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
of approaching death, the cats can observe which one falls to the rear of the pack, maybe because it has a lame leg, maybe because it is just naturally slower . . . or maybe because its sense of danger is less
developed. And it might even be possible that some antelopes — and some women — want to be brought down.
Suddenly he heard a sound that jerked him rudely out of these memories — the snap of her cigarette lighter.
The dull rage came again. His stomach filled with a heat which was not entirely unpleasant. Smoking. She was smoking. They had had a few of Tom Rogan’s Special Seminars on the subject. And here she was, doing it again. She was a slow learner, all right, but a good teacher is at his best with slow learners.
‘Yes,’ she said now. ‘Uh-huh. All right. Yes . . . ‘ She listened, then uttered a strange, jagged laugh he had never heard before. ‘Two things, since you ask — reserve me a room and say me a prayer. Yes, okay . . . uh-huh . . . me too. Goodnight.’
She was hanging up as he came in. He meant to come in hard, yelling at her to put it out, put it out now, RIGHT NOW!, but when he saw her the words died in his throat. He had seen her like this before, but only two or three times. Once before their first big show, once before the first private preview showing for national buyers, and once when they had gone to New York for the International Design Awards.
She was moving across the bedroom in long strides, the white lace nightgown molded to her body, the cigarette clamped between her front teeth (God he hated the way she looked with a butt in her mouth) sending back a little white riband over her left shoulder like smoke from a locomotive’s stack.
But it was her face that really gave him pause, that caused the planned shout to die in his throat. His heart lurched — k a-BAMP! — and he winced, telling himself that what he felt was not fear but only surprise at finding her this way.
She was a woman who really came alive all the way only when the rhythm of her work spiked toward a climax. Each of those remembered occasions had of course been career-related. At those tunes he had seen a different woman from the one he knew so well — a woman who fucked up his sensitive fear-radar with wild bursts of static. The woman who came out in times of stress was strong but high-strung, fearless but unpredictable.
There was lots of color in her cheeks now, a natural blush high on her cheekbones. Her eyes were wide and sparkly, not a trace of sleep left in them. Her hair flowed and streamed. And . . . oh, looky here, friends and neighbors! Oh you just looky right here! Is she taking a suitcase out of the closet? A suitcase? By God, she is!
Reserve me a room . . . say me a prayer.
Well, she wasn’t going to need a room in any hotel, not in the foreseeable future, because little Beverly Rogan was going to be staying right here at home, thank you very much, and taking her meals standing up for the next three or four days.
But she very well might need a prayer or two before he was through with her.
She tossed the suitcase on the foot of the bed and then went to her bureau. She opened the top drawer and pulled out two pairs of jeans and a pair of cords. Tossed them into the suitcase. Back to the bureau, cigarette streaming smoke over her shoulder. She grabbed a sweater, a couple of tee-shirts, one of the old Ship ‘n Shore blouses that she looked so stupid in but refused to give up. Whoever had called her sure hadn’t been a jet-setter. This was dull stuff, strictly Jackie –Kennedy-Hyannisport-weekend stuff.
Not that he cared about who had called her or where she thought she was going, since she wasn’t going anywhere. Those were not the things which pecked steadily at his mind, dull and achy from too much beer and not enough sleep.
It was that cigarette.
Supposedly she had thrown them all out. But she had held out on him — the proof was clamped between her teeth right now. And because she still had not noticed him standing in
the doorway, he allowed himself the pleasure of remembering the two nights which had assured him of his complete control over her.
I don’t want you to smoke around me anymore, he told her as they headed home from a party in Lake Forest. October, that had been. I have to choke that shit down at parties and at the office, but I don’t have to choke it down when I’m with you. You know what it’s like? I’m going to tell you the truth — it’s unpleasant but it’s the truth. Ifs like having to eat someone else’s snot.
