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
together. Her right arm now ached fiercely from the blow it had taken. She looked back over her shoulder and saw the bloody sink, bloody mirror, bloody wall, bloody floor. The bloody towel her father had used and then hung casually over the rod. She thought: How can I ever go in there to wash up again? Please God, dear God,
I’m sorry if I had a bad thought about my dad and You can punish me for it if You want, I deserve to be punished, make me fall down and hurt myself or make me have the flu like last winter when I coughed so hard once I threw up but please God make the blood be gone in the morning, pretty please, God, okay? Okay?
Her father tucked her in as he always did, and kissed her forehead. Then he only stood there for a moment in what she would always think of as ‘his’ way of standing, perhaps of being: bent slightly forward, hands plunged deep to above the wrist — in his pockets , the bright blue eyes in his mournful basset-hound’s face looking down at her from above. In later years, long after she stopped thinking about Derry at all, she would see a man sitting on the bus or maybe standing on a comer with his dinnerbucket in his hand, shapes, oh shapes of men, sometimes seen as day closed down, sometimes seen across Watertower Square in the noonlight of a clear windy autumn day, shapes of men, rules of men, desires of men: or Tom, so like her father when he took off his shirt and stood slightly slumped in front of the bathroom mirror to shave. Shapes of men.
‘Sometimes I worry about you, Bev,’ he said, but there was no trouble or anger in his voice now. He touched her hair gently, smoothing it back from her forehead.
The bathroom is full of blood, Daddy! she almost screamed then. Didn’t you see it? It’s everywhere! Cooking onto the light over the sink, even! Didn’t you SEE it?
But she kept her silence as he went out and closed the door behind him, filling her room with darkness. She was still awake, still staring into the darkness, when her mother came in at eleven-thirty and the TV went off. She heard her parents go into their room and she heard the bedsprings creaking steadily as they did their sex-act thing. Beverly had overheard Greta Bowie telling Sally Mueller that the sex-act thing hurt like fire and no nice girl ever wanted to do it (‘At the end of it the man pees all over your bug,’ Greta said, and Sally had cried: ‘Oh yuck, I’d never let a boy do that to me!’). If it hurt as badly as Greta said, then Bev’s mother kept the hurt to herself; Bev had heard her mom cry out once or twice in a low voice, but it hadn’t sounded at all like a pain-cry.
The slow creak of the springs speeded up to a beat so rapid it was just short of frantic, and then stopped. There was a period of silence, then some low talk, then the sound of her mother’s footsteps as she went into the bathroom. Beverly held her breath, waiting for her mother to scream or not.
There was no scream — only the sound of water running into the basin. That was followed by some low splashing. Then the water ran out of the basin with its familiar gurgling sound. Her mother was brushing her teeth now. Moments later the bedsprings in her parents’ room creaked again as her mom got back into bed.
Five minutes or so after that her father began to snore.
A black fear stole over her heart and closed her throat. She found herself afraid to turn over on her right side — her favorite sleeping position — because she might see something looking in the window at her. So she just lay on her back, stiff as a poker, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling. Some time later — minutes or hours, there was no way of telling — she fell into a thin troubled sleep.
3
Beverly always woke up when the alarm went off in her parents’ bedroom. You had to be fast, because the alarm no more than got started before her father banged it off. She dressed quickly while her father used the bathroom. She paused (as she now almost always did) to look at her chest in the mirror, trying to decide if her breasts had gotten any bigger in the night. She had started getting them late last year.
