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
Yes, it was hot that day but cool inside the Center Street Drug, the wooden fans turning leisurely below the pressed-tin ceiling, and there was that comforting smell of mixed powders and nostrums. This was the place where they sold health — that was his mother’s unstated but clearly communicated conviction, and with his body-clock set at half-past eleven, Eddie had no suspicion that his mother might be wrong about that, or anything else.
Well, Mr Keene sure put an end to that, he thinks now with a kind of sweet anger.
He remembers standing at the comic rack for awhile, spinning it idly to see if there were any new Batmans or Superboys, or his own favorite, Plastic Man. He had given his mother’s list (she sent him to the drugstore as other boys’ mothers might send them to the comer grocery) and his mother’s check to Mr Keene; he would fill the order and then write in the amount on the check, giving Eddie the receipt so she could deduct the amount from her checking balance. This was all SOP for Eddie. Three different kinds of prescription for his mother, plus a bottle of Geritol because, she told him mysteriously, ‘It’s full of iron, Eddie, and women need more iron than men.’ Also, there would be his vitamins, a bottle of Dr Swett’s Elixir for Children . . . and, of course, his asthma medicine.
It was always the same. Later he would stop in the Costello Avenue Market with his dollar and get two candy-bars and a Pepsi. He would eat the candy, drink the soda, and jingle his pocket-change all the way home. But this day was different; it would end with him in the hospital and that was certainly different, but it started being different when Mr Keene called him. Because instead of handing him the big white bag full of cures and the receipt, admonishing him to put the receipt in his pocket so he wouldn’t lose it, Mr Keene looked at him thoughtfully and said ‘Come
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back into the office for a minute, Eddie. I want to talk to you. ‘ Eddie only looked at him for a moment, bunking, a little scared. The idea that maybe Mr Keene thought he had been shoplifting flashed briefly through his mind. There was that sign by the door that he always read when he came into the Center Street Drug. It was written in accusing black letters so
large that he bet even Richie Tozier could read it without his glasses: SHOPLIFTING is NOT A ‘KICK’ OR A ‘GROOVE ‘ OR A ‘GASSER’! SHOPLIFTING i s A CRIME, AND WEWILLPROSECUTE!
Eddie had never shoplifted anything in his life, but that sign always made him feel guilty — made him feel as if Mr Keene knew something about him that he didn’t know about himself.
Then Mr Keene confused him even further by saying, ‘How about an ice-cream soda?’
‘Well — ‘
‘Oh,
