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
angry and he thought he said, She’s not the leper, please don’t think that, she’s only eating me because she loves me, but perhaps nothing came out because the nurse’s angry face didn’t change.
He had a faint recollection of being pushed up a corridor in a wheelchair and his mother’s voice somewhere behind, fading: ‘What do you mean, visiting hours) Don’t talk to me about visiting hours, that’s my son! ‘
Fading. He was glad she was fading, glad he was fading. The pain was gone and the clarity was gone with it. He didn’t want to think. He wanted to drift. He was aware that his right arm felt very heavy. He wondered if they had put it in a cast yet. He couldn’t seem to see if they had or not. He was vaguely aware of radios playing from rooms, of patients who looked like ghosts in their hospital johnnies walking up and down the wide halls, and that it was hot . . . so very hot. When he was wheeled into his room, he could see the sun going down in an angry orange boil of blood and thought incoherently: Like a great big clown-button.
‘Come on, Eddie, you can walk,’ a voice was saying, and he found that he could. He was slid between crisp cool sheets. The voice told him that he would have some pain in the night, but not to ring for a pain-killer unless it got very bad. Eddie asked if he could have a drink of water. The water came with a straw that had an accordion middle so you could bend it. It was cool and good. He drank it all.
There was pain in the night, a good deal of it. He lay awake in bed, holding the call-button in his left hand but not pressing it . A thunderstorm was going on outside, and when the
lightning flashed blue –white, he turned his head away from the windows, afraid he might see a monstrous, grinning face etched across the sky in that electric fire.
At last he slept again, and in his sleep he had a dream. In it he saw Bill, Ben, Richie, Stan, Mike, and Bev — his friends — arriving at the hospital on their bikes (Bill was riding Richie double on Silver). He was surprised to see that Beverly was wearing a dress — it was a lovely green, the color of the Caribbean in a National Geographic plate. He couldn’t remember if he had ever seen her in a dress before; all he remembered were jeans and pedal-pushers and what the girls called ‘school-sets’: skirts and blouses, the blouses usually white with round collars, the skirts usually brown and pleated and hemmed at mid –shin, so that the scabs on their knees didn’t show.
In the dream he saw them coming in for the 2:00 P.M. visiting hours and his mother, who had been waiting patiently since eleven, shouting so loudly at them that everyone turned to look at her.
If you think you’re going to go in there, you’ve got another think coming! Eddie’s mother shouted, and now the clown, who had been sitting here in the waiting room all along (but way back in one corner, with a copy of Look magazine held up in front of his face until now), jumped up and mimed applause, patting his white-gloved hands together rapidly. He capered and danced, now turning a cartwheel, now executing a neat back-over flip, as Mrs Kaspbrak ranted at Eddie’s fellow Losers and as they shrank, one by one, behind Bill, who only stood there, pale but outwardly calm, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans (maybe so no one, including Bill himself, would be able to see if they were shaking or not). No one saw the clown except Eddie . . . although a baby who had been sleeping peacefully in his mother’s arms awoke and began to cry lustily.
You’ve done enough damage! Eddie’s ma shouted. I know who those boys were! They’ve been in trouble at school, they’ve even been in trouble with the police! And just because those boys have something against you is no reason for them to have something against him. I told him so, and he agrees with me. He wants me to tell you to go away, he’s done with you, he never wants to see any of you again. He doesn’t want your so-called friendship anymore! Any of you! I knew it would lead to trouble, and look at this! My Eddie in the hospital! A boy as delicate as he is . . .
