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
His eyeglasses gleamed in the strong light thrown by the overhead fluorescent bars. ‘Do you know what a placebo is, Eddie?’
Nervously, taking his best guess, Eddie said: ‘Those are the things on cows that the milk comes out of, aren’t they?’
Mr Keene laughed and rocked back in his chair. ‘No,’ he said, and Eddie blushed to the roots of his flattop haircut. Now he could hear the whistle creeping into his breathing. ‘A placebo — ‘
He was interrupted by a brisk double tap at the door. Without waiting for a come-in call, Ruby entered with an oldfashioned ice-cream-soda glass in each hand. ‘Yours must be the chocolate,’ she said to Eddie, and gave him a grin. He returned it as best he could, but his interest in ice-cream sodas was at its lowest ebb in his entire personal history. He felt scared in a way that was both vague and specific; it was the way he felt scared when he was sitting on Dr Handor’s examination table in his underpants, waiting for the doctor to come in and knowing his mother was out in the waiting room, taking up most of one sofa, a book (most likely Norman Vincent Peak’s The Power of Positive Thinking or Dr Jarvis’s Vermont FolkMedicine) held firmly up to her eyes like a hymnal. Stripped of his clothes and defenseless, he felt caught between the two of them.
He sipped some of his soda as Ruby went out, hardly tasting it.
Mr Keene waited until the door was shut and then smiled his dry sun-on-mica smile again. ‘Loosen up, Eddie. I’m not going to bite you, or hurt you.’
Eddie nodded, because Mr Keene was a grownup and you were supposed to agree with grownups at all costs (his mother had taught him that), but inside he was thinking: Oh, I’ve heard that bullshit before. It was about what the doctor said when he opened his sterilizer and the sharp frightening smell of alcohol drifted out, stinging his nostrils. That was the smell of shots and this was the smell of bullshit and both came down to the same thing: when they said it was just going to be a little prick, something you hardly felt at all, that meant it was going to hurt plenty.
He tried another half-hearted suck on his soda straw, but it was no good; he needed all the space in his narrowing throat just to suck in air. He looked at the aspirator sitting in the middle of Mr Keene’s blotter, wanted to ask for it, didn’t quite dare. A weird thought occurred to him: maybe Mr Keene knew he wanted it but didn’t dare ask for it, that maybe Mr Keene was
(torturing)
teasing him. Except that was a really stupid idea, wasn’t it? A grownup — particularly a health-dispensing grownup — wouldn’t tease a little kid that way, would he? Surely not. It wasn’t even to be considered, because consideration of such an idea might necessitate a terrifying reappraisal of the world as Eddie understood it.
But there it was, there it was, so near and yet so far, like water just beyond the reach of a man who was dying of thirst in the desert. There it was, standing on the desk below Mr Keene’s smiling mica eyes.
Eddie wished, more than anything else, that he was down in the Barrens with his friends around him. The thought of a monster, some great monster, lurking under the city where he had been born and where he had grown up, using the sewers and drains to creep from place to place — that was a frightening thought, and the thought of actually fighting that creature, of taking it on, was even more frightening . . . but somehow this was worse. How could you fight a grownup who said it wasn’t going to hurt when you knew it was? How could you fight a grownup who asked you funny questions and said obscurely ominous things like This has gone on long enough? And almost idly, in a kind of side-thought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought. It was no big deal, not a thought that came in a revelatory flash or announced itself with trumpets and bells. It just came and was gone, almost buried under the stronger, overriding thought: I want myaspirator and I want to be out of here.
‘Loosen up,’ Mr Keene said again. ‘Most of your trouble, Eddie, comes from being so tight and stiff all the time. Take your asthma, for instance. Look here.’
Mr Keene opened his desk drawer, fumbled around inside, and then brought out a balloon. Expanding his narrow chest as much as possible (his tie bobbed like a narrow boat riding a mild wave), he huffed into it and blew it up. CENTER STREET DRUG, the balloon
