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
This isn’t Memory Lane we’re wandering down anymore, he thinks; it’s getting more and more like the Long Island Expressway.
Five years ago, during a routine check-up (Eddie has a routine check –up every six weeks), the doctor said matter-of-factly: ‘There’s an old break here, Ed . . . Did you fall out of a tree when you were a kid?’
‘Something like that,’ Eddie agreed, not bothering to tell Dr Robbins that his mother undoubtedly would have fallen down dead of a brain hemorrhage if she had seen or heard of her Eddie climbing trees. The truth was, he hadn’t been able to remember exactly how he broke the arm. It didn’t seem important (although, Eddie thinks now, that lack of interest was in itself very odd — he is, after all, a man who attaches importance to a sneeze or a slight change in the color of his stools). But it was an old break, a minor irritation, something that happened a long time ago in a boyhood he could barely remember and didn’t care to recall. It pained him a little when he had to drive long hours on rainy days. A couple of aspirin took care of it nicely. No big deal.
But now it is not just a minor irritation; it is some madman sharpening that rusty saw, playing bone-tunes, and he remembers that was how it felt in the hospital, especially late at night, in the first three or four days after it happened. Lying there in bed, sweating in the summer heat, waiting for the nurse to bring him a pill, tears running silently down his cheeks into the bowls of his ears, thinking It’s like some kook’s sharpening a saw in there.
If this is Memory Lane, Eddie thinks, I’d trade it for one great big brain enema: a mental high colonic.
Unaware he is going to speak, he says: ‘It was Henry Bowers who broke my arm. Do you remember that?’
Mike nods. ‘That was just before Patrick Hockstetter disappeared. I don’t remember the date.’
‘I do,’ Eddie says flatly. ‘It was the 20th of July. The Hockstetter kid was reported missing on . . . what? . . . the 23rd?’
‘Twenty-second,’ Beverly Rogan says, although she doesn’t tell them why she is so sure of the date: it is because she saw It take Hockstetter. Nor does she tell them that she believed then and believes now that Patrick Hockstetter was crazy, perhaps even crazier than Henry Bowers. She will tell them, but this is Eddie’s turn. She will speak next, and then she supposes that Ben will narrate the climax of that July’s events . . . the silver bullet they had never quite
