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
One of them really liked to bite. Probably even got himself a pretty good bone-on while he was doing it. I’m betting Garton, although we’ll never prove it. And Mellon’s earlobe was gone.’
Boutillier stopped, glaring at Harold.
‘If we let in this clown story we’ll never bring it home to them. Do you want that?’
‘No, I told you.’
‘The guy was a fruit, but he wasn’t hurting anyone,’ Boutillier said. ‘So hi-ho-the –dairy-o, along come these three pusholes in their engineer boots and they steal his life. I’m going to put them in the slam, my friend, and if I hear they got their puckery little assholes cored down there at Thomaston, I’m gonna send them cards saying I hope whoever did it had AIDS.’
Very fiery, Gardener thought. And the convictions will also look very good on your record when you run for the top spot in two years.
But he left without saying more, because he also wanted to see them put away.
18
John Webber Garton was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to ten to twenty years in Thomaston State Prison.
Steven Bishoff Dubay was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in Shawshank State Prison.
Christopher Philip Unwin was tried separately as a juvenile and convicted of second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to six months at the South Windham Boys ‘ Training Facility, sentence suspended.
At the time of this writing, all three sentences are under appeal; Garton and Dubay may be seen on any given day girl– watching or playing Penny Pitch in Bassey Park, not far from where Mellon’s torn body was found floating against one of the pilings of the Main Street Bridge.
Don Hagarty and Chris Unwin have left town.
At the major trial — that of Garton and Dubay — no one mentioned a clown.
1
Stanley Uris Takes a Bath
Patricia Uris later told her mother she should have known something was wrong. She should have known it, she said, because Stanley never took baths in the early evening. He showered early each morning and sometimes soaked late at night (with a magazine in one hand and a cold beer in the other), but baths at 7:00 P.M . were not his style.
And then there was the thing about the books. It should have delighted him; instead, in some obscure way she did not understand, it seemed to have upset and depressed him. About three months before that terrible night, Stanley had discovered that a childhood friend of his had turned out to be a writer — not a real writer, Patricia told her mother, but a novelist. The name on the books was William Denbrough, but Stanley had sometimes called him Stuttering Bill. He had worked his way through almost all of the man’s books; had, in fact, been reading the last on the night of the bath — the night of May 28th, 1985. Patty herself had picked up one of the earlier ones, out of curiosity. She had put it down after just three chapters.
It had not just been a novel, she told her mother later; it had been a horrorbook. She said it just that way, all one word, the way she would have said sexbook. Patty was a sweet, kind woman, but not terribly articulate — she had wanted to tell her mother how much that book had frightened her and why it had upset her, but had not been able. ‘It was full of monsters,’ she said. ‘Full of monsters chasing after little children. There were killings, and . . . I don’t know . . . bad feelings and hurt. Stuff like that.’ It had, in fact, struck her as almost pornographic; that was the word which kept eluding her, probably because she had never in her life spoken it, although she knew what it meant. But Stan felt as if he’d rediscovered one of his childhood chums . . . . He talked about writing to him, but I knew he wouldn’t . . . I knew those stories made him feel bad, too . . . and . . . and . . . ‘
And then Patty Uris began to cry.
That n i ght, lacking roughly six months of being twenty– eight years from the day in 1957 when George Denbrough had met Pennywise the Clown, Stanley and Patty had been sitting in the den of their home in a suburb of Atlanta. The TV was on. Patty was sitting in the love-seat in front of it, dividing her attention between a pile of sewing and her favorite game –show, Family Feud. She simply adored Richard Dawson and thought the watch-chain he always wore was terribly sexy, although wild horses would not have drawn this admission
