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
toward him, George, still dressed in his blood-spattered yellow rainslicker. One sleeve dangled limp and useless. George’s face was white as cheese and his eyes were shiny silver. They fixed on Bill’s own.
‘My boat!’ Georgie’s lost voice rose, wavering, in the tunnel. ‘I can’t find it, Bill, I’ve lookedeverywhere and I can’t find it and now I’m dead and it’s your fault your fault YOUR FAULT — ‘
‘Juh-Juh-Georgie!’ Bill shrieked. He felt his mind tottering, ripping free of its moorings.
George stumble-staggered toward him and now his one remaining arm rose toward Bill, the white hand at the end of it hooked into a claw. The nails were dirty and grasping.
‘Your fault,’ George whispered, and grinned. His teeth were fangs; they opened and closed slowly, like the teeth in a beartrap. ‘You sent me out and it’s all . . . your . . . fault.’
‘Nuh-Nuh-No, Juh Juh-Georgie!’ Bill cried. ‘I dih-dih –didn’t nuh-hun –nuh –know — ‘
‘Kill you!’ George cried, and a mixture of doglike sounds came out of that fanged mouth: yips, yelps, howls. A kind of laughter. Bill could smell him now, could smell George rotting. It was a cellar-smell, squirmy, the smell of some final monster standing slumped and yellow-eyed in the corner, waiting to unzip some small boy’s guts.
George’s teeth gnashed together. The sound was like billiard balls clicking off one another. Yellow pus began to leak from his eyes and dribble down his face . . . and the match went out.
Bill felt his friends disappear — they were running, of course they were, they were leaving him alone. They were cutting him off, as his parents had cut him off because George was right: it was all his fault. Soon he would feel that single hand seize his throat, soon he would feel those fangs pulling him open, and that would be right. That would be only just. He had
sent George out to die and he had spent his whole adult life writing about the horror of that betrayal — oh, he had put many faces on it, almost as many faces as It had put on for their benefit, but the monster at the bottom of everything was only George, running out into the receding flood with his paraffin-coated paper boat. Now would come the atonement.
‘You deserve to die for killing me,’ George whispered. He was very close now. Bill closed his eyes.
Then yellow light splashed the tunnel and he opened them. Richie was holding up a match. ‘Fight It, Bill!’ Richie shouted. ‘God’s sake! Fight It!’
What are you doing here? He looked at them, bewildered. They hadn’t run after all. How could that be? How could that be after they had seen how foully he had murdered his own brother?
‘Fight It!’ Beverly was screaming. ‘Oh Bill, fight It! Only you can do this one! Please — ‘
George was less than five feet away now. He suddenly stuck his tongue out at Bill. It was crawling with white fungoid growths. Bill screamed again.
‘Kill It, Bill!’ Eddie shouted. ‘That’s not your brother! Kill It while it’s small! Kill It NOW!’
George glanced at Eddie, cutting his shiny-silver eyes that way for just a moment, and Eddie reeled back and struck the wall as if he had been pushed. Bill stood mesmerized, watching his brother come toward him, George again after all these years, it was George at the end as it had been George at the beginning, oh yes, and he could hear the creak of George’s yellow slicker as George closed the distance, he could hear the jingle of the buckles on his overshoes and he could smell something like wet leaves, as if underneath the slicker George’s body was made of them, as if the feet inside George’s galoshes were leaf-feet, yes, a leaf-man, that was it, that was George, he was a rotted balloon face and a body made of dead leaves, the kind that sometimes choke the sewers after a flood.
Dimly he heard Beverly shriek.
(he thrusts his fists)
‘Bill, please Bill — ‘
(against the posts and still insists)
‘We’ll look for my boat together,’ George said. Thick yellow pus, mock tears, rolled down his cheeks. He reached for Bill and his head cocked sideward, his teeth peeling back from those fangs.
(he sees the ghosts he sees the ghosts HE SEES)
‘We’ll find it,’ George said and Bill could smell Its breath and it was
