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
seemingly at random — when his broker saw Rich coming, he immediately clutched his head — but the stocks had all risen steadily over the years. He was sometimes surprised by the thought that he was almost — not quite, but almost — a rich man. All courtesy of rock-and –roll music . . . and the Voices, of course.
House, acres, stocks, insurance policy, even a copy of his last will and testament. Thestrings that bind you tight to the map of your life, he thought.
There was a sudden wild impulse to whip out his Zippo and light it up, the whole whore’s combine of wherefores and know-ye-all –men-by-these-present’s and the-bearer-of-this-certificate-is-entitled’s. And he could do it, too. The papers in his safe had suddenly ceased to signify anything.
The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing at all supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on. Easy. Burn it up or blow it away, then just take a powder.
Behind the papers, which were only currency’s second cousins, was the real stuff. The cash. Four thousand dollars in tens, twenties, and fifties.
Taking it now, stuffing it into the pocket of his jeans, he wondered if he hadn’t somehow known what he was doing when he put the money in here — fifty bucks one month, a hundred and twenty the next, maybe only ten the month after that. Rathole money. Taking-a-powder money.
‘Man, that’s scary,’ he said, barely aware he had spoken. He was looking blankly out the big window at the beach. It was deserted now, the surfers gone, the honeymooners (if that was what they had been) gone, too.
Ah, yes, doc — it all comes back to me now. Remember Stanley Uris , for instance? Bet your fur I do . . . . Remember how we used to say that, and think it was so cool? Stanley Urine, the big kids called him. ‘Hey, Urine! Hey, you fuckin Christ-killer! Where ya goin? One of ya fag friends gonna give you a bee jay?’
He slammed the safe door shut and swung the picture back into place. When had he last thought of Stan Uris? Five years ago? Ten? Twenty? Rich and his family had moved away from Derry in the spring of 1960, and how fast all of their faces faded, his gang, that pitiful bunch of losers with their little clubhouse in what had been known then as the Barrens — funny name for an area as lush with growth as that place had been. Kidding themselves that they were jungle explorers, or Seabees carving out a landing strip on a Pacific atoll while they held off the Japs, kidding themselves that they were dam– builders, cowboys, spacemen on a jungle world, you name it, but whatever you name it, don’t let’s forget what it really was: it was hiding. Hiding from the big kids. Hiding from Henry Bowers and Victor Criss and Belch Huggins and the rest of them. What a bunch of losers they had been — Stan Uris with his big Jew-boy nose, Bill Denbrough who could say nothing but ‘Hi-yo, Silver!’ without stuttering so badly that it drove you almost dogshit, Beverly Marsh with her bruises and her cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of her blouse, Ben Hanscom who had been so big he looked like a human version of Moby Dick, and Richie Tozier with his thick glasses and his A averages and his wise mouth and his face which just begged to be pounded into new and
exciting shapes. Was there a word for what they had been? Oh yes. There always was. Le mot juste. In this case le mot juste was wimps.
How it came back, how all of it came back . . . and now he stood here in his den shivering as helplessly as a homeless mutt caught in a thunderstorm, shivering because the guys he had run with weren’t all he remembered. There were other things, things he hadn’t thought of in years, trembling just below the surface.
Bloody things.
A darkness. Some darkness.
The house on Neibolt Street, and Bill screaming: You k-kitted my brother, you fuh-fuh-fucker!
Did he remember? Just enough not to want to remember any more, and you could bet your fu r on that.
A smell of garbage, a smell of shit, and a smell of something else. Something
