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
like marks of guilt.
‘Well? I’m waiting.’ He tossed the bloody towel back over the rod.
There was blood . . . blood everywhere . . . and her father didn’t see it.
‘Daddy — ‘ She had no idea what might have come next, but her father interrupted her.
‘I worry about you,’ Al Marsh said. ‘I don’t think you’re ever going to grow up, Beverly. You go out running around, you don’t do hardly any of the housework around here, you can’t cook, you can’t sew. Half the time you’re off on a cloud someplace with your nose stuck in a book and the other half you’ve got vapors and megrims. I worry.’
His hand suddenly swung and spatted painfully against her buttocks. She uttered a cry, her eyes fixed on his. There was a tiny stipple of blood caught in his bushy right eyebrow. If Ilook at that long enough I’ll just go crazy and none of this will matter, she thought dimly.
‘I worry a lot,’ he said, and hit her again, harder, on the arm above the elbow. That arm cried out and then seemed to go to sleep. She would have a spreading yellowish-purple bruise there the next day.
‘An awful lot,’ he said, and punched her in the stomach. He pulled the punch at the last second, and Beverly lost only half of her air. S he doubled over, gasping, tears starting in her eyes. Her father looked at her impassively. He shoved his bloody hands in the pockets of his trousers.
‘You got to grow up, Beverly,’ he said, and now his voice was kind and forgiving. ‘Isn’t that so?’
She nodded. Her head throbbed. She cried, but silently. If she sobbed aloud — started what her father called ‘that baby whining ‘ — he might go to work on her in earnest. Al Marsh had lived his entire life in Derry and told people who asked (and sometimes those who did not) that he intended to be buried here — hopefully at the age of one hundred and ten. ‘No reason why I shouldn’t live forever,’ he sometimes told Roger Aurlette, who cut his hair once each month. ‘I have no vices.’
‘Now explain yourself,’ he said, ‘and make it quick.’
‘There was — ‘ She swallowed and it hurt because there was no moisture in her throat, none at all. ‘There was a spider. A big fat black spider. It . . . it crawled out of the drain and I . . . I guess it crawled back down.’
‘Oh\’ He smiled a little at her now, as if pleased by this explanation. ‘Was that it? Damn! If you’d told me, Beverly, I never would have hit you. All girls are scared of spiders. Sam Hill! Why didn’t you speak up?’
He bent over the drain and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out a warning . . . and some other voice spoke deep inside her, some terrible voice which could not have been a part of her; surely it was the voice of the devil himself: Let it get him, if it wants him. Let itpull him down. Good-fucking-riddance.
She turned away from that voice in horror. To allow such a thought to stay for even a moment in her head would surely damn her to hell.
He peered into the eye of the drain. His hands squelched in the blood on the rim of the basin. Beverly fought grimly with her gorge. Her belly ached where her dad had hit her.
‘Don’t see a thing,’ he said. ‘All these buildings are old, Bev. Got drains the size of freeways, you know it? When I was janitorin down in the old high school, we used to get drowned rats in the toilet bowls once in awhile. It drove the girls crazy.’ He laughed fondly at the thought of such female vapors and megrims. ‘Mostly when the Kenduskeag was high. Less wildlife in the pipes since they put in the new drain system, though.’
He put an arm around her and hugged her.
‘Look. You go to bed and don’t think about it anymore. Okay?’
She felt her love for him. I never hit you when you didn’t deserve it, Beverly, he told her once when she had cried out that some punishment had been unfair. And surely that had to be true, because he was capable of love. Sometimes he would spend a whole day with her, showing her how to do things or just telling her stuff or walking around town with her, and when he was kind like that she thought her heart would swell with happiness until it killed her. She loved him, and tried to understand that he had to correct her often because it was (as he said) his God-given job. Daughters, Al Marsh said, need more correction than sons. He had no sons, and she felt vaguely as if that might be partly her fault as well.
‘Okay, Daddy,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’
They walked into her small bedroom
