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
said. PRESCRIPTIONS, SUNDRIES, OSTOMY SUPPLIES. Mr Keene pinched the balloon’s rubber neck and held the balloon out in front of him. ‘Now pretend for just a moment that this is a lung,’ he said. ‘Your lung. I should really blow up two, of course, but since I only had one left from the sale we had just after Christmas — ‘
‘Mr Keene, could I have my aspirator now?’ Eddie’s head was starting to pound. He could feel his windpipe sealing itself up. His heartrate was up, and sweat stood out on his forehead. His chocolate ice-cream soda stood on the corner of Mr Keene’s desk, the cherry on top sinking slowly into a goo of whipped cream.
‘In a minute,’ Mr Keene said. ‘Pay attention, Eddie. I want to help you. It’s time somebody did. If Russ Handor isn’t man enough to do it, I’ll have to. Your lung is like this balloon, except it’s surrounded by a blanket of muscle; these muscles are like the arms of a man operating a bellows, you understand? In a healthy person, those muscles help the lungs to expand and contract easily. But if the owner of those healthy lungs is always getting stiff and tight, the muscles begin to work against the lungs rather than with them. Look!’
Mr Keene wrapped a bunched, bony, liverspotted hand around the balloon and squeezed. The balloon bulged over and under his fist and Eddie winced, trying to get ready for the pop. Simultaneously he felt his breathing stop altogether. He leaned over the desk and grabbed for the aspirator on the blotter. His shoulder struck the heavy ice-cream-soda glass. It toppled off the desk and shattered on the floor like a bomb.
Eddie heard that only dimly. He was clawing the top off the aspirator, slamming the nozzle into his mouth, triggering it off. He took a tearing heaving breath, his thoughts a ratrun of panic as they always were at moments like this: Please Mommy I’m suffocating I can’tBREATHE oh my dear God oh dear Jesus meekandmild I can’t BREATHE phase I don’t want to die don’t want to die oh please —
Then the fog from the aspirator condensed on the swollen walls of his throat and he could breathe again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, nearly crying. ‘I’m sorry about the glass . . . I’ll clean it up and pay for it . . . just please don’t tell my mother, okay? I’m sorry, Mr Keene, but I couldn’t breathe —
There was that double tap at the door again and Ruby poked her head in. ‘Is everything — ‘
‘Everything’s fine,’ Mr Keene said sharply. ‘Leave us.’
‘Well I’m saw –ry!’ Ruby said. She rolled her eyes and closed the door.
Eddie’s breath was starting to whistle in his throat again. He took another pull at the aspirator and then began his fumbling apology once more. He ceased only when he saw that Mr Keene was smiling at him — that peculiar dry smile. Mr Keene’s hands were laced over his middle. The balloon lay on his desk. A thought came to Eddie; he tried to hold it back and couldn’t. Mr Keene looked as if Eddie’s asthma attack had tasted better to him than his half-finished coffee soda.
‘Don’t be concerned,’ he said. ‘Ruby will clean up the mess later, and if you want to know the truth, I’m rather glad you broke the glass. Because I promise not to tell your mother that you broke it if you promise not to tell her we had this little talk.’
‘Oh, I promise that,’ Eddie said eagerly.
‘Good,’ Mr Keene said. ‘We have an understanding. And you feel much better now, don’t you?’
Eddie nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Why? Well . . . because I had my medicine.’ He looked at Mr Keene the way he looked at Mrs Casey in school when he had given an answer he wasn’t quite sure of.
‘But you didn’t have any medicine,’ Mr Keene said. ‘You had a placebo. A placebo, Eddie, is something that looks like medicine and tastes like medicine but isn’t medicine. A placebo isn’t medicine because it has no active ingredients. Or, if it is medicine, it’s medicine of a very special sort. Head-medicine.’ Mr Keene smiled. ‘Do you understand that, Eddie? Head-medicine.’
Eddie understood, all right; Mr Keene was telling him he was crazy. But through numb lips he said, ‘No, I don’t get you.’
‘Let me tell you a little story,’ Mr Keene said. ‘In 1954, a series of medical tests on ulcer patients was run at DePaul University. One hundred ulcer patients were given pills. They were all told the pills would help their ulcers, but fifty of the patients really got placebos . . . They were, in fact, M&M’s given a uniform pink coating.’ Mr Keene uttered a strange
