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
‘It’s Bev, Kay,’ she said, hesitated, and then plunged. ‘I need help.’
There was a moment of silence, and then Kay spoke again, sounding fully awake now. ‘Where are you? What happened?’
‘I’m at a Seven-Eleven on the comer of S trey land Avenue and some other street. I . . . Kay, I’ve left Tom.’
Kay, quick and emphatic and excited: ‘Good! F inally! Hurray! I’ll come and gel you! That son of a bitch! That piece of shit! I’ll come and get you in the fucking Mercedes! I’ll hire a forty-piece band! I’ll — ‘
‘I’ll take a cab,’ Bev said, holding the other two dimes in one sweating palm. In the round mirror at the back of the store she could see the pimply clerk staring at her ass with deep and dreamy concentration. ‘But you’ll have to pay the tab when I get there. I don’t have any money. Not a cent.’
‘I’ll tip the bastard five bucks,’ Kay cried. ‘This is the best fucking news since Nixon resigned! You get your buns over here, girl. And — ‘ She paused and when she spoke again her voice was serious and so full of kindness and love that Beverly felt she might weep. ‘Thank God you finally did it, Bev. I mean that. Thank God.’
Kay McCall is a former designer who married rich, divorced richer, and discovered feminist politics in 1972, about three years before Beverly first met her. At the time O f her greatest popularity/controversy she was accused of having embraced feminism after using archaic, chauvinistic laws to take her manufacturer husband for every cent the law would allow her.
‘Bullshit!’ Kay had once exclaimed to Beverly. ‘The people who say that stuff never had to go to bed with Sam Chacowicz. Two pumps a tickle and a squirt, that was ole Sammy’s motto. The only time he could keep it up for longer than seventy seconds was when he was pulling off in the tub. I didn’t cheat him; I just took my combat pay retroactively.’
She wrote three books — one on feminism and the working woman, one on feminism and the family, one on feminism and spirituality. The first two were quite popular. In the three years since her last, she had fallen out of fashion to a degree, and Beverly thought it was something of a relief to her. Her investments had done well (‘Feminism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive, thank God,’ she had once told Bev) and now she was a wealthy woman with a townhouse, a place in the country, and two or three lovers virile enough to go the distance with her in the sack but not quite virile enough to beat her at tennis. ‘When they get that good, I drop them at once,’ she said, and although Kay clearly thought this was a joke, Beverly wondered if it really was.
