By the time Richie finishes, they’re all nodding. Eddie is nodding along with them, remembering along with them, when the pain suddenly races up his left arm. Races up? No. Rips through: it feels as if someone is trying to sharpen a rusty saw on the bone in there. He grimaces and reaches into the pocket of his sport-jacket, sorts through a number of bottles by feel, and
takes out the Excedrin. He swallows two with a gulp of gin-and-prune-juice.
The arm has been paining him off and on all day. At first he dismissed it as the twinges of bursitis he sometimes gets when the weather is damp. But
halfway through Richie’s story, a new memory clicks into place for him and he understands the pain. This isn’t Memory Lane we’re wandering down anymore, he thinks; it’s getting more and more like the Long Island Expressway.
Five years ago, during a routine check-up (Eddie has a routine check-up every six weeks), the doctor said matter-of-factly: “There’s an old break
here, Ed. Did you fall out of a tree when you were a kid? ”
“Something like that, ” Eddie agreed, not bothering to tell Dr. Robbins that his mother undoubtedly would have fallen down dead of a brain
hemorrhage if she had seen or heard of her Eddie climbing trees. The truth was, he hadn’t been able to remember exactly how he broke the arm. It didn’t seem important (although, Eddie thinks now, that lack of interest was in itself very odd—he is, after all, a man who attaches importance to a
sneeze or a slight change in the color of his stools). But it was an old break, a minor irritation, something that happened a long time ago in a boyhood
he could barely remember and didn’t care to recall. It pained him a little
when he had to drive long hours on rainy days. A couple of aspirin took care of it nicely. No big deal.
But now it is not just a minor irritation; it is some madman sharpening that rusty saw, playing bone-tunes, and he remembers that was how it felt in the hospital, especially late at night, in the first three or four days after it happened. Lying there in bed, sweating in the summer heat, waiting for the nurse to bring him a pill, tears running silently down his cheeks into the
bowls of his ears, thinking It’s like some kook’s sharpening a saw in there.
If this is Memory Lane, Eddie thinks, I’d trade it for one great big brain enema: a mental high colonic.
Unaware he is going to speak, he says: “It was Henry Bowers who broke my arm. Do you remember that? ”
Mike nods. “That was just before Patrick Hockstetter disappeared. I don’t remember the date. ”
“I do, ” Eddie says flatly. “It was the 20th of July. The Hockstetter kid was reported missing on . . . what? . . . the 23rd? ”
“Twenty-second, ” Beverly Rogan says, although she doesn’t tell them
why she is so sure of the date: it is because she saw It take Hockstetter. Nor does she tell them that she believed then and believes now that Patrick
Hockstetter was crazy, perhaps even crazier than Henry Bowers. She will tell them, but this is Eddie’s turn. She will speak next, and then she supposes that Ben will narrate the climax of that July’s events . . . the silver bullet
they had never quite dared to make. A nightmare agenda if ever there was one, she thinks—but that crazy exhilaration persists. When did she last feel this young? She can hardly sit still.
“The 20th of July, ” Eddie muses, rolling his aspirator along the table
from one hand to the other. “Three or four days after the smoke-hole thing. I spent the rest of the summer in a cast, remember? ”
Richie slaps his forehead in a gesture they all remember from the old days and Bill thinks, with a mixture of amusement and unease, that for a
moment there Richie looked just like Beaver Cleaver. “Sure, of course! You were in a cast when we went to the house on Neibolt Street, weren’t you?
And later. . . in the dark. . . ” But now Richie shakes his head a little, puzzled.
“What, R-Richie? ” Bill asks.
“Can’t remember that part yet, ” Richie admits. “Can you? ” Bill shakes his head slowly.
