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
girl filled out the form and Audra signed it.
‘I thought it was you,’ the girl said, and then, timidly: ‘Might I please have your autograph?’
Audra gave it, writing her name on the back of a rental form, and thought: Enjoy it whileyou can, girl. If Freddie Firestone is right, it won’t be worth doodley-squat five years from now.
With some amusement she realized that, after only fifteen minutes back in the States, she had begun to think like an American again.
She got a roadmap, and the girl, so star-struck she could barely talk, managed to trace out her best route to Derry.
Ten minutes later Audra was on the road, reminding herself at every intersection that if she forgot and began driving on the left, they would be scrubbing her off the asphalt.
And as she drove, she realized that she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.
8
By one of those odd quirks of fate or coincidence which sometimes obtain (and which, in truth, obtained more frequently in Derry), Tom had taken a room at the Koala Inn on Outer Jackson Street and Audra had taken a room at the Holiday Inn; the two motels were side by side, their parking lots divided only by a raised concrete sidewalk. And as it so happened, Audra’s rented Datsun and Tom’s purchased LTD wagon were parked nose-to-nose, separated only by that walkway. Both slept now, Audra quietly on her side, Tom Rogan on his back, snoring so heavily that his swollen lips flapped.
9
Henry spent that day hiding — hiding in the puckies beside Route 9. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he lay watching police cruisers slide by like hunting dogs. While the Losers ate lunch, Henry listened to voices from the moon.
And when dark fell, he went out to the verge of the road and stuck out his thumb.
After awhile, some fool came along and picked him up. ‘A bird came down the Walk — He did not know I saw — He bit an Angleworm in halves And ate the fellow, raw’
— Emily Dickinson, ‘A Bird Came Down the Walk
March 17th, 1985
The fire at the Black Spot happened in the late fall of 1930. So far as I am able to determine, that fire — the one my father barely escaped — ended the cycle of murder and disappearance which happened in the years 1929-30, just as the explosion at the Ironworks ended a cycle some twenty-five years before. It is as if a monstrous sacrifice is needed at the end of the cycle to quiet whatever terrible force it is which works here . . . to send It to sleep for another quarter-century or so.
But if such a sacrifice is needed to end each cycle, it seems that some similar event is needed to set each cycle in motion.
Which brings me to the Bradley Gang.
Their execution took place at the three-way intersection of Canal, Main, and Kansas — not far, in fact, from the place shown in the picture which began to move for Bill and Richie one day in June of 1958 — some thirteen months before the fire at the Black Spot, in October of 1929 . . . not long before the stock-market crash.
As with the fire at the Black Spot, many Derry residents affect not to remember what happened that day. Or they were out of town, visiting relatives. Or they were napping that afternoon and never found out what had happened until they heard it on the radio news that night. Or they will simply look you full in the face and lie to you.
The police logs for that day indicate that Chief Sullivan was not even in town (Sure I remember, Aloysius Nell told me from a chair on the sun-terrace of the Paulson Nursing Home in Bangor. That was my first year on the force, and I ought to remember. He was off inwestern Maine, bird-hunting. They’d been sheeted and carried off by the time he got back. Madder than a wet hen was Jim Sullivan), but a picture in a reference book on gangsters called Bloodletters and Badmen shows a grinning man standing beside the bullet-riddled corpse of Al Bradley in the morgue, and if that man is not Chief Sullivan, it is surely his twin brother.
It was from Mr Keene that I finally got what I believe to be the true version of the story — Norbert Keene, who was the proprietor of the Center Street Drug Store from 1925 until 1975. He talked to me willingly enough, but, like Betty Ripsom’s father, he made me turn off my tape-recorder before he would really unwind the tale — not that it mattered; I can hear his papery
