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
She came back out. ‘Tom, that was an old friend. An old old friend. I have to — ‘
‘Shut up, that’s what you have to do!’ he shouted at her. ‘Just shut up!’ But the fear he wanted to see — the fear of him — was not on her face. There was fear, but it had come out of the telephone, and fear was not supposed to come to Beverly from that direction. It was almost as if she didn’t see the belt, didn’t see him, and Tom felt a trickle of unease. Was he here? It was a stupid question, but was he?
This question was so terrible and so elemental that for a moment he felt in danger of coming completely unwrapped from the root of himself and just floating off like a tumbleweed in a high breeze. Then he caught hold of himself. He was here, all right, and that was quite enough fucking psycho-babble for one night. He was here, he was Tom Rogan, Tom by-God Rogan, and if this dippy cunt didn’t straighten up and fly right in the next thirty seconds or so, she was going to look like she got pushed out of a fast-moving boxcar by a mean railroad dick.
‘Got to give you a whuppin,’ he said. ‘Sorry about that, babe.’
He had seen that mixture of fear and aggressiveness before, yes. Now for the first time ever it flashed out at him.
‘Put that thing down,’ she said. ‘I have to get out to O’Hare as fast as I can.’
Are you here, Tom? Are you?
He pushed the thought away. The strip of leather which had once been a belt swung slowly before him like a pendulum. His eyes flickered and then held fast to her face.
‘Listen to me, Tom. There’s been some trouble back in my home town. Very bad trouble. I had a friend in those days. I guess he would have been my boyfriend, except we weren’t quite old enough for that. He was only an eleven-year-old kid with a bad stutter back then. He’s a novelist now. You even read one of his books, I think . . . The Black Rapids?’
She searched his face but his face gave no sign. There was only the belt penduluming back and forth, back and forth. He stood with his head lowered and his stocky legs slightly apart. Then she ran her hand restlessly through her hair — distractedly — as if she had many important things to think of and hadn’t seen the belt at all, and that haunting, awful question resurfaced in his head again: Are you there? Are you sure?
‘That book laid around here for weeks and I never made the connection. Maybe I should have, but we’re all older and I haven’t even thought about Derry in a long, long time. Anyway, Bill had a brother, George, and George was killed before I really knew Bill. He was murdered. And then, the next summer — ‘
But Tom had ilstened to enough craziness from within and from without. He moved in on her fast, cocking his right arm back over his shoulder like a man about to throw a javelin. The belt hissed a path through the air. Beverly saw it coming and tried to duck away, but he r right shoulder struck the bathroom doorway and there was a meaty whapl as the belt struck her left forearm, leaving a red weal.
‘Gonna whup you,’ Tom repeated. His voice was sane, even regretful, but his teeth showed in a white and frozen smile. He wanted to see that look in her eyes, that look of fear and terror and shame, that look that said Yes you’re right I deserved it, that look that said Yes you’re there all right, I feel your presence. Then love could come back, and that was right and good, because he did love her. They could even have a discussion, if she wanted it, of exactly who had called and what all this was about. But that must come later. For now, school was in session. The old one-two. First the whuppin, then the fuckin.
‘Sorry, babe.’
‘Tom, don’t do th — ‘
He swung the belt sidearm and saw it lick around her hip. There was a satisfying snap as it finished on her buttock. And . . .
And Jesus, she was grabbing at it! She was grabbing at the belt!
For a moment Tom Rogan was so astounded by this unexpected act of insubordination that he almost lost his punisher, would have lost it except for the loop, which was tucked securely into his fist.
He jerked it back.
‘Don’t you ever try to grab something away from me,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You hear me? You ever do that again and you’ll spend a month pissing raspberry juice.’
‘Tom, stop it,’ she said, and her very tone infuriated him — she sounded like a playground monitor talking down to a tantrumy six-year-old. ‘I have
