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
them, then Mike Ben came last. He looked excruciatingly uncomfortable in a white trurtleneck sweater.
They came to his bed, solemn. Not even Richie was smiling.
Their faces, Eddie thought, fascinated. Jeezum-crow, their faces!
He was seeing in them what his mother had seen in him that afternoon: that odd combination of power and helplessness. The yellow stormlight lay on their skins, making their faces seem ghost-like, distant, shadowy.
We’re passing over, Eddie thought. Passing over into something new — we’re on the border. But what’s on the other side? Where are we going? Where?
‘H-h-Hello, Eh-Eh –Eddie,’ Bill said. ‘How you d-d-doin?’
‘Okay, Big Bill,’ Eddie said, and tried to smile.
‘Had a day yesterday, I guess,’ Mike said. Thunder rumbled behind his voice. Neither the overhead light nor the bedside lamp was on in Eddie’s room, and all of them seemed to fade in and out of the bruised light. Eddie thought of that light all over Derry right now, lying long and still across McCarron Park, falling through the holes in the roof of the Kissing Bridge in smudged lackadaisical rays, making the Kenduskeag look like smoky glass as ifcut its broad shallow path through the Barrens; he thought of seesaws standing at dead angles behind Derry Elementary as the thunderheads piled up and up; he thought of this thundery yellow light, and the stillness, as if the whole town had fallen asleep . . . or died.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was a big day.’
‘My f-folks are g-going out to a muh-muh-movie the night a-a-after n-next,’ Bill said. ‘When the p-pic –hictures change. We’re g-going to m-make them then. The suh –suh –suh — ‘
‘Silver balls,’ Richie said.
‘I thought — ‘
‘It’s better this way,’ Ben said quietly. ‘I still think we could have made the bullets, but thinking isn’t good enough. If we were grownups — ‘
‘Oh yeah, the world would be peachy if we were grownups,’ Beverly said. ‘Grownups can make anything they want, can’t they? Grownups can do anything they want, and it always comes out right.’ She laughed, a jagged nervous sound. ‘Bill wants me to shoot It. Can you feature that, Eddie? Just call me Beverly Oakley.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Eddie said, but he thought he did — he was getting some kind of picture, anyway.
Ben explained. They would melt down one of his silver dollars and make two silver balls a little smaller than ball-bearings. And then, if there really was a werewolf residing at 29 Neibolt Street, Beverly would put a silver ball into Its head with Bill’s Bullseye slingshot. Goodbye werewolf. And if they were right about one creature who wore many faces, goodbye It.
There must have been some sort of expression on Eddie’s face, because Richie laughed and nodded.
‘I know how you feel, man. I thought Bill must have lost his few remaining marbles when he started talking about using his slingshot instead of his dad’s gun. But this afternoon — ‘ He stopped and cleared his throat. This afternoon after your ma blew us out of the water was how he had been about to start, and that obviously wouldn’t do. ‘This afternoon we went down to the dump. Bill brought his Bullseye. Look.’ From his back pocket Richie took a flattened can which had once held Del Monte pineapple chunks. There was a ragged hole about two inches in diameter through the middle of it. ‘Beverly did that with a rock, from twenty feet away. Looks like a .38 to me. De Trashmouth was convinced. And when de Trashmouth is convinced, de Trashmouth is convinced.’
‘Killing cans is one thing,’ Beverly said. ‘If it was something else . . . something alive . . . Bill, you should be the one. Really.’
‘N-no,’ Bill said. ‘We a-a-all t-took turns. You suh-suh-saw how it w-w-went.’
‘How did it go?’ Eddie asked.
Bill explained, slowly and haltingly, while Beverly looked out the window with her lips pressed so tightly together they were white. She was, for reasons she could not explain even to herself, more than afraid: she was deeply embarrassed by what had happened today. On the way over here tonight she had argued again, passionately, that they try to make the bullets after all . . . not because she was any more sure than Bill or Richie that they would actually work when the time came, but because — if something did happen out at that house — the weapon would be in
(Bill’s)
someone else’s hands.
But facts were facts. They had
