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 composed. Mike paid the check, kissed Rose’s cheek, and then they all went out into the rainy afternoon.
‘Does this change anyone’s mind?’ Mike asked.
‘I don’t think it changes mine,’Ben said.
‘No,’ Eddie said.
‘What mind?’ Richie said.
Bill shook his head and then looked at Beverly.
‘I’m staying,’ she said. ‘Bill, what did you mean when you said It’s up to Its old tricks?’
‘I’ve been thinking about writing a bug story,’ he said. ‘That Langlahan story had woven itself into my thinking. And so I saw a fly. Yours was blood, Beverly. Why was blood on your mind?’
‘I guess because of the blood from the drain,’ Beverly said at once. ‘The blood that came out of the bathroom drain in the old place, when I was eleven.’ But was that really it? She didn’t really think so. Because what had flashed immediately to mind when the blood spurted across her fingers in a warm little jet had been the bloody footprint she had left behind her after stepping on the broken perfume bottle. Tom. And
(Bevvie sometimes I worry a lot)
her father.
‘You got a bug, too,’ Bill said to Eddie. ‘Why?’
‘Not just a bug,’ Eddie said. ‘A cricket. There are crickets in our basement. Two-hundred-thousand –dollar house and we can’t get rid of the crickets. They drive us crazy at night. A couple of nights before Mike called, I had a really terrible nightmare. I dreamed I woke up and my bed was full of crickets. I was trying to shoot them with my aspirator, but all it would do when I squeezed it was make crackling noises, and just before I woke up I realized it was full of crickets, too.’
‘The hostess didn’t see any of it,’ Ben said. He looked at Beverly. ‘Like your folks never saw the blood that came out of the drain, even though it was everywhere.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
They stood looking at each other in the fine spring rain.
Mike looked at his watch. ‘There’ll be a bus in twenty minutes or so,’ he said, ‘or I can take four of you in my car, if we cram. Or I can call some cabs. Whatever way you want to do it.’
‘I think I’m going to walk from here,’ Bill said. ‘I don’t know where I’m going, but a little fresh air seems like a great idea along about now.’
‘I’m going to call a cab,’ Ben said.
‘I’ll share it with you, if you’ll drop me off downtown,’ Richie said.
‘Okay. Where you going?’
Richie shrugged.’Not really sure yet.’
The others elected to wait for the bus.
‘Seven tonight,’ Mike reminded. ‘And be careful, all of you.’ They agreed to be careful, although Bill did not know how you could truthfully make a promise like that when dealing with such a formidable array of unknown factors.
He started to say so, then looked at their faces and saw that they knew it already.
He walked away instead, raising one hand briefly in farewell. The misty air felt good against his face. The walk back to town would be a long one, but that was all right. He had a lot to think about. He was glad that the reunion was over and the business had begun.
1
Ben Hanscom Makes a Withdrawal
Richie Tozier got out of the cab at the three-way intersection of Kansas Street, Center Street, and Main Street, and Ben dismissed it at the top of Up-Mile Hill. The driver was Bill’s ‘religious fella,’ but neither Richie nor Ben knew it: Dave had lapsed into a morose silence. Ben could have gotten off with Richie, he supposed, but it seemed better somehow that they all start off alone.
He stood on the corner of Kansas Street and Daltrey Close, watching the cab pull back into traffic, hands stuffed deeply into his pockets, trying to get the lunch’s hideous conclusion out of his mind. He couldn’t do it; his thoughts kept returning to that black-gray fly crawling out of the fortune cookie on Bill’s plate, its veined wings plastered to its back. He would try to divert his mind from this unhealthy image, think he had succeeded, only to discover five minutes later that his mind was back at it.
I’m trying to justify it somehow, he thought, meaning it not in the moral sense but rather in the mathematical one. Buildings are built by observing certain natural laws; natural laws may be expressed by equations; equations must be justified. Where was the justification in what had happened less than half an hour ago?
Let it alone, he told himself, not for the first time. You can’t justify it, so let it alone.
Very good advice; the problem was that he couldn’t take
