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
Yes — my, yes! That would surely set her mind at rest!
‘No,’ he said. ‘I guess I can’t tell you what it is.’
And before she could say more, before she could begin again (Eddie, get out of that taxi! They give you cancer!), he was striding away from her, faster and faster. By the time he got to the cab he was almost running.
She was still standing in the doorway when the cab backed into the street, still standing there when they started for the city — a big black woman-shadow cut out of the light spilling from their house. He waved, and thought she raised her hand in return.
‘Where we headed tonight, my friend?’ the cabbie asked.
‘Penn Station,’ Eddie said, and his hand relaxed on the aspirator. His asthma had gone to wherever it went to brood between its assaults on his bronchial tubes. He felt . . . almost well.
But he needed the aspirator worse than ever four hours later, coming out of a light doze all in a single spasmodic jerk that caused the fellow in the business suit across the way to lower his paper and look at him with faintly apprehensive curiosity.
I’m back, Eddie! the asthma yelled gleefully. I’m back and oh, I dunno, this time I just might killya! Why not? Gotta do it sometime, you know! Can’t fuck around with you forever!
Eddie’s chest surged and pulled. He groped for the aspirator, found it, pointed it down his throat, and pulled the trigger. Then he sat back in the tall Amtrak seat, shivering, waiting for relief, thinking of the dream from which he had just awakened. Dream? Christ, if that was all. He was afraid it was more memory than dream. In it there had been a green light like the light inside a shoe-store X-ray machine, and a rotting leper had pursued a screaming boy named Eddie Kaspbrak through tunnels under the earth. He ran and ran
(he runs quite fast Coach Black had told his mother and he ran plenty fast with that rotting thing after him oh yes you better believe it you bet your fur)
in this dream where he was eleven years old, and then he had smelled something like the death of time, and someone lit a match and he had looked down and seen the decomposing face of a boy named Patrick Hockstetter, a boy who had disappeared in July of 1958, and there were worms crawling in and out of Patrick Hockstetter’s cheeks, and that gassy, awful smell was coming from inside of Patrick Hockstetter, and in that dream that was more memory than dream he had looked to one side and had seen two schoolbooks that were fat with moisture and overgrown with green mold: Roads to Everywhere, and Understanding Our America. They were in their current condition because it was a foul wetness down here (‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’ a theme by Patrick Hockstetter — ‘I spent it dead in a tunnel! Moss grew on my books and they swelled up to the size of Sears catalogues!’). Eddie opened his mouth to scream and that was when the scabrous fingers of the leper clittered around his cheek and plunged themselves into his mouth and that was when he woke up with that back-snapping jerk to find himself not in the sewers under Derry, Maine, but in an Amtrak club-car near the head of a train speeding across Rhode Island under a big white moon.
The man across the aisle hesitated, almost thought better of speaking, and then did. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘Oh yes,’ Eddie said. ‘I fell asleep and had a bad dream. It got my asthma going.’
‘I see.’ The paper went up again. Eddie saw it was the paper his mother had sometimes referred to as The Jew York Times.
Eddie looked out the window at a sleeping landscape litten only by the fairy moon. Here and there were houses, or sometimes clusters of them, most dark, a few showing lights. But the lights seemed little, and falsely mocking, compared to the moon’s ghost-glow.
He thought the moon talked to him, he thought suddenly. Henry Bowers. God, he was so crazy. He wondered where Henry Bowers was now. Dead? In prison? Drifting across empty plains somewhere in the middle of the country like an incurable virus, sticking up Seven-Elevens in the deep slumbrous hours between one and four in the morning or maybe killing some of the people stupid enough to slow down for