“Hockstetter was with them that day, ” Eddie says. “It was the last time I ever saw him alive. Maybe he was a replacement for Peter Gordon. I guess Bowers didn’t want Peter around anymore after he ran the day of the rockfight. ”
“They all died, didn’t they? ” Beverly asks quietly. “After Jimmy Cullum, the only ones who died were Henry Bowers’s friends. . . or his ex-friends. ” “All but Bowers, ” Mike agrees, glancing toward the balloons tethered to
the microfilm recorder. “And he’s in Juniper Hill. A private insane asylum in Augusta. ”
Bill says, “W-W-What about when they broke your arm, E-E-Eddie? ” “Your stutter’s getting worse, Big Bill, ” Eddie says solemnly, and
finishes his drink in one gulp.
“Never mind that, ” Bill says. “T-Tell us. ”
“Tell us, ” Beverly repeats, and puts her hand lightly on his arm. The pain flares there again.
“All right, ” Eddie says. He pours himself a fresh drink, studies it, and says, “It was a couple of days after I came home from the hospital that you guys came over to the house and showed me those silver ballbearings. You remember, Bill? ”
Bill nods.
Eddie looks at Beverly. “Bill asked you if you’d shoot them, if it came to that. . . because you had the best eye. I think you said you wouldn’t. . . that you’d be too afraid. And you told us something else, but I just can’t
remember what it was. It’s like—” Eddie sticks his tongue out and plucks the end of it, as if something were stuck there. Richie and Ben both grin. “Was it something about Hockstetter? ”
“Yes, ” Beverly says. “I’ll tell when you’re done. Go ahead. ”
“It was after that, after all you guys left, that my mother came in and we had a big fight. She didn’t want me to hang around with any of you guys again. And she might have gotten me to agree—she had a way, a way of working on a guy, you know . . . ”
Bill nods again. He remembers Mrs. Kaspbrak, a huge woman with a
strange schizophrenic face, a face capable of looking stony and furious and miserable and frightened all at the same time.
“Yeah, she might have gotten me to agree, ” Eddie says. “But something else happened the same day Bowers broke my arm. Something that really
shook me up. ”
He utters a little laugh, thinking: It shook me up, all right Is that all
you can say? What good’s talking when you can never tell people how you really feel? In a book or a movie what I found out that day before Bowers
broke my arm would have changed my life forever and nothing would have happened the way it did in a book or a movie it would have set me free.
In a book or a movie I wouldn’t have a whole suitcase full of pills back in my room at the Town House, I wouldn’t be married to Myra, I wouldn’t
have this stupid fucking aspirator here right now. In a book or a movie. Because—
Suddenly, as they all watch, Eddie’s aspirator rolls across the table by itself. As it rolls it makes a dry rattling sound, a little like maracas, a little like bones a little like laughter. As it reaches the far side, between
Richie and Ben, it flips itself up into the air and falls on the floor. Richie makes a startled half-grab and Bill cries sharply, “Don’t t-t-touch it!”
“The balloons!” Ben yells, and they all turn.
Both balloons tethered to the microfilm recorder now read ASTHMA MEDICINE GIVES YOU CANCER! Below the slogan are grinning skulls.
They explode with twin bangs.
Eddie looks at this, mouth dry, the familiar sensation of suffocation starting to tighten down in his chest like locking bolts.
Bill looks back at him. “Who t-told you and w-w-what did they tell you?
”
Eddie licks his lips, wanting to go after his aspirator, not quite daring to.
Who knew what might be in it now?
He thinks about that day, the 20th, about how it was hot, about how his mother gave him a check, all filled out except for the amount, and a dollar in cash for himself—his allowance.
“Mr. Keene, ” he says, and his voice sounds distant to his own ears, without power. “It was Mr. Keene. ”
“Not exactly the nicest man in Derry, ” Mike says, but Eddie, lost in his thoughts, barely hears him.
Yes, it was hot that day, but cool inside the Center Street Drug, the wooden fans turning leisurely below the pressed-tin ceiling, and there was
that comforting smell of mixed powders and nostrums. This was the place where they sold health—that was his mother’s unstated but clearly communicated conviction, and with his body-clock set at half-past eleven, Eddie had no suspicion that his mother might be wrong about that, or anything else.
