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
boy.
A feeding place for animals. Yes, that’s the one that haunts me.
If anything else happens — anything at all — I’ll make the calls. I’ll have to. In the meantime I have my suppositions, my broken rest, and my memories — my damned memories. Oh, and one other thing — I have this notebook, don’t I? The wall I wail to. And here I sit, my hand shaking so badly I can hardly write in it, here I si t in the deserted library after closing, listening to faint sounds in the dark stacks, watching the shadows thrown by the dim yellow globes to make sure they don’t move . . . don’t change.
Here I sit next to the telephone.
I put my free hand on it . . . let it slide down . . . touch the holes in the dial that could put me in touch with all of them, my old pals.
We went deep together.
We went into the black together.
Would we come out of the black if we went in a second time?
I don’t think so.
Please God I don’t have to call them.
Please God.
‘My surface is myself.
Under which To witness, youth is
buried. Roots?
Everybody has roots.’
— William Carlos Williams, Paterson
‘Sometimes I wonder what I’m a-gonna do, There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.’
— Eddie Cochran
1
Around 11:45 PM., one of the stews serving first class on the Omaha-to-Chicago run — United Airlines’s flight 41 — gets one hell of a shock. She thinks for a few moments that the man in 1-A has died.
When he boarded at Omaha she thought to herself: ‘Oh boy, here comes trouble. He’s just as drunk as a lord.’ The stink of whiskey around his head reminded her fleetingly of the cloud of dust that always surrounds the dirty little boy in the Peanuts strip — Pig Pen, his name is. She was nervous about First Service, which is the booze service. She was sure he would ask for a drink — and probably a double. Then she would have to decide whether or not to serve him. Also, just to add to the fun, there have been thunderstorms all along the route tonight, and she is quite sure that at some point the man, a lanky guy dressed in jeans and chambray, would begin upchucking.
But when First Service came along, the tall man ordered nothing more than a glass of club soda, just as polite as you could want. His service light has not gone on, and the stew forgets all about him soon enough, because the flight is a busy one. The flight is, in fact, the kind you want to forget as soon as it’s over, one of those during which you just might — if you had time — have a few questions about the possibility of your own survival.
United 41 slaloms between the ugly pockets of thunder and lightning like a good skier going downhill. The air is very rough. The passengers exclaim and make uneasy jokes about the lightning they can see flickering on and off in the thick pillars of cloud around the plane. ‘Mommy, is God taking pictures of the angels?’ a little boy asks, and his mother, who is looking rather green, laughs shakily. First Service turns out to be the only service on 41 that night. The seat-belt sign goes on twenty minutes into the flight and stays on. All the same the stewardesses stay in the aisles, answering the call-buttons which go off like strings of polite-society firecrackers.
