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
but he didn’t share them out. He didn’t want the bitch to smell cigarette smoke if she was around. He could have explained, but there was no need. The voice had only spoken two words to him, but they seemed to explain everything. They played down here. Soon the others would come back. Why settle for just the bitch when they could have all seven of the little shitepokes?
They waited and watched. Victor and Belch seemed to have gone to sleep with their eyes open. It was not a long wait, but there was time for Henry to think of a good many things. How he had found the switchblade this morning, for instance. It wasn’t the same one he’d had on the last day of school; he’d lost that one somewhere. This one looked a lot cooler.
It came in the mail.
Sort of.
He had stood on the porch, looking at their battered leaning RFD box, trying to grasp what he was seeing. The box was decked with balloons. Two were tied to the metal hook where the postman sometimes hung packages; others were tied to the flag. Red, yellow, blue, green. It was as if some weird circus had crept by on Witcham Road in the dead of night, leaving this sign.
As he approached the mailbox, he saw there were faces on the balloons — the faces of the kids who had deviled him all this summer, the kids who seemed to mock him at every turn.
He had stared at these apparitions, gape– mouthed, and then the balloons popped, one by one. That had been good; it was as if he were making them pop just by thinking about it, killing them with his mind.
The front of the mailbox suddenly swung down. Henry walked toward it and peered in. Although the mailman didn’t get this far out until the middle of the afternoon, he felt no surprise when he saw a flat rectangular package inside. He pulled it out. MR HENRY BOWERS, RFD #2, DERRY, MAINE, the address read. There was even a return-address of sorts: MR ROBERT GRAY, DERRY, MAINE.
He opened the package, letting the brown paper drift down heedlessly by his feet. There was a white box inside. He opened it. Lying on a bed of white cotton had been the switchknife. He took it into the house.
His father was lying on his pallet in the bedroom they shared, surrounded by empty beer cans, his belly bulging over the top of his yellow underpants. Henry knelt beside him, listening to the snort and flutter of his father’s breathing, watching his father’s horsy lips purse and pucker with each breath.
Henry placed the business-end of the switchknife agains t his father’s scrawny neck. His father moved a little and then settled back into beery sleep again. Henry kept the knife like that for almost five minutes, his eyes distant and thoughtful, the ball of his left thumb caressing the silver button set into the switchblade’s neck. The voice from the moon spoke to him — it whispered like the spring wind which is warm with a cold blade buried somewhere in its middle, it buzzed like a paper nest full of roused hornets, it huckstered like a hoarse politician.
Everything the voice said seemed pretty much okey-dokey to Henry and so he pushed the silver button. There was a click inside the knife as the suicide-spring let go, and six inches of steel drove through Butch Bowers’s neck. It went in as easily as the tine s of a meat-fork into the breast of a well-roasted chicken. The tip of the blade popped out on the other side, dripping.
Butch’s eyes flew open. He stared at the ceiling. His mouth dropped open. Blood ran from the corners of it and down his cheeks toward the lobes of his ears. He began to gurgle. A large blood-bubble formed between his slack lips and popped. One of his hands crept to Henry’s knee and squeezed convulsively. Henry didn’t mind. Presently the hand fell away. The gurgling noises stopped a moment later. Butch Bowers was dead.
Henry pulled the knife out, wiped it on the dirty sheet that covered his father’s pallet, and pushed the blade back in until the spring clicked again. He looked at his father without much interest. The voice had told him about the day’s work while he knelt beside Butch with the knife against Butch’s neck. The voice had explained everything. So he went into the other room to call Belch and Victor.
Now here they were, all three, and although his balls still ached horribly, the knife made a comforting bulge in his left front pants pocket. He felt that the cutting would begin soon. The others would come back down to resume whatever baby game they had been playing, and then the cutting would begin. The voice from the moon had laid it out for him as he knelt by his father, and on his way into town he had been unable to take his eyes from that pale ghost-disc in the sky. He saw that there was indeed a man in the moon — a g r i s l y g l i m m e r i n g
ghost –face with cratered holes for eyes and a glabrous grin that seemed to
