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
shivered.
Mike nodded again.
There was a moment of quiet while they looked around at each other. Then Bill got to his feet, and the others rose with him.
‘I want you all to be careful for the rest of the night,’ Mike said. ‘It’s been here; It can be wherever you are. But this meeting has made me feel better.’ He looked at Bill. ‘I’d say it still can be done, wouldn’t you, Bill?’
Bill nodded slowly. ‘Yes. I think it still can be done.’
‘It will know that, too,’ Mike said, ‘and It will do whatever It can to slug the odds in Its favor.’
‘What do we do if It shows up?’ Richie asked. ‘Hold our noses, shut our eyes, turn around three times, and think good thoughts? Puff some magic dust in Its face? Sing old Elvis Presley songs? What?’
Mike shook his head. ‘If I could tell you that, there would be no problem, would there? All I know is that there’s another force — at least there was when we were kids — that wanted us to stay alive and to do th e job. Maybe it’s still there.’ He shrugged. It was a weary gesture. ‘I thought two, maybe as many as three of you would be gone by the time we started our meeting tonight. Missing or dead. Just seeing you turn up gave me reason to hope.’
Richie looked at his watch. ‘Quarter past one. How the time flies when you’re having fun, right, Haystack?’
‘Beep-beep, Richie,’ Ben said, and smiled wanly.
‘You want to walk back to the Tuh-Tuh-Townhouse with me, Beverly?’ Bill asked.
‘All right.’ She was putting on her coat. The library seemed very silent now, shadowy, frightening. Bill felt the last two days catching up with him all at once, piling up on his back. If it had just been weariness, that would have been okay, but it was more: a feeling that he was cracking up, dreaming, having delusions of paranoia. A sensation of being watched. Maybe I’m really not here at all, he thought. Maybe I’m in Dr Seward’s lunatic asylum, with
the Count’s crumbling townhouse next door and Renfield just across the hall, him with his flies and me with my monsters, both of us sure the party is really going on and dressed to the nines for it, not in tuxedos but in strait-waistcoats.
‘What about you, R-Richie?’
Richie shook his head. ‘I’m going to let Haystack and Kaspbrak lead me home,’ he said. ‘Right, fellers?’
‘Sure,’ Ben said. He looked briefly at Beverly, who was standing close to Bill, and felt a pain he had almost forgotten. A new memory trembled, almost within his grasp, then floated away.
‘What about you, M-M-Mike?’ Bill asked. ‘Want to walk with Bev and m-me?’
Mike shook his head. ‘I’ve got to — ‘
That was when Beverly screamed, a high-pitched hurt sound in the stillness. The vaulted dome overhead picked it up, and the echoes were like the laughter of banshees, flying and flapping around them.
Bill turned toward her; Richie dropped his sportcoat as he was taking it off the back of his chair; there was a crash of glass as Eddie’s arm swept an empty gin bottle onto the floor.
Beverly was backing away from them, her hands held out, her face as white as good bond paper. Her eyes, deep in dusky-purple sockets, bulged. ‘My hands!’ She screamed. ‘My hands!’
‘What — ‘ Bill began, and then he saw the blood dripping slowly between her shaking fingers. He started forward and felt sudden lines of painful warmth cross his own hands. The pain was not sharp; it was more like the pain one sometimes feels in an old healed wound.
The old scars on his palms, the ones which had reappeared in England, had broken open and were bleeding. He looked sideways and saw Eddie Kaspbrak peering stupidly down at his own hands. They were also bleeding. So were Mike’s. And Richie’s. And Ben’s.
‘We’re in it to the end, aren’t we?’ Beverly asked. She had begun to cry. This sound was also magnified in the library’s still emptiness; the building itself seemed to be weeping with her. Bill thought that if he had to listen to that sound for long, he would go mad. ‘God help us, we’re in it to the end.’ She sobbed, an d a runner of snot depended from one of her nostrils. She wiped it off with the back of one shaking hand, and more blood dripped on the floor.
‘Quh-Quh-hick!’ Bill said, and seized Eddie’s hand.
‘What — ‘
‘Quick?
He held out his other hand, and after a moment Beverly took it. She was still crying.
‘Yes,’ Mike said. He looked dazed —
