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
stay together almost forgotten. They were listening to gale –force panicwinds blowing between their ears. As if in a dream Ben heard Miss Davies, the assistant librarian, reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping on my bridge? And he saw them, the little ones, the babies, leaning forward, ht eir faces still and solemn, their eyes reflecting the eternal fascination of the fairy-story: would the monster be bested . . . or would It feed?
‘I don’t have anything!’ Stan Uris wailed, and he seemed very small, almost small enough to slip through one of the cracks in the hallway’s plank flooring like a human letter. ‘You got your brother, man, but I don’t have anything?
‘You duh-duh-duh-do!’ Bill yelled back. He grabbed Stan and Ben felt sure he was going to bust him one and his thoughts moaned, No, Bill, please, that’s Henry’s way, if you do that It’ll kill us all right now!
But Bill didn’t hit Stan. He whirled him around with rough hands and tore the paperback from the back pocket of Stan’s jeans.
‘Gimme it!’ Stan screamed, beginning to cry. The others stood stunned, shrinking away from Bill, whose eyes now seemed to actually burn. His forehead glowed like a lamp, and he held the book out to Stan like a priest holding out a cross to ward off a vampire.
‘You guh-guh-got your b-b-bi-bir-bir —
He turned his head up, the cords in his neck standing out like cables, his adam’s apple like an arrowhead buried in his throat. Ben was filled with both fear and pity for his friend Bill Denbrough; but there was also a strong sense of wonderful relief. Had he doubted Bill? Had any of them? Oh Bill, say it, please, can’t you say it?
And somehow, Bill did. ‘You got your BUH-BUH-BUH-BIRDS! Your BUH-BUH-BIRDS!’
He thrust the book at Stan. Stan took it, and looked at Bill dumbly. Tears glimmered on his cheeks. He held the book so tightly that his fingers were white. Bill looked at him, then at the others.
‘Cuh-cuh-home on,’ he said again.
‘Will the birds work?’ Stan asked. His voice was low, husky.
They worked in the Standpipe, didn’t they?’ Bev asked him.
Stan looked at her uncertainly.
Richie clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come on, Stan-kid,’ he said. ‘Is you a man or is you a mouse?’
‘I must be a man,’ Stan said shakily, and wiped tears from his face with the heel of his left hand. ‘So far as I know, mice don’t shit their pants.’
They laughed and Ben could have sworn he felt the house pulling away from them, from that sound. Mike turned. ‘That big room. The one we just came through. Look!’
They looked. The parlor was now almost black. It was not smoke, nor any kind of gas; it was just blackness, a nearly solid blackness. The air had been robbed of its light. The blackness seemed to roll and flex as they stared into it, to almost coalesce into faces.
‘Come oh-oh-on.’
They turned away from the black and walked down the hall. Three doors opened off it, two with dirty white porcelain doorknobs, the third with only a hole where the knob’s shaft had been. Bill grabbed the first knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. Bev crowded up next to him, raising the Bullseye.
Ben drew back, aware that the others were doing the same, crowding behind Bill like frightened quail. It was a bedroom, empty save for one stained mattress. The rusty ghosts of the coils in a box-spring long departed were tattooed into the mattress’s yellow hide. Outside the room’s one window, sunflowers dipped and nodded.
‘There’s nothing — ‘ Bill began, and then the mattress began to bulge in and out rhythmically. It suddenly ripped straight down the middle. A black sticky fluid began to spill out, staining the mattress and then running over the floor toward the doorway. It came in long ropy tendrils.
‘Shut it, Bill!’ Richie shouted. ‘Shut the fuckin door!’
Bill slammed it shut, looked around at them, and nodded. ‘Come on.’ He had barely touched the knob of the second door — this one on the other side of the narrow hall — when the buzzing scream began behind the cheap wood.
9
Even Bill drew back from that rising, inhuman cry. Ben felt the sound might drive him mad; his mind visualized a giant cricket behind the door, like something from a movie where radiation made all the bugs get big — The Beginning of the End, maybe, or The Black Scorpion, or that one about the ants in the Lo s Angeles
