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
turn. In just a moment he would plunge the blade into the skinny little creep’s throat. He waited. The door opened and Eddie
10
The Losers All Together / 1:20 P.M.
saw Stan and Richie just coming out of the Costello Avenue Market, each of them eating a Rocket on a push-up stick. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, wait up!’
They turned around and Stan waved. Eddie ran to join them as quickly as he could, which was not, in truth, very quickly. One arm was immured in a plaster-of-Paris cast and he had his Parcheesi board under the other.
‘Whatchoo say, Eddie? Whatchoo say, boy?’ Richie asked in his grandly rolling Southern Gentleman Voice (the one that sounded more like Foghorn Leghorn in the Warner Brothers cartoons than anything else). ‘Ah say . . . Ah say . . . the boy’s got a broken ahm! Lookit that, Stan, the boy’s got a broken ahm! Ah say . . . be a good spote and carreh the boy’s Pawcheeseh bo-wud for him!’
‘I can carry it,’ Eddie said, a little out of breath. ‘How about a lick on your Rocket?’
‘Your mom wouldn’t approve, Eddie,’ Richie said sadly. He began to eat faster. He had just gotten to the chocolate stuff in the middle, his favorite part. ‘Germs, boy! Ah say . . . Ah say you kin get germs eatin after someone else!’
‘I’ll chance it,’ Eddie said.
Reluctantly, Richie held his Rocket up to Eddie’s mouth . . . and snatched it away quickly as soon as Eddie had gotten in a couple of moderately serious licks.
‘You can have the rest of mine, if you want,’ Stan said. ‘I’m still full from lunch.’
‘Jews don’t eat much,’ Richie instructed. ‘It’s part of their religion.’ The three of them were walking along companionably enough now, headed up toward Kansas Street and the Barrens. Derry seemed lost in a deep hazy afternoon doze. The blinds of most of the houses they passed were pulled down. Toys stood abandoned on lawns, as if their owners had been hastily called in from play or put down for naps. Thunder rumbled thickly in the west.
‘Is it?’ Eddie asked Stan.
‘No, Richie’s just pulling your leg,’ Stan said. ‘Jews eat as much as normal people.’ He pointed at Richie. ‘Like him.’
‘You know, you’re pretty fucking mean to Stan,’ Eddie told Richie. ‘How would you like somebody to say all that made-up shit about you, just because you’re a Catholic?’
‘Oh, Catholics do plenty,’ Richie said. ‘My dad told me once that Hitler was a Catholic, and Hitler killed billions of Jews. Right, Stan?’
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ Stan said. He looked embarrassed.
‘My mom was furious when my dad told me that,’ Richie went on. A little reminiscent grin had surfaced on his face.’ Absolutely fyoo-rious. Us Catholics also had the Inquisition, that was the little dealie with the rack and the thumbscrews and all that stuff. I figure all religions are pretty weird.’
‘Me too,’ Stan said quietly. ‘We’re not Orthodox, or anything like that. I mean, we eat ham and bacon. I hardly even know what being a Jew is. I was born in Derry, and sometimes we go up to synagogue in Bangor for stuff like Yom Kippur, but — ‘ He shrugged.
‘Ham? Bacon?’ Eddie was mystified. He and his mo m were Methodists.
‘Orthodox Jews don’t eat stuff like that,’ Stan said. ‘It says something in the Torah about not eating anything that creeps through the mud or walks on the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know exactly how it goes. But pigs are supposed to be out, also lobster. But my folks eat them. I do too.’
‘That’s weird,’ Eddie said, and burst out laughing. ‘I never heard of a religion that told you what you could eat. Next thing, they’ll be telling you what kind of gas you can buy.’
‘Kosher gas,’ Stan said, and laughed by himself. Neither Richie nor Eddie understood what he was laughing about.
‘You gotta admit, Stanny, it is pretty weird,’ Richie said. ‘I mean, not being able to eat a sausage just because you happen to be Jewish.’
‘Yeah?’ Stan said. ‘You eat meat on Fridays?’
‘ ‘Jeez, no!’ Richie said, shocked. ‘You can’t eat meat on Friday, because — ‘ He began to grin a little. ‘Oh, okay, I see what you mean.’
‘Do Catholics really go to hell if they eat meat on Fridays?’ Eddie asked, fascinated, totally unaware that, until two generations before, his own people had been devout Polish Catholics who would no more have eaten meat on Friday than they would have gone outside with no clothes on.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Eddie,’ Richie said. ‘I don’t really think God would send me down to the Hot Place just for forgetting and having a baloney sandwich for lunch on a Friday, but why take a chance? Right?’
‘I guess not,’ Eddie said. ‘But it seems so — ‘ So stupid,
