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
hand. He was dressed in his khakis, and when she glanced down she saw that his high-topped shoes were le aving tracks on her mother’s carpet. I’ll have to get the vacuum out, she thought incoherently. Vacuum that up. If he leaves me able to vacuum. If he —
It was mud .Black mud. Her mind sideslipped alarmingly. She was back in the Barrens with Bill, Richie, Eddie, and the others. There was black, viscous mud like the kind on Daddy’s shoes down there in the Barrens, in the swampy place where the stuff Richie called bamboo stood in a skeletal white grove. When the wind blew the stalks rattled together hollo wly, producing a sound like voodoo drums, and had her father been down in the Barrens? Had her father —
WHAP!
His hand rocketed down in a wide sweeping orbit and struck her face. Her head thudded back against the wall. He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked at her with that expression of deadly disconnected curiosity. She felt a trickle of blood running warmly from the left corner of her lower lip.
‘I have seen you getting big,’ he said, and she thought he would say something more, but for the time being that seemed to be all.
‘Daddy, what are you talking about?’ she asked in a low trembling voice.
‘If you lie to me, I’ll beat you within an inch of your life, Bevvie,’ he said, and she realized with horror that he wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at the Currier and Ives picture over her head, on the wall above the sofa. Her mind sideslipped crazily again and she was four, sitting in the bathtub with her blue plastic boat and her Popeye soap; her father, so big and so well-loved, was kneeling beside her, dressed in gray twill pants and a strappy tee-shirt, a washcloth in one hand and a glass of orange soda in the other, soaping her back and saying, Lemme see those ears, Bevvie; your ma needs taters for supper. And she could hear her small self giggling, looking up at his slightly grizzled face, which she had then believed must be eternal.
‘I . . . I won’t lie, Daddy,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’ Her view of him was gradually shivering apart as the tears came.
‘You been down there in the Bar’ns with a gang of boys?’
Her heart leaped; her eyes dropped to his mud-caked shoes again. That black, clingy mud. If you stepped into it too deep it would suck your sneaker or your loafer right off . . . and both Richie and Bill believe d that, if you went in all the way, it turned to quickmud.
‘I play down there somet — ‘
Whap! the hand, covered with hard calluses, rocketing down again. She cried out hurt, afraid. That look on his face scared her, and the way he wouldn’t look at her scared her, too. There was something wrong with him. He had been getting worse . . . What if he meant to kill her? What if
(oh stop it Beverly he’s your FATHER and FATHERS don’t kill DAUGHTERS)
he lost control, then? What if —
‘What have you let them do to you?’
‘Do? What — ‘ She had no idea what he meant.
‘Take your pants off.’
Her confusion increased. Nothing he said seemed connected to anything else. Trying to follow him made her feel . . . seasick, almost.
‘What . . . why . . . ?’
His hand rose; she flinched back. ‘Take them off, Bevvie. I want to see if you are intact.’
Now there was a new image, crazier than the rest: she saw herself pulling her jeans off, and one of her legs coming off with them. Her father belting her around the room as she tried to hop away from him on her one good leg, Daddy shouting: I knew you wasn’t intact! I knew it!I knew it!
‘Daddy, I don’t know what — ‘
His hand came down, not slapping this time but clutching. It bit into her shoulder with furious strength. She screamed. He pulled her up, and for the first time looked directly into her eyes. She screamed again at what she saw there. It was . . . nothing. Her father was gone. And Beverly suddenly understood that she was alone in the apartment with It, alone with It on this dozey August morning. There was not the thick sense of power and untinctured evil she had felt in the house on Neibolt Street a week and a half ago — It had been diluted somehow by her father’s essential humanity — but It was here, working through him.
He threw her aside. She struck the coffee table, tripped over it, and went sprawling on the floor with a cry. This is how it happens, she thought. I’ll tell Bill so he understands. It’s everywhere in Derry. It just . . . It just fills the hollow places, that’s all.
