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
‘What are you guys talking about?’ Eddie asks, looking from one to the other.
Richie looks at Mike, but Mike shakes his head. ‘You go ahead, Richie. I’ve had my say for the evening.’
‘The rest of you don’t know or maybe don’t remember, because you left,’ Richie tells them. ‘Me and Mikey, we were the last two Injuns in the smoke-hole.’
‘The smoke-hole,’ Bill muses. His eyes are far and blue.
‘The burning sensation in my eyes,’ Richie says, ‘under my contact lenses. I felt it for the first time right after Mike called me in California. I didn’t know what it was then, but I do now. It was smoke. Smoke that was twenty-seven years old.’ He looks at Mike. ‘Psychological, would you say? Psychosomatic? Something from the subconscious?’
‘I would say not,’ Mike answers quietly. ‘I would say that what you felt was as real as those balloons, or the head I saw in the icebox, or the corpse of Tony Tracker that Eddie saw. Tell them, Richie.’
Richie says: ‘It was four or five days after Mike brought his dad’s album down to the Barrens. Sometime just after the middle of July, I guess. The clubhouse was done. But . . . the smoke-hole thing, that was your idea, Haystack. You got it out of one of your books.’
Smiling a little, Ben nods.
Richie thinks: It was overcast that day. No breeze. Thunder in the air. Like the day a month or so later when we stood in the stream and made a circle and Stan cut our hands with that chunk of Coke bottle. The air was just sitting there, waiting for something to happen, and later Bill said tha t was why it got so bad in there so quick, because there was no draft.
July 17th. Yes, that was it, that had been the day of the smoke-hole. July 17th, 1958, almost a month after summer vacation began and the nucleus of the Losers — Bill, Eddie, and Ben — had formed down in the Barrens. Let me look up the weather forecast for that day almost twenty-seven years ago, Richie thinks, and I’ll tell you what it said before I even read it: Richard Tozier, aka the Great Mentalizer. ‘Hot, humid, chance of thundershowers. And watch out for the visions that may come while you’re down in the smoke-hole . . . ‘
It had been two days after the body of Jimmy Cullum was discovered, the day after Mr Nell had come down to the Barrens again and sat right on the clubhouse without knowing it was there, because by then they had capped it off and Ben himself had carefully overseen the replacement of the sods. Unless you got right down on your hands and knees and crawled around, you’d have no idea anything was there. Like the dam, Ben’s clubhouse had been a roaring success, but this time Mr Nell didn’t know anything about it.
