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
on a talismanic cast in his mind: the day he could walk up to his mother and simply speak that phrase without tripping or stuttering, looking her right in the eye as he spoke it, the coldness would break apart; her eyes would light up and she would hug him and say, ‘Wonderful, Billy! What a good boy! What a good boy!’
He had, of course, told this to no one. Wild horses would not have dragged it from him; neither the rack nor the boot would have induced him to give up this secret fantasy, which lay at the very center of his heart. If he could say this phrase which she had taught him casually one Saturday morning as he and Georgie sat watching Guy Madison and Andy Devine in TheAdventures of Wild Bill Hickok, it would be like the kiss that awakened Sleeping Beauty from her cold dreams to the warmer world of the fairytale prince’s love.
He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Nor did he tell it to his friends on that July 3rd — but he told them what his father had told him about the Derry sewer and drain systems. He was a boy to whom invention came easily and naturally (sometimes more easily than telling the truth), and the scene he painted was quite different from the scene in which the conversation had actually taken place: he and his old man had been watching the tube together, he said, having cups of coffee.
‘Your dad lets you have coffee?’ Eddie asked.
‘Sh-sh-sure,’ Bill said.
‘Wow,’ Eddie said. ‘My mother would never let me have a coffee. She says the caffeine in it is dangerous.’ He paused. ‘She drinks quite a bit of it herself, though.’
‘My dad lets me have coffee if I want it,’ Beverly said, ‘but he’d kill me if he knew I smoked.’
‘What makes you so sure it’s in the sewers?’ Richie asked, looking from Bill to Stan Uris and then back to Bill again.
‘E-E-Everything g-goes back t-to th-th-that,’ Bill said. ‘The v-voices Beh-he-heverly heard c-came from the d-d-drain. And the bluh-blood. When the c-c-clown ch-chased us, those o-orange buh-buh-buttons were by a suh-sewer. And Juh juh-George — ‘
‘It wasn’t a clown, Big Bill,’ Richie said. ‘I told you that. I know it’s crazy, but it was a werewolf.’ He looked at the others defensively. ‘Honest to God. I saw it.’
Bill said: ‘It was a werewolf for y-y-you.’
‘Huh?’
Bill said, ‘D-Don’t you s-s-see? It was a wuh-wuh-were wolf for y-you because y-you saw that duh-humb movie at the A-A-A-Aladdin.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘I think I do,’ Ben said quietly.
‘I went to the l-l-library and l-looked it uh-uh-up,’ Bill said. ‘I think It’s a gluh-gluh’ — he paused, throat straining, and spat it out — ‘a glamour.’
‘Glammer?’ Eddie asked doubtfully.
‘G-G-Glamo ur,’ Bill said, and spelled it. He told them about an encyclopedia entry on the subject and, a chapter he had read in a book called Night’s Truth. Glamour, he said, was the Gaelic name for the creature which was haunting Derry; other races and other cultures at other times had different words for it, but they all meant the same thing. The Plains Indians called it a manitou, which sometimes took the shape of a mountain-lion or an elk or an eagle. These same Indians believed that the spirit of a manitou could sometimes enter them, and at these times it was possible for them to shape the clouds themselves into representations of those animals for which their houses had been named. The Himalayans called it a tallus or taelus, which meant an evil magic being that could read your mind and then assume the shape of the thing you were most afraid of. In Central Europe it had been called eylak, brother of the vurderlak, or vampire. In France it was le loup-garou, or skin-changer, a concept that had been crudely translated as the werewolf, but, Bill told them, le loup-garou (which he pronounced ‘le loop-garoo’) could be anything, anything at all: a wolf, a hawk, a sheep, even a bug.
‘Did any of those articles tell you how to beat a glamour?’ Beverly asked.
Bill nodded, but he didn’t look hopeful. ‘The H-H-Himalayans had a rih-hi-hitual to g-get rih-rid of i-i-it, but ih –it’s pretty gruh-gruh-grue-some.’
They looked at him, not wanting to hear but needing to.
‘I-I-It was cuh-called the R-R-Ritual of Chüh-Chüd,’ Bill said, and went on to explain what that was. If you were a Himalayan holy-man, you tracked the taelus. The taelus stuck its tongue out. You stuck yours out. You and it overlapped
