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
sentence
(his fists against the posts and still insists)
resurfaced, as strange and out of place as an easy chair on a battlefield, a record-player in a fireplace, a row of pencils protruding from a cement sidewalk.
Bill shook his head. The sentence broke up and dispersed like smoke. He pushed Silver on to Mike’s place.
6
Mike Hanlon Makes a Connection
But first he made supper — hamburgers with sauteed mushrooms and onions and a spinach salad. They had finished working on Silver by then and were more than ready to eat.
The house was a neat little Cape Cod, white with green trim. Mike had just been arriving when Bill pushed Silver up Palmer Lane. He was behind the wheel of an old Ford with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear window, and Bill remembered the fact Mike had so quietly pointed out: the six members of the Losers’ Club who left Derry had quit being losers. Mike had stayed behind and was still behind.
Bill rolle d Silver into Mike’s garage, which was floored with oiled dirt and was every bit as neat as the house proved to be. Tools hung from pegs, and the lights, shielded with tin cones, looked like the lights which hang over pool tables. Bill leaned the bike against the wall. The two of them looked at it without speaking for a bit, hands in pockets.
‘It’s Silver, all right,’ Mike said at last. ‘I thought you might have been wrong. But it’s him. What are you going to do with him?’
‘Fucked if I know. Have you got a bicycle pump?’
‘Yeah. I think I’ve got a tire-patching kit, too. Are those tubeless tires?’
‘They always were.’ Bill bent down to look at the flat tire. ‘Yeah. Tubeless.’
‘Getting ready to ride it again?’
‘Of c-course not,’ Bill said sharply. ‘I just don’t like to see it si-hi-hitting there on a flat.’
‘Whatever you say, Big Bill. You’re the boss.’
Bill looked around sharply at that, but Mike had gone to the garage’s back wall and was taking down a tire-pump. He got a tin tir e-patching kit from one of the cabinets and handed it to Bill, who looked at it curiously. It was as he remembered such things from his childhood: a small tin box of about the same size and shape as those kept by men who roll their own cigarettes, except the top was bright and pebbled — you used it for roughing the rubber around the hole before you put on the patch. The box looked brand-new, and there was a Woolco price sticker on it that said $7.23. It seemed to him that when he was a kid such a kit had gone for about a buck-twenty-five.
‘You didn’t just have this hanging around,’ Bill said. It wasn’t a question.
‘No,’ Mike agreed. ‘I bought it last week. Out at the mall, as a matter of fact.’
‘You’ve got a bike of your own?’
‘No,’ Mike said, meeting his eyes.
‘You just happened to buy this kit.’
‘Just got the urge,’ Mike agreed, his eyes still on Bill’s. ‘Woke up thinking it might come in handy. The thought kept coming back all day. So . . . I got the kit. And here you are to use it.’
‘Here I am to use it,’ Bill agreed. ‘But like they say on the soaps, what does it all mean, dear?’
‘Ask the others,’ Mike said. ‘Tonight.’
‘Will they all be there, do you think?’
‘I don’t know, Big Bill.’ He paused and added: ‘I think there’s a chance that all of them won’t be. One or two of them may decide to just creep out of town. Or . . . ‘He shrugged.
‘What do we do if that happens?’
‘I don’t know.’ Mike pointed to the tire-patching kit. ‘I paid seven bucks for that thing. Are you going to do something with it or just look at it?’
Bill took his sportcoat out of the basket and hung it carefully on an unoccupied wallpeg. Then he turned Silver upside down so that he rested on his seat and began to carefully rotate the rear tire. He didn’t like the rusty way the axle squeaked, and remembered the almost silent click of the ball-bearings in the kid’s skateboard. A little 3-in-1 oil would fix that right up, he thought.
Wouldn’t hurt to oil the chain, either. It’s rusty as hell . . . And playing cards. It needs playing cards on the spokes. Mike would have cards, I bet. The good ones. Bikes, with the celluloid coating that made them so stiff and so slippery that the first time you tried to shuffle them they always sprayed all over the floor. Playing cards, sure, and clothespins to hold them —
