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
books were scattered around him, bloated to the size of dictionaries in the damp.
‘Christ,’ Mike said hoarsely, his eyes wide.
‘I hear them again,’ Beverly said. ‘Henry and the others.’
The acoustics must have carried her voice to them as well; Henry bellowed down the sewer-pipe and for a moment it was as if he was standing right there.
‘We’ll getyouuuuuu — ‘
‘You come on right ahead!’ Richie shouted. His eyes were bright, dancing, febrile. ‘Keep coming, banana-heels! This is just like the YMCA swimming pool down here! Keep — ‘
Then a shriek of such mad fear and pain came through the pipe that the guttering match fell from Bill’s fingers and went out. Eddie’s arm had curled around him and Bill hugged Eddie back, feeling his body trembling like a wire as Stan Uris packed close to him on the other side. That shriek rose and rose . . . and then there was an obscene, thick flapping noise, and the shriek was cut off.
‘Something got one of them,’ Mike choked, horrified, in the darkness. ‘Something . . . some monster . . . Bill, we got to get out of here . . . please . . . ‘
Bill could hear whoever was left — one or two, with the acoustics it was impossible to tell — stumbling and scrabbling through the sewer-pipe toward them. ‘Wuh-Which w-w-way, Eh –Eddie?’ he asked urgently. ‘D-Do you nuh-know?’
‘Toward the Canal?’ Eddie asked, shaking in Bill’s arms.
‘Yes!’
To the right. Past Patrick . . . or over him.’ Eddie’s voice suddenly hardened. ‘I don’t care that much. He was one of the ones that broke my arm. Spit in my face, too.’
‘Let’s guh-go,’ Bill said, looking back at the sewer-pipe they had just quitted. ‘S-Single luh-line! Keep a t-t-touch on e-each uh-uh-other, like b-b-before!’
He groped forward, dragging his right shoulder along the slimy porcelain surface of the pipe, gritting his teeth, not wanting to step on Patrick . . . or into him.
So they crawled farther into the darkness while waters rushed around them and while, outside, the storm walked and talked and brought an early darkness to Derry — a darkness that screamed with wind and stuttered with electric fire and racketed with falling trees that sounded like the death-cries of huge prehistoric creatures.
3
It / May 1985
Now they were coming again, and while everything had gone much as It had foreseen, something It had not foreseen had returned: that maddening, galling fear . . . that sense of Another. It hated the fear, would have turned on it and eaten it if It could have . . . but the fear danced mockingly out of reach, and It could only kill the fear by kitting them.
Surely there was no need for such fear; they were older now, and their number had been reduced from seven to five. Five was a number of power, but it did not have the mystical talismanic quality of seven. It was true that Its dogsbody hadn’t been able to kill the librarian, but the librarian would die in the hospital. Later, just before dawn touched the sky, It would send a male nurse with a bad pill habit to finish the librarian once and for all.
The writer’s woman was now with It, alive yet not alive — her mind had been utterly destroyed by her first sight of It as It really was, with all of Its little masks and glamours thrown aside — and all of the glamours were only mirrors, of course, throwing back at the terrifie d viewer the worst thing in his or her own mind, heliographing images as a mirror may bounce a reflection of the sun into a wide unsuspecting eye and stun it to blindness.
