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
about the Girl He Left Behind.
Now the red paint had faded to a wishy-washy pink that was peeling away in ugly patches that looked like sores. The windows were blind eyes, boarded up. Most of the shingles were gone. Weeds grew rankly down both sides of the house and the lawn was covered with the season’s first bumper crop of dandelions. To the left, a high board fence, perhaps once a neat white but now faded to a dull gray that almost matched the lowering sky, lurched drunkenly in and out of the dank shrubbery. About halfway down this fence Richie could see a monstrous grove of sunflowers — the tallest looked five feet tall or more. They had a bloated, nasty look he didn’t like. A breeze rustled them and they seemed to nod together: The boysare here, isn’t that nice? More boys. Our boys. Richie shivered.
While Bill leaned Silver carefully against an elm, Richie surveyed the house. He saw a wheel sticking out of the thick grass near the porch, and pointed it out to Bill. Bill nodded; it was the overturned trike Eddie had mentioned.
They looked up and down Neibolt Street. The chug of the diesel engine rose and fell off, then began again. The sound seemed to hang in the overcast like a charm. The street was utterly deserted. Richie could hear occasional cars passing on Route 2, but could not see them.
The diesel engine chugged and faded, chugged and faded.
The huge sunflowers nodded sagely together. Fresh boys. Good boys. Our boys.
‘Y-Y-You r-ruh-ready?’ Bill asked, and Richie jumped a little.
‘You know, I was just thinking that maybe the last bunch of library books I took out are due today,’ Richie said. ‘Maybe I ought to — ‘
‘Cuh-Cuh-Cut the c-crap, R-R-Richie. Are y-you ready or n-n-not?’
‘I guess I am,’ Richie said, knowing he was not ready at all — he was never going to be ready for this scene.
They crossed the overgrown lawn to the porch.
‘Luh-look th-th-there,’ Bill said.
At the far lefthand side, the porch’s latticework skirt leaned out against a tangle of bushes. Both boys could see the rusty nails that had been pulled free. There were old rosebushes here, and while the roses both to the right and the left of the unanchored stretch of latticework were blooming in a lackadaisical way, those directly around and in front of it were skeletal and dead.
Bill and Richie looked at each other grimly. Everything Eddie said seemed true enough; seven weeks later, the evidence was still here.
‘You don’t really want to go under there, do you?’ Richie asked. He was almost pleading.
‘Nuh-nuh –no,’ Bill said, ‘b-but I’m g-gonna.’
And with a sinking heart, Richie saw that he absolutely meant it. That gray light was back in Billy’s eyes, shining steadily. There was a stony eagerness in the lines of his face that made him look older. Richie thought, I think he really does mean to kill it, if it’s still there. Kill it
and maybe cut off its head and take it to his father and say, ‘Look, this is what killed Georgie, now will you talk to me again at night, maybe just tell me how your day was, or who lost when you guys were flipping to see who paid for the morning coffee?’
‘Bill — ‘ he said, but Bill was no longer there. He was walking around to the righthand end of the porch, where Eddie must have crawled under. Richie had to chase after him, and he almost fell over the trike caught in the weeds and slowly rusting its way into the ground.
He caught up as Bill squatted, looking under the porch. There was no skirt at all on this end; someone — some hobo — had pried it off long ago to gain access to the shelter underneath, out of the January snow or the cold November rain or a summer thundershower.
Richie squatted beside him, his heart thudding like a drum. There was nothing under the porch but drifts of moldering leaves, yellowing newspapers, and shadows. Too many shadows.
‘Bill,’ he repeated.
‘Wh-wh-what?’ Bill had produced his father’s Walther again. He pulled the clip carefully from the grip, and then took four bullets from his pants pocket. He loaded them in one at a tune. Richie watched this, fascinated, and then looked under the porch again. He saw something else this tune. Broken glass. Faintly glinting shards of glass.
