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
He sat down on Mike’s bed — the one he had shared for the last week of nights with his warm but corpse-like wife — and put on his sneakers . . . a pair of Keds, which he ha d also bought yesterday in Bangor.
He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror again. He saw a man pressing middle age dressed up in a kid’s clothes.
You look ludicrous.
What kid doesn’t?
You’re no kid. Give this up!
‘Fuck, let’s rock and roll a little,’ Bill said softly, and left the room.
2
In the dreams he will have in later years, he is always leaving Derry alone, at sunset. The town is deserted; everyone has left. The Theological Seminary and the Victorian houses on West Broadway brood black against a lurid sky, every summer sunset you ever saw rolled up into one.
He can hear his footfalls echoing back as they rap along the concrete. The only other sound is water rushing hollowly through the stormdrains
3
He rolled Silver out into the driveway, put him on the kickstand, and checked the tires again. The front one was okay but the back one felt a little mushy. He got the bike pump that Mike had bought and firmed it up. When he put the pump back, he checked the playing cards and the clothespins. The bike’s wheels still made those exciting machine-gun sounds Bill remembered from his boyhood. Good deal.
You’ve gone crazy.
Maybe. We’ll see.
He went back into Mike’s garage again, got the 3-in –l, and oiled the chain and sprocket. Then he stood up, looked at Silver, and gave the bulb of the oogah-horn a light, experimental squeeze. It sounded good. He nodded and went into the house.
4
and he sees all those places again, intact, as they were then: the hulking brick fort of Derry Elementary, the Kissing Bridge with its complex intaglio of initials, high-school sweethearts ready to crack the world open with their passion who had grown up to become insurance agents and car salesmen and waitresses and beauticians; he sees the statue of Paul Bunyan against that bleeding sunset sky and the leaning white fence which ran along the Kansas Street sidewalk at the edge of the Barrens. He sees them as they were, as they always will be in some part of his mind . . . and his heart breaks with love and honor.
Leaving, leaving Derry, he thinks. We are leaving Derry, and if this was a story it would be the last half-dozen pages or so; get ready to put this one up on the shelf and forget it. The sun’s going down and there’s no sound but my footfalls and the water in the drains. This is the time of
5
Dialing for Dollars had given way to Wheel of Fortune. Audra sat passively in front of it, her eyes never leaving the set. Her demeanor did not change when Bill snapped the TV off.
‘Audra,’ he said, going to her and taking her hand. ‘Come on.’
She didn’t move. Her hand lay in his, warm wax. Bill took her other hand from the arm of Mike’s chair and pulled her to her feet. He had dressed her that morning much as he had dressed himself — she was wearing Levis and a blue shell top. She would have looked quite lovely if not for her wide-eyed vacant stare.
‘Cuh-come on,’ he said again, and led her through the door, into Mike’s kitchen and, eventually, outside. She came willingly enough . . . although she would have plunged off the back porch stoop and gone sprawling in the dirt if Bill had not put an arm around her waist
