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
reach halfway up Its cheekbones. It talked
(we float down here Henry we all float you’ll float too)
all the way to town. Kill them all, Henry, the ghost-voice from the moon said, and Henry could dig it; Henry felt he could second that emotion. He would kill them all, his tormentors, and then those feelings — that he was losing his grip, that he was coming inexorably to a larger world he would not be able to dominate as he had dominated the playyard at Derry Elementary, that in the wider world the fat-boy and the nigger and the stuttering freak might somehow grow larger while he somehow only grew older — would be gone.
He would kill them all, and the voices — those inside and the one which spoke to him from the moon — would leave him alone. He would kill them and then go back to the house and sit on the back porch with his father’s souvenir Jap sword across his lap. He would drink one of his father’s Rheingolds. He would listen to the radio, too, but no baseball. Baseball was strictly Squaresville. He would listen to rock and roll instead. Although Henry didn’t know it (and wouldn’t have cared if he did), on this one subject he and the Losers agreed: rock and roll was pretty much okey-dokey. We got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn. Everything would be good then; everything would be the ginchiest then; everything would be okeyfine then and anything which might come next would not matter. The voice would take care of him — he sensed that. If you took care of It, It would take care of you. That was how things had always been in Derry.
But the kids had to be stopped, stopped soon, stopped today. The voice had told him so.
Henry took his new knife out of his pocket, looked at it, turned it this way and that, admiring the way the sun winked and slid off the chrome facing. Then Belch was grabbing his arm and hissing: ‘Look that, Henry! Jeezly-old –crow! Look that!’
Henry looked and felt the clear light of understanding burst over him. A square section of the clearing was rising as if by magic, revealing a growing slice of darkness beneath. For just a moment he felt a jolt of terror as it occurred to him that this might be the owner of the voice . . . for surely It lived somewhere under the city. Then he heard the gritty squall of dirt in the hinges and understood. They hadn’t been able to see the treehouse because there was none.
‘By God, we was standin right on top of em,’ Victor grunted, and as Ben’s head and shoulders appeared in the square hatchway in the center of the clearing, he made as if to charge forward. Henry grabbed him and held him back.
‘Ain’t we gonna get em, Henry?’ Victor asked as Ben boosted himself up. Both of them were puffing and blowing.
‘We’ll get em,’ Henry said, never taking his eyes from the hated fat-boy. Another ball-kicker. I’ll kick your balls so high up you can wear them for earrings, you fat fuck. Wait andsee if I don’t. ‘Don’t worry.’
The fat-boy was helping the bitch out of the hole. She looked around doubtfully, and for a moment Henry believed she looked right at him. Then her eyes passed on. The two of them murmured together and then they pushed their way into the thick undergrowth and were gone.
‘Come on,’ Henry said, when the sound of snapping branches and rustling leaves had faded almost to inaudibility. ‘We’ll follow em. But keep back and keep quiet. I want em all together.’
The three of them crossed the clearing like soldiers on patrol, bent low, their eyes wide and moving. Belch paused to look down into the clubhouse and shook his head in admiring wonder. ‘Sittin right over their heads, I was,’ he said.
Henry motioned him forward impatiently.
They took the path, because it was quieter. They were halfway back to Kansas Street when the bitch and the fat-boy, holding hands (isn’t that cute? Henry thought in a kind of ecstasy), emerged almost directly in front of them.
Luckily, their backs were to Henry’s group, and neither of them looked around. Henry, Victor, and Belch froze, then drew into the shadows at the side of the path. Soon Ben and Beverly were just two shirts seen through a tangle of shrubs and bushes. The three of them began to pursue again . . . cautiously. Henry took the knife out again and
9
Henry Gets a Lift / 2.:30 A.M.
pressed the chrome button in the handle. The blade popped out. He looked at it dreamily in the moonlight. He liked the way the starlight ran along the blade. He had no idea exactly what time
