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
with coaldust.
1
Somewhere high over New York State on the afternoon of May 29th, 1985, Beverly Rogan begins to laugh again. She stifles it in both hands, afraid someone will think she is crazy, but can’t quite stop.
We laughed a lot back then, she thinks. It is something else, another light on in the dark. We were afraid all the time, but we couldn’t stop laughing, any more than I can stop now.
The guy sitting next to her in the aisle seat is young, long-haired, good-looking. He has given her several appreciative glances since the plane took off in Milwaukee at half past two (almost two and a half hours ago now, with a stop in Cleveland and another one in Philly), but has respected her clear desire not to talk; after a couple of conversational gambits to which she has responded with politeness but no more, he opens his tote-bag and takes out a Robert Ludlum novel.
Now he closes it, holding his place with his finger, and says with some concern: ‘Everything cool with you?’
She nods, trying to make her face serious, and then snorts more laughter. He smiles a little, puzzled, questioning.
‘It’s nothing,’ she says, once again trying to be serious, but it’s no good; the more she tries to be serious the more her face wants to crack up. Just like the old days. ‘It’s just that all at once I realized I didn’t know what airline I was on. Only that there was a great big d-d-duck on the s-s-side — ‘ But the thought is too much. She goes off into gales of merry laughter. People look around at her, some frowning.
‘Republic,’ he says.
‘Pardon?’
‘You are whizzing through the air at four hundred and seventy miles an hour courtesy of Republic Airlines. It’s on the KYAG folder in the seat pocket.’
‘KYAG?’
He pulls the folder (which does indeed have the Republic logo on the front) out of the pocket. It shows where the emergency exits are, where the flotation devices are, how to use the oxygen masks, how to assume the crash-landing position. ‘The kiss-your-ass-goodbye folder,’ he says, and this time they both burst out laughing,
He really is good-looking, she thinks suddenly — it is a fresh thought, somehow clear-eyed, the sort of thought you might expect to have upon waking, when your mind isn’t all junked up. He’s wearing a pullover sweater and faded jeans. His darkish blond hair is tied back with a piece of rawhide, and this makes her think of the ponytail she always wore her hair in when she was a kid. She thinks:
