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
a thought come from? — but it somehow did not seem like his own thought at all.
He looked at the Standpipe more closely, and then veered in that direction without even thinking about it. Windows circled the building at intervals, rising around it in a spiral that made Stan think of the barber pole in front of Mr Aurlette’s shop, where he and his dad got their haircuts. The bone-white shingles bulged out over each of those dark windows like brows over eyes. Wonder how they did that, Stan thought — not with as much interest as Ben Hanscom would have felt, but with some — and that was when he saw there was a much larger space of darkness at the foot of the Standpipe — a clear oblong in the circular base.
He stopped, frowning, thinking that was a funny place for a window: it was completely out of symmetry with the others. Then he realized it wasn’t a window. It was a door.
The noise I heard, he thought. It was that door, blowing open.
He looked around. Early, gloomy dusk. White sky now fading to a dull dusky purple, mist thickening a bit more toward the steady rain which would fall most of the night. Dusk and mist and no wind at all.
So . . . if it hadn’t blown open, had someone pushed it open? Why? And it looked like an awfully heavy door to slam open hard enough to make a noise like that boom. He supposed a very big person . . . maybe . . .
Curious, Stan walked over for a closer look.
The door was bigger than he had first supposed — six feet high and two feet thick, the boards which composed it bound with brass strips. Stan swung it half-closed. It moved smoothly and easily on its hinges in spite of its size. It also moved silently — there was not a single squeak. He had moved it to see how much damage it had done to the shingles, blasting open like that. There was no damage at all; not so much as a single mark. Weirdsville, as Richie would say.
Well, it wasn’t the door you heard, that’s all, he thought. Maybe a jet from Loring boomed over Derry, or something. Door was probably open all al —
His foot struck something. Stan looked down and saw it was a padlock . . . correction. It was the remains of a padlock. It had been burst wide open. It looked, in fact, as if someone had rammed the Lock’s keyway full of gunpowder and then set a match to it. Flowers of metal, deadly sharp, stood out from the body of the lock in a stiff spray. Stan could see the layers of steel inside. The thick hasp hung askew by one bolt which had been yanked three-uarters of the way out of the wood. The other three hasp-bolts lay on the wet grass. They had been twisted like pretzels.
Frowning, Stan swung the door open again and peered inside.
Narrow stairs led upward, circling around and out of sight. The outer wall of the staircase was bare wood supported by giant cross-beams which had been pegged together rather than nailed. To Stan some of the pegs looked thicker than his own upper arm. The inner wall was steel from which gigantic rivets swelled like boils.
‘Is anyone here?’ Stan asked.
There was no answer.
He hesitated, then stepped inside so he could see up the narrow throat of the staircase a little better. Nothing. And it was Creep City in here. As Richie would also say. He turned to leave . . . and heard music.
It was faint, but still instantly recognizable.
Calliope music.
He cocked his head, listening, the frown on his face starting to dissolve a little. Calliope music, all right, the music of carnivals and county fairs. It conjured up trace memories which were as delightful as they were ephemeral: popcorn, cotton candy, doughboys frying in hot grease, the chain-driven clatter of rides like the Wild Mouse, the Whip, the Koaster-Kups.
Now the frown had become a tentative grin. Stan went up one step, then two more, head still cocked. He paused again. As if thinking about carnivals could actually create one; he could now actually smell the popcorn, the cotton candy, the doughboys . . . and more! Peppers, chili-dogs, cigarette smoke and sawdust. There was the sharp smell of white vinegar, the kind you could shake over your french fries through a hole in the tin cap. He could smell mustard, bright yellow and stinging hot, that you spread on your hotdog with a wooden paddle.
This was amazing . . . incredible . . . irresistible.
He took another step up and that was when he heard the rustling, eager footsteps above him, descending the stairs. He cocked his head again. The calliope music had gotten suddenly
