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
directly across from Richie, his eyes as red as a weasel’s.
Comparative coolness struck them again. The air freshened as smoke swirled up through the trap. Ben was coughing and dry-retching. He pulled himself out with Stan’s help, and before either of them could close the trapdoor, Eddie was staggering to his feet, his face a deadly pale except for the bruised-looking patches under his eyes and traced just below his cheekbones. His thin chest was hitching up and down in quick, shallow spasms. He groped
weakly for the edge of the escape hatch and would have fallen if Ben had not grabbed hand and Stan the other.
‘Sorry,’ Eddie managed in a squeaky little whisper, and then they hauled him up. The trapdoor banged down again.
There was a long, quiet period. The smoke built up until it was a thick still fog in the clubhouse. Looks like a pea-souper to me, Watson, Richie thought, and for a moment he imagined himself as Sherlock Holmes (a Holmes who looked a great deal like Basil Rathbone and who was totally black and white), moving purposefully along Baker Street; Moriarty was somewhere near, a hansom cab awaited, and the game was afoot.
The thought was amazingly clear, amazingly solid. It seemed almost to have weight, as if it were not a little pocket-daydream of the sort he had all the time (batting cleanup for the Bosox, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and there it goes, it’s up . . . ITS GONE! Home run,Tozier . . . and that breaks the Babe’s record!), but something that was almost real.
There was still enough of the wiseacre in him to think that if all he was getting out of this was a vision of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, then the whole idea of visions was pretty overrated.
Except of course it isn’t Moriarty that’s out there. It’s out there — some It — and It’s real. It —
Then the trapdoor opened again and Beverly was struggling her way out, coughing dryly, one hand cupped over her mouth. Ben got one hand and Stan grabbed her under the other arm. Half-pulled, half-scrambling under her own power, she was up and gone.
‘Ih-Ih-It i-is bi-higger,’ Bill said.
Richie looked around. He saw the circle of stones with the fire smoldering within, fuming out clouds of smoke. Across the way he saw Mike sitting cross-legged like a totem carved from mahogany, staring at him through the fire with his smoke-reddened eyes. Except Mike was better than twenty yards away, and Bill was even farther away, on Richie’s right. The underground clubhouse was now at least the size of a ballroom.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Mike said. ‘It’s gonna come pretty quick. Somethin is.’
‘Y-Y-Yeah,’ Bill said. ‘But I . . . I . . . I — ‘
He began to cough. He tried to control it, but the cough worsened, a dry rattling. Dimly Richie saw Bill stumble to his feet, lunge for the trapdoor, and shove it open.
‘Guh-Guh-Go od luh –luh –luh — ‘
And then he was gone, dragged up by the others.
‘Looks like it’s you and me, ole Mikey,’ Richie said, and then he began to cough himself. ‘I thought for sure that it would be Bill — ‘
The cough worsened. He doubled over, hacking dryly, unable to get his breath. His head was thudding — whacking — like a turnip filled with blood. His eyes teared behind his glasses.
From far away, he heard Mike saying: ‘Go on up if you have to, Richie. Don’t go flippy. Don’t kill yourself.’
He raised a hand toward Mike and flapped it at him
(no stinkin batches)
in a negative gesture. Little by little he began to get the coughing under control again. Mike was right; something was going to happen, and soon. He wanted to still be here when it did.
He tilted his head back and looked up at the smoke-hole again. The coughing fit had left him feeling light-headed, and now he seemed to be floating on a cushion of air. It was a pleasant feeling. He took shallow breaths and thought: Someday I’m going to be a rock-and-roll star. That’s it, yes. I’ll be famous. I’ll make records and albums and movies. I’ll have a black sportcoat and white shoes and a yellow Cadillac. And when I come back to Derry,
they’ll all eat their hearts out, even Bowers. I wear glasses, but what the fuck? Buddy Holly wears glasses. I’ll bop till I’m blue and dance till Fm black. I’ll be the first rock-and-roll star to ever come from Maine. I’ll —