Well, Mr. Keene sure put an end to that, he thinks now with a kind of sweet anger.
He remembers standing at the comic rack for awhile, spinning it idly to see if there were any new Batmans or Superboys, or his own favorite,
Plastic Man. He had given his mother’s list (she sent him to the drugstore as other boys’ mothers might send them to the corner grocery) and his
mother’s check to Mr. Keene; he would fill the order and then write in the amount on the check, giving Eddie the receipt so she could deduct the amount from her checking balance. This was all SOP for Eddie. Three
different kinds of prescription for his mother, plus a bottle of Geritol because, she told him mysteriously, “It’s full of iron, Eddie, and women need more iron than men. ” Also, there would be his vitamins, a bottle of Dr. Swett’s Elixir for Children. . . and, of course, his asthma medicine.
It was always the same. Later he would stop in the Costello Avenue Market with his dollar and get two candy-bars and a Pepsi. He would eat the candy, drink the soda, and jingle his pocket-change all the way home.
But this day was different; it would end with him in the hospital and that
was certainly different, but it started being different when Mr. Keene called him. Because instead of handing him the big white bag full of cures and the receipt, admonishing him to put the receipt in his pocket so he wouldn’t lose it, Mr. Keene looked at him thoughtfully and said, “Come
2
back into the office for a minute, Eddie. I want to talk to you. ”
Eddie only looked at him for a moment, blinking, a little scared. The idea that maybe Mr. Keene thought he had been shoplifting flashed briefly through his mind. There was that sign by the door that he always read when he came into the Center Street Drug. It was written in accusing black letters
so large that he bet even Richie Tozier could read it without his glasses:
SHOPLIPTING IS NOT A “KICK” OR A “GROOVE” OR A “GASSER”! SHOPLIFTING IS A CRIME, AND WE WILL PROSECUTE!
Eddie had never shoplifted anything in his life, but that sign always made him feel guilty—made him feel as if Mr. Keene knew something about him that he didn’t know about himself.
Then Mr. Keene confused him even further by saying, “How about an ice-cream soda? ”
“Well—”
“Oh, it’s on the house. I always have one in the office around this time of day. Good energy, unless you need to watch your weight, and I’d say neither of us do. My wife says I look like a stuffed string. Your friend there the Hanscom boy, he’s the one who needs to have a care about his weight What flavor, Eddie? ”
“Well, my mother said to get home as soon as I—”
“You look like a chocolate man to me. Chocolate okay for you? ” Mr.
Keene’s eyes twinkled, but it was a dry twinkle, like the sun shining on
mica in the desert. Or so Eddie, a fan of such Western writers as Max Brand and Archie Joceylen, thought.
“Sure, ” Eddie gave in. Something about the way Mr. Keene pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up on his blade of a nose made him edgy. Something about the way Mr. Keene seemed both nervous and secretly pleased. He didn’t want to go into the office with Mr. Keene. This wasn’t about a soda. Nope. And whatever it was about, Eddie had an idea it wasn’t such great news.
Maybe he’s going to tell me I got cancer or something, Eddie thought wildly. That kid-cancer. Leukemia. Jesus!
Oh, don’t be so stupid, he answered himself back, trying to sound, in his own mind, like Stuttering Bill. Stuttering Bill had replaced Jock Mahoney, who played the Range Rider on TV Saturday mornings, as the great hero of Eddie’s life. In spite of the fact that he couldn’t talk right, Big Bill always seemed to be on top of things. This guy’s a pharmacist, not a doctor, for cripe’s sake. But Eddie was still nervous.
Mr. Keene had raised the counter-gate and was beckoning to Eddie with one bony finger. Eddie went, but reluctantly.
Ruby, the counter-girl, was sitting by the cash register and reading a
Silver Screen. “Would you make two ice-cream sodas, Ruby? ” Mr. Keene called to her. “One chocolate, one coffee? ”
“Sure, ” Ruby said, marking her place in the magazine with a tinfoil gum wrapper and getting up.
