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
up enough to show the edging on her yellow cotton panties. Below them, her legs were already smoothly muscled, beautiful in spite of the scabs, bruises, and smutches of dirt.
It’s a trick. He saw you and he knows he probably can’t catch you in a fair chase, so he’s trying to get you to come out. Don’t go, Bevvie.’
But another part of her thought there was too much pain and fear in those screams. She wished she had seen whatever had happened to Patrick — if anything had — more clearly. She wished more than anything else that she had come into the Barrens a different way and missed the whole crazy shenanigans.
Patrick’s screams stopped. A moment later Beverly heard someone speak — but she knew that had to be her imagination. She heard her father say, ‘Hello and goodbye.’ Her father wasn’t even in Derry that day: he had set off for Brunswick at eight o’clock. He and Joe Tammerly were going to pick up a Chevy truck in Brunswick. She shook her head as if to clear it. The voice didn’t speak again. Her imagination, obviously.
She walked out of the bushes to the path, ready to run the instant she saw Patrick charging at her, her reactions on triggers as delicate as a cat’s whiskers. She looked down at the path and her eyes widened. There was blood here. Quite a lot of it.
Fake blood, her mind insisted. You can buy a bottle of it at Dahlie’s for forty-nine cents. Becareful, Bevvie!
She knelt and quickly touched the blood with her fingers. She looked at them closely. It wasn’t fake blood.
There was a flash of heat in her left arm, just below the elbow. She looked down and saw something that she first thought was some kind of burr. No — not a burr. Burrs didn’t twitch and flutter. This thing was alive. A moment after that she realized it was biting her. She struck it hard with the back of her right hand and it spattered, spraying blood. She backed up a step, getting ready to scream now that it was over . . . and then she saw that it wasn’t over at all. The thing’s featureless head was still on her arm, its snout buried in her flesh.
With a shrill cry of disgust and fear, she picked it off and saw its proboscis come out of her arm like a small dagger, dripping with blood. She understood the blood on the path now, oh yes, and her eyes went to the refrigerator.
The door had swung closed and latched again, but a number of the parasites had been left o u t s i d e a n d w e r e c r a w l i n g s l u g g i s h l y over the rusty-white porcelain. As Beverly looked, one of them unfurled its membranous fly-like wings and buzzed toward her.
She acted without thinking, loading one of the steel ball-bearings into the cup of the Bullseye and pulling the sling back. As the muscles of her left arm flexed smoothly, she saw loose blood squirt from the hole the thing had made in her arm. She let fly anyway, unconsciously leading the flying thing.
Shit! Missed! she thought as the Bullseye snapped and the ball-bearing fle w, a glittering chunk of light in the hazy sun. And she would later tell the other Losers that she knew she had missed it, the same way a bowler knows he has missed the strike as soon as a bad ball leaves his hand. But then she saw the ball-bearing curve. It happened in a split-second, but the impression was very clear: it had curved. It struck the flying thing and splattered it to mush. There was a shower of yellowish droplets which pattered on the path.
Beverly backed up slowly at first, her eyes huge, her lips trembling, her face a shocked grayish-white. Her gaze was pinned to the front of the discarded refrigerator, waiting to see if any of the other things would smell or sense her. But the parasites only crawled slowly back and forth, like autumn fl ies drugged with the cold.
At last she turned and ran.
Panic beat darkly against her thoughts, but she would not give in to it entirely. She held the Bullseye in her left hand and looked back over her shoulder from time to time. There was still blo od dappled brightly on the path and on the leaves of some of the bushes bordering it, as if Patrick had woven from side to side as he ran.
Beverly burst out into the area of the junked cars again. Ahead of her there was a bigger splash of blood, just beginning to soak into the gravelly earth. The ground looked disturbed, darker streaks of earth lined into the powdery-white surface. As if there had been a struggle there. Two grooves, about two and a half feet apart, led away from this
