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 was pointing and said I sure did see it. So then he
busted me one in the nose and knocked me over and there I wa s on the ground with blood running down over the last fresh shirt I had.
‘»You don’t see it because some bigmouth jig bastard filled it up!» he shouted at me, and he had two big blotches of color on his cheeks. But he was grinning, too, and you could tell he was enjoying himself. «So what you do, Mr A Good Afternoon To You, what you do is you get the dirt out of my hole. Doubletime!»
‘So I dug for most two hours, and pretty soon I was in that hole up to my chin. The last couple of feet was clay, and by the time I finished I was standing in water up to my ankles and my shoes were soaked right through.
‘»Get out of there, Hanlon,» Sergeant Wilson said. He was sitting there on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t offer me any help. I was dirt and muck from top to bottom, not to mention the blood drying on the blouse of my suntans. He stood up and walked over. He pointed at the hole.
‘»What do you see there, nigger?» he asked me.
‘»Your hole, Sergeant Wilson,» says I.
‘»Yeah, well, I decided I don’t want it,» he says. «I don’t want no hole dug by a nigger. Put my dirt back in, Private Hanlon.»
‘So I filled it back in and by the time I was done the sun was going down and it was getting cold. He comes over and looks at it after I finished patting down the last of the dirt with the flat of the spade.
‘»Now what do you see there, nigger?» he asks.
‘»Bunch of dirt, sir,» I said, and he hit me again. My God, Mikey, I came this close to just bouncing up off ‘n the ground and split ting his head open with the edge of that shovel. But if I’d done that, I never would have looked at the sky again, except through a set of bars. Still, there were times when I almost think it would have been worth it. I managed to hold my peace somehow, though.
‘»That ain’t a bunch of dirt, you stupid coontail night-fighter!» he screams at me, the spit flying off’n his lips. «That’s MY HOLE, and you best get the dirt out of it right now! Doubletime!»
‘So I dug the dirt out of his hole and then I filled it in again, and then he asks me why I went and filled in his hole just when he was getting ready to take a crap in it. So I dug it out again and he drops his pants and hangs his skinny-shanks cracker redneck ass over the hole and he grins up at me while he’s doing his business and says, «How you doin, Hanlon?»
‘»I am doing just fine, sir,» I says right back, because I had decided I wasn’t going to give up until I fell unconscious or dropped dead. I had my dander up.
‘»Well, I aim to fix that,» he says. «To start with, you better just fill that hole in, Private Hanlon. And I want to see some life. You’re slowin down.»
‘So I got her filled in again and I could see by the way he was grinning that he was only warming up. But just then this friend of his came humping across the field with a gas lantern and told him there’d been a surprise inspection and Wilson was in hack for having missed it. My friends covered for me and I was okay, but Wilson’s friends — if that’s what he called them — couldn’t be bothered.
‘He let me go then, and I waited to see if his name would go up on the Punishment Roster the next day, but it never did. I guess he must have just told the Loot he missed the inspection because he was teaching a smartmouth nigger who it was owned all the holes at the Derry army base — those that had already been dug and those that hadn’t been. They probably gave him a medal instead of potatoes to peel. And that’s how things were for Company E here in Derry.’
It was right around 1958 that my father told me the story, and I guess he was pushing fifty, although my mother was only forty or so. I asked him if that was the way Derry was, why had he come back?
‘Well, I was only sixteen when I joined the army, Mikey,’ he said. ‘Lied about my age to get in. Wasn’t my idea, either. My mother told me to do it. I was big, and that’s the only reason the lie stuck, I guess. I was born and grew up in Burgaw, North Carolina, and the only time we saw meat was right after the tobacco was in, or sometimes in the winter if my father shot a coon or a possum. The only good thing I remember about Burgaw is possum pie with hoecakes spread around her just as pretty as you could want.
‘So when my dad died in an accident with some farm machinery, my ma said she was going to take Philly Loubird up to Corinth, where she had people. Philly Loubird was the baby of the family.’
‘You mean my Uncle Phil?’ I asked, smiling to think of anybody calling him Philly Loubird. He was a lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, and had been on the City Council there for six years. When I was a kid, I thought Uncle Phil was rich. For a black man in 1958, I suppose he was. He made twenty thousand dollars a year.
‘That’s who I mean,’ my dad said. ‘But
