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
on the tip of your tongue but won’t quite come off, or something that lights on your skin like a mosquito or a noseeum. He said he finally figured out what it was one night when he had to get up and tap a kidney. He stood there whizzing into the bowl, thinking of nothing in particular, when it come to him all at once that it was two-twenty-five in the afternoon when the shooting started and the sun was out but that clown didn’t cast any shadow. No shadow at all.’
‘You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty Shaken.’
William Carlos Williams, Paterson
‘Well I was born in my birthday suit The doctor slapped my behind He said «You gonna be special You sweet little toot toot.»‘
— Sidney Simien, ‘My Toot Toot’
1
Bill’s there first. He sits in one of the wing-back chairs just inside the Reading Room door watching as Mike deals with the library’s last few customers of the night — an old lady with a clutch of paperback gothics, a man with a huge historical tome on the Civil War, and a skinny kid waiting to check out a novel with a seven-day-rental sticker in an upper corner of its plastic cover. Bill sees with no sense of surprise or serendipity at all that it is his own latest novel. He feels that surprise is beyond him, serendipity a believed-in reality that has turned out to be only a dream after all.
A pretty girl, her tartan skirt held together with a big gold safety pin (Christ, I haven’t seen one of those in years, Bill thinks, are they coming back?), is feeding quarters into the Xerox machine and copying an off print with one eye on the big pendulum clock behind the checkout desk. The sounds are library-soft and library-comforting: the hush-squeak of soles and heels on the red-and-black linoleum of the floor; the steady lock and tick of the clock dropping off dry seconds; the catlike purr of the copying machine.
The boy takes his William Denbrough novel and goes to the girl at the copier just as she finishes and begins to square up her pages.
‘You can just leave that off print on the desk, Mary,’ Mike says. ‘I’ll put it away.’
She flashes a grateful smile. ‘Thanks, Mr Hanlon.’
‘Goodnight. Goodnight, Billy. The two of you go right home.’
‘The boogeyman will get you if you don’t . . . watch . . . out!’ Billy, the skinny kid, chants, and slips a proprietary arm around the girl’s slim waist.
‘Well, I don’t think he’d want a pair as ugly as you two,’ Mike says, ‘but be careful, all the same.’
‘We will, Mr Hanlon,’ Mary replies, seriously enough, and punches the boy lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come on, ugly,’ she says, and giggles. When she does this she is transformed from a pretty mildly desirable high-school junior into the coltish not-quite-gawky eleven-year-old that Beverly Marsh had been . . . and as they pass him Bill is shaken by her beauty . . . and he feels fear; he wants to go to the boy and tell him earnestly that he must go home by well-lighted streets and not look around if someone speaks.
