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
wouldn’t be shocked), and the returnable cans in a box behind his desk. Then he got the broom and swept up the remains of the gin bottle Eddie had broken.
When the table was clean, he had gone into the Periodicals Room and picked up the scattered magazines. As he did these simple chores, his mind sifted the stories they had told — concentrating the most, perhaps, on what they had left out. They believed they remembered everything; he thought that Bill and Beverly almost did. But there was more. It would come to them . . . if it allowed them the time. In 1958, there had been no chance for preparation. They had talked endlessly — their talk interrupted only by the rockfight and that one act of group heroism at 29 Neibolt Street — and might, in the end, have done no more than talk. Then August 14th had come, and Henry and his friends had simply chased them into the sewers.
Maybe I should have told them, he thought, putting the last of the magazines back in their places. But something spoke strongly against the idea — the voice of the Turtle, he supposed. Perhaps that was part of it, and perhaps that sense of circularity was part of it, too. Maybe that last act was going to repeat itself, in some updated fashion, as well. He had put flashlights and miner’s helmets carefully by against tomorrow; he had the blueprints of the Derry sewer and drain systems neatly rolled up and held with rubber bands in that same closet. But, when they were kids, all their talk and all their plans, half-baked or otherwise, had come to nothing in the end; in the end they had simply been chased into the drains, hurled into the confrontation which had followed. Was that going to happen again ? Faith and power, he had come to believe, were interchangeable. Was the final truth even simpler? That no act of faith was possible until you were rudly pushed out into the screaming middle of things like a newborn child skydiving chutelessly out of his mother’s womb? Once you were falling, you were forced to believe in the chute, into existence, weren’t you? Pulling the ring as you fell became your final statement on the subject, one way or the other.
Jesus Christ, it’s Fulton Sheen in blackface, Mike thought, and laughed a little.
Mike cleaned, neatened, thought his thoughts, while another part of his brain expected that he would finish and finally find himself tired enough to go home and sleep for a few hours. But when he finally did finish, he found himself as wide awake as ever. So he had gone to the single closed stack behind his office, unlocking the wire gate with a key from his ring and letting himself in. This stack, supposedly fireproof when the vault-type door was closed and locked, contained the library’s valuable first editions, books signed by writ ers long since dead (among the signed editions were Moby Dick and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), historical matter relating to the town, and the personal papers of the few writers who had lived and
worked in Derry. Mike hoped, if all of this ended well, to persuade Bill to leave his manuscripts to the Derry Public library. Walking down the third aisle of the stack beneath tin-shaded light –bulbs, smelling the familiar library scents of must and dust and cinnimony, ageing paper, he thought: When I die, I guess I’ll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe that’s better than dying with a gun in your hand, nigger.
He stopped halfway down this third aisle. His dog-eared steno notebook, which contained the jotted tales of Derry and his own troubled wanderings, was tucked between Fricke’s OldDerry-Town and Michaud’s History of Derry. He had pushed the notebook so far back it was nearly invisible. No one would stumble across it unless they were looking for it.
Mike took it and went back to the table where they had held their meeting, pausing to turn off the lights in the closed stack and to re-lock the wire mesh. He sat down and flipped through the pages he had written, thinking what a strange, crippled affidavit he had created: half-history, half-scandal, part diary, part confessional. He had not entered since April 6th. Have to get a new book soon, he thought, thumbing the few blank pages that were left. He thought bemusedly for a moment of Margaret Mitchell’s first draft of Gone with the Wind, written in longhand
