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
He didn’t know, any more than he knew why he should feel, in spite of the pain, such intense relief. Was it maybe just because he was still alive, that the worst he had suffered was a broken arm, and there were still some pieces to pick up? He settled for that, but years later, sitting in the Derry Library with a glass of gin and prune juice in front of him and his aspirator near at hand, he told the others he thought it was something more than that; he had been old enough to feel that something more, but not to understand or define it.
I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life, he would tell the others. It wasn’t what I thought it would be at all. It didn’t put an end to me as a person. I think . . . it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain.
Eddie turned his head weakly to the right and saw large black Firestone tires, blinding chrome hubcaps, and pulsing blue lights. He heard Mr Nell’s voice then, thickly Irish, impossibly Irish, more like Richie’s Irish Cop Voice than Mr Nell’s real voice . . . but perhaps that was the distance:
‘Holy Jaysus, it’s the Kaspbrak bye!’
At this point Eddie floated away.
4
And, with one exception, stayed away for quite awhile.
There was a brief period of consciousness in the ambulance. He saw Mr Nell sitting across from him, tipping a drink from his little brown bottle and reading a paperback called The Jury. The girl on the cover had the biggest bosoms Eddie had ever seen. His eyes shifted past Mr Nell to the driver up front. The driver peered around at Eddie with a big leering grin, his skin livid with greasepaint and talcum powder, his eyes shiny as new quarters. It was Pennywise.
‘Mr Nell,’ Eddie husked.
Mr Nell looked up and smiled. ‘How are you feelin, me bye?’
‘ . . . driver . . . the driver . . . ‘
‘Yes, we’ll be there in a jig,’ Mr Nell said, and handed him the little brown bottle. ‘Suck some of this. It’ll make ye feel better.’
Eddie drank what tasted like liquid fire. He coughed, hurting his arm. He looked toward the front and saw the driver again. Just some guy with a crewcut. No clown.
He drifted off again.
Much later there was the Emergency Room and a nurse wiping blood and dirt and snot and gravel off his face with a cold cloth. It stung, but it felt wonderful at the same time. He heard his mother bugling and clarioning outside, and he tried to tell the nurse not to let her in, but no words would come out, no matter how hard he tried.
‘ . . . if he’s dying, I want to know!’ his mother was bellowing. ‘You hear me? It’s my right to know, and it’s my right to see him! I can sue you, you know! I know lawyers, plenty of lawyers! Some of my best friends are lawyers!’
‘Don’t try to talk,’ the nurse said to Eddie. She was young, and he could feel her bosoms pressing against his arm. For a moment he had this crazy idea that the nurse was Beverly Marsh, and then he drifted away again.
When he came back his mother was in the room, talking to Dr Handor at a mile –a-minute clip. Sonia Kaspbrak was a huge woman. Her legs, encased in support hose, were trunklike but weirdly smooth. Her face was pale now except for hectic flaring blots of rouge.
‘Ma,’ Eddie managed,’ . . . all right . . . I’m all right . . . ‘
‘You’re not, you’re not,’ Mrs Kaspbrak moaned. She wrung her hands. Eddie heard her knuckles crack and grind. He began to feel his breath shorten up as he looked at her, seeing what a state she was in, how this latest escapade of his had hurt her. He wanted to tell her to take it easy or she’d have a heart attack, but he couldn’t. His throat was too dry. ‘You’re not all right, you’ve had a serious accident, a very serious accident, but you will be all right, I promise you that, Eddie, you will be all right, even if we need to bring in every specialist in the book, oh Eddie . . . Eddie . . . your poor arm . . . ‘
She burst into honking sobs. Eddie saw that the nurse who had washed his face was looking at her without much sympathy.
All through this aria, Dr Handor had been stuttering, ‘Sonia . . . please, Sonia . . . Sonia . . . ?’ He was a skinny, limp-looking man with a little mustache that hadn’t grown very well and which, in addition, had been clipped unevenly, so it was longer
