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
place to come with firecrackers than the dump. You could put them under tin cans and then watch the cans fly into the air when the firecrackers went off, or you could light the fuses and drop them into bottles and then run like hell. The bottles didn’t always break, but usually they did.
‘Wish we had some M-80s,’ Richie sighed, unaware of how soon one would be chucked at his head.
‘My mother says people ought to be happy with what they have,’ Eddie said so solemnly that they all laughed.
When the laughter died away, they all looked toward Bill again.
Bill thought about it and then said, ‘I nuh-know a p-place. There’s an old gruh-gruh-gravel-pit at the end of the Bun –Barrens by the t –t-trainyards — ‘
‘Yeah!’ Stan said, getting to his feet. ‘I know that place! You’re a genius, Bill!’
‘They’ll really echo there,’ Beverly agreed.
‘Well, let’s go,’ Richie said.
The s ix of them, one shy of the magic number, walked along the brow of the hill which circled the dump. Mandy Fazio glanced up once and saw them silhouetted against the blue sky like Indians out on a raiding party. He thought about hollering at them — the Barrens was no place for kids — and then he turned back to his work instead. At least they weren’t in his dump.
7
Mike Hanlon ran past the Church School without pausing and pelted straight up Neibolt Street toward the Derry trainyards. There was a janitor at NCS, but Mr Gendron was very old and even deafer than Mandy Fazio. Also, he liked to spend most of his summer days asleep in the basement by the summer-silent boiler, stretched out in a battered old reclining chair with the Derry News in his lap. Mike would still be pounding on the door and shouting for the old man to let him in when Henry Bowers came up behind him and tore his freaking head off.
So Mike just ran.
But not blindly; he was trying to pace himself, trying to control his breathing, not ye t going all out. Henry, Belch, and Moose Sadler presented no problems; even relatively fresh they ran like wounded buffalo. Victor Criss and Peter Gordon, however, were much faster. As Mike passed the house where Bill and Richie had seen the clown — or the werewolf — he snapped a glance back and was alarmed to see that Peter Gordon had almost closed the distance. Peter was grinning cheerfully — a steeplechase grin, a full-out polo grin, a pip-pip –jolly –good-show grin, and Mike thought: I wonder if he’d grin that way if he knew what’s going to happen if they catch me . . . Does he think they’re just going to say ‘Tag, you’re it,’ and run away?
As the trainyard gate with its sign — PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT VIOLATORS WILL B E PROSECUTED — loomed up, Mike wa s forced to let himself out to the limit. There was no pain — his breathing was rapid yet still controlled — but he knew everything was going to start hurting if he had to keep this pace up for long. The gate was standing halfway open. He snapped a second look back and saw that he’d pulled away from Peter again. Victor was perhaps ten paces behind Peter, the others now forty or fifty yards back. Even in that quick glance Mike could see the black anger on Henry’s face.
He skittered through the opening, whirled, and slammed the gate closed. He heard the click as it latched. A moment later Peter Gordon slammed into the chainlink, and a moment after that, Victor Criss ran up beside him. Peter’s smile was gone; a sulky, balked look had replaced it. He grabbed for the latch, but of course there was none: the latch was on the inside.
Incredibly, he said: ‘Come on, kid, open the gate. That’s not fair.’
‘What’s your idea of fair?’ Mike asked, panting. ‘Five against one?’
‘Fair-up,’ Peter repeated, as if he had not heard Mike at all.
Mike looked at Victor, saw the troubled look in Victor’s eyes. He started to speak, but that was when the others pulled up to the gate.
‘Open up, nigger!’ Henry bawled. He began to shake the chainlink with such ferocity that Peter looked at him, startled. ‘Open up! Open up right now!’
‘I won’t,’ Mike said quietly.
‘Open up!’ Belch shouted. ‘Open up, ya fuckin jigaboo!’
Mike backed away from the gate, his heart beating heavily in his chest. He couldn’t remember ever being quite this scared, quite this upset. They lined their side of the gate, shouting at him, calling him names for nigger he had never dreamed existed — nightfighter, Ubangi, spade, blackberry, junglebunny, others. He was barely aware that Henry was taking something from his pocket, that he had
