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
never goan tag you out!’
Never called any of them by name, Eddie remembered. It was always hey Red, hey Blondie, hey Four-Eyes, hey Half –Pint. It was never a ball, it was always a bawl. It was never a bat, it was always something Tony Tracker called an ‘ash-handle,’ as in ‘You ain’t never goan hit that bawl if you don’t choke up on the ash-handle, Horsefoot.’
Grinning, Eddie walked a little closer . . . and then the grin faded. The long brick building where orders had been processed, trucks repaired, and goods stored on a short-term basis was now dark and silent. Weeds were growing up through the gravel, and there were no trucks in either side yard . . . only a single box, its sides rusty and dull.
Getting clo ser still, he saw that there was a realtor’s FOR SALE sign in the window.
Tracker’s out of business, he thought, and was surprised at the sadness the thought carried with it . . . as if someone had died. He was glad now he hadn’t walked over to West Br oadway. If Tracker Brothers could have gone under — Tracker Brothers, which had seemed eternal — what might have happened on that street he had liked so much to walk down as a kid? He realized uneasily that he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to see Greta Bowie with gray in her hair, her hips and legs thickened with much sitting and much eating and much drinking; it was better — safer — to just stay away.
That’s what we all should have done, just stayed away. We’ve got no business here. Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there’s nothing left; it can’t be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can’t . . . what do you suppose happened to Tony and Phil Tracker, anyway?
A heart attack for Tony, perhaps; he had been carrying maybe seventy-five extra pounds of meat on his bones. You had to watch out for what your heart might be up to. The poets might romance about broken hearts and Barry Manilow sing about them, and that was fine by Eddie (he and Myra had every album Barry Manilow had ever recorded), but he himself preferred a good solid EKG every year. Sure, Tony’s heart had probably given it up as a bad job. And Phil? Bad luck on the highway maybe. Eddie, who made his living behind the wheel himself (or had; these days he only drove the celebs and spent the rest of his tune driving a desk), knew about bad luck on the highway. Old Phil might have jack-knifed a rig somewhere in New Hampshire or in the Hainesville Woods up north in Maine when the going was icy or maybe he had lost his brakes on some long hill south of Derry, heading into Haven in a driving springtime rain. Those things or any of the others you heard in those shitkicking country songs about truck-drivers who wore Stetson hats and had cheating on their minds. Driving a desk was sometimes lonely, but Eddie had been in the driver’s seat himself more than once, his aspirator riding there with him on the dashboard, its trigger reflected ghostly in the windshield (and a bucket-load of pills in the glove compartment), and he knew that real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hottop in a driving rain.
‘Oh shit the time goes by,’ Eddie Kaspbrak said in a sighing sort of whisper, and was not even aware that he had spoken aloud.
Feeling both mellow and unhappy — a state more common to him than he ever would have believed — Eddie skirted the building, Gucci loafers crunching in the gravel, to look at the lot where the baseball games had been played when he was a kid — when, it seemed, ninety percent of the world had been made up of kids.
The lot wasn’t much changed, but a look was enough to convince him beyond doubt that the games had stopped — a tradition that had simply died out at some point in the years between, for reasons of its own.
In 1958 the diamond shape of the infield had been defined not by limed basepaths but in ruts made by running feet. They had no actual bases, those boys who had played baseball here (boys who were all older than the Losers, although Eddie remembered now that Stan Uris had sometimes played; his batting was only fair, but in the outfield he could run fast and he had the reflexes of an angel), but four pieces of dirty canvas were always kept under