“Bring them into the office. ” “Sure. ”
“Come on, son. I’m not going to bite you. ” And Mr. Keene actually winked, astounding Eddie completely.
He had never been in back of the counter before, and he gazed at all the bottles and pills and jars with interest. He would have lingered if he had been on his own, examining Mr. Keene’s mortar and pestle, his scales and weights, the fishbowls full of capsules. But Mr. Keene propelled him forward into the office and closed the door firmly behind him. When it clicked shut Eddie felt a warning tightness in his chest and fought it. There would be a fresh aspirator in with his mother’s things, and he could have a long satisfying honk on it as soon as he was out of here.
A bottle of licorice whips stood on the corner of Mr. Keene’s desk. He offered it to Eddie.
“No thank you, ” Eddie said politely.
Mr. Keene sat down in the swivel chair behind his desk and took one.
Then he opened his drawer and took something out. He put it down next to the tall bottle of licorice whips and Eddie felt real alarm course through him. It was an aspirator. Mr. Keene tilted back in his swivel chair until his head was almost touching the calendar on the wall behind him. The picture on the calendar showed more pills. It said SQUIBB. And—
—and for one nightmare moment, when Mr. Keene opened his mouth to speak, Eddie remembered what had happened in the shoe store when he was just a little kid, when his mother had screamed at him for putting his foot in the X-ray machine. For that one nightmare moment Eddie thought Mr.
Keene would say: “Eddie, nine out of ten doctors agree that asthma
medicine gives you cancer, just like the X-ray machines they used to have in the shoe stores. You’ve probably got it already. Just thought you ought to know. ”
But what Mr. Keene did say was so peculiar that Eddie could think of no response at all; he could only sit in the straight wooden chair on the other
side of Mr. Keene’s desk like a nit. “This has gone on long enough. ”
Eddie opened his mouth and then closed it again. “How old are you, Eddie? Eleven, isn’t it? ”
“Yes, sir, ” Eddie said faintly. His breathing was indeed shallowing up.
He wasn’t yet whistling like a tea-kettle (which was how Richie put it:
Somebody turn Eddie off! He’s reached the boil!), but that might happen at any time. He looked longingly at the aspirator on Mr. Keene’s desk, and
because something else seemed required, he said: “I’ll be twelve in November. ”
Mr. Keene nodded, then leaned forward like a TV pharmacist in a commercial and clasped his hands together. His eyeglasses gleamed in the strong light thrown by the overhead fluorescent bars. “Do you know what a placebo is, Eddie? ”
Nervously, taking his best guess, Eddie said: “Those are the things on cows that the milk comes out of, aren’t they? ”
Mr. Keene laughed and rocked back in his chair. “No, ” he said, and Eddie blushed to the roots of his flattop haircut. Now he could hear the whistle creeping into his breathing. “A placebo—”
He was interrupted by a brisk double tap at the door. Without waiting for a come-in call, Ruby entered with an oldfashioned ice-cream-soda glass in each hand. “Yours must be the chocolate, ” she said to Eddie, and gave him a grin. He returned it as best he could, but his interest in ice-cream sodas
was at its lowest ebb in his entire personal history. He felt scared in a way that was both vague and specific; it was the way he felt scared when he was sitting on Dr. Handor’s examination table in his underpants, waiting for the doctor to come in and knowing his mother was out in the waiting room, taking up most of one sofa, a book (most likely Norman Vincent Peale’s
The Power of Positive Thinking or Dr. Jarvis’s Vermont Folk Medicine) held firmly up to her eyes like a hymnal. Stripped of his clothes and defenseless, he felt caught between the two of them.
He sipped some of his soda as Ruby went out, hardly tasting it.
