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
in her back yard. She and her husband used the money to make an extra two payments on their Bombardier Skidoo. Dr Hale, a retired doctor who had lived on West Broadway for nearly fifty years, was killed at 8:00 A.M. Dr Hale liked to boast that he had taken the same two-mile walk from his West Broadway home and around Derry Park and the Elementary School for the last twenty-five of those fifty years. Nothing stopped him; not rain, sleet, hail, howling nor’easters, or subzero cold. He set out on the morning of May 31st in spite of his housekeeper’s worried fussings. His exit-line from the world, spoken back over his shoulder as he went through the front door, pulling his hat firmly down to his ears, was: ‘Don’t be so goddamned silly, Hilda. This is nothing but a capful of rain. You should have seen it in ’57! That was a storm!’ As Dr Hale turned back onto West Broadway, a manhole cover in front of the Mueller place suddenly lifted off like the pay load of a Redstone rocket. It decapitated the good doctor so quickly and neatly that he walked on another three steps before collapsing, dead, on the sidewalk. And the wind continued to rise.
7
Under the City / 4:15 P.M.
Eddie led them through the darkened tunnels for an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, before admitting, in a tone that was more bewildered than frightened, that for the first time in his life he was lost.
They could still hear the dim thunder of water in the drains, but the acoustics of all of these tunnels was so crazed that it was impossible to tell if the water-sounds were coming from ahead or behind, left or right, above or below. Their matches were gone. They were lost in the dark.
Bill was scared . . . plenty scared. The conversation he’d had with his father in his father’s shop kept coming back to him. There’s nine pounds of blueprints that just disappeared somewhere along the line . . . My point is that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why. When they work, nobody cares. When they don’t, there’s three or four sad sacks from Derry Water who have to try and find out which pump went flooey or where the plug-up is . . . It’s dark and smelly and there are rats. Those are al l good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It’s happened before.
Happened before. Happened before. It’s happened —
Sure it had. There was that bundle of bones and polished cotton they had passed on the way to Its lair, for instance.
Bill felt panic trying to rise and pushed it back. It went, but not easily. He could feel it back there, a live thing, struggling and twisting, trying to get out. Adding to it was the nagging unanswerable question of whether they had killed It or not. Richie said yes, Mike said yes, so did Eddie. But he hadn’t liked the frightened doubtful look on Bev’s face, or on Stan’s, as the light died and they crawled back through the small door, away from the susurating collapsing web.
‘So what do we do now?’ Stan asked. Bill heard the frightened, little –boy tremble in Stan’s voice and knew the question was aimed directly at him.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘What? Damn, I wish we had a flashlight . . . or even a can . . . candle.’ Bill thought he heard a stifled sob in the second ellipsis. It frightened him more than anything else. Ben would have been astounded to know it, but Bill thought the fat boy tough and resourceful, steadier than Richie and less apt to cave in suddenly than Stan. If Ben was getting ready to crack, they were on the edge of very bad trouble. It was not the skeleton of the Water Department guy to which Bill’s own mind kept returning but to Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, lost in McDougal’s Cave. He would push the thought away and then it would come stealing back.
Something else was troubling him, but the concept was too large and too vague for his tired boy’s mind to grasp. Perhaps it was the very simplicity of the idea that made it elusive: they were falling away from each other. The bond that had held them all this long summer was dissolving. It had been faced and vanquished. It might be dead, as Richie and Eddie thought,
