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
Ben to give you ten fingers,’ Richie said. ‘You can yank Bev up, and the two of you can get your wife. Ben can boost me and we’ll get Ben. And after that I’ll show you how to set up a volleyball tournament for a thousand sorority girls.’
‘Beep-beep, Richie.’
‘Beep-beep your ass, Big Bill.’
The tiredness was going through him in steady waves. He caught Beverly’s level gaze and held it for a moment. She nodded to him slightly, and he made a smile for her.
‘Give me ten fingers, B-B-Ben?’
Ben, who also looked unutterably weary, nodded. A deep scratch ran down one cheek. ‘I think I can handle that.’
He stooped slightly and laced his hands together. Bill hiked one foot, stepped into Ben’s hand, and jumped up. It wasn’t quite enough. Ben lifted the step he had made with his hands and Bill grabbed the edge of the broken– in tunnel roof. He yanked himself up. The first thing he saw was a white-and –orange crash barrier. The second thing was a crowd of milling men and women beyond the barrier. The third was Freese’s Department Store — only it had an oddly bulged-out, foreshortened look. It took him a moment to realize that almost half of
Freese’s had sunk into the street and the Canal beneath. The top half had slued out over the street and seemed in danger of toppling over like a pile of badly stacked books.
‘Look! Look! There’s someone in the street!’
A woman was pointing toward the place where Bill’s head had poked out of the crevasse in the shattered pavement.
‘Praise God, there’s someone else!’
She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. ‘Not safe out there, Mrs Nelson. You know it. Rest of the street might go any time.’
Mrs Nelson, Bill thought. I remember you. Your sister used to sit George and me sometimes. He raised his hand to show her he was all right, and when she raised her own hand in return, he felt a sudden surge of good feelings — and hope.
He turned around and lay flat on the sagging pavement, trying to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the way you were supposed to do on thin ice. He reached down for Bev. She grasped his wrists and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, he pulled her up. Th e sun, which had disappeared again, now ran out from behind a brace of mackerel-scale clouds and gave them their shadows back. Beverly looked up, startled, caught Bill’s eyes, and smiled.
‘I love you, Bill,’ she said. ‘And I pray she’ll be all right.’
‘Thuh-hank you, Bevvie,’ he said, and his kind smile made her start to cry a little. He hugged her and the small crowd gathered behind the crash barrier applauded. A photographer from the Derry News snapped a picture. It appeared in the June 1st edition of the paper, which was printed in Bangor because of water damage to the News’s presses. The caption was simple enough, and true enough for Bill to cut the picture out and keep it tucked away in his wallet for years to come: SURVIVORS, the caption read. That was all, but that was enough.
It was six minutes of eleven in Derry, Maine.
7
Derry / Later the Same Day
The glass corridor between the Children’s Library and the adult library had exploded at 10:30 A .M . At 10:33, the rain stopped. It didn’t taper off; it stopped all at once, as if Someone Up There had flicked a toggle switch. The wind had already begun to fall, and it fell so rapidly that people stared at each other with uneasy, superstitious faces. The sound was like the wind-down of a 747’s engines after it has been safely parked at the gate. The sun peeked out for the first time at 10:47. By midafternoon the clouds had burned away entirely, and the day had come off fair and hot. By 3:30 P.M. the mercury in the Orange Crush thermometer outside the door of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes read eighty-three — the highest reading of the young season. People walked through the streets like zombies, not talking much. Their expressions were remarkably similar: a kind of stupid wonder that would have been funny if it was not also so frankly pitiable. By evening reporters from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN had arrived in Derry, and the network news reporters would bring some version of the truth home to most people; they would make it real . . . although there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb. The following morning Bryant Gumble and Willard Scott of the Today