Mr. Keene waited until the door was shut and then smiled his dry sun-on- mica smile again. “Loosen up, Eddie. I’m not going to bite you, or hurt you. ”
Eddie nodded, because Mr. Keene was a grownup and you were supposed to agree with grownups at all costs (his mother had taught him that), but inside he was thinking: Oh, I’ve heard that bullshit before. It was about what the doctor said when he opened his sterilizer and the sharp frightening smell of alcohol drifted out, stinging his nostrils. That was the smell of shots and this was the smell of bullshit and both came down to the same thing: when they said it was just going to be a little prick, something you hardly felt at all, that meant it was going to hurt plenty.
He tried another half-hearted suck on his soda straw, but it was no good; he needed all the space in his narrowing throat just to suck in air. He looked at the aspirator sitting in the middle of Mr. Keene’s blotter, wanted to ask for it, didn’t quite dare. A weird thought occurred to him: maybe Mr. Keene knew he wanted it but didn’t dare ask for it, that maybe Mr. Keene was
(torturing)
teasing him. Except that was a really stupid idea, wasn’t it? A grownup— particularly a health-dispensing grownup—wouldn’t tease a little kid that way, would he? Surely not. It wasn’t even to be considered, because consideration of such an idea might necessitate a terrifying reappraisal of
the world as Eddie understood it.
But there it was, there it was, so near and yet so far, like water just beyond the reach of a man who was dying of thirst in the desert. There it was, standing on the desk below Mr. Keene’s smiling mica eyes.
Eddie wished, more than anything else, that he was down in the Barrens with his friends around him. The thought of a monster, some great monster, lurking under the city where he had been born and where he had grown up, using the sewers and drains to creep from place to place—that was a frightening thought, and the thought of actually fighting that creature, of taking it on, was even more frightening . . . but somehow this was worse.
How could you fight a grownup who said it wasn’t going to hurt when you knew it was? How could you fight a grownup who asked you funny
questions and said obscurely ominous things like This has gone on long enough?
And almost idly, in a kind of side-thought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought. It was no big deal, not a thought that came in a revelatory flash or announced itself with trumpets and bells. It just came and was gone, almost buried under the
stronger, overriding thought: I want my aspirator and I want to be out of here.
“Loosen up, ” Mr. Keene said again. “Most of your trouble, Eddie, comes from being so tight and stiff all the time. Take your asthma, for instance.
Look here. ”
Mr. Keene opened his desk drawer, fumbled around inside, and then brought out a balloon. Expanding his narrow chest as much as possible (his tie bobbed like a narrow boat riding a mild wave), he huffed into it and
blew it up. CENTER STREET DRUG, the balloon said. PRESCRIPTIONS, SUNDRIES, OSTOMY SUPPLIES. Mr. Keene pinched the balloon’s rubber neck and held the balloon out in front of him. “Now pretend for just a moment that this is a lung, ” he said. “Your lung. I should really blow up two, of course, but since I only had one left from the sale we had just after Christmas—”
“Mr. Keene, could I have my aspirator now? ” Eddie’s head was starting to pound. He could feel his windpipe sealing itself up. His heartrate was up, and sweat stood out on his forehead. His chocolate ice-cream soda stood on the corner of Mr. Keene’s desk, the cherry on top sinking slowly into a goo of whipped cream.
“In a minute, ” Mr. Keene said. “Pay attention, Eddie. I want to help you. It’s time somebody did. If Russ Handor isn’t man enough to do it, I’ll have to. Your lung is like this balloon, except it’s surrounded by a blanket of muscle; these muscles are like the arms of a man operating a bellows, you
understand? In a healthy person, those muscles help the lungs to expand and contract easily. But if the owner of those healthy lungs is always getting stiff and tight, the muscles begin to work against the lungs rather than with them. Look!”
Mr. Keene wrapped a bunched, bony, liverspotted hand around the balloon and squeezed. The balloon bulged over and under his fist and Eddie winced, trying to get ready for the pop. Simultaneously he felt his breathing stop altogether. He leaned over the desk and grabbed for the aspirator on the blotter. His shoulder struck the heavy ice-cream-soda glass. It toppled off
the desk and shattered on the floor like a bomb.
