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
West Broadway; they jostled for places on the aluminum branches of the elaborate TV antenna on top of Wally’s Spa; they loaded the wet black branches of the elms on Lower Main Street. They settled, they talked to each other in the screamy babbling voices of old countrywomen at the weekly Grange Bingo games, and then, at some signal which humans could not discern, they all took wing at once, turning the sky black with their numbers . . . and came down somewhere else.
Yes, the birds, I was thinking of them because I was ashamed. It was my father who made me ashamed, I guess, and maybe that was It’s doing, too. Maybe.
The memory came — the memory behind the birds — but it was vague and disconnected. Perhaps this one always would be. She had — Her thoughts broke off as she realized that Eddie
12
Love and Desire / August 10th, 1958
comes to her first, because he is the most frightened. He comes to her not as her friend of that summer, or as her brief lover now, but the way he would have come to his mother only three or four years ago, to be comforted; he doesn’t draw back from her smooth nakedness and at first she doubts if he even feels it. He is trembling, and although she holds him the darkness is so perfect that even this close she cannot see him; except for the rough cast he might as well be a phantom.
‘What do you want?’ he asks her.
‘You have to put your thing in me,’ she says.
He tries to pull back but she holds him and he subsides against her. She has heard someone — Ben, she thinks — draw in his breath.
‘Bevvie, I can’t do that. I don’t know how — ‘
‘I think it’s easy. But you’ll have to get undressed.’ She thinks about the intricacies of managing cast and shirt, first somehow separating and then rejoining them, and amends, ‘Your pants, anyway.’
‘No, I can’t!’ But she thinks part of him can, and wants to, because his trembling has stopped and she feels something small and hard which presses against the right side of her belly.
‘You can,’ she says, and pulls him down. The surface beneath her bare back and legs is firm, clayey, dry. The distant thunder of the water is drowsy, soothing. She reaches for him. There’s a moment when her father’s face intervenes, harsh and forbidding
(I want to see if you’re intact)
and then she closes her arms around Eddie’s neck, her smooth cheek against his smooth cheek, and as he tentatively touches her small breasts she sighs and thinks for the first time This is Eddie and she remembers a day in July — could it only have been last month? — when no one else turned up in the Barrens but Eddie, and he had a whole bunch of Little Lulu comic books and they read together for most of the afternoon, Little Lulu looking for beebleberries and getting in all sorts of crazy situations, Witch Hazel, all of those guys. It had been fun.
