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
into drive. The bunched white knots of Belch’s knuckles glimmered through the decaying flesh of his fingers.
The Fury began to move down Kansas Street toward Up-Mile Hill.
‘How you doin, Belch?’ Henry heard himself say. It was stupid, of course — Belch couldn’t be here, dead people couldn’t drive cars — but it was all he could think of.
Belch didn’t reply. His one sunken eye stared at the road. His teeth glared sickly at Henry through the hole in his cheek. Henry became vaguely aware that ole Belch smelled pretty ripe. Ole Belch smelled, in fact, like a bushel-basket of tomatoes that had gone bad and watery.
The glove compartment flopped open, banging Henry’s knees, and in the light of the small bulb inside he saw a bottle of Texas Driver, half-full. He took it out, opened it, and had himself a good shot. It went down like cool silk and hit his stomach like an explosion of lava. He shuddered all over, moaning and then began to feel a little better, a little more connected to the world.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
Belch’s head turned toward him. Henry could hear the tendons in Belch’s neck’ the sound was like the scream of rusty screen-door hinges. Belch regarded him for a moment with a dead one-eyed stare, an d Henry realized for the first time that most of Belch’s nose was gone. It looked like something had been at the ole Belcher’s nose. Dog, maybe. Or maybe rats. Rats seemed more likely. The tunnels they had chased the little kids into that day had been full of rats.
Moving just as slowly, Belch’s head turned toward the road again. Henry was glad. Ole Belch staring at him that way, well, Henry hadn’t been able to dig it too much. There had been something in Belch’s single sunken eye. Reproach? Anger? What?
There is a dead boy behind the wheel of this car.
Henry looked down at his arm and saw that huge goosebumps had formed there. He quickly had another snort from the bottle. This one hit a little easier and spread its warmth farther.
The Plymouth rolled down Up-Mile Hill and made its way around the counter-clockwise traffic circle . . . except at this time of night there was no traffic; all the traffic –lights had changed to yellow bunkers splashing the empty streets and closed buildings with st eady
pulses of light. It was so quiet that Henry could hear the relays clicking inside each light . . . or was that his imagination?
‘Never meant to leave you behind that day, Belcher,’ Henry said. ‘I mean, if that was, you know, on your mind.’
That scream of dried tendons again. Belch looking at him again with his one sunken eye. And his lips stretched in a terrible grin that revealed gray-black gums which were growing their own garden of mold. What sort of a grin is that? Henry asked himself as the car purred silkily up Main Street, past Freese’s on the one side, Nan’s Luncheonette and the Aladdin Theater on the other. Is it a forgiving grin? An old –pals grin? Or is it the kind of grin that says I’m going to get you, Henry, I’m going to get you for running out on me and Vie? What kind of grin?
‘You have to understand how it was,’ Henry said, and then stopped. How had it been? It was all confused in his mind, the pieces jumbled up like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had just been dumped out on one of the shitty cardtables in the rec room at Jumper Hill. How had it been, exactly? They had followed the fatboy and the bitch back to Kansas Street and had waited back in the bushes, watching them climb up the embankment to the top. If they had disappeared from view, he and Victor and Belch would have dropped the stalking game and simply gone after them; two of them were better than none at all, and the rest would be along in time.
But they hadn’t disappeared. They had simply leaned against the fence, talking and watching the street. Every now and then they would check down the slope into the Barrens, but Henry kept his two troops well out of sight.
The sky, Henry remembered, had become overcast, clouds moving in from the east, the air thickening. There would be rain that afternoon.
What had happened next? What —
A bony, leathery hand closed over his forearm and Henry screamed. He had been drifting away again into that cottony grayness, but Belch’s dreadful touch and the dagger of pain in his stomach from the scream brought him back. He looked around and Belch’s face was less than two inches from Henry’s; he gasped
