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
opened it to one of the first pages.
‘Daddy says there’s no way to date that one, but it’s probably from the early or mid-seventeen-hundreds,’ Mike said. ‘He repaired a guy’s handsaw for a box of old books and pictures. That was one of them. He says it might be worth forty bucks or even more.
The picture was a woodcut, the size of a large postcard. When Bill’s turn came to look at it, he was relieved to see that Mike’s father had the land of album where the pictures were under a protective plastic sheet. He looked, fascinated, and he thought: There. I’m seeing him — orIt. Really seeing. That’s the face of the enemy.
The picture showed a funny fe low juggling oversized bowling pins in the middle of a muddy street. There were a few houses on either side of the street, and a few huts that Bill guessed were stores, or trading posts, or whatever they called them back then. It didn’t look like Derry at all, except for the Canal. It was there, neatly cobbled on both sides. In the upper background, Bill could see a team of mules on a towpath, dragging a barge.
There was a group of maybe half a dozen kids gathered around the funny fellow. One of them was wearing a pastoral straw hat. Another had a hoop and a stick to roll it with. Not the sort of stick that would come with a hoop that you bought today in a Woolworth’s; it was a branch from a tree. Bill could see the bare knobs on it where smaller branches had been lopped off with a knife or a hatchet. That baby wasn’t made in Taiwan or Korea, he thought, fascinated by this boy who could have been him if he’d been born four or five generations before.
The funny fellow had a huge grin on his face. He wore no makeup (except to Bill his whole face looked like make-up), but he was bald except for two tufts of hair that stuck up like horns over his ears, and Bill had no trouble recognizing their clown. Two hundred years ago or more, he thought, and felt a crazy surge of terror, anger, and excitement rush through him. Twenty-seven years later, sitting in the Derry Public Library and remembering his first look into Mike’s father’s album, he realized he had felt the way a hunter might feel, coming upon the first fresh spoor of an old killer tiger. Two hundred years ago . . . that long, and only God knows how much longer. This led him to wonder just how long the spirit of Pennywise had been here in Derry — but he found that was a thought he did not really want to pursue.
‘Gimme, Bill!’ Richie was saying, but Bill held the album a moment longer, staring fixedly at the woodcut, sure it would begin to move: the bowling pins (if that’s what they were) which the funny fellow was juggling would rise and fall, rise and fall, the kids would laugh and applaud (except maybe they wouldn’t all laugh and applaud; some of them might scream and run instead), the mule –team pulling the barge would move beyond the borders of the picture.
It didn’t happen, and he passed the book on to Richie.
When the album came back to Mike he turned some more pages, hunting. ‘Here,’ he said. This one is from 1856, four years before Lincoln was elected President.’
The book went around again. This was a color picture — a sort of cartoon — which showed a bunch of drunks standing in front of a saloon while a fat politician with muttonchop whiskers declaimed from a board that had been set between two hogsheads. He held a foamy pitcher of beer in one hand. The board upon which he stood was considerably bowed with his weight. Some distance off, a group of bonneted women were looking at this show of mingled buffoonery and intemperance with disgust. The caption below the picture read: POLITICSIS THIRSTY WORK, SEZ SENATOR GARNER!
‘Daddy says pictures like this were really popular for about twenty years before the Civil War,’ Mike said. ‘They called them «foolcards,» and people used to send them to each other. They were like some of the jokes in Mad, I guess.’
‘Suh-suh-satire,’ Bill said.
‘Yeah,’ Mike said. ‘But now look down in the corner of this one.’
The picture was like Mad in another way — it had as many details and little side-jokes as a big Mort Drucker panel in a Mad magazine movie take– o f f . T h e r e w a s a g r i n n i n g f a t m a n pouring a glass of beer down a spotted dog’s throat. There was a woman who had fallen on her prat in a mudpuddle. There were two street urchins slyly sticking sulphur –headed matches into the soles of a prosperous