Eddie heard that only dimly. He was clawing the top off the aspirator, slamming the nozzle into his mouth, triggering it off. He took a tearing heaving breath, his thoughts a ratrun of panic as they always were at
moments like this: Please Mommy I’m suffocating I can’t BREATHE oh my dear God oh dear Jesus meekandmild I can’t BREATHE please I don’t want to die don’t want to die oh please—
Then the fog from the aspirator condensed on the swollen walls of his throat and he could breathe again.
“I’m sorry, ” he said, nearly crying. “I’m sorry about the glass . . . I’ll clean it up and pay for it . . . just please don’t tell my mother, okay? I’m sorry, Mr. Keene, but I couldn’t breathe—”
There was that double tap at the door again and Ruby poked her head in. “Is everything—”
“Everything’s fine, ” Mr. Keene said sharply. “Leave us. ”
“Well I’m saw-ry!” Ruby said. She rolled her eyes and closed the door.
Eddie’s breath was starting to whistle in his throat again. He took another pull at the aspirator and then began his fumbling apology once more. He ceased only when he saw that Mr. Keene was smiling at him—that peculiar dry smile. Mr. Keene’s hands were laced over his middle. The balloon lay on his desk. A thought came to Eddie; he tried to hold it back and couldn’t. Mr. Keene looked as if Eddie’s asthma attack had tasted better to him than his half-finished coffee soda.
“Don’t be concerned, ” he said. “Ruby will clean up the mess later, and if you want to know the truth, I’m rather glad you broke the glass. Because I promise not to tell your mother that you broke it if you promise not to tell her we had this little talk. ”
“Oh, I promise that, ” Eddie said eagerly.
“Good, ” Mr. Keene said. “We have an understanding. And you feel much better now, don’t you? ”
Eddie nodded. “Why? ”
“Why? Well . . . because I had my medicine. ” He looked at Mr. Keene
the way he looked at Mrs. Casey in school when he had given an answer he wasn’t quite sure of.
“But you didn’t have any medicine, ” Mr. Keene said. “You had a placebo. A placebo, Eddie, is something that looks like medicine and tastes like medicine but isn’t medicine. A placebo isn’t medicine because it has no active ingredients. Or, if it is medicine, it’s medicine of a very special sort.
Head-medicine. ” Mr. Keene smiled. “Do you understand that, Eddie?
Head-medicine. ”
Eddie understood, all right; Mr. Keene was telling him he was crazy. But through numb lips he said, “No, I don’t get you. ”
“Let me tell you a little story, ” Mr. Keene said. “In 1954, a series of medical tests on ulcer patients was run at DePaul University. One hundred ulcer patients were given pills. They were all told the pills would help their ulcers, but fifty of the patients really got placebos. They were, in fact,
M&M’s given a uniform pink coating. ” Mr. Keene uttered a strange shrill giggle—that of a man describing a prank rather than an experiment. “Of
those one hundred patients, ninety-three said they felt a definite improvement, and eighty-one showed an improvement. So what do you think? What conclusion do you draw from such an experiment, Eddie? ”
“I don’t know, ” Eddie said faintly.
Mr. Keene tapped his head solemnly. “Most sickness starts in here, that’s what I think. I’ve been in this business a long long time, and I knew about placebos a mighty stretch of years before those doctors at DePaul University did their study. Usually it’s old folks who end up getting the placebos. The old fellow or the old girl will go to the doctor, convinced that they’ve got heart disese or cancer or diabetes or some damn thing. But in a good many cases it’s nothing like that at all. They don’t feel good because
they’re old, that’s all. But what’s a doctor to do? Tell them they’re like
watches with wornout mainsprings? Huh! Not likely. Doctors like their fees too much. ” And now Mr. Keene’s face wore an expression somewhere between a smile and a sneer.
Eddie just sat there waiting for it to be over, to be over, to be over. You didn’t have any medicine: those words clanged in his mind.
