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
incoherent thought was No wonder Stan committed suicide! Oh God, I wish I had! He saw the same expressions of stunned horror and dawning realization on the faces of the others as the last key turned in the last lock.
Then Beverly was shrieking, clingin g to Bill, as It raced down the gossamer curtain of Its webbing, a nightmare Spider from beyond time and space, a Spider from beyond the fevered imaginings of whatever inmates may live in the deepest depths of hell.
No, Bill thought coldly, not a Spider either, not really, but this shape isn’t one It picked out of our minds; it’s just the closest our minds can come to
(the deadlights)
whatever It really is.
It was perhaps fifteen feet high and as black as a moonless night. Each of Its legs wa s as thick as a muscle –builder’s thigh. Its eyes were bright malevolent rubies, bulging from sockets filled with some dripping chromium-colored fluid. Its jagged mandibles opened and closed,
opened and closed, dripping ribbons of foam. Frozen in an ecstasy of horror, tottering on the brink of utter lunacy, Ben observed with an eye-of-the –storm calm that this foam was alive; it struck the stinking stone –flagged floor and then began to writhe away into the cracks like protozoa.
But It’s something else, there’s some final shape, one that I can almost see the way you might see the shape of a man moving behind a movie screen while the show is on, some other shape, but I don’t want to see It, please God, don’t let me see It . . .
And it didn’t matter, d id it? They were seeing what they were seeing, and Ben understood somehow that It was imprisoned in this final shape, the shape of the Spider, by their common unsought and unfathered vision. It was against this It that they would live or die.
The creature was squealing and mewling, and Ben became quite sure he was hearing sounds It made twice — i n h i s head, and then, a split second later, in his ears. Telepathic, he thought, I’m reading Its mind. Its shadow was a squat egg that raced along the ancient wall of this keep that was Its lair. Its body was covered by coarse hair, and Ben saw that It was possessed of a stinger long enough to impale a man. A clear fluid dripped from its tip, and Ben saw that this was also alive; like the saliva, the poison writhed away into the cracks of the floor. Its stinger, yes . . . but below that, Its belly bulged grotesquely, almost dragging on the floor as It moved, now changing direction slightly, heading unerringly toward their leader, toward Big Bill.
That’s Its egg-sac, Ben thought, and his mind seemed to shriek at the implication. Whatever It is beyond what we see, this representation is at least symbolically correct: It’s female, and It’s pregnant . . . It was pregnant then and none of us knew except Stan, oh Jesus Christ YES, it was Stan, Stan, not Mike, Stan who understood, Stan who told us . . . That’s why we had to come back, no matter what, because It is female, It’s pregnant with some unimaginable spawn . . . and Its time has drawn close.
Incredibly, Bill Denbrough was stepping forward to meet It.
‘Bill, no!’ Beverly screamed.
‘Stuh-Stuh-Stay b-b-back!’ Bill shouted without looking around. And then Richie was running toward him, shouting his name, and Ben found his own legs in motion. He seemed to feel a phantom stomach swaying in front of him, and he welcomed the sensation. Got tobecome a child again, he thought incoherently. That’s the only way I can keep It from driving me crazy. Got to become a kid again . . . got to accept it. Somehow.
