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 bug, leaving him to die a rusty twitching death.
He picked up a window-sash and tossed it aside. Here was a dipper big enough for a giant’s table, its handle rippled and warped by some unimaginable flash of heat. Here was a piston too big for him to even budge, let alone lift. He stepped over it. He stepped over it and —
What if I find a skull? he thought suddenly. The skull of one of the kids who were killed here while they were hunting for chocolate Easter eggs back in nineteen-whenever-it-was?
He looked around the sunwashed empty field, nastily shocked by the idea. The wind blew a low conch-note in his ears and another shadow cruised silently across the field, like the shadow of a giant bat . . . or bird. He became aware all over again of how quiet it was here, and how strange the field looked with its straggling piles of masonry and its beached iron hulks leaning this way and that. It was as if some horrid battle had been fought here long ago.
Don’t be such a dip, he replied uneasily to himself. They found everything there was to find fifty years ago. After it happened. And even if they didn’t, some other kid — or grownup — would have found . . . the rest . . . since then. Or do you think you’re the only person who ever came here hunting for souvenirs?
No . . . no, I don’t think that. But . . .
But what? that rational side of his mind demanded, and Mike thought it was talking just a little too loud, a little too fast. Even if there was still something to find, it would have decayed long ago. So . . . what?
Mike found a splintered desk drawer in the weeds. He glanced at it, tossed it aside, and moved a little closer to the cellarhold, where the stuff was thickest. Surely he would find something there.
But what if there are ghosts? That’s but what. What if I see hands coming over the edge of that cellarhold, and what if they start to come up, kids in the remains of their Easter Sunday clothes, clothes that are all rotted and torn and marked with fifty years of spring mud and fall rain and caked winter snow? Kids with no heads (he had heard at school that, after the explosion, a woman had found the head of one of the victims in a tree in her back yard), kids
with no legs, kids flayed open like codfish, kids just like me who would maybe come down and play . . . down there where it’s dark . . . under the leaning iron girders and the big old rusty cogs . . .
Oh, stop it, for the Lord’s sake!
But a shudder wrenched its way up his back and he decided it was time to take something — a n y t h i n g — and get the dickens out of here. He reached down, almost at random, and came up with a gear-toothed wheel about seven niches in diameter. He had a pencil in his pocket and he used it, quickly, to dig the dirt out of the teeth. Then he slipped his souvenir in his pocket. He would go now. He would go, yes —
But his feet moved slowly in the wrong direction, toward the cellarhold, and he realized with a dismal sort of horror that he needed to look down inside. He had to see.
He gripped a spongy support-beam leaning out of the earth and swayed forward, trying to see down and inside. He couldn’t quite do it. He had come to within fifteen feet of the edge, but that was still a little too far to see the bottom of the cellarhold.
I don’t care if I see the bottom or not. I’m going back now. I’ve got my souvenir. I don’t need to look down into any crummy old hole. And Daddy’s note said to stay away from it.
