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
Henry said, and sat up. His hands clawed at the air, as if for holds which only Henry could see. His gouged eye leaked and dribbled; its bottom arc now bulged pregnantly down onto his cheek. He looked around, saw Eddie shrinking back against the wall, and tried to get up.
He opened his mouth and a stream of blood gushed out. Henry collapsed again.
Heart racing, Eddie fumbled for the telephone and succeeded only in knocking it off the table and onto the bed. He snatched it up and dialed 0. The phone rang again and again and again.
Come on, Eddie thought, what are you doing down there, jacking off? Come on, please, answer the frigging phone!
It rang again and again. Eddie kept his eyes on Henry, expecting him to start trying to gain his feet again at any moment. Blood. Dear God, so much blood.
‘Desk,’ a fuzzy, resentful voice said at last.
‘Ring Mr Denbrough’s room,’ Eddie said. ‘Quick as you can.’ With his other ear he was now listening to the rooms around him. How loud had they been? Was someone going to pound on the door and ask if everything was all right in there?
‘You sure you want me to ring?’ the clerk asked. ‘It’s ten after three.’
‘Yes, do it!’ Eddie nearly screamed. The hand holding the phone was trembling in convulsive little bursts. There was a nest of waspy, rotten-ugly singing in his other arm. Had Henry moved again? No; surely not.
‘Okay, okay,’ the clerk said. ‘Cool your jets, my friend.’
There was a click, and then the hoarse burr of a room-phone ringing. Come on, Bill, come on, c —
A sudden thought, gruesomely plausible, occurred to him. Suppose Henry had visited Bill’s room first? Or Richie’s? Ben’s? Bev’s? Or had Henry perhaps paid a visit to the library? Surely he had been somewhere else first; if someone hadn’t softened Henry up, it would have been Eddie lying dead on the floor, with a switchblade growing out of his chest the way the neck of the Perrier bottle was growing out of Henry’s gut. Or suppose Henry had visited all the others first, catching them bleary and half-asleep, as Henry had caught him? Suppose they
were all dead? And that thought was so awful Eddie believed he would soon begin screaming if someone didn’t answer the phone in Bill’s room.
‘Please, Big Bill,’ Eddie whispered. ‘Please be there, man.’
The phone was picked up and Bill’s voice, uncharacteristically cautious, said: ‘H-H-Hello?’
‘Bill,’ Eddie said . . . almost babbled. ‘Bill, thank God.’
‘Eddie?’ Bill’s voice grew momentarily fainte r, speaking to someone else, telling the someone who it was. Then he was back strong. ‘W-What’s the muh-hatter, Eddie?’
‘It’s Henry Bowers,’ Eddie said. He looked at the body on the floor again. Had it changed position? This time it was not so easy to persuade himself it hadn’t. ‘Bill, he came here . . . and I killed him. He had a knife. I think . . . ‘ He lowered his voice. ‘I think it was the same knife he had that day. When we went into the sewers. Do you remember?’
‘I r-r-remember,’ Bill said grimly. ‘Eddie, listen to me. I want you to
12
The Barrens / 1:55 P.M.
g-g-go back and tell B-B-Ben to c-come up h-h-here.’
‘Okay,’ Eddie said, and dropped back at once. They were approaching the clearing now. Thunder rumbled in the overcast sky, and the bushes sighed in the rising breeze.
Ben joined him as they came into the clearing. The trapdoor to the clubhouse stood open, an improbable square of blackness in the green. The sound of the river was very clear, and Bill was suddenly struck by a crazy certainty: that he was experiencing that sound, and this place, for the last time in his childhood. He drew a deep breath, smelling earth and air and the distant sooty dump, fuming like a sullen volcano that cannot quite make up its mind to erupt. He saw a flock of birds fly off the railroad trestle and toward the Old Cape. He looked up at the boiling clouds.
‘What is it?’ Ben asked.
‘Why h-h-haven’t they tried to guh-guh –het u-us?’ Bill asked. ‘They’re th-there. Eh-Eh –Eddie was ruh-hight about that. I can fuh-fuh-heel them.’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘I guess they might be stupid enough to think we’re going back into the clubhouse. Then they’d have us trapped.’
‘Muh-muh-maybe,’ Bill said, and he felt a sudden helpless fury at his stutter, which made it impossible for him to talk fast. Perhaps they were things he would have found impossible to say anyway — how he felt he could almost see through Henry Bowers’s eyes, how he felt that, although
