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
his weeping wife.
‘Come on downstairs with me and I’ll tell you what I can,’ he said.
Eddie put his two bags — clothes in one, medicine in the other — by the door in the front hall. He remembered something else then . . . or rather the ghost of his mother, who had been dead many years but who still spoke frequently in his mind, remembered for him.
You know when your feet get wet you always get a cold, Eddie — you’re not like other people, you have a very weak system, you have to be careful. That’s why you must always wear your rubbers when it rains.
It rained a lot in Derry.
Eddie opened the front-hall closet, got his rubbers off the hook where they hung neatly in a plastic bag, and put them in his clothes suitcase.
That’s a good boy, Eddie.
He and Myra had been watching TV when the shit hit the fan. Eddie went into the television room and pushed the button which lowered the screen of the MuralVision TV — its screen was so big that it made Freeman McNeil look like a visitor from Brobdingnag on Sunday afternoons. He picked up the telephone and called a taxi. The dispatcher told him it would probably be fifteen minutes. Eddie said that was no problem.
He hung up and grabbed his aspirator off the top of their expensive Sony compact-disc player. I spent fifteen hundred bucks on a state-of-the-art sound system so that Myra wouldn’t miss a single golden note on her Barry Manilow records and her ‘Supremes Greatest Hits,’ he thought, and then felt a flush of guilt. That wasn’t fair, and he damn well knew it. Myra would have been just as happy with her old scratchy records as she was with the new 45-rpm-sized laser discs, just as she would have been happy to keep on living in the little four –room house in Queens until they were both old and gray (and, if the truth were told, there was a little snow on Eddie Kaspbrak’s mountain already). He had bought the luxury sound system for the same reasons that he had bought this low fieldstone house on Long Island, where the two of them often rattled around like the last two peas in a can: because he had been able to, and because they were ways of appeasing the soft, frightened, often bewildered, always implacable voice of his mother; they were ways of saying: I made it, Ma! Look at all this! Imade it! Now will you please for Christ’s sake shut up awhile?
Eddie stuffed the aspirator into his mouth and, like a man miming suicide, pulled the trigger. A cloud of awful licorice taste roiled and boiled its way down his throat, and Eddie breathed deeply. He could feel breathing passages which had almost closed start to open up again. The tightness in his chest started to ease, and suddenly he heard voices in his mind, ghost –voices.
Didn’t you get the note I sent you?
I got it, Mrs Kaspbrak, but —
Well, in case you can’t read, Coach Black, let me tell you in person. Are you ready?
Mrs Kaspbrak —
Good. Here it comes, from my lips to your ears. Ready? My Eddie cannot take physical education. I repeat: he canNOT take phys ed. Eddie is very delicate, and if he runs . . . or jumps . . .
Mrs Kaspbrak, I have the results of Eddie’s last physical on file in my office — that’s a state requirement. It says that Eddie is a little small for his age, but otherwise he’s absolutely normal. So I called your family physician just to be sure and he confirmed —
Are you saying I’m a liar, Coach Black? Is that it? Well, here he is! Here’s Eddie, standing right beside me! Can you hear the way he’s breathing? CAN you?
