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
O of fear — fear, yes, but no surprise. Hadn’t she known? Hadn’t she known something like this was going to happen?
The tape ran out to its final stop. Eighteen feet; an even six yards.
A soft chuckle came wafting out of the drain, followed by a low whisper that was almost reproachful: ‘Beverly, Beverly, Beverly . . . you can’t fight us . . . you’ll die if you try . . . die if you try . . . die if you try . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . ly-ly-ly . . . ‘
Something clicked inside the tape– measure’s housing, and it suddenly began to run rapidly back into its case, the numbers and hashmarks blurring by. Near the end — the last five or six feet — the yellow became a dark, dripping red and she screamed and dropped it on the floor as if the tape had suddenly turned into a live snake.
Fresh blood trickled over the clean white porcelain of the basin and back down into the drain’s wide eye. She bent, sobbing now, her fear a freezing weight in her stomach, and picked the tape up. She tweezed it between the thumb and first finger of her right hand and, holding it in front of her, took it into the kitchen. As she walked, blood dripped from the tape onto the faded linoleum of the hall and the kit chen.
She steadied herself by thinking of what her father would say to her — what he would do to her — if he found that she had gotten his measuring tape all bloody. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to see the blood, but it helped to think that.
She took one of the clean rags — still as warm as fresh bread from the dryer — and went back into the bathroom. Before she began to clean, she put the hard rubber plug in the drain, closing that eye. The blood was fresh, and it cleaned up easily. She went up he r own trail, wiping away the dune-sized drops on the linoleum, then rinsing the rag, wringing it out, and putting it aside.
She got a second rag and used it to clean her father’s measuring tape. The blood was thick, viscous. In two places there were clots of the stuff, black and spongy.
Although the blood only went back five or six feet, she cleaned the entire length of the tape, removing from it all traces of pipemuck. That done, she put it back into the cupboard over the sink and took the two stained rags out in back of the apartment. Mrs Doyon was yelling at Jim again. Her voice was clear, almost bell-like in the still hot late afternoon.
In the back yard, which was mostly bare din, weeds, and clothes-lines, there Was a rusty incinerator. Beverly threw the rags into it, then sat down on the back steps. Tears came suddenly, with surprising violence, and this time she made no effort to hold them back.
She put her arms on her knees, her head in her arms, and wept while Mrs Doyon called for J im to come out of that road, did he want to get hit by a car and be killed? ‘Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui.’
— Virgil
‘You don’t fuck around with the infinite.’
— Mean Streets
February 14th, 1985 Valentine’s Day
Two more disappearances in the past week — both children. Just as I was beginning to relax. One of them a sixteen-year-old boy named Dennis Torrio, the other a girl of just five who was out sledding in back of her house on West Broadway. The hysterical mother found her sled, one of those blue plastic flying saucers, but nothing else. There had been a fresh fall of snow the night before — four inches or so. No tracks but hers, Chief Rademacher said when I called him. He is becoming extremely annoyed with me, I think. Not anything that’s going to keep me awake nights; I have worse things to do than that, don’t I?
Asked him if I could see the police photos. He refused.
Asked him if her tracks led away toward any sort of drain or sewer grating. This was followed by a long period of silence. Then Rademacher said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder if maybe you shouldn’t see a doctor, Hanlon. The head-peeper kind of doctor. The kid was snatched by her father. Don’t you read the papers?’
‘Was the Torrio boy snatched by his father?’ I asked. .
Another long pause.
‘Give it a rest, Hanlon,’ he said. ‘Give me a rest.’
He hung up.
Of course I read the papers — don’t I put them out in the Reading Room of the Public Library each morning myself? The little girl, Laurie Ann Winterbarger, had been in the custody of her mother following an acrimonious divorce proceeding in the spring of 1982. The police are operating on the theory that
