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
Well, that hadn’t turned out to be true. The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself — that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn’t go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that’s the scary part. How you don’t stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown’s trick balloons with the Burma-Shave slogans on the sides. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you. You could go on wearing blue-jeans, you could keep going to Springsteen and Seger concerts, you could dye your hair, but that was a grownup’s face in the mirror just the same. It all happened while you were asleep, maybe, like a visit from the Tooth Fairy.
No, he thinks. Not the Tooth Fairy. The Age Fairy.
He laughs aloud at the stupid extravagance of this-image, and when Beverly looks at him questioningly, he waves a hand at her. ‘Nothing, babe, he says. ‘Just thinkin me thinks.’
But now that energy is back. No, not all the way back — not yet, anyway — but coming back. And it’s not just him; he can feel it filling the room. Mike looks okay to Richie for the first time since they all got together for that hideous lunch out by the mall. When Richie walked into the lobby and saw Mike sitting there with Ben and Eddie, he thought, shocked: There’s a man who’s going crazy, getting ready to commit suicide, maybe. But that look isgone now. Not just sublimated; gone. Richie has sat right here and watched the last of it slip out of Mike’s face while he relived the experience of the bird and the album. He’s been energised. And it is the same with all of them. Its in their faces, their voices, their gestures.
Eddie pours himself ‘another gin-and-prune juice. Bill knocks back some bourbon, and Mike cracks another beer. Beverly glances up at the balloons Bill has tethered to the microfilm recorder at the main desk and finishes her third screwdriver in a hurry. They have
all been drinking pretty enthusiastically, but none of them are drunk. Richie doesn’t know where that energy he feels is coming from, but its not out of a liquor bottle.
