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
Christ,’ Bill said in a weak teary voice.
‘Bill?’ Beverly looked at him, then put a hand on his arm. Her voice was full of startled concern. ‘Bill, what’s wrong?’
‘Harold would have been about five then,’ Bill said. His stunned eyes searched Mike’s face for confirmation.
‘Yes.’
‘What is it, Bill?’ Richie asked.
‘H-H-Harold Gardener was the s-son of Dave Gardener,’ Bill said. ‘Dave lived down the street from us back then, when George was k-killed. He was the one who got to Juh juh . . . to my brother first and brought him up to the house, wrapped in a piece of qu-quilt.’
They sat silently, saying nothing. Beverly put a hand briefly over her eyes.
‘It all fits rather too well, doesn’t it?’ Mike said finally.
‘Yes,’ Bill said in a low voice. ‘It fits, all right.’
‘I’d kept tabs on the six of you over the years, as I said,’ Mike went on, ‘but it wasn’t until then that I began to understand just why I had been doing it, that it had a real and concrete purpose. Still, I held off, waiting to see how things would develop. You see, I felt that I had to be absolutely sure before I . . . disturbed your lives. Not ninety percent, not even ninety-five percent. One hundred was all that would do it.
‘In December of last year, an eight-year-old boy named Steven Johnson was found dead in Memorial Park. Like Adrian Mellon, he had been badly mutilated just before or just after his death, but he looked as if he could have died of just plain fright.’
‘Sexually assaulted?’ Eddie asked.
‘No. Just plain mutilated.’
‘How many in all?’ Eddie asked, not looking as if he really wanted to know.
‘It’s bad,’ Mike said.
‘How many?’ Bill repeated.
‘Nine. So far.’
‘It can’t be!’ Beverly cried. ‘I would have read about it in the paper . . . seen it on the news! When that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock, Maine . . . and those children that were murdered in Atlanta . . . ‘
‘Yes, that,’ Mike said. ‘I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s really the closest correlative to what’s going on here, a nd Bev’s right: that really was coast-to-coast news. In some ways, the Atlanta comparison is the thing about all of this that frightens me the most. The murder of nine children . . . we should have TV news correspondents here, and phony psychics, and reporters from The Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone . . . the whole media circus, in short.’
‘But it hasn’t happened,’ Bill said.
‘No,’ Mike answered, ‘it hasn’t. Oh, there was a Sunday-supplement piece about it in the Portland Sunday Telegram, and ano ther one in the Boston Globe after the last two. A Boston-based television program called Good Day! did a segment this February on unsolved murders, and one of the experts mentioned the Derry murders, but only passingly . . . and he certainly gave no indic ation of knowing there had been a similar batch of murders in 1957 –58, and another in 1929-30.
‘There are some ostensible reasons, of course. Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Detroit . . . those are big media towns, and in big media towns when something happens it makes a bang. There isn’t a single TV or radio station in Derry, unless you count the little FM the English and Speech Department runs up at the high school. Bangor’s got the corner on the market when it comes to the media.’
‘Except for the Derr y News,’ Eddie said, and they all laughed.
‘But we all know that doesn’t really cut it with the way the world is today. The communication web is there, and at some point the story should have broken nationally. But it didn’t. And I think the reason is just this: It doesn’t want it to.’
‘It,’ Bill mused, almost to himself.
‘It,’ Mike agreed. ‘If we have to call It something, it might as well be what we used to call It. I’ve begun to think, you see, that It has been here so long whatever It really is . . . that It’s become a part of Derry, something as much a part of the town as the Standpipe, or the Canal, or Bassey Park, or the library. Only It’s not a matter of outward geography, you understand. Maybe that was true once, but now It’s . . . inside. Somehow It’s gotten inside. That’s the only way I know to understand all of the terrible things that have happened here — the nominally explicable as well as the utterly inexplicable! There was a fire at a Negro nightclub called the Black Spot in 1930. A year before that, a bunch of half-bright Depression outlaws was gunned down on Canal Street in the middle of the afternoon.’
‘The Bradley Gang,’ Bill said. ‘The FBI got them, right?’
‘That’s what the histories say, but that’s not precisely true. So far as I’ve been able to find out — and I’d give a lot to believe that it wasn’t so, because
