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
Mike’s hand tightened on his and he realized that now the silence had been broken. There was a steady low vibration — he could feel it more than hear it, working against the tight flesh of his eardrums, buzzing the tiny bones that conducted the sound. It grew steadily. It had no tone; it simply was:
(the word in the beginning was the word the world the)
a tuneless, soulless sound. He groped for the tree they stood near and as his hand touched it, cupped the curve of the bole, he could feel th e vibration caught inside. At the same moment he realized he could feel it in his feet, a steady tingling that went up his ankles and calves to his knees, turning his tendons into tuning forks.
It grew. And grew.
It was coming out of the sky. Not wanting to but unable to help himself, Richie turned his face up. The sun was a molten coin burning a circle in the low-hanging overcast, surrounded by a fairy-ring of moisture. Below it, the verdant green slash that was the Barrens lay utterly still. Richie thought he understood what this vision was: they were about to see the coming of It.
The vibration took on a voice — a rumbling roar that built to a shattering crescendo of sound. He clapped his hands to his ears and screamed and could not hear himself scream. Beside him, Mike Hanlon was doing the same, and Richie saw that Mike’s nose was bleeding a little.
The clouds in the west lit with a bloom of red fire. It traced its way toward them, widening from an artery to a stream to a river of ominous color; and then, as a burning, falling object broke through the cloud cover, the wind came. It was hot and searing, smoky and suffocating. The thing in the sky was gigantic, a flaming match-head that was nearly too bright to look at. Arcs of electricity bolted from it, blue bullwhips that flashed out from it and left thunder in their wake.
A spaceship! Richie screamed, falling to his knees and covering his eyes. Oh my God it’s aspaceship! But he believed — and would tell the others later, as best he could — that it was not a spaceship, although it might have come through space to get here. Whatever came down on that long-ago day had come from a place much farther away than another star or another galaxy, and if spaceship was the first word to come into his mind, perhaps that was only because his mind had no other way of grasping what his eyes were seeing.
There was an explosion then — a roar of sound followed by a rolling concussion that knocked them both down. This time it was Mike who groped for Richie’s hand. There was another explosion. Richie opened his eyes and saw a glare of fire and a pillar of smoke rising into the sky.
It ! he screamed at Mike, in an ecstasy of terror now — never in his life, before or after, would he feel any emotion so deeply, be so overwhelmed by feeling. It! It! It!
Mike dragged him to his feet and they ran along the high bank of the young Kenduskeag, never noticing how close they were to the drop. Once Mike stumbled and went skidding to his knees. Then it was Ric hie’s turn to go down, barking his shin and tearing his pants. The wind had come up and it was pushing the smell of the burning forest toward them. The smoke grew thicker, and Richie became dimly aware that he and Mike were not running alone. The animals were on the move again, fleeing from the smoke, the fire, the death in the fire. Running from It, perhaps. The new arrival in their world.
Richie began to cough. He could hear Mike beside him, also coughing. The smoke was thicker, washing out the greens and grays and reds of the day. Mike fell again and Richie lost his hand. He groped for it and could not find it.
Mike! He screamed, panicked, coughing. Mike, where are you? Mike! MIKE!
But Mike was gone; Mike was nowhere.
richie! richie! richie!
(!!WHACKO!!)
‘richie! richie! richie, are you
6
all right?’
His eyes fluttered open and he saw Beverly kneeling beside him, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. The others — Bill, Eddie, Stan, and Ben — stood behind her, their faces sole mn and scared. The side of Richie’s face hurt like hell. He tried to speak to Beverly and could only croak. He tried to clear his throat and almost vomited. His throat and lungs felt as if they had somehow been lined with smoke.
At last he managed, ‘Did you slap me, Beverly?’
|It was all I could think of to do,’ she said.
‘Whacko,’ Richie muttered.
‘I didn’t think you were going to be all right, is all,’ Bev said, and suddenly
