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
were not things of which he could have spoken; to his mind the ideas were nothing but an incoherent jumble. But his warm and desiring heart understood, and that was all that mattered.
Sometimes he looked through George’s books, sometimes he sifted through George’s toys.
He hadn’t looked in George’s photograph album since last December.
Now, on the night after meeting Ben Hanscom, Bill opened the door of George’s closet (steeling himself as always to meet the sight of Georgie himself, standing in his bloody slicker amid the hanging clothes, expecting as always to see one pallid, fish-fingered hand come pistoning out of the dark to grip his arm) and took the album down from the top shelf.
MYPHOTOGRAPHS , the gold script on the front read. Below, Scotch-taped on (the tape was now slightly yellow and peeling), the carefully printed words GEORGE ELMER DENBROUGH , AGE 6. Bill to ok it back to the bed Georgie had slept in, his heart beating heavier than ever. He couldn’t tell what had made him get the photograph album down again. After what had happened in December . . .
A second look, that’s all. Just to convince yourself that it wasn’t real the first time. That the first time was just your head playing a trick on itself.
Well, it was an idea, anyway.
It might even be true. But Bill suspected it was just the album itself. It held a certain mad fascination for him. What he had seen, or what he thought he had seen —
He opened the album now. It was filled with pictures George had gotten his mother, father, aunts, and uncles to give him. George didn’t care if they were pictures of people and places he knew or not; it wa s the idea of photography itself which fascinated him. When he had been unsuccessful at pestering anyone into giving him new photos to mount he would sit cross-legged on his bed where Bill was sitting now and look at the old ones, turning the pages carefully, studying the black-and –white Kodaks. Here was their mother when she was young and impossibly gorgeous; here their father, no more than eighteen, one of a trio of smiling rifle –toting young men standing over the open-eyed corpse of a deer; Uncle Hoyt standing on some rocks and holding up a pickerel; Aunt Fortuna, at the Derry Agricultural Fair, kneeling proudly beside a basket of tomatoes she had raised; an old Buick automobile; a church; a house; a road that went from somewhere to somewhere. All these pictures, snapped by lost somebodies for lost reasons, locked up here in a dead boy’s album of photographs.
Here Bill saw himself at three, propped up in a hospital bed with a turban of bandages covering his hair. Bandages went down his cheeks and under his fractured jaw. He had been struck by a car in the parking lot of the A&P on Center Street. He remembered very little of his hospital stay, only that they had given him ice-cream milk shakes through a straw and his head had ached dreadfully for three days.
Here was the whole family on the lawn of the house, Bill standing by his mother and holding her hand, and George, only a baby, sleeping in Zack’s arms. And here —
It wasn’t the end of the book, but it was the last page that mattered, because the following ones were all blank. The final picture was George’s school picture, taken in October of last year, less than ten days before he died. In it George was wearing a crew-neck shirt. His fly –away hair was slicked down with water. He was grinning, revealing two empty slots in which new teeth would never grow — unless they keep on growing after you die, Bill thought, and shuddered.
He looked at the picture fixedly for some time and was about to close the book when what had happened in December happened again.
George’s eyes rolled in the picture. They turned up to meet Bill’s own. George’s artificial say-cheese smile turned into a horrid leer. His right eye drooped closed in a wink: See yousoon, Bill. In my closet. Maybe tonight.
Bill threw the book across the room. He clapped his hands over his mouth.
The book struck the wall and fell to the floor, open. The pages turned, although there was no draft. The book opened itself to that awful picture again, the picture which said SCHOOL FRIENDS 1957-58 beneath it.
Blood began to flow from the picture.
Bill sat frozen, his tongue a swelling choking lump in his mouth, his skin crawling, his hair lifting. He wanted to scream but the tiny whimpering sounds crawling out of his throat seemed to be the best he could
