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
‘You looked’
(dead)
‘a little under the weather.’
‘I was thinking of the old days,’ he says. ‘I only realized earlier tonight that there were such things as old days, at least as far as I myself am concerned.’
More call-buttons chime. ‘Pardon me, stewardess?’ someone calls nervously.
‘Well, if you’re quite sure you’re all right — ‘
‘I was thinking about a dam I built with some friends of mine,’ Ben Hanscom says. ‘The first friends I ever had, I guess. They were building the dam when I — ‘ He stops, looks startled, then laughs. It is an honest laugh, almost the carefree laugh of a boy, and it sounds very odd in this jouncing, bucking plane.’ — when I dropped in on them. And that’s almost literally what I did. Anyhow, they were making a helluva mess with that dam. I remember that.’
‘Stewardess? ‘
‘Excuse me, sir — I ought to get about my appointed rounds again.’
‘Of course you should.’
She hurries away, glad to be rid of that gaze — that deadly, almost hypnotic gaze.
Ben Hanscom turns his head to the window and looks out. Lightning goes off inside huge thunderheads nine miles off the starboard wing. In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.
He feels in the pocket of his vest, but the silver dollars are gone. Out of his pocket and into Ricky Lee’s. Suddenly he wishes he had saved at least one of them. It might have come in handy. Of course you could go down to any bank — at least when you weren’t bumping around at twenty-seven thousand feet you could — and get a handful of silver dollars, but you couldn’t do anything with the lousy copper sandwiches the government was trying to pass off as real coins these days. And for werewolves and vampires and all manner of things that squirm by starlight, it was silver you wanted; honest silver. You needed silver to stop a monster. You needed —
He closed his eyes. The air around him was full of chimes. The plane rocked and rolled and bumped and the air was full of chimes. Chimes?
No . . . bells.
It was bells, it was the bell, the bell of all bells, the one you waited for all year once the new wore off school again, and that always happened by the end of the first week.
