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
he said, knowing it must sound idiotic but unable to think of anything more useful. He touched her shoulders lightly (she had put her hands over her face to hide her wet eyes and blotchy cheeks) and then took them away as if she were too hot to touch. He was now blushing so hard he looked apoplectic. ‘Cheer up, Beverly.’
She lowered her hands and cried out in a shrill, furious voice: ‘My mother is not a whore! She . . . she’s a waitress !’
This was greeted by absolute silence. Ben stared at her with his lower jaw sprung ajar. Eddie looked up at her from the cobbled surface of the alley, his hands full of pennies. And suddenly all three of them were laughing hysterically.
‘A waitress! ‘ Eddie cackled. He had only the faintest idea of what a whore was, but something about this comparison struck him as delicious just the same. ‘Is that what she is!’
‘Yes! Yes, she is!’ Beverly gasped, laughing and crying at the same time.
Ben was laughing so hard he couldn’t stand up. He sat heavily on a trashcan. His bulk drove the lid into the can and spilled him into the alley on his side. Eddie pointed at him and howled with laughter. Beverly helped him to his feet.
A window went up above them and a woman yelled, ‘You kids get out of there! There’s people that have to work the night shift, you know! Get lost!’
Without thinking, the three of them linked hands, Beverly in the middle, and ran for Center Street. They were still laughing.
6
They pooled their money and discovered they had forty cents, enough for two ice-cream frappes from the drugstore. Because old Mr Keene was a grouch and wouldn’t let kids under twelve eat their stuff at the soda fountain (he claimed the pinball machines in the back room might corrupt them), they took the frappes in two huge waxed containers up to Bassey Park and sat on the grass to drink them. Ben had coffee, Eddie strawberry. Beverly sat between the two boys with a straw, sampling each in turn like a bee at flowers. She felt okay again for the first time since the drain had coughed up its gout of blood the night before — washed out and emotionally exhausted, but okay, at peace with herself. For the time being, anyway.
‘I just don’t get what was wrong with Bradley,’ Eddie said at last — it had the tone of awkward apology. ‘He never acted like that before.’
‘You stood up for me,’ Beverly said, and suddenly kissed Ben on one cheek. ‘Thank you.’
Ben went scarlet again. ‘You weren’t cheating,’ he mumbled, and abruptly gulped down half of his coffee frappe in three monster swallows. This was followed by a burp as loud as a shotgun blast.
‘Get any on you, Daddy-o?’ Eddie asked, and Beverly laughed helplessly, holding her stomach.
‘No more,’ she giggled. ‘My stomach hurts. Please, no more.’
Ben was smiling. That night, before sleep, he would play the moment when she had kissed him over and over again in his mind.
‘Are you really okay now?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘It wasn’t him. It really wasn’t even what he said about my mother. It was something that happened last night.’ She hesitated, looking from Ben to Eddie and back to Ben again. ‘I . . . I have to tell somebody. Or show somebody. Or something. I guess I cried because I’ve been scared I’m going looneytunes.’
‘What are you talking about, looneytunes?’ a new voice asked.
It was Stanley Uris. As always he looked small, slim, and preternaturally neat — much too neat for a kid wh o was just barely eleven. In his white shirt, neatly tucked into his fresh jeans all the way around, his hair combed, the toes of his high-top Keds spotlessly clean, he looked instead like the world’s smallest adult. Then he smiled, and the illusion was broken.
She won’t say whatever she was going to say, Eddie thought, because he wasn’t there when Bradley called her mother that name.
But after a moment’s hesitation, Beverly did tell. Because somehow Stanley was different from Bradley — he was there in a way Bradley had not been.
Stanley’s one of us, Beverly thought, and wondered why that should cause her arms to suddenly break out in bumps. I’m not doing any of them any favors by telling, she thought. Not them, and not me, neither.
But it wa s too late. She was already speaking. Stan sat down with them, his face still and grave. Eddie offered him the last of the strawberry frappe and Stan only shook his head, his eyes never leaving Beverly’s face. None of the boys
