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
that another part of him stood aghast at the idea. He couldn’t believe that anyone in his right mind would want to tear down that stately pleasure dome with its glittering glass chandelier, its sweeping right-and –left staircases which spiraled up to the balcony, and its mammoth curtain, which did not simply pull apart when the show started but which instead rose in magical folds and tucks and gathers, all underlit in fabulous shades of red and blue and yellow and green while pullies off stage ratcheted and groaned. Not the Aladdin, that shocked part of him cried out. How couldthey ever even think of tearing down the Aladdin for a BANK?
‘Oh, ayup, a bank,’ the cabbie said. ‘You’re fucking-A, pardon my French if you’re a religious man. It was the First Merchants of Penobscot County had its eye on the ‘laddin. Wanted to pull it down and put up what they called a «complete banking mall.» Got all the papers from the City Council, and the Aladdin was condemned. Then a bunch of folks formed a committee — folks that had lived here a long time — and they petitioned, and they marched, and they hollered, and finally they had a public City Council meeting about it, and Hanlon blew those suckers out.’ The cabbie sounded extremely satisfied.
‘Hanlon?’ Bill asked, startled. ‘Mike Hanlon?’
‘Ayup,’ the cabbie said. He twisted around briefly to look at Bill, revealing a round, chapped face and horn-rimmed glasses with old specks of white paint on the bows. ‘Librarian. Black fella. You know him?’
‘I did,’ Bill said, remembering how he had met Mike, back in July 1958. It had been Bowers and Huggins and Criss again . . . of course. Bowers and Huggins and Criss
(oh my)
at every turn, playing their own part, unwitting visegrips driving the seven of them together — tight, tighter, tightest. ‘We played together when we were kids. Before I moved away.’
‘Well, there you go,’ the cabbie said. ‘It’s a small fucking world, pardon my — ‘
‘ — French if you’re a religious man,’ Bill finished wit h him.
‘There you go,’ the cabbie repeated comfortably, and they rode in silence for awhile before he said, ‘It’s changed a lot, Derry has, but yeah, a lot of it’s still here. The Town House, where I picked you up. The Standpipe in Memorial Park. You remember that place, mister? When we were kids, we used to think that place was haunted.’
‘I remember it,’ Bill said.
‘Look, there’s the hospital. You recognize it?’
They were passing the Derry Home Hospital on the right now. Behind it, the Penobscot flowed toward its meeting-place with the Kenduskeag. Under the rainy spring sky, the river was dull pewter. The hospital that Bill remembered — a white woodframe building with two wings, three stories high — was still there, but now it was surrounded, dwarfed, by a whole complex of buildings, maybe a dozen in all. He could see a parking-lot off to the left, and what looked like better than five hundred cars parked there.
‘My God, that’s not a hospital, that’s a fucking college campus!’ Bill excla imed.
The cab-driver cackled. ‘Not bein a religious man, I’ll pardon your French. Yeah, it’s almost as big as the Eastern Maine up in Bangor now. They got radiation labs and a therapy center and six hundred rooms and their own laundry and God knows what else. The old hospital’s still there, but it’s all administration now.’
Bill felt a queer doubling sensation in his mind, the sort of sensation he remembered getting the first time he watched a 3– D movie. Trying to bring together two images that didn’t quite jibe. You could fool your eyes and your brain into doing that trick, he remembered, but you were apt to end up with a whopper of a headache . . . and he could feel his own headache coming on now. New Derry, fine. But the old Derry was still here, like the wooden Home Hospital building. The old Derry was mostly buried under all the new construction . . . but your eye was somehow dragged helplessly back to look at it . . . to look for it.
‘The trainyard’s probably gone, isn’t it?’ Bill asked.
The cabbie laughed again, delighted. ‘For someone who moved away when he was just a kid, you got a good memory, mister.’ Bill thought: You should have met me last week, myFrench-speaking friend. ‘It’s all still out there, but it’s nothing but ruins and rusty tracks now. The freights don’t even stop no more. Fella wanted to buy the land and put up a whole roadside entertainment thing pitch ‘n putt , batting cages, driving ranges, mini golf, go –karts, little shack fulla video games, I don’t know whatall
