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
a moment he felt Its stinking flesh simply give, as if it would rebound and send him flying. With an inarticulate scream he drove harder, pushing forward and upward with his legs, digging at It with his hands. And he broke through; was inundated with Its hot fluids. They ran across his face, in his ears. He snuffled them up his nose in thin squirming streams.
He was in the black again, up to his shoulders inside Its convulsing body. And in hi s clogged ears he could hear a sound like the steady whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK of a big bass drum, the one that leads the parade when the circus comes to town with its complement of freaks and strutting capering clowns.
The sound of Its heart.
He heard Richie scream in sudden pain, a sound that rose into a quick, gasping moan and was cut off. Bill suddenly thrust both fisted hands forward. He was choking, strangling in Its pulsing bag of guts and waters.
Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK —
He plunged his hands into It, ripping, tearing, parting, seeking the source of the sound; rupturing organs, his slimed fingers opening and closing, his locked chest seeming to swell from lack of air.
Whack-WHACK-whack-WHACK —
And suddenly it was in his hands, a great living thing that pumped and pulsed against his palms, pushing them back and forth.
NONONONONONONO)
Yes! Bill cried, choking, drowning. Yes! Try this, you bitch! TRY THIS ONE OUT! DO YOU LIKE IT? DO YOU LOVE IT? DO YOU?
He laced his ifngers together over the pulsing narthex of Its heart, palms spread apart in an inverted V — and brought them together with all the force he could muster.
There was one final shriek of pain and fear as Its heart exploded between his hands, running out between his fingers in jittering strings.
Whack-WHACK-whack-WHA
The scream, fading, dwindling. Bill felt Its body clench around him sudd e n l y , l i k e a f i s t i n a slick glove. Then everything loosened. He became aware that Its body was tilting, slippin g slowly off to one side. At the same time he began pulling back, his consciousness leaving him.
The Spider collapsed on Its side, a huge bundle of steaming alien meat, Its legs still quivering and jerking, caressing the sides of the tunnel and scraping across the floor in random scrawls.
Bill staggered away, breathing in whooping gasps, spitting in an effort to clear his mouth of Its horrible taste. He tripped over his own feet and fell to his knees.
And clearly, he heard the Voice of the Other; the Turtle might be dead, but whatever had invested it was not.
‘Son, you did real good.’
Then it was gone. The power went with it. He felt weak, revulsed, half-insane. He looked over his shoulder and saw the dying black nightmare of the Spider, still jerking and quivering.
‘Richie!’ He cried out in a hoarse, breaking voice. ‘Richie, where are youman?’
No answer.
The light was gone now. It had died with the Spider. He fumbled in the pocket of his matted shirt for the last book of matches. They were there, but they wouldn’t light; the heads were soaked with blood.
‘Richie!’ he screamed again, beginning to weep now. He began to crawl forward, first one hand and then the other groping in the dark. At last one of them struck something which yielded limply to his touch. His hands flew over it . . . and stopped as they touched Richie’s face.
‘Richie! Richie!’
Still no answer. Struggling in the dark, Bill got one arm under Richie’s back and the other under his knees. He wobbled to his feet and began to stumble back the way they had come with Richie in his arms.
3
Derry / 10:00 – 10:15 A.M.
At 10:00 the steady vibration which had been running through Derry’s downtown streets increased to a rumbling roar. The Derry News w o u l d l a ter write that the supports of the Canal’s underground portion, weakened by the savage assault of what amounted to a flash flood, simply collapsed. There were, however, people who disagreed with that view. ‘I was there, I know,’ Harold Gardener later told his wife. ‘It wasn’t just that the Canal’s supports collapsed. It was an earthquake, that’s what it was. It was a fucking earthquake.’
Either way, the results were the same. As the rumbling built steadily up and up, windows began to shatter, plaster ceilings began to fall, and the inhuman cry of twisting
