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
‘Does it mean anything to you?’ Bill asked.
‘»He thr usts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.»‘ He nodded. ‘Yes, I know what that is.’
‘Well then, tell me. Or are you going to give me some more cuh-cuh-crap about figuring it out for myself?’
‘No,’ Mike said, ‘in this case I think it’s okay to tell you. The phrase goes back to English times. It’s a tongue-twister that became a speech exercise for lispers and stutterers. Your mother kept trying to get you to say it that summer. The summer of 1958. You used to go around mumb ling it to yourself.’
‘I did?’ Bill said, and then, slowly, answering his own question: ‘I did.’
‘You must have wanted to please her very much.’
Bill, who suddenly felt he might cry, only nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
‘You never made it,’ Mike told him. ‘I remember that. You tried like hell but your tang kept getting all tungled up.’
‘But I did say it,’ Bill replied. ‘At least once.’
‘When?’
Bill brought his fist down on the picnic table hard enough to hurt. ‘I don’t remember!’ he shouted. And then, dully, he said it again: ‘I just don’t remember.’
1
On the day after Mike Hanlon made his calls, Henry Bowers began to hear voices. Voices had been talking to him all day long. For awhile, Henry thought they were coming from the moon. In the late afternoon, looking up from where he was hoeing in the garden, he could see the moon in the blue daytime sky, pale and small. A ghost-moon.
That, in fact, was why he believed it was the moon that was talking to him. Only a ghost-moon would talk in ghost-voices — the voices of his old friends, and the voices of those little kids who had played down in the Barrens so long ago. Those, and another voice . . . one he did not dare name.
Victor Criss spoke from the moon first. They comin back, Henry. All of em, man. They comin back to Derry.
Then Belch Huggins spoke from the moon, perhaps from the dark side of the moon. You’rethe only one, Henry. The only one of us left. You’ll have to get em for me and Vie. Ain’t no little kids can rank us out like that. Why, I hit a ball one time down to Tracker’s, and Tony Tracker said that ball would have been out of Yankee Stadium.
He hoed, looking up at the ghost-moon in the sky, and after awhile Fogarty came over and hit him in the back of the neck and knocked him flat on his face.
‘You’re hoein up the peas right along with the weeds, you ijit.’
Henry got up, brushing dirt off his face and out of his hair. There stood Fogarty, a big man in a white jacket and white pants, his belly swelled out in front of him. It was illegal for the guards (who were called ‘counsellors’ here at Juniper Hill) to carry billyclubs, so a number of them — Fogarty, Adler, and Koontz were the worst — carried rolls of quarters in their pockets. They almost always hit you with them in the same place, right in the back of the neck. There was no rule against quarters. Quarters were not considered a deadly weapon at Juniper Hill, an institution for the mentally ins ane which stood on the outskirts of Augusta near the Sidney town line.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Fogarty,’ Henry said, and offered a big grin which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth. They looked like the pickets in a fence outside a haunted house. Henry had begun to lose his teeth when he was fourteen or so.
‘Yeah, you’re sorry,’ Fogarty said. ‘You’ll be a lot sorrier if I catch you doing it again, Henry.’
‘Yes sir, Mr Fogarty.’
Fogarty walked away, his black shoes leaving big brown tracks in the dirt of West Garden. Because Fogarty’s back was turned, Henry took a moment to look around surreptitiously. They had been shooed out to hoe as soon as the clouds cleared, everyone from the Blue Ward — which was where they put you if you had once been very dangerous but were now considered only moderately dangerous. Actually, all the patients at Juniper Hill were considered moderately dangerous; it was a facility for the criminally insane. Henry Bowers was here because he had been convicted of killing his father in the late fall of 1958 — it had been a famous year for murder trials, all right; when it came to murder trials, 1958 had been a pip.
Only of course
