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
Home Nursing Corps, the Derry Christian Marching Band, then the Derry World War II vets themselves, with the high-school band behind them. The crowd moved and shifted. Tickertape and confetti fluttered down from the second– and third –floor windows of the business buildings that lined the streets. The clown pranced along the sidelines, doing splits and cartwheels, miming a sniper, miming a salute. And Bill noticed for the first time that people were turning from him — but not as if they saw him, exactly; it was more as if they felt a draft or smelled something bad.
Only the children really saw him, and they shrank away.
Ben stretched his hand out to the picture, as Bill had done in George’s room.
‘Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-NO!’ Bill cried.
‘I think it’s all right, Bill,’ Ben said. ‘Look.’ And he laid his hand on the protective plastic over the picture for a moment and then took it back. ‘But if you stripped off that cover — ‘
Beverly screamed. The clown had left off its antics when Ben withdrew his hand. It rushed toward them, its paint-bloody mouth gibbering and laughing. Bill winced ba ck but held onto the book all the same, thinking it would drop out of sight as the parade had done, and the marching band, and the Boy Scouts, and the Cadillac convertible carrying Miss Derry of 1945.
But the clown did not disappear along that curve that seemed to define the edge of that old existence. Instead, it leaped with a scary, nimble grace onto a lamppost that stood in the extreme left foreground of the picture. It shinnied up like a monkey on a stick — and suddenly its face was pressed against the tough plastic sheet Will Hanlon had put over each of the pages in his book. Beverly screamed again and this time Eddie joined her, although his scream was faint and blue-breathless. The plastic bulged out — later they would all agree they saw it. Bill saw the bulb of the clown’s red nose flatten, the way your nose will flatten when you press it against a windowpane.
‘Kill you all!’ The clown was laughing and screaming. ‘Try to stop me and I’ll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can’t stop me! I’m the Gingerbread Man! I’m the Teenage Werewolf!’
And for a moment It was the Teenage Werewolf, the moon-silvered face of the lycanthrope peering out at them from over the collar of the silver suit, white teeth bared.
‘Can’t stop me, I’m the leper!’
Now the leper’s face, haunted and peeling, rotting with sores, stared at them with the eyes of the living dead.
‘Can’t stop me, I’m the mummy!’
The leper’s face aged and ran with sterile cracks. Ancient bandages swam halfway out of its skin and solidified there. Ben turned away, his face as white as curds, one hand plastered over his neck and ear.
‘Can’t stop me, I’m the dead boys!’
‘No!’ Stan Uris screamed. His eyes bulged above braised-looking crescents of skin — shockflesh, Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space
(otherspace)
where the good words come from sometimes.
Stan snatched the album from his hands and slammed it shut. He held it closed with both hands, the tendons standing out along the inner surfaces of his wrists and forearms. He looked around at the others with eyes that were nearly insane. ‘No,’ he said rapidly. ‘No, no, no.’
And suddenly Bill found he was more concerned with Stan’s repeated denials than with the clown, and he understood that this was exactly the sort of reaction the clown had hoped to provoke, because . . .
Because maybe It’s scared us . . . really scared for the first time in Its long, long life.
He grabbed Stan and shook him twice, hard, holding onto his shoulders. Stan’s teeth clicked together and he dropped the album. Mike picked it up and put it aside in a hurry, not liking to touch it after what he had seen. But it was still his father’s, and he understood intuitively that his father would never see in it what he had just seen.
‘No,’ Stan said softly.
‘Yes,’ Bill said.
‘No,’ Stan said again.
‘Yes. Wea-a-all — ‘
‘No.’
‘ — a-a-all suh –haw it, Stan,’
