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
of Dorsey’s older brother, Eddie Corcoran. Macklin would not break down and confess, weeping, on the witness stand for another two days, but the Losers were in agreement that Macklin probably had nothing to do with Eddie’s disappearance. The boy had either run away . . . or It had gotten him.
They left around quarter of seven, and the rain still had not fallen. It continued to threaten until long after Eddie’s ma had come, made her visit, and gone home again (she had been horrified at the signatures on Eddie’s cast, and even more horrified at his determination to leave the hospital the following day — she had been envisioning a stay of a week or more in absolute quiet, so that the ends of the break could ‘set together,’ as she said).
Eventually the stormclouds broke apart and drifted away. Not so much as a drop of rain had fallen in Derry. The humidity remained, and people slept on porches and on lawns and in sleeping bags in back fields that night.
The rain came the next day, not long after Beverly saw something terrible happen to Patrick Hockstetter.
1
When he finishes, Eddie pours himself another drink with a hand not completely steady. He looks at Beverly and says, ‘You saw It, didn’t you? You saw It take Patrick Hockstetter the day after you all signed my cast.’
The others lean forward.
Beverly pushes her hair back in a reddish cloud. Beneath it her face looks extraordinarily pale. She fumbles a fresh cigarette out of her pack — the last one — and flicks her Bic. She can’t seem to guide the flame to the tip of her cigarette. After a moment Bill holds her wrist lightly but firmly and puts the flame where it’s supposed to go. Beverly looks at him gratefully and exhales a cloud of bluish-gray smoke.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I saw that happen.’
She shivers.
‘He was cruh-cruh-crazy,’ Bill says, and thinks: Just the fact that Henry let a flako like Patrick Hockstetter hang around as that summer wore on . . . that says something, doesn’t it? Either that Henry was losing some of his charm, some of his attraction, or that Henry’s own craziness had progressed far enough so that the Hockstetter kid seemed okay to him. Both came to the same thing — Henry’s increasing . . . what? degeneration? Is that the word? Yes, i n l i g h t of what happened to him, where he ended up, I think it is.
There’s something else to support the idea, too, Bill thinks, but as yet he can onlyremember it vaguely. He and Richie and Beverly had been down at Tracker Brothers — early August by then, and the summer-school that had kept Henry out of their hair for most of the summer was just about to end — and hadn’t Victor Criss approached them? A very frightened Victor Criss? Yes, that had happened. Things had been rapidly approaching the end by then, and Bill thinks now that every kid in Derry had sensed it — the Losers and Henry’s group most of all. But that had been later.
‘Oh yeah you got that right,’ Beverly says flatly. ‘Patrick Hockstetter was crazy. None of the girls would sit in front of him in school. You’d be sitting there, doing your arithmetic or writing a story or a composition, and all at once you’d feel this hand . . . almost as light as a feather, but warm and sweaty.
