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
becoming not a face but a pale shape in the growing shadows. The light was fading. It decided him. ‘All right,’ he said to Bill. ‘This time we chase.’
Ben was standing in back of the spiderweb, which had begun to decay again. He had also seen the shape swaying high up in it, and he prayed that Bill would not look up.
But as the web began to fall in drifts and strands and skeins, Bill did.
He saw Audra, sagging as if in a very old and creaky elevator. She dropped ten feet, stopped, swaying from side to side, and then abruptly dropped another fifteen. Her face never changed. Her eyes, china-blue, were wide open. Her bare feet swung back and forth like pendulums. Her hair hung lankly over her shoulders. Her mouth was ajar.
‘AUDRA!’ he screamed.
‘Bill, come on!’ Ben shouted.
The web was falling all around them now, thudding to the floor and beginning to run. Richie suddenly grabbed Bill around the waist, and propelled him forward, shooting for a ten-foot-high gap between the floor and the bottommost cross-strand of the sagging web. ‘Go, Bill! Go! Go!’
‘That’s Audra!’ Bill shouted desperately. ‘Thuh-That’s AUDRA!’
‘I don’t give a shit if it’s the Pope,’ Richie said grimly. ‘Eddie’s dead and we’re going to kill It, if It’s still alive. We’re going to finish the job this time, Big Bill. Either she’s alive or she’s not. Now come on!’
Bill hung back a moment longer, and then snapshots of the children, all the dead children, seemed to flutter through his mind like lost photographs from George’s album. SCHOOL FRIENDS.
‘A-A11 ruh-right. Let’s g-go. Guh –Guh-God forgive m-me.’
He and Richie ran under the strand of cross-webbing seconds before it collapsed, and joined Ben on the other side. They ran after It as Audra swung and dangled fifty feet above the stone floor, wrapped in a numbing cocoon that was attached to the decaying web.
9
Ben
They followed the trail of Its black blood — oily pools of ichor that ran and dripped into the cracks between the flagstones. But as the floor began to rise toward a semicircular black opening at the far side of the chamber, Ben saw something new: a trail of eggs. Each was black and rough-shelled, perhaps as big as an ostrich– e g g . A w a x y l i g h t s h o n e f r o m w i t h i n them. Ben realized they were semi-transparent; he could see bla ck shapes moving inside.
Its children, he thought, and felt his gorge rise. Its miscarried children. God! God!
Richie and Bill had stopped and were staring at the eggs with stupid, dazed wonder.
‘Go on! Go on!’ Ben shouted. ‘I’ll take care of them! Get It!’
‘Here!’ Richie shouted, and threw Ben a pack of Derry Town House matches.
Ben caught them. Bill and Richie ran on. Ben watched them in the rapidly dimming light for a moment. They ran into the darkness of Its escape-passage and were lost from sight. Then he looked down at the first of the thin-shelled eggs, at the black, mantalike shadow inside, and felt his determination waver. This . . . hey guys, this was too much. This was simply too awful. And surely they would die without his help; they had not been so much laid as dropped.
But It’s time was close . . . and if one of them is capable of surviving . . . even one . . .
Summoning all of his courage, summoning up Eddie’s pale, dying face, Ben brought one Desert Driver boot down on the first egg. It broke with a sodden squelch as some stinking placenta ran out around his boot. Then a spider the size of a rat was scrabbling weakly across the floor, trying to get away, and Ben could hear it in his head, its high mewling cries like the sound of a handsaw being bent rapidly back and forth so that it makes ghost-music.
Ben lurched after it on legs that felt like stilts and brought his foot down again. He felt the spider’s body crunch and splatter under the heel of his boot. His gorge clenched and this time there was no way he could hold back. He vomited, then twisted his heel, grinding the thing into the stones, listening to the cries in his head fade to nothing.
How many? How many eggs? Didn’t I read somewhere that spiders can lay thousands . . . or millions? I can’t keep doing this, I’ll go mad —
You have to. You have to. Come on, Ben . . . get it together!
