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
He had questioned them carefully, officially, taking down their answers in his black notebook, but there had been little they could tell him — at least about Jimmy Cullum — and Mr Nell had gone away again, after reminding them once more that they were not to play in the Barrens alone . . . ever. Richie guessed that Mr Nell would have told them simply to get out if anyone in the Derry Police Department had really believed that the Cullum boy (or any of the others) had actually been killed in the Barrens. But they knew better; because of the sewer and stormdrain system, that was simply where the remains tended to finish up.
Mr Nell had come on the 16th, yes, a hot and humid day also, but sunny. The 17th had been overcast.
‘Are you going to talk to us or not, Richie?’ Bev asks. She is smiling a little, her lips full and a pale rose-red, her eyes alight.
‘I’m just thinking about where to start,’ Richie says. He takes his glasses off, wipes them on his skirt, and suddenly he knows where: with the ground opening up at his and Bill’s feet. Of course he knew about the clubhouse — so did Bill and the rest of them, but it still freaked him out, seeing t he ground suddenly open on a slit of darkness like that.
He remembers Bill riding him double on the back of Silver to the usual place on Kansas Street and then stowing his bike under the little bridge. He remembers the two of them walking along the path toward the clearing, sometimes having to turn sideways because the brush was so thick — it was midsummer now, and the Barrens was at that year’s apogee oflushness. He remembers swatting at the mosquitoes that hummed maddeningly close to their ears; he even remembers Bill saying (oh how clearly it all comes back, not as if it happened yesterday, but as if it is happening now), ‘H-H-Hold it a s –s-s
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— econd, Ruh-Richie. There’s a damn guh-guh –hood one on the b-back of your neh-neck.’
‘Oh Christ,’ Richie said. He hated mosquitoes. Little flying vampires, that’s all they were when you got right down to the facts. ‘Kill it, Big Bill.’
Bill swatted the back of Richie’s neck.
‘Ouch!’
‘Suh-suh-see?’
Bill held his hand in front of Richie’s face. There was a broken mosquito body in the center of an irregular patch of blood. My blood, Richie thought, which was shed for you and for many. ‘Yeeick,’ he said.
‘D-Don’t w-worry,’ Bill said. ‘Li’l fucker’ll neh-never dance the tuh-tuh –tango again .’
They walked on, slapping at mosquitoes, waving at the clouds of noseeums attracted by something in the smell of their sweat — something which would years later be identified
