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
he was go ing to say, and then he remembered a story Mrs Portleigh had told the Sunday-school class when he was just a little kid — a first grader in Little Worshippers. According to Mrs Portleigh, a bad boy had once stolen some of the communion bread when the tray was passed and put it in his pocket. He took it home and threw it into the toilet bowl just to see what would happen. At once — or so Mrs Portleigh reported to her rapt Little Worshippers — the water in the toilet bowl had turned a bright red. It was the Blood of Christ, she said, and it had appeared to that little boy because he had done a very bad act called a BLASPHEMY. It had appeared to warn him that, by throwing the flesh of Jesus into the toilet, he had put his immortal soul in danger of Hell.
Up until then, Eddie had rather enjoyed the act of communion, which he had only been allowed to take since the previous year. The Methodists used Welch’s grape juice instead of wine, and the Body of Christ was represented by cut-up cubes of fresh, springy Wonder Bread. He liked the idea of taking in food and drink as a religious rite. But following Mrs Portleigh’s story, his awe of the ritual darkened into something more potent, something rather dreadful. Simply reaching for the cubes of bread became an act which required courage, and he always feared an electrical shock . . . or worse, that the bread would suddenly change color in his hand, become a blood-clot, and a disembodied Voice would begin to thunder in the church: Not worthy! Not worthy! Damned to Hell! Damned to Hell! Often, after he had taken communion, his throat would close up, his breath would begin to wheeze in and out, and he would wait with panicky impatience for the benediction to be over so he could hurry into the vestibule and use his aspirator.
You don’t want to be so silly, he told himself as he grew older. That was nothing but a story, and Mrs Portleigh sure wasn’t any saint — Mamma said she was divorced down in Kittery and that she plays Bingo at Saint Mary’s in Bangor, and that real Christians don’t gamble, real Christians leave gambling for pagans and Catholics.
All that made perfect sense, but it didn’t relieve his mind. The story of the communion bread that turned the water in the toilet bowl to blood worried at him, gnawed at him, even caused him to lose sleep. It came to him one night that the way to get this behind him once and for all would be to take a piece of the bread himself, toss it in the toilet, and see what happened.
But such an experiment was far beyond his courage; his rational mind could not stand against that sinister image of the blood spreading its cloud of accusation and potential damnation in the water, it could not stand against that talismanic magical incantation: This ismy body, take, eat; this is my blood, shed for you and for many.
No, he had never made the experiment.
‘I guess all religions are weird,’ Eddie said now. But powerful, his mind added, almost magical . . . or was that BLASPHEMY? He began to think about the thing they had seen on Neibolt Street, and for the first time he saw a crazy parallel — the Werewolf had, after all, come out of the toilet.
‘Boy, I guess everybody’s asleep,’ Richie said, tossing his empty Rocket– tube n o n c h a l a n t l y into the gutter. ‘You ever see it so quiet? What, did everybody go to Bar Harbor for the day?’
‘H-H-H-Hey you guh-guh –guys!’ Bill Denbrough shouted from behind them. ‘Wuh-Wuh-hait up!’
Eddie turned, delighted as always to hear Big Bill’s voice. He was wheeling Silver around the corner of Costello Avenue, outdistancing Mike, although Mike’s Schwinn was almost brand-new.
‘Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYYY!’ Bill yelled. He rolled up to them doing perhaps twenty miles an hour, the playing cards clothespinned to the fender-struts roaring. Then he back-pedalled, locked the brakes, and produced an admirably long skid –mark.
‘Stuttering Bill!’ Richie said. ‘Howaya, boy? M say . . . Ah say . . . how aw you, boy?’
‘I’m o-o-okay,’ Bill said. ‘Seen Ben or Buh-Buh-heverly?’ is Mike rode up and joined them. Sweat stood out on his face in little drops. ‘How fast does that bike go, anyway?’
Bill laughed. ‘I d-d-don’t nun-know, e-exactly. Pretty f-f-fast.’
