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
does.’
‘You mean I’m crazy.’
Mr Keene leaned forward, looking at him intently over his folded hands.
‘I don’t know,’ he said softly. ‘Are you?’
‘It’s all a lie!’ Eddie cried, surprised the words came out so strongly from his tight chest. He was thinking of Bill, how Bill would react to such amazing charges. Bill would know what to say, stutter or not. Bill would know how to be brave. ‘All a great big lie! I do have asthma, I do!’
‘Yes,’ Mr Keene said, and now the dry smile had become a weird skeletal grin. ‘But who gave it to you, Eddie?’
Eddie’s brain thudded and whirled. Oh, he felt sick, he felt very sick.
‘Four years ago, in 1954 — the same year as the DePaul tests, oddly enough — Dr Handor began prescribing this HydrOx for you. That stands for hydrogen and oxygen, the two components of water. I have condoned this deception since then, but I will not condone it anymore. Your asthma medicine works on your mind rather than your body. Your asthma is the result of a nervous tightening of the diaphragm that is ordered by your mind . . . or your mother.
‘You are not sick.’
A terrible silence descended.
Eddie sat in his chair, his mind whirling. For a moment he considered the possibility that Mr Keene might be telling the truth, bu t there were ramifi cations in such an idea that he could not face. Yet why would Mr Keene lie, especially about something so serious? ! Mr Keene sat and smiled his bright dry heartless desert smile.
I do have asthma, I do. The day that Henry Bowers punched me in the nose, the day Bill and I were trying to make a dam in the Barrens, I almost died. Am I supposed to think that my mind was just . . . just making all of that up?
But why would he lie? (It was only years later, in the library, that Eddie asked himself the more terrible question: Why would he tell me the truth?)
Dimly he heard Mr Keene saying: ‘I’ve kept my eye on you, Eddie. I told you all this because you’re old enough to understand, but also because I’ve noticed you’ve finally made some friends. They are good friends, aren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ Eddie said.
Mr Keene tilted his chair back (it made that cricketlike noise again), and closed one eye in what might or might not have been a wink. ‘And I’ll bet your mother doesn’t like them much, does she?’
‘She likes them fine,’ Eddie said, thinking of the cutting things his mother had said about Richie Tozier (He has a foul mouth . . . and I’ve smelled his breath, Eddie . . . I think hesmokes}, her sniffing remark not to loan any mone y to Stan Uris because he was a Jew, her outright dislike of Bill Denbrough and ‘that fatboy.’
He repeated to Mr Keene: ‘She likes them a lot.’
‘Does she?’ Mr Keene said, still smiling. ‘Well, maybe she’s right and maybe she’s wrong, but at least yo u have friends. Maybe you ought to talk to them about this problem of yours. This . . . this mental weakness. See what they have to say.’
Eddie didn’t reply. He was through talking to Mr Keene; that seemed safer. And he was afraid that if he didn’t ge t out of here soon, he really would cry.
‘Well!’ Mr Keene said, standing up. ‘I think that just about finishes us up, Eddie. If I’ve upset you, I’m sorry. I was only doing my duty as I saw it. I — ‘
But before he could say any more, Eddie had snatched up his aspirator and the white bag of pills and nostrums and had fled. One of his feet skidded in the ice-creamy mess on the floor and he almost fell. Then he was running, bolting from the Center Street Drug Store in spite of his whistling breath. Ruby stared after him over her movie magazine, her mouth open.
Behind him he seemed to sense Mr Keene standing in the doorway of his office and watching his graceless retreat over the prescription counter, gaunt and neat and thoughtful and smiling. Smiling that dry desert smile.
He paused outside on the three-way corner of Kansas, Main, and Center. He took another deep pull from his aspirator while sitting on the low stone wall by the bus-stop — his throat was now positively slimy with that medicinal taste
(nothing but water with some camphor thrown in)
and he thought that if he had to
