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
dared to make. A nightmare agenda if ever there was one, she thinks — but that crazy exhilaration persists. When did she last feel this young? She can hardly sit still.
‘The 20th of July,’ Eddie muses, rolling his aspirator along the table from one hand to the other. ‘Three or four days after the smoke-hole thing. I spent the rest of the summer in a cast, remember?’
Richie slaps his forehead in a gesture they all remember from the old days and Bill thinks, with a mixture of amusement and unease, that for a moment there Richie looked just like Beaver Cleaver. ‘Sure, of course! You were in a cast when we went to the house on Neibolt Street, weren’t you? And later . . . i n the dark . . . ‘ But now Richie shakes his head a little, puzzled.
‘What, R-Richie?’ Bill asks.
‘Can’t remember that part yet,’ Richie admits. ‘Can you?’ Bill shakes his head slowly.
‘Hockstetter was with them that day,’ Eddie says. ‘It was the last time I ever saw him alive. Maybe he was a replacement for Peter Gordon. I guess Bowers didn’t want Peter around anymore after he ran the day of the rockfight.’
‘They all died, didn’t they?’ Beverly asks quietly. ‘After Jimmy Cullum, the only ones who died were Henry Bowers’s friends . . . or his ex-friends.’
‘All but Bowers,’ Mike agrees, glancing toward the balloons tethered to the microfilm recorder. ‘And he’s in Juniper Hill. A private insane asylum in Augusta.’
Bill says, ‘W-W –What about when they broke your arm, E –E –Eddie?’
‘Your stutter’s getting worse, Big Bill,’ Eddie says solemnly, and finishes his drink in one gulp.
‘Never mind that,’ Bill says. ‘T-Tell us.’
‘Tell us,’ Beverly repeats, and puts her hand lightly on his arm. The pain flares there again.
‘All right,’ Eddie says. He pours himself a fresh drink, studies it, and says, ‘It was a couple of days after I came home from the hospital that you guys came over to the house and showed me those silver ball-bearings. You remember, Bill?’
Bill nods.
Eddie looks at Beverly. ‘Bill asked you if you’d shoot them, if it came to that . . . because you had the best eye. I think you said you wouldn’t . . . that you’d be too afraid. And you told us something else, but I just can’t remember what it was. It’s like — ‘ Eddie sticks his tongue out and plucks the end of it, as if something were stuck there. Richie and Ben both grin. ‘Was it something about Hockstetter?’
