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
love you, man.’
‘Same here.’
‘Okay. Keep your thumb on it.’
‘Beep-beep, Richie.’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stick it in your ear, Mike. Ah say, in yo ear, boy.’
He hung up and so did I. Then I lay back on my pillows with my eyes shut and didn’t open them for a long time.
June 7th, 1985
Police Chief Andrew Rademacher, who took over from Chief Borton in the late sixties, is dead. It was a bizarre accident, one I can’t help associating with what has been happening in Derry . . . what has just ended in Derry.
The combination police-station — courthouse stands on the edge of the area that fell into the Canal, and while it didn’t go, the upheaval — or the flood — must have caused structural damage of which no one was aware.
Rademacher was working late in his office last night, the story in the paper says, as he has every night since the storm and the flood. The Police Chiefs office has moved from the third to the fifth floor since the old days, to just below an attic where all sorts of records and useless city artifacts are stored. One of those artifacts was the tramp-chair I have described earlier in these pages. It was made of iron and weighed better than four hundred pounds. The building shipped a quantity of water during the downpour of May 31st, and that must have weakened the attic floor (or so the paper says). Whatever the reason, the tramp –chair fell from the attic directly onto Chief Rademacher as he sat at his desk, reading accident reports. He was killed instantly. Officer Bruce Andeen rushed in and found him lying on the ruins of his shattered desk, his pen still in one hand.
Talked to Bill on the phone again. Audra is taking some solid food, he says, but otherwise there is no change. I asked him if Eddie’s big problem had been asthma or migraine.
‘Asthma,’ he said promptly. ‘Don’t you remember his aspirator?’
‘Sure,’ I said, and did. But only when Bill mentioned it.
‘Mike?’
‘Yeah?’
‘What was his last name?’
I looked at my address book lying on the nighttable, but didn’t pick it up. ‘I don’t quite remember.’
‘It was like Kerkorian,’ Bill said, sounding distressed, ‘but that wasn’t quite it. You’ve got everything written down, though. Right?’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Have you had any ideas about Audra?’
‘One,’ he said, ‘but it’s so crazy I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘All right.’
‘Mike, it’s scary, isn’t it? Forgetting like this?’
‘Yes,’ I said. And it is.
June 8th, 1985
Raytheon, which had been scheduled to break ground on its Derry plant in July, has decided at the last minute to build in Waterville instead. The editorial on page one of the News expresses dismay . . . and, if I read correctly between the lines, a little fright.
I think I know what Bill’s idea is. He’ll have to act quickly, before the last of the magic departs this place. If it hasn’t already.
I guess what I thought before wasn’t so paranoid after all. The names and addresses of the others in my little book are fading. The color and quality of the ink combine to make those entries look as if they were written fifty or seventy-five years before the others I’ve jotted in there. This has happened in the last four or five days. I’m convinced that by September their names will be utterly gone.
I suppose I could preserve them; I could just keep copying them. But I’m also convinced that each would fade in its turn, and that very soon it would become an exercise in futility — like writing I will not throw spit –balls in class five hundred times. I would be writing names that meant nothing for a reason I didn’t remember.
Let it go, let it go.
Bill, act quickly . . . but be careful!
June 9th, 1985
Woke up in the middle of the night from a terrible nightmare I couldn’t remember, got panicky, couldn’t breathe. Reached for the call-button and then couldn’t use it. Had a terrible vision of Mark Lamonica answering the bell with a hypo . . . or Henry Bowers with his switchblade.
I grabbed my address book and called Ben Hanscom in Nebraska . . . the address and number have faded still more, but they are still legible. No go, Joe. Got a recorded phone-company voice telling me service to that number has been cancelled.
Was Ben fat, or did he have something like a club foot?
Lay awake until dawn.
June 10th, 1985
They tell me I can go home tomorrow.
I called Bill and told him that — I suppose I wanted to warn him that his time is getting shorter all the time. Bill
