lomp-bomp . . . ‘ Music. Low. And darts of light in his eyes. He remembers the darts of light because.
2
Richie had hung his transistor radio over the lowermost branch of the tree he was leaning against. Although they were in the shade, the sun bounced off the surface of the Kenduskeag, onto the radio’s chrome facing, and from there into Bill’s eyes.
T-Take that th-hing d-d-d-own, Ruh –Ruh-Richie,’ Bill said. ‘It’s gonna bun-blind m-m-me.’
‘Sure, Big Bill,’ Richie said at once, with no smartmouth at all, and removed the radio from the branch. He also turned it off, and Bill wished he hadn’t done that; it made the silence, broken only by the rippling water and the vague hum of the sewage –pumping machinery, seem very loud. Their eyes watched him and he wanted to tell them to look somewhere else, what did they think he was, a freak?
But of course he couldn’t do that, because all they were doing was waiting for him to tell them what to do now. They had come by dreadful knowledge, and they needed him to tell them what to do with it. Why me! he wanted to shout at them, but of course he knew that, too. It was because, like it or not, he had been tapped for the position. Because he was the idea-man, because he had lost a brother to whatever it was, but most of all because he had become, in some obscure way he would never completely understand, Big Bill.
He glanced at Beverly and looked away quickly from the calm trust in her eyes. Looking at Beverly made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach. Fluttery.
‘We cuh-can’t go to the p-p-police,’ he said at last. His voice sounded harsh to his own ears, too loud. ‘We c-ca-han’t g-go to our puh-huh-harents, either. Unless . . . ‘ He looked hopefully at Richie. ‘What a-a-about your m-mom and d-dad, four-eyes? They suh-heem p-pretty reh-reh-regular.’
‘My good man,’ Richie said in his Toodles the Butler Voice, ‘you obviously have no understahnding whatsoevah of my mater and pater. They — ‘
‘Talk American, Richie,’ Eddie said from his spot by Ben. He was sitting by Ben for the simple reason that Ben provided enough shade for Eddie to sit in. His face looked small and pinched and worried — an old man’s face. His aspirator was in his right hand.
‘They’d think I was ready for Juniper Hill,’ Richie said. He was wearing an old pair of glasses today. The day before a friend of Henry Bowers’s named Card Jagermeyer had come up behind Richie as Richie left the Derry Ice Cream Bar with a pistachio cone. ‘Tag, you’re it!’ this Jagermeyer, who outweighed Richie by forty pounds or so, screamed, and slammed Richie full in the back with both hands laced together. Richie flew into the gutter, losing his glasses and his ice-cream cone. The left lens of his glasses had shattered, and his mother was furious with him about it, lending very little credence to Richie’s explanations.
‘All I know is that it was a lot of fooling around,’ she had said. ‘Honestly, Richie, do you think there’s a glasses-tree somewhere and we can just pull off a new pair of spectacles for you whenever you break the old pair?’
‘But Mom, this kid pushed me, he came up behind me, this big kid, and pushed me — ‘ Richie wa s by then near tears. This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter by Card Jagermeyer, who was so stupid they hadn’t even bothered to send him to summer-school.
‘I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Maggie Tozier said flatly. ‘But the next time you see your father come in looking whipped after working late three nights in a row, you think a little bit, Richie. You think about it.’
‘But Mom — ‘
‘No more, I said.’ Her voice was curt and final — worse, it was near tears. She left the room then and the TV went on much too loud. Richie had been left alone sitting miserably at the kitchen table.
It was this memory that caused Richie to shake his head again. ‘My folks are okay, but they’d never believe something like this.’
‘W-What a-a-about other kih-kids?’
And
