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
it wasn’t just his father they thought he had killed; if it had only been his father, Henry would not have spent twenty years in the Augusta State Mental Hospital, much of that time under physical and chemical restraint. No, not just his father; the authorities thought he had killed all of them, or at least most of them.
Following the verdict the News had published a front-page editorial titled ‘The End of Derry’s Long Night.’ In it they had recapped the salient points: the belt in Henry’s bureau that belonged to the missing Patrick Hockstetter; the jumble of schoolbooks, some signed out to the missing Belch Huggins and some to the missing Victor Criss, both known chums of the Bowers boy, in Henry’s closet; most damning of all, the panties found tucked into a slit in Henry’s mattress, panties which had been identified by laundry-mark as having belonged to Veronica Grogan, deceased.
Henry Bowers, the News declared, had been the monster haunting Derry in the spring and summer of 1958.
But then the News had proclaimed the end of Derry’s long night on the front page of its December 6th edition, and even an ijit like Henry knew that in Derry night never ended.
They had bullied him with questions, had stood around him in a circle, had pointed fingers at him. Twice the Chief of Police had slapped him across the face and once a detective named Lottman had punched him in the gut, telling him to fess up, and be quick.
‘There’s people outside and they ain’t happy, Henry,’ this Lottman had said. ‘There ain’t been a lynching in Derry for a long tune, but that don’t mean there couldn’t be one.’
He supposed they would have kept it up as long as necessary, not because any of them really believed the good Derryfolk were going to break into the Police station, carry Henry out, and hang him from a sour-apple tree, but because they were desperate to close the books on that summer’s blood and horror; they would have, but Henry didn’t make them. They wanted him to confess to everything, he understood after awhile. Henry didn’t mind. After the horror in the sewers, after what had happened to Belch and Victor, he didn’t seem to mind about anything. Yes, he said, he had killed his father This was true. Yes, he had killed Victor Criss and Belch Huggins. This was also true, at least in the sense that he had led them into the tunnels where they had been murdered. Yes, he had killed Patrick. Yes, Veronica. Yes one, yes all. Not true, but it didn’t matter. Blame needed to be taken. Perhaps that was why he had been spared. And if he refused . . .
He understood about Patrick’s belt. He had won it from Patrick playing seal one day in April, discovered it didn’t fit, and tossed it in his bureau. He understood about the books, too — hell, the three of them chummed around together and they cared no more for their summer textbooks than they had for their regular ones, which is to say, they cared for them about as much as a woodchuck cares for tap-dancing. There were probably as many of his books in their closets, and the cops probably knew it, too.
The panties . . . no, he didn’t know how Veronica Grogan’s panties had come to be in his mattress.
But he thought he knew who — or what — had taken care of it.
Best not to talk about such things.
Best to just dummy up.
So they sent him to Augusta and finally, in 1979, they had transferred him to Juniper Hill, and he had only run into trouble once here and that was because at first no one understood. A guy had tried to turn off Henry’s nightlight. The nightlight was Donald Duck doffing his little sailor hat. Donald was protection after the sun went down. With no light, things could come in. The locks on the door and the wire mesh did not stop them. They came like mist. Things. They talked and laughed . . . and sometimes they clutched. Hairy things, smooth things, things with eyes. The sort of things that had really killed Vie and Belch when the three of them had chased the kids into the tunnels under Derry in August of 1958.
Looking around now, he saw the others from the Blue Ward. There was George DeVille, who had murdered his wife and four children one winter night in 1962. George’s head was studiously bent, his white hair blowing in the breeze, snot running gaily out of his nose, his huge wooden crucifix bobbing and dancing as he hoed. There was Jimmy Donlin, and all they said in the papers about Jimmy was that he had killed his mother in Portland during the summer of 1965, but what they hadn’t said in the papers was that Jimmy had tried a novel experiment in body-disposal: by the
