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
‘Oh Eddie, I do love you,’ Beverly says, and Eddie looks up, startled but smiling. She gazes up and down the table. ‘I love all of you.’
Bill says, ‘W-We love you too, B-Bev.’
‘Yes,’ Ben says. ‘We love you.’ His eyes widen a little, and he laughs. ‘I think we still all love each other . . . Do you know how rare that must be?’
There’s a moment of silence, and Mike is really not surprised to see that Rickie is wearing his glasses.
‘My contacts started to burn and I had to take them out,’ Richie says briefly when Mike asks. ‘Maybe we should get down to business?’
They all look at Bill then, as they had in the gravel-pit, and Mike thinks: They look at Bill when they need a leader, at Eddie when they need a navigator. Get down to business, what a hell of a phrase that is. Do I tell them that the bodies of the children that were found back then and now weren’t sexually molested, not even precisely mutilated, but partially eaten? Do I tell them I’ve got seven miner’s helmets, the kind with strong electric lights set into the front, stored back at my house, one of them for a guy named Stan Uris who couldn’t make the scene, as we used to say? Or is it maybe enough just to tell them to go home and get a good night’s sleep, because it ends tomorrow or tomorrow night for good — either for It or us?
None of those things have to be said, perhaps, and the reason why they don’t has already been stated: they still love one another. Things have changed over the last twenty-seven years, but that, miraculously, hasn’t. It is, Mike thinks, our only real hope.
The only thing that really remains is to finish going through it, to complete the job of catching up, of stapling past to present so that the strip of experience forms some half-assed kind of wheel. Yes, Mike thinks, that’s it. Tonight the job is to make the wheel; tomorrow we
can see if it still turns . . . the way it did when we drove the big kids out of the gravel-pit and out of the Barrens.
‘Have you remembered the rest?’ Mike asks Richie.
Richie swallows some beer and shakes his head. ‘I remember you telling us about the bird . . . and about the smoke-hole.’ A grin breaks over Richie’s face. ‘I remembered about that walking over here tonight with Bevvie and Ben. What a fucking honor-show that was —
‘Beep-beep, Richie,’ Beverly says, smiling.
‘Well, you know,’ he says, still smiling himself and punching his glasses up on his nose in a gesture that is eerily reminiscent of the old Richie. He winks at Mike. ‘You and me, right, Mikey?’
Mike snorts laughter and nods.
‘Miss Scawlett! Miss Scawlett!’ Richie shrieks in his Pickaninny Voice. ‘It’s gettin a little wa’am in de smokehouse, Miss Scawlett!’
Laughing, Bill says, ‘Another engineering and architectural triumph by Ben Hanscom.’
