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
morning the Derry Highway Patrol had orange DETOUR signs on both sides of the dip.
Those who waited under the shelter on Main Street for the first bus of the day to take them to work stood looking over the railing at the Canal, where the water was ominously high in its concrete channel. There would be no flood, of course; all agreed on that. The water was still four feet below the high –water mark of 1977, and there had been no flood that year. But the rain came down with steady pounding persistence, and thunder grumbled in the low clouds. Water ran down Up-Mile Hill in streams and roared in the stormdrains and sewers.
No flood, they agreed, but there was a patina of unease on every face.
At 5:45 a power-transformer on a pole beside the abandoned Tracker Brothers’ Truck Depot exploded in a flash of purple light, spraying twisted chunks of metal onto the shingled roof. One of the flying chunks of metal severed a high-tension wire, which also fell on the roof, spluttering and twisting like a snake, shooting an almost liquid stream of sparks. The roof caught fire in spite of the downpour, and soon the depot was blazing. Th e power-cable tumbled from the roof to the weedy verge that led around to the lot where small boys had once played baseball. The Derry Fire Department rolled for the first time that day at 6:02 A.M. and arrived at Tracker Brothers’ at 6:09. One of the first firemen off the truck was Calvin Clark, one of the Clark twins with whom Ben, Beverly, Richie, and Bill had gone to school. His third step away from the truck brought the sole of his leather boot down on the live line. Calvin was electrocuted almost ins tantly. His tongue popped out of his mouth and his rubber fireman’s coat began to smolder. He smelled like burning tires at the town dump.
At 6:05 A.M., residents of Merit Street in the Old Cape felt something that might have been an underground explosion. Plates fell from shelves and pictures from walls. At 6:06, every toilet on Merit Street suddenly exploded in a geyser of shit and raw sewage as some unimaginable reversal took place in the pipes which fed the holding tanks of the new waste-treatment plant in the Barrens. In some cases these explosions were strong enough to tear holes in bathroom ceilings. A woman named Anne Stuart was killed when an ancient gearwheel catapulted from her toilet along with a gout of sewage. The gearwheel went through the frosted glass of the shower door and passed through her throat like a terrible bullet as she washed her hair. She was nearly decapitated. The gear-wheel was a relic of the Kitchener Ironworks, and had found its way into the sewers almost three-quarters of a century before. Another woman was killed when the sudden violent reversal of sewage, driven by expanding methane gases, caused her toilet to explode like a bomb. The unfortunate woman, who was sitting on the John at the time and reading the current Banana Republic catalogue, was torn to pieces.
At 6:19 A.M., a bolt of lightning struck the so-called Kissing Bridge, which spanned the Canal between Bassey Park and Derry High School. The splintered pieces were thrown high into the air and then rained down into the swiftly moving Canal to be carried away.
The wind was rising. At 6:30 A.M ., the gauge in the lobby of the courthouse building registered it at just over fifteen miles an hour. By 6:45, it had risen to twenty-four miles an hour.
At 6:46 A.M., Mike Hanlon awoke in his room at the Derry Home Hospital. His return to consciousness was a kind of slow dissolve — for a long time he thought he was dreaming. If so, it was an odd sort of dream — an anxiety dream, his old psych prof Doc Abelson mig h t have called it. There seemed to be no overt reason for the anxiety, but it was there all the same; the plain white room seemed to shriek menace.
He gradually realized that he was awake. The plain white room was a hospital room. Bottles hung over his head, one full of clear liquid, the other a deep dark red one. Whole blood. He saw a blank TV set bolted to the wall and became aware of the steady sound of rain beating against the window.
Mike tried to move his legs. One moved freely but the other, his right leg, wouldn’t move at all. The feeling in that leg was very faint, and he realized it was tightly bandaged.
Little by little it came back. He had settled down to write in his notebook and Henry Bowers had turned up. A real blast from the past, a golden gasser. There had been a fight, and —
Henry! Where had Henry gone? After the others?
Mike groped for the call-bell. It was draped over the head of the bed, and he had it in his hands when the door opened. A nurse stood there. Two buttons of his white tunic were unbuttoned and his dark hair was mussed, giving him a rumpled Ben Casey look. He wore a
Saint
