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
no. But she has a feeling it’s the closest she’s going to get tonight. ‘I was roller-skating, you see, and I fell down and gave myself a good scrape. Then I decided I’d go down to the Barrens and practice. I went by the clubhouse first to see if you guys were there. You weren’t. Just that smoky smell. You guys remember how long that place went on smelling of smoke?’
They all nod, smiling.
‘We never really did get the smell out, did we?’ Ben says.
‘So then I headed down to the dump,’ she says, ‘because that’s where we had the . . . the tryouts, I guess you’d call them, and I knew there’d be lots of things to shoot at. Maybe even, you know, rats.’ She pauses. There’s a fine misty sweat on her forehead now. ‘That’s what I really wanted to shoot at,’ she says finally. ‘Something that was alive. Not a seagull — I knew I couldn’t shoot a gull — but a rat . . . I wanted to see if I could.
‘I’m glad I came from the Kansas Street side instead of the Old Cape side, though, because there wasn’t much cover over there by the railroad embankment. They would have seen me and God knows what would have happened then.’
‘Who would have suh-suh-seen y-you?’
‘Them,’ Beverly says. ‘Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, and Patrick Hockstetter. They were down in the dump and —
Suddenly, amazing all of them, she begins to giggle like a child, her cheeks turning rose-red. She giggles until tears stand in her eyes.
‘What the hell, Bev,’ Rickie says. ‘Let us in on the joke.’
‘Oh it was a joke, all right,’ she says. ‘It was a joke, but I think they might have killed me if they knew I’d seen.’
‘I remember now!’ Ben cries, and he begins to laugh, too. ‘I remember you telling us!’
Giggling wildly, Beverly says, ‘They had their pants down and they were lighting farts.’
There is an instant of thunderstruck silence and then they all begin to laugh — the sound echoes through the library.
Thinking of exactly how to tell them of Patrick Hockstetter’s death, the thing she fixes on first is how approaching the town dump from the Kansas Street side was like entering some weird asteroid belt. There was a rutted din track (a town road, actually; it even had a name, Old Lyme Street) that ran from Kansas Street to the dump, the only actual road into the Barrens — the city’s dump trucks used it. Beverly walked near Old Lyme Street but didn’t take it — she had grown more cautious — she supposed all of them had — since Eddie’s arm had been broken. Especially when she was alone.
