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,’ Richie demurs. ‘Bill thought of it first, and he got nervous first.’
‘I just started to wuh-wuh-worry — ‘
‘Doesn’t really matter, I guess,’ Ben says. ‘The three of us spent some heavy library time that July. We were trying to find out how to make silver bullets. I had the silver; four silver dollars that were my father’s. Then Bill got nervous, thinking about what kind of shape we’d be in if we had a misfire with some kind of monster coming down our throats. And when we saw how good Beverly was with that slingshot of his, we ended up using one of my silver dollars to make slugs instead. We got the stuff together and all of us we went down to Bill’s place. Eddie, you were there — ‘
‘I told my mother we were going to play Monopoly,’ Eddie says. ‘My arm was really hurting, but I had to walk. That’s how pissed she was at me. And every time I heard someone behind me on the sidewalk I’d whip around, thinking it was Bowers. It didn’t help the pain.’
Bill grins. ‘And what we did was stand around and watch Ben make the ammo. I think Ben r-really could have made sil-silver bullets.’
‘Oh, I’m not so sure of that,’ Ben says, although he still is. He remembers how the dusk was drawing down outside (Mr Denbrough had promised them all rides home), the sound of the crickets in the grass, the first lightning-bugs blinking outside the windows. Bill had carefully set up the Monopoly board in the dining room, making it look as if the game had been going on for an hour or more.
He remembers that, an d the clean pool of yellow light falling on Zack’s worktable. He remembers Bill saying, ‘We gotta be c –c-
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careful. I don’t want to leave a muh-muh-mess. My dad’ll be — ‘ He spat out a number of ‘p’s, and finally managed to say ‘pissed off.’
Richie made a burlesque of wiping his cheek. ‘Do you serve towels with your showers, Stuttering Bill?’
Bill made as if to hit him. Richie cowered, shrieking in his Pickaninny Voice.
Ben took very little notice of them. He watched Bill lay out the implements and tools one by one in the light. Part of his mind was wishing that someday’ he might have such a nice worktable as this himself. Most of it was centered directly on the job ahead. Hot as difficult as making silver bullets would have been, but he would still be careful. There was no excuse for sloppy workmanship. This was not something he had been taught or told, just something he knew.
Bill had insisted that Ben make the slugs, just as he continued to insist that Beverly would be the one carrying the Bullseye. These things could have and had been discussed, but it was only twenty-seven years later, telling the story, that Ben realized no one had even suggested that a silver bullet or slug might not stop a monster — they had the weight of what seemed like a thousand horror movies on their side.
‘Okay,’ Ben said. He cracked his knuckles and
