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
if it’s nuh-nuh-not?
No one answered him. Thunder boomed, closer now. Eddie looked at the sky and saw the stormclouds moving in from the west in black thunderheads. It was going to rain a bitch, as his mother sometimes said.
‘Nuh-nuh –how I’ll t-t-tell you what,’ Bill said, looking at them. ‘None of you have to guh-guh-go w-with me if you d-don’t want to. That’s uh-uh-up to you.’
‘I’ll go along, Big Bill,’ Richie said quietly.
‘Me too,’ Ben said.
‘Sure,’ Mike said with a shrug.
Beverly and Stan agreed, and Eddie last.
‘I don’t think so, Eddie,’ Richie said. ‘Your arm’s not, you know, looking too cool.’
Eddie looked at Bill.
‘I w-w-want h-him,’ Bill said. ‘You w-w-walk with muh-muh-me, Eh-Eh –Eddie. I’ll keep an eye on yuh-you.’
‘Thanks, Bill,’ Eddie said. Bill’s tired, half-crazy face seemed suddenly lovely to him — lovely and well loved. He felt a dim sense of amazement. I’d die for him, I guess, if he toldme to. What kind of power is that? If it makes you look like Bill looks now, it’s maybe not such a good power to have.
‘Yeah, Bill’s got the ultimate weapon,’ Richie said. ‘BO bombs.’ He raised his left arm and fluttered his right hand under the exposed armpit. Ben and Mike laughed a little, and Eddie smiled.
Thunder boomed again, close and loud enough this time to make them jump and huddle closer together. The wind was picking up, rattling trash around in the gutter. The first of the dark clouds sailed over the hazy ringed disc of the sun, and their shadows melted away. The wind was cold, chilling the sweat on Eddie’s uncovered arm. He shivered.
Bill looked at Stan and said a peculiar thing then.
‘You got your b-b-bird-book, Stan?’
Stan tapped his hip pocket.
Bill looked at them again. ‘Let’s g-g-go down,’ he said.
They went down the embankment single-file except for Bill, who stayed with Eddie as he had promised. He allowed Richie to push Silver down, and when they had reached the bottom, Bill put his bike in its accustomed place under the bridge. Then they stood together, looking around.
The coming storm did not produce a darkness; not even, precisely, a dimness. But the quality of the light had changed, and things stood out in a kind of dreamlike steely relief: shadowless, clear, chis elled. Eddie felt a sinking of horror and apprehension in his guts as he realized why the quality of this light seemed so familiar — it was the same sort of light he remembered from the house at 29 Neibolt Street.
A streak of lightning tattooed the clouds, bright enough to make him wince. He put a hand up to his face and found himself counting: One . . . two . . . three . . . And then the thunder came in a single coughing bark, an explosive sound, a sound like an M-80 firecracker, and they drew even closer together.
‘Wasn’t any rain forecast this morning,’ Ben said uneasily. ‘The paper said hot and hazy.’
Mike was scanning the sky. The clouds up there were black-bottomed keelboats, high and heavy, swiftly overrunning the blue haze that had covered the sky from horizon to horizon when he and Bill came out of the Denbrough house after lunch. ‘It’s comin fast,’ he said. ‘Never saw a storm come so fast.’ And as if in confirmation, thunder whacked again.
‘C-C-Come on,’ Bill said. ‘L-Let’s put Eh-Eh –Eddie’s Parchee-hee-si board in the cluh-cluh-clubhouse.’
They started along the path they had beaten in the weeks since the incident of the dam. Bill and Eddie were at the head of the line, their shoulders brushing the broad green leaves of the shr ubs, the others behind them. The wind gusted again, making the leaves on the trees and bushes whisper together. Farther ahead, the bamboo rattled eerily, like drums in a jungle tale.
‘Bill?’ Eddie said in a low voice.
‘What?’
‘I thought this was just in the movies, but . . . ‘ Eddie laughed a little. ‘I feel like somebody’s watching me.’
‘Oh, they’re th-th-there, all r-r-right,’ Bill said.
Eddie looked around nervously and held his Parcheesi board a link tighter. He
11
Eddie’s Room / 3:05 A.M.
opened the door on a monster from a horror comic.
A gore-streaked apparition stood there and it could only be Henry Bowers. Henry looked like a corpse which has returned from the grave. Henry’s face was a frozen witch-doctor’s mask of hate and murder. His right hand was cocked at cheek-level, and even as Eddie’s
