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
more than once, anyway . . . and now that I think about it, most of the pejorative terms for ‘black’ or ‘Negro’ I’ve ever heard, I heard first from the lips of Henry Bowers, between grades one and four.
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘the idea that Butch Bowers is crazy might not be far wrong. People said he was never right after he come back from the Pacific. He was in the Marines over there. Anyway, the Sheriff took him into custody and Butch was hollering that it was a put-up job and they were all just a bunch of nigger-lovers. Oh, he was gonna sue everybody. I guess he had a list that would have stretched from here to Witcham Street. I doubt if he had a single pair of underdrawers that was whole in the seat, but he was going to sue me, Sheriff Sullivan, the Town of Derry, the County of Penobscot, and God alone knows who else.
‘As to what happened next . . . well, I can’t swear it’s true, but this is how I heard it from Dewey Conroy. Dewey said th e Sheriff went in to see Butch at the jail up in Bangor. And Sheriff Sullivan says, «It’s time for you to shut your mouth and do some listening, Butch. That black guy, he don’t want to press charges. He don’t want to send you to Shawshank, he just wants the worth of his chickens. He figures two hundred dollars would do her.»
‘Butch tells the Sheriff he can put his two hundred dollars where the sun don’t shine, and Sheriff Sullivan, he tells Butch: «They got a lime pit down at the Shank, Butch, and they tell me after you’ve been workin there about two years, your tongue goes as green as a lime Popsicle. Now you pick. Two years peelin lime or two hundred dollars. What do you think?»
‘»No jury in Maine will convict me,» Butch says, «not for killing a nigger’s chickens.»
‘»I know that,» Sullivan says.
‘»Then what the Christ are we chinnin about?» Butch asts him.
‘»You better wake up, Butch. They won’t put you away for the chickens, but they will put you away for the swastiker you painted on the door after you killed em.»
‘Well, Dewey said Butch’s mouth just kind of dropped open, and Sullivan went away to let him think about it. About three days later Butch told his brother, the one that froze to death couple of years after while out hunting drunk, to sell his new Mercury, which Butch had bought with his muster-out pay and was mighty sweet on. So I got my two hundred dollars and Butch swore he was going to burn me out. He went around telling all his friends that. So I caught up with him one afternoon. He’d bought an old pre-war Ford to replace the Merc, and I had my pick-up. I cut him off out on Witcham Street by the trainyards and got out with my Winchester rifle.
‘»Any fires out my way and you got one bad black man gunning for you, old boss,» I told him.
‘»You can’t talk to me that way, nigger,» he said, and he was damn near to blubbering between being mad and being scared. «You can’t talk to no white man that way, not a jig like you.»
‘Well, I’d had enough of the whole thing, Mikey. And I knew if I didn’t scare him off for good right then I’d never be shed of him. There wasn’t nobody around. I reached in that Ford with one hand and caught him by the hair of the head. I put the stock of my rifle against the buckle of my belt and go t the muzzle right up under his chin. I said, «The next time you call me a nigger or a jig, your brains are going to be dripping off the domelight of your car. And you believe me, Butch: any fires out my way and I’m gunning for you. I may come gunning for your wife and your brat and your no-count brother as well. I have had enough.»
‘Then he did start to cry, and I never saw an uglier sight in my life. «Look what things has come to here,» he says, «when a nih. . . . when a jih . . . when a feller can pu t a gun to a workingman’s head in broad daylight by the side of the road.»
‘»Yeah, the world must be going to a camp-meeting hell when something like that can happen,» I agreed. «But that don’t matter now. All that matters now is, do we have an understanding here or do you want to see if you can learn how to breathe through your forehead?»
‘He allowed as how we had an understanding, and that was the last bit of trouble I ever had with Butch Bowers, except for maybe when your dog Mr Chips died, and I’ve got no proof that was Bowers’s doing. Chippy might have just got a poison bait or something.
‘Since that day we’ve been pretty much left alone to make our way, and when I look back on it, there ain’t much I regret. We’ve had a good life here, and if there are nights when I dream about that fire, well, there isn’t nobody that can live a natural life without having a few bad dreams.’
February 28th, 1985
It’s been days since I sat down to write the story of the fire at the Black Spot as my father told it to me, and I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s in The Lord of the Rings,
