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
Christopher medal around his neck. Even in his soupy, only-three-quarters-awake state, Mike placed him immediately. In 1958, a sixteen-year-old girl named Cheryl Lamonica had been killed in Derry, killed by It. The girl had had a fourteen-year-old brother named Mark, and this was him.
‘Mark?’ he said weakly. ‘I have to talk to you.’
‘Shhh,’ Mark said. His hand was in his pocket. ‘No talk.’
He walked into the room, and as he stood at the foot of the bed, Mike saw with a hopeless chill how blank Mark Lamonica’s eyes were. His head was slightly cocked, as if hearing distant music. He took his hand out of his pocket.
There was a syringe in it.
‘This will put you to sleep,’ Mark said, and began to walk toward the bed.
11
Under the City / 6:49 A.M.
‘Shhhhh!’ Bill cried suddenly, although there had been no sound except their own faint footsteps.
Richie struck a light. The walls of the tunnel had moved away, and the five of them seemed very small in this space under the city. They huddled together and Beverly felt a dreamy sense of déjà vu as she observed the gigantic flagstones on the floor and the hanging nets of cobweb. They were close now. Close.
‘What do you hear?’ she asked Bill, trying to look everywhere as the match in Richie’s hand burned down, expecting to see some new surprise come lurching or flying out of the darkness. Rodan, anyone? The alien from that gruesome movie with Sigourney Weaver? A great scuttering rat with orange eyes and silver teeth? But there was nothing — only the dusty smell of the dark, and, far away, the thunder of running water, as if the drains were filling up.
‘S-S-Something ruh –ruh –wrong,’ Bill said. ‘Mike — ‘
‘Mike?’ Eddie asked. ‘What about Mike?’
‘I felt it, too,’ Ben said. ‘Is it . . . Bill, did he die?’
‘No,’ Bill said. His eyes were hazy and distant, unemotional — all of his alarm was in his tone and the defensive posture of his body. ‘He . . . H-H-He . . . ‘ He swallowed. There was a click in his throat. His eyes widened ‘Oh Oh no — !’
‘Bill?’ Beverly cried, alarmed. ‘Bill, what is it? What — ‘
‘Gruh-gruh-grab my hub-hands!’ Bill screamed. ‘Kwuh-kwuh-quick!’
Richie dropped the match and seized one of Bill’s hands. Beverly grabbed the other. She groped with her free hand, and Eddie grasped it feebly with the hand at the end of his broken arm. Ben grasped his other hand and completed the circle by holding Richie’s hand.
‘Send him our power!’ Bill cried in that same strange, deep voice. ‘Send him our power,whatever You are, send him our power! Now! Now! Now!’
Beverly felt something go out from them and toward Mike. Her head rolled on her shoulders in a kind of ecstasy, and the harsh whistle of Eddie’s breathing merged with the headlong thunder of water in the drains.
12
‘Now,’ Mark Lamonica said in a low voice. He sighed — the sigh of a man who feels orgasm approaching.
Mike pushed the call-button in his hands again and again. He could hear it ringing at the nurses’ station down the hall, but no one came. With a kind of hellish second sight he understood that the nurses were sitting around down there, reading the morning paper, drinking coffee, hearing his call-bell but not hearing it, hearing but not responding, they would respond only later when it was all over, because that was how things worked in Derry. In Derry some things were better not seen or heard . . . until they were over.
Mike let the call –button fall from his hands.
Mark bent toward him, the tip of the syringe glittering. His Saint Christopher medal swung hypnotically back and forth as he drew the sheet down.
‘Right there,’ he whispered. The sternum.’ And sighed again.
Mike suddenly felt power wash into him — some primitive power that crammed his body like volts. He stiffened, fingers splaying out as if in a convulsion. His eyes widened. A grunt jerked out of him, and that sense of dreadful paralysis was driven from him as if by a roundhouse slap.
His right hand pistoned out toward the nighttable. There was a plastic pitcher there and a heavy cafeteria –style water-glass beside it. His hand closed around the glass. Lamonica sensed the change; that dreamy, pleased ilght disappeared from his eyes and was replaced by wary confusion. He drew back a bit, and then Mike brought the glass up and smashed it into his face.
Lamonica screamed and staggered backward, dropping the syringe. His hands went to his spouting face; blood ran down his wrists and splashed
