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
put it, since he had poured a generous quantity of lye into a tumbler of gin and quaffed this devil’s brew while sitting on the bathroom hopper. Mrs Rogan had found work at the Ford plant. Tom, although only eleven, became the man of the family. And if he screwed up — if the baby shat her didies after the sitter went home and the mess was still in them when Mom got home . . . if he forgot to cross Megan on the Broad Street corner after her nursery school got out and that nosy Mrs Gant saw . . . if he happened to be watching American Bandstand while Joey made a mess in the kitchen . . . if any of those things or a thousand others happened . . . then, after the smaller children were in bed, the spanking stick would come out and she would call the invocation: Come here, Tommy. I gotto give you a whuppin.
Better to be the whupper than the whupped.
If he had learned nothing else on the great toll-road of life, he had learned that.
So he flipped the loose end of the belt over once and pulled the loop snug. Then he closed h is fist over it. It felt good. It made him feel like a grownup. The strip of leather hung from his clenched fist like a dead blacksnake. His headache was gone.
She had found that one last thing in the back of the drawer: an old white cotton bra with gunshell cups. The thought that this early-morning call might have been from a lover surfaced briefly in his mind and then sank again. That was ridiculous. A woman going away to meet her lover did not pack her faded Ship ‘n Shore blouses and her cotton K-Mart undies with the pops and snarls in the elastic. Also, she wouldn’t dare.
‘Beverly,’ he said softly, and she turned at once, startled, her eyes wide, her long hair swinging.
The belt hesitated . . . dropped a little. He stared at her, feeling that l i t t l e b l o o m o f uneasiness again. Yes, she had looked this way before the big shows, and then he hadn’t gotten in her way, understanding that she was so filled with a mixture of fear and competitive aggressiveness that it was as if her head was full of illuminating gas: a single spark and she would explode. She had seen the shows not as a chance to split off from Delia Fashions, to make a living-or even a fortune — on her own. If that had been all, she would have been fine. But if that were all, she also would not have been so ungodly talented. She had seen those
shows as a kind of super-exam on which she would be graded by fierce teachers. What she saw on those occasions was some creature without a face. It had no face, but it did have a name — Authority.
All of that wide-eyed nerviness was on her face now. But not just there; it was all around her, an aura that seemed almost visible, a high-tension charge which made her suddenly both more alluring and more dangerous than she had seemed to him in years. He was afraid because she was here, all here, the essential she as apart from the she Tom Rogan wanted her to be, the she he had made.
Beverly looked shocked and frightened. She also looked almost madly exhilarated. Her cheeks glowed with hectic color, yet there were stark white patches below her lower lids which looked almost like a second pair of eyes. Her forehead glowed with a creamy resonance.
And the cigarette was still jutting out of her mouth, now at a slight up-angle, as if she thought she was goddam Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The cigarette! Just looking at it caused dull fury to wash over him again in a green wave. Faintly, far back in his mind, he remembered her saying something to him one night out of the dark, speaking in a dull and list less voice: Someday you’re going to kill me, Tom. Do you know that? Someday you’re justgoing to go too far and that will be the end. You’ll snap.
He had answered: You do it my way, Bev, and that day will never come.
Now, before the rage blotted out everything, he wondered if that day hadn’t come after all.
The cigarette. Never mind the call, the packing, the weird look on her face. They would deal with the cigarette. Then he would fuck her. Then they could discuss the rest. By then it might even seem important.
‘Tom,’ she said. ‘Tom, I have to — ‘
‘You’re smoking,’ he said. His voice seemed to come from a distance, as if over a pretty good radio. ‘Looks like you forgot, babe. Where you been hiding them?’
‘Look, I’ll put it out,’ she said, and went to the bathroom door. She flipped the cigarette — even from here he could see the teeth-marks driven deep into the filter — into the bowl of the John. Fsssss.
