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
‘Bill saved your bacon,’ Eddie says abruptly. ‘I mean, Bev saved us all, but if it hadn’t been for you, Bill — ‘
‘Yes,’ Ben agrees. ‘You did, big Bill. I was, like, lost in the funhouse.’
Bill points briefly at the empty chair. ‘I had some help from Stan Uris. And he paid for it. Maybe died for it.’
Ben Hansom is shaking his head. ‘Don’t say that, Bill.’
‘But it’s t-true. And if it’s yuh-your f-fault, it’s my fault, too, and e-e-everyone else’s here, because we went on. Even after Patrick, an d what was written on that r-re-frigerator, we went on. It would be my fault m-most of all, I guess, because I wuh-wuh-wanted us to go on.
Because of Juh-George. Maybe even because I thought that if I killed whatever k-killed George, my puh-harents would have to luh-luh-luh — ‘
‘Love you again?’ Beverly asks gently.
‘Yes. Of course. But I d-d-don’t think it was a-a-anyone’s fuh-hault, Ben. It was just the w-w-way Stan was built.’
‘He couldn’t face it,’ Eddie says. He is thinking of Mr Keene’s revelation about his asthma medicine, and how he could still not give it up. He is thinking that he might have been able to give up the habit of being sick; it was the habit of believing he had been unable to kick. As things had turned out, maybe that habit had saved his life.
‘He was great that day,’ Ben says. ‘Stan and his birds.’
A chuckle stirs through them, and they look at the chair where Stan would have been in a rightful sane world where all the good guys won all of the time. I miss him, Ben thinks. God, how I miss him! He says, ‘You remember that day, Richie, when you told him you heard somewhere he killed Christ, and Stan says totally deadpan, «I think that was my father»?’
‘I remember,’ Richie says in a voice almost too low to hear. He takes his handkerchief out of his back pocket, removes his glasses, wipes his eyes, then puts his glasses back on. He puts away the handkerchief and without looking up from his hands he says, ‘Why don’t you just tell it, Ben?’
‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Richie says, his voice so thick it is hard to understand him. ‘Why, sure. It hurts.’
Ben looks around at them, then nods. ‘All right, then. One more story before twelve. Just to keep us warm. Bill and Richie had the idea of the bullets — ‘
