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
at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said in a lower voice. ‘Please. She didn’t tell me Please don’t hurt me.’
He tossed the vase in the wastebasket and stood up.
He left without looking back, head down, a big shambling bear of a man
She rushed after him and locked the door. She rushed into the kitchen and locked that door. After a moment’s pause she had limped upstairs (as fast as her aching belly would allow) and had locked the french doors which gave on the upstairs verandah — it was not beyond possibility that he might decide to shinny up one of the pillars and come in again that way. He was hurt, but he was also insane.
She went for the telephone for the first time and had no more than dropped her hand on it before remembering what he had said.
What I’d do is post bail and come right back here . . . your tits on the kitchen table and your eyes in the fishbowl.
She jerked her hand off the phone.
She went into the bathroom then and looked at her dripping tomato nose, her black eye. She didn’t weep; the shame and horror she felt were too deep for tears. Oh Bev, I did the best I could, dear, she thought. But my face . . . he said he would cut up my face . . .
There was Darvon and Valium in the medicine cabinet. She debated between them and finally swallowed one of each. Then she went to Sisters of Mercy for treatment and met the famous Dr Geffin, who right now was the only man she could think of whom she would not be perfectly happy to see wiped off the face of the earth.
And from there home again, home again, jiggety-jog.
She went to her bedroom window and looked out. The sun was low on the horizon now. On the East Coast it would be late twilight — just going on seven o’clock in Maine.
You can decide what to do about the cops later. The important thing now is to warn Beverly.
It would be a hell of a lot easier, Kay thought, if you had told me where you were staying, Beverly my love. I suppose you didn’t know yourself.
Although she had quit smoking two years before, she kept a pack of Pall Malls in the drawer of her desk for emergencies. She shot one out of the pack, lit up, grimaced. She had last smoked from this pack around December of 1982, and this baby was staler than the ERA in the Illinois state Senate. She smoked it anyway, one eye half-lidded against the smoke, the other just half-lidded, period. Thanks to Tom Rogan.
Using her left hand laboriously — the son of a bitch had dislocated her good arm — s h e dialed Maine information and asked for the name and number of every hotel and motel in Derry.
‘Ma’am, that’s going to take awhile,’ the directory-assistance operator said dubiously. ‘It’s going to take even longer than that, sister,’ Kay said. ‘I’m going to have to write with my stupid hand. My good one’s on vacation.’
‘It’s not customary for — ‘
‘Listen to me,’ Kay said, not unkindly. ‘I’m calling you from Chicago, and I’m trying to reach a woman-friend of mine who has just left her husband and gone back to Derry, where she grew up. Her husband knows where she went. He got the information out of me by beating the living shit out of me. This man is a psycho. She needs to know he’s coming.’
There was a long pause, and then the directory-assistance operator said in a decidedly more human voice, ‘I think the number you really need is the Derry Police Department.’
‘Fine. I’ll take that, too. But she has to be warned,’ Kay said. ‘And . . . ‘ She thought of Tom’s cut cheeks, the knot on his forehead, the one on his temple , his limp, his hideously swelled lips. ‘And if she knows he’s coming, that may be enough.’
There was another long pause.
‘You there, sis?’ Kay asked.
‘Arlington Motor Lodge,’ the operator said, ‘643-8146. Bassey Park Inn, 648-4083. The Bunyan Motor Court — ‘
‘Slow down a little, okay?’ she asked, writing furiously. She looked for an ashtray, didn’t see one, and mashed the Pall Mall out on the desk blotter. ‘Okay, go on.’
The Clarendon Inn — ‘
4
She got half-lucky on her fifth call. Beverly Rogan was registered at the Derry Town House. She was only half-lucky because Beverly was out. She left her name and number and a message that Beverly should
