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 his back. Then they rocked together in long, slow strokes and somewhere in there he thought she came again. Tom would get close, and then he would think of White Sox batting averages or who was trying to undercut him for the Chesley account at work and he would be okay again. Then she began to speed up, her rhythm finally dissolving into an excited bucking. He looked at her face, the raccoon ringlets of mascara, the smeared lipstick, and he felt himself suddenly shooting deliriously toward the edge.
She jerked her hips up harder and harder — there had been no beergut between them in those days and their bellies clapped hands in a quickening beat.
Near the end she screamed and then bit his shoulder with her small, even teeth.
How many times did you come? he asked her after they had showered.
She turned her face away, and when she spoke her voice was so low he almost couldn’t hear her. That isn’t something you’re supposed to ask.
No? Who told you that? Misterogers?
He took her face in one hand, thumb pressing deep into one cheek, fingers pressing into the other, palm cupping her chin in between.
You talk to Tom, he said. You hear me, Bev? Talk to Papa.
Three, she said reluctantly.
Good, he said. You can have a cigarette.
She looked at him distrustfully, her red hair spread over the pillows, wearing nothing but a pair of hip –hugger panties. Just looking at her that way got his motor turning over again. He nodded.
Go on, he said. That’s all right.
They had been married in a civil ceremony three months later. Two of his friends had come; the only friend of hers to attend had been Kay McCall, whom Tom called ‘that titsy women’s-lib bitch.’
All of these memories went through Tom’s mind in a space of seconds, like a speeded-up piece of film, as he stood in the doorway watching her. She had gone on to the bottom drawer of what she sometimes called her ‘weekend bureau,’ and now she was tossing underwear into the suitcase — not the sort of stuff he liked, the slippery satins and smooth silks; this was cotton stuff, little –girl stuff, most of it faded and with little puffs of popped elastic on the waistbands. A cotton nightie that looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie. She poked in the back of this bottom drawer to see what else might be lurking in there.
Tom Rogan, meanwhile, moved across the shag rug toward his wardrobe. His feet were bare and his passage noiseless as a puff of breeze. It was the cigarette. That was what had
really gotten him mad. It had been a long time since she had forgotten that first lesson. There had been other lessons to learn since, a great many, and there had been hot days when she had worn long-sleeve d blouses or even cardigan sweaters buttoned all the way to the neck. Gray days when she had worn sunglasses. But that first lesson had been so sudden and fundamental —
He had forgotten the telephone call that had wakened him out of his deepening sleep. It was the cigarette. If she was smoking now, then she had forgotten Tom Rogan. Temporarily, of course, only temporarily, but even temporarily was too damned long. What might have caused her to forget didn’t matter. Such things were not to happen in his house for any reason.
There was a wide black strip of leather hanging from a hook inside the closet door. There was no buckle on it; he had removed that long ago. It was doubled over at one end where a buckle would have gone, and this doubled-over section formed a loop into which Tom Rogan now slipped his hand.
Tom, you been bad! his mother had sometimes said — well, ‘sometimes’ was maybe not such a good word; maybe ‘often’ would have been a better one. You come here, Tommy! I got to give you a whuppin. His life as a child had been punctuated by whuppins. He had finally escaped to Wichita State College, but apparently there was no such thing as a complete escape, because he continued to hear her voice in dreams: Come here, Tommy. I got to giveyou a whuppin. Whuppin . . .
He had been the eldest of four. Three months after the youngest had been born, Ralph Rogan had died — well, ‘died’ was maybe not such a good word; maybe ‘committed suicide’ would have been a better way to
