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
years or better, I added what he sometimes said: ‘It hasn’t ever escaped my mind.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you now,’ he said. ‘Fifteen is old enough, I guess, and your mother ain’t here to stop me. Besides, you ought to know. I think something like it could only have happened in Derry, and you need to know that, too. So you can beware. The conditions for such things have always seemed right here. You’re careful, aren’t you, Mikey?
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said, and his head dropped back on his pillow. ‘That’s good.’ I thought he was going to drift off again — his eyes had slipped closed — but instead he began to talk.
‘When I was at the army base here in ’29 and ’30,’ he said, ‘there was an NCO Club up there on the hill, where Derry Community College is now. It was right behind the PX, where you used to be able to get a pack of Lucky Strike Greens for seven cents. The NCO Club was only a big old quonset hut, but they had fixed it up nice inside — carpet on the floor, booths along the walls, a jukebox — and you could get soft drinks on the weekend . . . if you were white, that was. They would have bands in most Saturday nights, and it was quite a place to go. It was just pop over the bar, it being Prohibition, but we heard you could get stronger stuff if you wanted it . . . and if you had a little green star on your army card. That was like a secret sign they had. Home –brew beer mostly, but on weekends you could sometimes get stronger stuff. If you were white.
‘Us Company E boys weren’t allowed any place near it, of course. So we went on the town if we had a pass in the evening. In those days Derry was still something of a logging town and there were eight or ten bars, most of em down in a part of town they called Hell’s Half-Acre. They wasn’t speakeasies; that was too grand a name for em. Wasn’t anybody in em spoke very easy, anyhow. They was what folks called «blind pigs,» and that was about right, because most of the customers acted like pigs when they were in there and they was about blind when they turned em out. The Sheriff knew and the cops knew, but those places roared
all night long, same as they’d done since the logging days in the 1890s. I suppose palms got greased, but maybe not as many or with so much as you might think; in Derry people have a way of looking the odier way. Some served hard stuff as well as beer, and by all accounts I ever heard, the stuff you could get in town was ten times as good as the rotgut whiskey and bathtub gin you could get at the white boys’ NCO on Friday and Saturday nights. The downtown hooch came over the border from Canada in pulp trucks, and most of them bottles had what the labels said. The good stuff was expensive, but there was plenty of furnace-oil too, and it might hang you over but it didn’t kill you, and if you did go blind, it didn’t last. On any given night you’d have to duck your head when the bottles came flying by. There was Nan’s, the Paradise, Wally’s Spa, the Silver Dollar, and one bar, the Powderhorn, where you could sometimes get a whore. Oh, you could pick up a woman at any pig, you didn’t even have to work at it that hard — there was a lot of them wanted to find out if a slice off n the rye loaf was any different — but to kids like me and Trevor Dawson and Carl Roone, my friends in those days, the thought of buying a whore — a white whore — that was something you had to sit down and consider.’
As I’ve told you, he was heavily doped that night. I don’t believe he would have said any of that stuff — not to his fifteen-year-old son — if he had not been.
‘Well, it wasn’t very long before a representative of the Town Council showed up, wanting to see Major Fuller. He said he wanted to talk about «some problems between the townspeople and the enlisted men» and «concerns of the electorate» and «questions of propriety,» but what he really wanted Fuller to know was as clear as a windowpane. They didn’t want no army niggers in their pigs, botherin white women and drinkin illegal hooch — at a bar where only white men was supposed to be standin and drinkin illegal hooch.
‘All of which was a laugh, all right. The flower of white womanhood they were so worried about was mostly a bunch of barbags, and as far as getting in the way of the men . . . ! Well, all I can say is that I never saw a member of the Derry Town Council down in the Silver Dollar, or in the Powderhorn. The men who drank in those dives were pulp-cutters in those big red-and –black-checked lumberman’s jackets, scars and scabs all over their hands, some of em missing eyes or fingers, all of em missing most of then– teeth, all of em smellin like woodchips and sawdust and sap. They wore green flannel pants and green gumrubber boots and tracked snow across the floor until it was black with it. They smelled big, Mikey,
