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
by the current . . . then nothing.
Nothing except the fear that was suddenly suffocating him and the deadly certainty that there was something near, something watching him, gauging its chances, biding its time.
He turned, meaning to walk back to his bike — to run would be to dignify those fears and undignify himself — and then that splashing sound came again. It was a lot louder this second time. So much for dignity. Suddenly he was running as fast as he could, beating his buns for the gate and his bike, jamming the kickstand up with one heel and pedaling for the street as fast as he could. That sea-smell was all at once too thick . . . much too thick. It was everywhere. And the water dripping from the wet branches of the trees seemed much too loud.
Something was coming. He heard dragging, lurching footsteps in the grass.
He stood on the pedals, giving it everything, and shot out onto Main Street without looking back. He headed for home as fast as he could, wondering what in hell had possessed him to come in the first place . . . what had drawn him.
A n d t h e n he tried to think about the chores, the whole chores, and nothing but the chores. After awhile he actually succeeded.
And when he saw the headline in the paper the next day (MISSING BOY PROMPTS NEW FEARS), he thought about the pocket knife he had thrown into the Canal — the pocket knife with the initials EC scratched on the side. He thought about the blood he had seen on the grass.
And he thought about those grooves which stopped at the edge of the Canal.
1
Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past — a plague, perhaps, or a curse. The smell of salt, heavy and cloying, comes off the ocean. Runners of early-morning fog obscure much of what movement would be seen otherwise.
Driving north along Storrow Drive, sitting behind the wheel of the black ’84 Cadillac he picked up from Butch Carrington at Cape Cod Limousine, Eddie Kaspbrak thinks you can feel this city’s age; perhaps you can get that feeling of age nowhere else in America but here. Boston is a sprat compared with London, an infant compared with Rome, but by American standards at least it is old, old. It kept its place on these low hills three hundred years ago, when the Tea and Stamp Taxes were unthought of, Paul Revere and Patrick Henry unborn.
Its age, its silence, and the foggy smell of the sea — all of these things make Eddie nervous. When Eddie’s nervous he reaches for his aspirator. He sticks it in his mouth and triggers a cloud of revivifying spray down his throat.
There are a few people in the streets he’s passing, and a pedestrian or two on the walkways of the overpasses — they give lie to the impression that he has somehow wandered into a Lovecrafty tale of doomed cities, ancient evils, and monsters with unpronounceable names. Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep.
