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
He looks at Beverly and she is smiling at him. She closes her eyes and holds her hands out to either side. Bill takes her left; Ben her right. Bill can feel the warmth of her blood mixing with his own. The others join in and they stand in a circle, all of their hands now sealed in that peculiarly intimate way.
Stan is looking at Bill with a kind of urgency; a kind of fear.
‘Swuh-Swear to muh-me that you’ll c-c-c-come buh-back,’ Bill says. ‘Swear to me that if lh –Ih-It isn’t d-d-dead, you’ll cuh-home back.’
‘Swear,’ Ben said.
‘Swear.’ Richie.
‘Yes — I swear.’ Bev.
‘Swear it,’ Mike Hanlon mutters.
‘Yeah. Swear.’ Eddie, his voice a thin and reedy whisper.
‘I swear too,’ Stan whispers, but his voice falters and he looks down as he speaks.
‘I-I swuh-swuh-swear.’
That was it; that was all. But they stand there for awhile longer, feeling the power that is in their circle, the closed body that they make. The light paints their faces in pale fading colors; the sun is now gone and sunset is dying. They stand together in a circle as the darkness creeps down into the Barrens, filling up the paths they have walked this summer, the clearings where they have played tag and guns, the secret places along the riverbanks where they have sat and discussed childhood’s long questions or smoked Beverly’s cigarettes or where they have merely been silent, watching the passage of the clouds reflected in the water. The eye of the day is closing.
At last Ben drops his hands. He starts to say something, shakes his head, and walks away. Richie follows him, then Beverly and Mike, walking together. No one talks; they climb the embankment to Kansas Street and simply take leave of one another. And when Bill thinks it over twenty-seven years later, he realizes that they really never did all get together again. Four of them quite often, sometimes five, and maybe six once or twice. But never all seven.
He’s the last to go. He stands for a long time with his hands on the rickety white fence, looking down into the Barrens as, overhead, the first stars seed the summer sky. He stands under the blue and over the black and watches the Barrens fill up with darkness.
I never want to play down there again, he thinks suddenly and is amazed to find the thought is not terrible or distressing but tremendously liberating.
