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
But she did remember one time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! Weare your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.
In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. ‘We want to know if there is something wrong,’ Stanley said, ‘and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is.’
They took the tests. They showed that Stanley’s sperm was perky, that Patty’s eggs were fertile, that all the channels that were supposed to be open were open.
Harkavay, who wore no wedding ring and who had the open, pleasant, ruddy face of a college grad student just back from a midterm skiing vacation in Colorado, told them that maybe it was just nerves. He told them that such a problem was by no means uncommon. He told them that there seemed to be a psychological correlative in such cases that was in some ways simila r to sexual impotency — the more you wanted to, the less you could. They would have to relax. They ought, if they could, to forget all about procreation when they had sex.
Stan was grumpy on the way home. Patty asked him why.
‘I never do,’ he said.
‘Do what?’
‘Think of procreation during. ‘
She began to giggle, even though she was by then feeling a bit lonesome and frightened. And that night, lying in bed, long after she believed that Stanley must be asleep, he had frightened her by speaking out of the dark. His voice was flat but nevertheless choked with tears. ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘It’s my fault.’
She rolled toward him, groped for him, held him.
‘Don’t be a stupid,’ she said. But her heart was beating fast — much too fast. It wasn’t just that he had startled her; it was as if he had looked into her mind and read a secret conviction she held there but of which she had not known until this minute. With no rhyme, no reason, she felt — knew — that he was right. There was something wrong, and it wasn’t her. It was him. Something in him.
‘Don’t be such a klutz,’ she whispered fiercely against his shoulder. He was sweating lightly and she became suddenly aware that he was afraid. The fear was coming off him in cold waves; lying naked with him was suddenly like lying naked in front of an open refrigerator.
‘I’m not a klutz and I’m not being stupid,’ he said in that same voice, which was simultaneously flat and choked with emotion, ‘and you know it. It’s me. But I don’t know why. ‘
‘You can’t know any such thing.’ Her voice was harsh, scolding — her mother’s voice when her mother was afraid. And even as she scolded him a shudder ran through her body, twisting it like a whip. Stanley felt it and his arms tightened around her.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘sometimes I think I know why. Sometimes I have a dream, a bad dream, and I wake up and I think, «I know now. I know what’s wrong.» Not just you not catching pregnant — everything. Everything that’s wrong with my life.’
‘Stanley, nothing’s wrong with your life!’
‘I don’t mean from inside,’ he said. ‘From inside is fine. I’m talking about outside. Something that should be over and isn’t. I wake up from these dreams and think, «My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don’t understand.» I’m afraid. But then it just . . . fades. The way dreams do.’
She knew that he sometimes dreamed uneasily. On half a dozen occasions he had awakened her, thrashing and moaning. Probably there had been other times when she had slept through his dark interludes. Whenever she reached for him, asked him, he said the same thing: I can’t remember. Then he would reach for his cigarettes and smoke sitting up in bed, waiting for the residue of the dream to pass through his pores like bad sweat.
No kids. On the night of May 28th, 1985 — the night of the bath — their assorted in-laws were still waiting to be grandparents. The extra room was still an extra room; the Stayfree Maxis and Stayfree Minis still occupied their accustomed places in the cupboard under the bathroom sink; the cardinal still paid its monthly visit. Her mother, who was much occupied with her own affairs but not entirely oblivious to her daughter’s pain, had stopped asking in her letters and when Stanley and Patty made their twice-yearly trips back to New York. There were no
