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
Bill said. He looked at the others.
‘Yes,’ Ben said.
‘Yes,’ Richie said.
‘Yes,’ Mike said. ‘Oh my God, yes.’
‘Yes,’ Bev said.
‘Yes,’ Eddie managed, gasping it out of his rapidly closing throat.
Bill looked at Stan, demanding with his eyes that Stan look back at him. ‘Duh-don’t let it g-g-get y-you, man,’ Bill said. ‘Yuh-you suh-saw it, t-t-too.’
‘I didn’t want to!’ Stan wailed. Sweat stood out on his brow in an oily sheen.
‘But y-y-you duh-duh-did.’
Stan looked at the others, one by one. He ran his hands through his short hair and fetched up a great, shuddering sigh. His eyes seemed to clear of that lowering madness that had so disturbed Bill.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Okay. Yes. That what you want? Yes.’
Bill thought: We’re still all together. It didn’t stop us. We can still kill It. We can still kill It . . . if we’re brave.
Bill looked around at the others and saw in each pair of eyes some measure of Stan’s hysteria. Not quite as bad, but there.
‘Y-Y-Yeah,’ he said, and smiled at Stan. After a moment Stan smiled back and some of that horrible shocked look left his face. ‘That’s what I wuh-wuh-wanted, you weh-weh-wet end.’
‘Beep-beep, Dumbo,’ Stan said, and they all laughed. It was hysterical screaming laughter, but better than no laughter at all, Bill reckoned.
‘C-C-Come on,’ he said, because someone had to say something. ‘Let’s f-f-finish the clubhouse. What do you s-s-say?’
He saw the gratitude in their eyes and felt a measure of gladness for them . . . but their gratitude did little to heal his own horror. In fact, there was something in their gratitude which made him want to hate them. Would he never be able to express his own terror, lest the fragile welds that made them into one thing should let go? And even to think such a thing wasn’t really fair, was it? Because in some measure at least he was using them — using his friends, risking their lives — to settle the score for his dead brother. And was even that the bottom? No, because George was dead, and if revenge could be exacted at all, Bill suspected it could only be exacted on behalf of the living. And what did that make him? A selfish little shit waving a tin sword and trying to make himself look like King Arthur?
Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up. His resolve was still strong, but it was a bitter resolve. Bitter.
1
Richie Tozier pushes his glasses up on his nose (already the gesture feels perfectly familiar, although he has worn contact lenses for twenty years) and thinks with some amazement that the atmosphere has changed in the room while Mike recalled the incident with the bird out at the Ironworks and reminded them about his father’s photograph album and the picture that had moved.
Richie had felt a mad, exhilarating kind of energy growing in the room. He had done cocaine nine or ten times over the last couple of years — at parties, mostly; coke wasn’t something you wanted just lying around your house if you were a bigga-time disc jockey — and the feel was something like that, but not exactly. This feeling was purer, more of a mainline high. He thought he recognized the feeling from his childhood, when he had felt it every day and had come to take it merely as a matter of course. He supposed that, if he had ever thought about that deep-running aquifer of energy as a kid (he could not recall that he ever had), he would have simply dismissed it as a fact of life, something that would always be there, like the color of his eyes or his disgusting hammertoes.
