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
thought: Why are we just standing around here? We could hurt It while It’s occupied with Richie! Why doesn’t somebody move, for Christ’s sake?
He sensed a wild triumph — and that feeling was dearer, sharper. Closer. They’re coming back! he wanted to shout, but his mouth was too dry, his throat too tight. They’re comingback!
Then Richie’s head began to turn slowly from side to side. His body seemed to ripple inside his clothes. His glasses hung on the end of his nose for a moment . . . then fell off and shattered on the stone floor.
The Spider stirred, its spiny legs making a dry clittering on the floor. Eddie heard It cry out in terrible triumph, and a moment later, Richie’s voice burst clearly into his head:
(help! I’m losing it! somebody help me!}
Eddie ran forward then, yanking his aspirator from his pocket with his good hand, his lips drawn back in a grimace, his breath whistling painfully in and out of a throat that now felt the size of a pinhole. Crazily, his mother’s face danced before him and she was crying: Don’t gonear that Thing, Eddie! Don’t go near It! Things like that give you cancer!
‘Shut up, Ma!’ Eddie screamed in a high, shrieky voice — all the voice he had left. The Spider’s head turned toward the sound, Its eyes momentarily leaving Richie’s.
‘Here!’ Eddie howled in his fading voice. ‘Here, have some of this!’
He leaped at It, triggering the aspirator at the same time, and for an instant all his childhood belief in the medicine came back to him, the childhood medicine that could solve everything, that could make him feel better when the bigger boys roughed him up or when he was knocked over in the rush to get through the doors when school let out or when he had to sit on the edge of the Tracker Brothers’ vacant lot, out of the game because his mother wouldn’t allow him to play baseball. It was good medicine, strong medicine, and as he leaped into the Spider’s face, smelling Its foul yellow stench, feeling himself overwhelmed by Its single –minded fury and determination to wipe them all out, he triggered the aspirator into one of Its ruby eyes.
He felt-heard Its scream — no rage this time, only pain, a horrid screaming agony. He saw the mist of droplets settle on that blood-red bulge, saw the droplets turn white where they landed, saw them sink in as a splash of carbolic acid would sink in; he saw Its huge eye begin to flatten out like a bloody egg-yolk and run in a ghastly stream of living blood and ichor and maggoty pus.
‘Come home now, Bill!’ he screamed with the last of his voice, and then he struck It, he felt Its noisome heat baking into him; he felt a terrible wet warmth and realized that his good arm had slipped into the Spider’s mouth.
He triggered the aspirator again, shooting the stuff right down Its throat this tune, right down Its rotten evil stinking gullet, and there was sudden, flashing pain, as clean as the drop of a heavy knife, as Its jaws closed and ripped his arm off at the shoulder.
Eddie fell to the floor, the ragged stump of his arm spraying blood, faintly aware that Bill was getting shakily to his feet, that Richie was weaving and stumbling toward him like a drunk at the end of a long hard night.
‘ — eds — ‘
Far away. Unimportant. He could feel everything running out of him along with his life’s blood . . . all the rage, all the pain, all the fear, all the confusion and hurt. He supposed he was dying but he felt . . . ah, God, he felt so lucid, so clear, like a window-pane which has been washed clean and now lets in all the gloriously frightening light of some unsuspected dawning; the light, oh God, that perfect rational light that clears the horizon somewhere in the world every second.
‘ — eds oh my god bill ben someone he’s lost his arm, his — ‘
He looked up at Beverly and saw she was crying, the tears coursing down her dirty cheeks as she got an arm under him; he became aware that she had taken off her blouse and was trying to staunch the flow of blood, and that she was screaming for help. Then he looked at
Richie and licked his lips. Fading, fading back. Becoming clearer and clearer, emptying out, all of the impurities flowing out of him so he could become clear, so that the light could flow through, and if he had had time enough he could have preached
