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
Mom . . . please . . . I’m all right . . .
Eddie, you know better than that. I taught you better than that. Don’t interrupt your elders.
I hear him, Mrs Kaspbrak, but —
Do you? Good! I thought maybe you were deaf! He sounds like a truck going uphill in low gear, doesn’t he? And if that isn’t asthma —
Mom, I’ll be —
Be quiet, Eddie, don’t interrupt me again. If that isn’t asthma, Coach Black, then I’m Queen Elizabeth!
Mrs Kaspbrak, Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physical-education classes. He loves to play games, and he runs quite fast. In my conversation with Dr Baynes, the word ‘psychosomatic’ came up. I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility that —
— that my son is crazy? Is that what you’re trying to say? ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY THAT MY SON IS CRAZY????
No, but —
He’s delicate.
Mrs Kaspbrak —
My son is very delicate.
Mrs Kaspbrak, Dr Baynes confirmed that he could find nothing at all —
‘ — physically wrong,’ Eddie finished. The memory of that humiliating encounter, his mother screaming at Coach Black in the Derry Elementary School gymnasium while he gasped and cringed at her side and the other kids huddled around one of the baskets and watched, had recurred to him tonight for the first time in years. Nor was that the only memory which Mike Hanlon’s call was going to bring back, he knew. He could feel many others, as bad or even worse, crowding and jostling like sale-mad shoppers bottlenecked in a department –store doorway. But soon the bottleneck would break and they would be along. He was quite sure of that. And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.
‘Nothing physically wrong,’ he repeated, took a deep shuddery breath, and stuffed the aspirator into his pocket.
‘Eddie,’ Myra said. ‘Please tell me what all of this is about!’
Tear-tracks shone on her chubby cheeks. Her hands twisted restlessly together like a pair of pink and hairless animals at play. Once, shortly before actually proposing marriage, he had taken a picture of Myra which she had given him and had put it next to one of his mother, who had died of congestive heart-failure at the age of sixty-four. At the time of her death Eddie’s mother had topped the scales at over four hundred pounds — four hundred and six, to be exact. She had become something nearly monstrous by then — her body had seemed nothing more than boobs and butt and belly, all overtopped by her pasty, perpetually dismayed face. But the picture of her which he put next to Myra’s picture had been taken in 1944, two years before he had been born (You were a very sickly baby, the ghost-mom now whispered in his ear. Many times we despaired of your life . . . ). In 1944 his mother had been a relatively svelte one hundred and eighty pounds.
He had made that comparison, he supposed, in a last-ditch effort to stop himself from committing psychological incest. He looked from Mother to Myra and back again to Mother.
They could have been sisters. The resemblance was that close.
Eddie looked at the two nearly identical pictures and promised himself he would not do this crazy thing. He knew that the boys at work were already making jokes about Jack Sprat and his wife, but they didn’t know the half of it. The jokes and snide remarks he could take, but did he really want to be a clown in such a Freudian circus as this? No. He did not. He
would break it off with Myra. He would let her down
