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
barely audible, she could hear the murmur of conversation from the dumpster’s cab. More men on lunch-break. It lacked no more than three or four minutes of noon; soon the courthouse clock would begin to chime the hour.
She could hear him coming again, closing in. She threw herself down and hooked her way under the dumpster, using her elbows and wounded knees. The stink of exhaust and diesel
fuel mixed with the smell of ripe meat and made her feel a kind of giddy nausea. In a way, the ease of her progress was worse; she was skidding greasily over a coating of slime and garbagey crud. She kept moving, once rising too high off the cobbles so that her back came in contact with the dumpster’s hot exhaust-pipe. She had to bite back a scream.
‘Beverly? You under there?’ Each word separated from the last by an out-of-breath gasp for air. She looked back and met his eyes as he bent and peered under the truck.
‘Leave . . . me alone!’ she managed.
‘You bitch,’ he replied in a thick, spit –choked voice. He threw himself flat, keys jingling, and began to crawl after her, using a grotesque swimming stroke to pull himself along.
Beverly clawed her way from under the truck’s cab, grabbed one of the huge tires — her fingers hooked their way into a tread up to the second knuckle — and yanked herself up. She banged her tail-bone on the dumpster’s front bumper and then she was running again, heading up Up-Mile Hill now, her blouse and jeans smeared with goop and stinking to high heaven. She looked back and saw her father’s hands and freckled arms shoot out from under the dumpster’s cab like the claws of some imagined childhood monster from under the bed.
Quickly, hardly thinking at all, she darted between Feldman’s Storage and the Tracker Brothers’ Annex. This covert, too narrow to even be called an alley, was filled with broken crates, weeds, sunflowers, and, of course, more garbage. Beverly dived behind a pile of crates and crouched there. A few moments later she saw her father pound by the mouth of the covert and on up the hill.
Beverly got up and hurried to the far end of the covert. There was a chainlink fence here. She monkeyed her way to the top, got over, and worked her way down the far side. She was now on Derry Theological Seminary property. She ran up the manicured back lawn and around the side of the building. She could hear someone inside playing something classical on an organ. The notes seemed to engrave their pleasant, calm selves on the still air.
There wa s a tall hedge between the Seminary and Kansas Street. She peered through it and saw her father on the far side of the street, breathing hard, patches of sweat darkening his gray work-shirt under the arms. He was peering around, hands on hips. His keyring twinkled brightly in the sun.
Beverly watched him, also breathing hard, her heart beating rabbit-fast in her throat. She was very thirsty, and her simmering smell disgusted her. If I was drawn in a comicstrip, she thought distractedly, there’d be all those wavy stink-lines coming up from me.
Her father crossed slowly to the Seminary side.
Beverly’s breath stopped.
Please God, I can’t run anymore. Help me, God. Don’t let him find me.
Al Marsh walked slowly down the sidewalk, directly past where his daughter crouched on the far side of the hedge.
Dear God, don’t let him smell me!
He didn’t — perhaps because, after a tumble in the alleyway and crawling under the dumpster himself, Al smelled as bad as she did. He walked on. She watched him go back down Up-Mile Hill until he was out of sight.
Beverly picked herself up slowly. Her clothes were covered with garbage, her face was dirty, her back hurt where she had burnt it on the exhaust-pipe of the dumpster. These physical things paled before the confused swirl of her thoughts — she felt that she had sailed off the edge of the world, and none of the normal patterns of behavior seemed to apply. She could not imagine going home; but she could not imagine not going home. She had defied he r father, defied him —
She had to push that thought away because it made her feel weak and trembly, sick to her stomach. She loved her father. Wasn’t one of the Ten Commandments ‘Honor thy mother and
father that thy days may be long upon the earth’? Yes. But he hadn’t been himself. Hadn’t been her father. Had, in fact, been someone completely different. An imposter. It —
Suddenly she went cold as a terrible question occurred to her. Was this
