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
a grayish-brown flood of lumpy sewage.
‘Eh-Eh –Eddie!’
Eddie floundered up beside him. His hair was plastered to his head. His cast was a soaking, drippy mess.
‘Wh-Wh-Which wuh-wuh-one?’ If you wanted to know how to build something, you asked Ben; if you wanted to know which way to go, you asked Eddie. They didn’t talk about this, but they all knew it. If you were in a strange neighborhood and wanted to get back to a place you knew, Eddie could get you there, making lefts and rights with undiminished confidence until you were reduced simply to following him and hoping that things would turn out right . . . which they always seemed to do. Bill told Richie once that when he and Eddie first began to play in the Barrens, he, Bill, was constantly afraid of getting lost. Eddie had no such fears, and he always brought the two of them out right where he said he was going to. ‘If I g-g-got luh-lost in the Hainesville Woods and Eh –Eddie was with me, I wouldn’t wuh-hurry a b-bit,’ Bill told Richie. ‘He just nuh-nuh-knows. My d-d-dad says some people, ih –hit’s Hike they got a cuh –huh –hompass in their heads. Eddie’s l-l-like that.’
‘I can’t hear you!’ Eddie shouted.
‘I said wh-which one?
‘Which one what? Eddie had his aspirator clutched in his good hand, and Bill thought he actually looked more like a drowned muskrat than a kid.
‘Which one do we tuh-tuh-take ?‘
‘Well, that all depends on where we want to go,’ Eddie said, and Bill could have cheerfully throttled him even though the question made perfect sense.
Eddie was looking dubiously at the three pipes. They could fit into all of them, but the bottom one looked pretty snug.
Bill motioned the others to move up into a circle. ‘Where the fuck is Ih-Ih-It?’ he asked them.
‘Middle of town,’ Richie said promptly. ‘Right under the middle of town.
Near the Canal.’
Beverly was nodding. So was Ben. So was Stan.
‘Muh-Muh-Mike?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s where It is. Near the Canal. Or under it.’
Bill looked back at Eddie. ‘W-W-Which one?’
Eddie pointed reluctantly at the lower pipe . . . and although Bill’s heart sank, he wasn’t at all surprised. ‘That one.’
‘Oh, gross,’ Stan said unhappily. That’s a shit-pipe.’
‘We don’t — ‘ Mike began, and then broke off. He cocked his head in a listening gesture. His eyes were alarmed.
‘What — ‘ Bill began, and Mike put a finger across his lips in a Shhhh! gesture. Now Bill could hear it too: splashing sounds. Approaching. Grunts and muffled words. Henry still hadn’t given up.
‘Quick,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s go.’
Stan looked back the way they had come, then he looked at the lowest of the three pipes. He pressed his lips tightly together and nodded. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Shit washes off.’
‘Stan the Man Gets Off A Good One!’ Richie cried. ‘Wacka-wacka-wa — ‘
‘Richie, will you shut up?’ Beverly hissed at him.
Bill led them to the pipe, grimacing at the smell, and crawled in. The smell: it was sewage, it was shit, but there was another smell here, too, wasn’t there? A lower, more vital smell. If an animal’s grunt could have a smell (and, Bill supposed, if the animal in question had been eating the right things, it could), it would be like this undersmell. We’re headed in the rightdirection, all right. It’s been here . . . and Its been here a lot.
By the time they had gone twenty feet, the air had grown rancid and poisonous. He squished slowly along, moving through stuff that wasn’t mud. He looked back over his shoulder and said, ‘You fuh-fuh –follow right behind m-me, Eh-Eh –Eddie. I’ll nuh-need y-you.’
The light faded to the faintest gray, held that way briefly, and then it was gone and they were
(out of the blue and)
into th e black. Bill shuffled forward through the sunk, feeling that he was almost cutting through it physically, one hand held out before him, part of him expecting that at any moment it would encounter rough hair and green lamplike eyes would open in the darkness. The end would come in one hot flare of pain as It walloped his head off his shoulders.
The dark was stuffed with sounds, all of them magnified and echoing. He could hear his friends shuffling along behind him, sometimes muttering something. There were gurglings and strange clanking groans. Once a flood of sickeningly warm water washed past and between his legs, wetting him to the thighs and rocking him back on his heels. He felt Eddie clutch frantically at the back of his shirt, and
