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
One supposes the thought of popular publication had done more than cross Mr Hanlon’s mind.
January 2nd, 1985 Can an entire city be haunted?
Haunted as some houses are supposed to be haunted?
Not just a single building in that city, or the corner of a single street, or a single basketball court in a single pocket-park, the netless basket jutting out at sunset like some obscure and bloody instrument of torture, not just one area
— but everything. The whole works.
Can that be?
Listen:
Haunted: ‘Often visited by ghosts or spirits.’ Funk and Wagnalls. Haunting: ‘Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget.’ Ditto Funk and Friend. To haunt: ‘To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost.’ But — and listen!
— ‘A place often visited: resort, den, hangout . . . ‘ Italics are of course mine.
And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and it’s the one
that really scares me: ‘.A feeding place for animals.’
Like the animals that beat up Adrian Mellon and then threw him over the bridge?
Like the animal that was waiting underneath the bridge?
A feeding place for animals.
What’s feeding in Derry? What’s feeding on Derry?
You know, it’s sort of interesting — I didn’t know it was possible for a man to become as frightened as I have become since the Adrian Mellon business and still live, let alone function. It’s as if I’ve fallen into a story, and everyone knows you’re not supposed to feel this afraid until the end of the story, when the haunter of the dark finally comes out of the woodwork to feed . . . on you, of course.
On you.
But if this is a story, it’s not one of those classic screamers by Lovecraft or Bradbury or Poe. I know, you see — not everything, but a lot. I didn’t just start when I opened the Derry News one day last September, read the transcript of the Unwin boy’s preliminary hearing, and realized that the clown who killed George Denbrough might well be back again. I actually started around 1980 — I think tha t is when some part of me which had been asleep woke up . . . knowing that Its time might be coming round again.
What part? The watchman part, I suppose.
Or maybe it was the voice of the Turtle. Yes . . . I rather think it was that. I know it’s what Bill Denbrough would believe.
I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightnings-to-come. I began making notes for a book I will almost certainly not live to write. And at the same time I went on with my life. On one level of my mind I was and am living with the most
grotesque, capering horrors; on another I have continued to live the mundane life of a small-city librarian. I shelve books; I make out library cards for new patrons; I turn off the microfilm readers careless users sometimes leave on; I joke with Carole Danner about how much I would like to go to bed with her, and she jokes back about how much she’d like to go to bed with me, and both of us know that she’s really joking and I’m really not, just as both of us know that she won’t stay in a little place like Derry for long and I will be here until I die, taping torn pages in Business Week, s i t t i n g d o w n a t m o n t h l y a c q u i s i t i o n m e e t i n g s w i t h m y pipe in one hand and a stack of Library Journals in the other . . . and waking in the middle of the night with my fists jammed against my mouth to keep in the screams.
The gothic conventions are all wrong. My hair has not turned white. I do not sleepwalk. I have not begun to make cryptic comments or to carry a planchette around in my sportcoat pocket. I think I laugh a little more, that’s all, and sometimes it must seem a little shrill and strange, because sometimes people look at me oddly when I laugh.
Part of me — the part Bill would call the voice of the Turtle — says I should call them all, tonight. But am I, even now, completely sure? Do I want to be completely sure? No — of course not. But God, what happened to Adrian Mellon is so much like what happened to Stuttering Bill’s brother, George, in the fail of 1957.
If it has started again, I will call them. I’ll have to. But not yet. It’s too early anyway. Last time it began slowly
