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
up the back stairs, he supposedly jumped from the bathroom window into the yard she’d just left and got away clean. But the window is only one of those half-sized jobs; a kid of seven would have to wriggle to get through it. And the drop was twenty-five feet to a stone-flagged patio. Rademacher doesn’t like to talk about those things, and no one in the press — certainly no one at the News — has pressed him about them.’
Mike took a drink of water and then passed another picture down the line. This was not a police photograph; it was another school picture. It showed a grinning boy who was maybe thirteen. He was dressed in his best for the school photo and his hands were clean and folded neatly in his lap . . . but there was a devilish little glint in his eyes. He was black.
‘Jeffrey Holly,’ Mike said. ‘May 13th. A week after the Cowan boy was killed. Torn open. He was found in Bassey Park, by the Canal.
‘Nine days after that, May 22nd, a fifthgrader named John Feury was found dead out on Neibolt Street — ‘
Eddie uttered a high, quavering scream. He groped for his aspirator and knocked it off the table. It rolled down to Bill, who picked it up. Eddie’s face had gone a sickish yellow color. His breath whistled coldly in his throat.
‘Get him something to drink!’ Ben roared. ‘Somebody get him —
But Eddie was shaking his head. He triggered the aspirator down his throat. His chest heaved as he tore in a gulp of air. He triggered the aspirator again and then sat back, eyes half-closed, panting.
‘I’ll be all right,’ he gasped. ‘Gimme a minute, I’m with you.’
‘Eddie, are you sure?’ Beverly asked. ‘Maybe you ought to lie down — ‘
‘I’ll be all right,’ he repeated querulously. ‘It was just . . . the shock. You know. The shock. I’d forgotten all about Neibolt Street.’
No one replied; no one had to. Bill thought: You believe your capacity has been reached, and then Mike produces another name, and yet another, like a black magician with a hatful of malign tricks, and you’re knocked onyour ass again.
It was too much to face all at once, this outpouring of inexplicable violence, somehow directly aimed at the six people here — or so George’s photograph seemed to suggest.
‘Both of John Feury’s legs were gone,’ Mike continued softly, ‘but the medical examiner says that happened after he died. H is heart gave out. He seems to have quite literally died of fear. He was found by the postman, who saw a hand sticking out from under the porch — ‘
‘It was 29, wasn’t it?’ Rich said, and Bill looked at him quickly. Rich glanced back at him, nodded slightly, and then looked at Mike again. ‘Twenty-nine Neibolt Street.’
‘Oh yes,’ Mike said in that same calm voice. ‘It was number 29.’ He drank more water. ‘Are you really all right, Eddie?’
Eddie nodded. His breathing had eased.
‘Rademacher made an arrest the day after Feury’s body was discovered,’ Mike said. ‘There was a front-page editorial in the News that same day, calling for his resignation, incidentally.’
‘After eight murders?’ Ben said. ‘Pretty radical of them, wouldn’t you say?’
Beverly wanted to know who had been arrested.
‘A guy who lives in a little shack way out on Route 7, almost over the town line and into Newport,’ Mike said. ‘Kind of a hermit. Burns scrapwood in his stove, roofed the place with scavenged shingles and hubcaps. Name of Harold Earl. Probably doesn’t see two hundred dollars in cash money over the course of a year. Someone driving by saw him standing out in his dooryard, just looking up at the sky, on the day John Feury’s body was discovered. His clothes were covered with blood.’
Then maybe — ‘ Rich began hopefully.
‘He had three butchered deer in his shed,’ Mike said. ‘He’d been jacking over in Haven. The blood on his clothes was deer-blood. Rademacher asked him if he killed John Feury, and Earl is sup posed to have said, «Oh ayuh, I killed a lot of people. I shot most of them in the war.» He also said he’d seen things in the woods at night. Blue lights sometimes, floating just a few inches off the ground. Corpse-lights, he called them. And Bigfoot.
‘They sent him up to the Bangor Mental Health. According to the medical report, his liver’s almost entirely gone. He’s been drinking paint-thinner — ‘
‘Oh my God,’ Beverly said.
‘ — and is prone to hallucinations. They’ve been holding on to him, a nd until three days ago Rademacher was sticking to his idea that Earl was the most likely suspect. He had eight guys out there, digging around his shack and looking for the missing heads, lampshades made out of
