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
Meaty.‘ She swallows, and there is a small click in her throat. The others watch her solemnly from around the table. ‘You’d feel it on your side, or maybe on your breast. Not that any of us had much in the way of breasts back then. But Patrick didn’t seem to care about that.
‘You’d feel that . . . that touch, and you’d jerk away from it, and turn around, and there Patrick would be, grinning with those big rubbery lips. He had a pencil-box — ‘
‘Full of flies,’ Richie says suddenly. ‘Sure. He’d kill em with this green ruler he had and then put em in his pencil-box. I even remember what it looked like — red, with a wavy white plastic cover that slid open and closed.’
Eddie is nodding.
‘You’d jerk away and he’d grin and then maybe he’d open his pencil-box so you could see the dead flies inside,’ Beverly says. ‘And the worst thing-the horrible thing — was the way
he’d smile and never say anything. Mrs Douglas knew. Greta Bowie told on him, and I think Sally Mueller said something once, too. But . . . I think Mrs Douglas was scared of him, too.’
Ben has rocked back on the rear legs of his chair, and his hands are laced behind his neck. She still cannot believe how lean he is. ‘I’m pretty sure you’re right,’ he says.
‘Wh-What h-happened to h-h-him, Beverly?’ Bill asks.
She swallows again, trying to fight off the nightmarish power of what she saw that day in the Barrens, her roller skates tied together and hung over her shoulder, one knee a stinging net of pain from a fall she had taken on Saint Crispin’s Lane, another of the short tree-lined streets that dead-ended where the land fell (and still falls) sharply into the Barrens. She remembers (oh these memories, when they come, are so clear and so powerful) that she was wearing a pair of denim shorts — really too short, they came only to just below the hem of her panties. She had become more conscious of her body over the last year — over the last six months, actually, as it began to curve and become more womanly. The mirror was one reason for this heightened consciousness, of course, but not the main one; the main one was that her father seemed even sharper just lately, more apt to use his slapping hand or even his fists. He seemed restless, almost caged, and she was more and more nervous when she was around him, more and more on her mark. It was as if there was a smell they made between them, a smell that wasn’t there when she was in the apartment alone, one that had never been there when they were in it together — not until this summer. And when Mom was gone it was worse. If there was a smell, some smell, then he knew it too, maybe, because Bev saw less and less of him as the hot weather wore on, partly because of his summer bowling league, partly because he was helping his friend Joe Tammerly fix cars . . . but she suspects it was partly that smell, the one they made between them, neither of them meaning to but mak ing it just the same, as helpless to stop it as either was helpless to stop sweating in July.