“The doctors don’t tell them that, and I don’t tell them that, either. Why bother? Sometimes an old party will come in with a prescription blank that will say it right out: Placebo, or 25 grains Blue Skies, which was how old Doc Pearson used to put it. ”
Mr. Keene cackled briefly and then sucked on his coffee soda.
“Well, what’s wrong with it? ” he asked Eddie, and when Eddie only sat there, Mr. Keene answered his own question. “Why, nothing! Nothing at all!
“At least usually.
“Placebos are a blessing for old people. And then there are other cases— folks with cancer, folks with degenerative heart disease, folks with terrible things that we don’t understand yet, some of them children just like you, Eddie! In cases like that, if a placebo makes the patient feel better, where is the harm? Do you see the harm, Eddie? ”
“No sir, ” Eddie said, and looked down at the splatter of chocolate ice cream, soda-water, whipped cream, and broken glass on the floor. In the
middle of all this was the maraschino cherry, as accusing as a blood-clot at a crime scene. Looking at this mess made his chest feel tight again.
“Then we’re like Ike and Mike! We think alike! Five years ago, when Vernon Maitland had cancer of the esophagus—a painful, painful sort of cancer—and the doctors had run out of anything effective they could give him for his pain, I came by his hospital room with a bottle of sugar-pills. He was a special friend, you see. And I said, ‘Vern, these are special experimental pain-pills. The doctor doesn’t know I’m giving them to you, so for God’s sake be careful and don’t tattle on me. They might not work, but I think they will. Take no more than one a day, and only if the pain is especially bad. ’ He thanked me with tears in his eyes. Tears, Eddie! And they worked for him! Yes! They were only sugar-pills, but they killed most of his pain . . . because pain is here. ”
Solemnly, Mr. Keene tapped his head again. Eddie said: “My medicine does so work. ”
“I know it does, ” Mr. Keene replied, and smiled a maddening complacent grownup’s smile. “It works on your chest because it works on your head. HydrOx, Eddie, is water with a dash of camphor thrown in to give it a medicine taste. ”
“No, ” Eddie said. His breath had begun to whistle again.
Mr. Keene drank some of his soda, spooned some of the melting ice cream, and fastidiously wiped his chin with his handkerchief while Eddie used his aspirator again.
“I want to go now, ” Eddie said. “Let me finish, please. ”
“No! I want to go, you’ve got your money and I want to go!”
“Let me finish, ” Mr. Keene said, so forbiddingly that Eddie sat back in his chair. Grownups could be so hateful in their power sometimes. So
hateful.
“Part of the problem here is that your doctor, Russ Handor, is weak. And part of the problem is that your mother is determined you are ill. You, Eddie, have been caught in the middle. ”
“I’m not crazy, ” Eddie whispered, the words coming out in a bare husk. Mr. Keene’s chair creaked like a monstrous cricket. “What? ”
“I said I’m not crazy!” Eddie shouted. Then, immediately, a miserable blush rose into his face.
Mr. Keene smiled. Think what you like, that smile said. Think what you
like, and I’ll think what I like.
“All I’m telling you, Eddie, is that you’re not physically ill. Your lungs
don’t have asthma; your mind does. ” “You mean I’m crazy. ”
Mr. Keene leaned forward, looking at him intently over his folded hands. “I don’t know, ” he said softly. “Are you? ”
“It’s all a lie!” Eddie cried, surprised the words came out so strongly from his tight chest. He was thinking of Bill, how Bill would react to such amazing charges. Bill would know what to say, stutter or not. Bill would know how to be brave. “All a great big lie! I do have asthma, I do!”
“Yes, ” Mr. Keene said, and now the dry smile had become a weird skeletal grin. “But who gave it to you, Eddie? ”
Eddie’s brain thudded and whirled. Oh, he felt sick, he felt very sick. “Four years ago, in 1954—the same year as the DePaul tests, oddly
enough—Dr. Handor began prescribing this HydrOx for you. That stands for hydrogen and oxygen, the two components of water. I have condoned this deception since then, but I will not condone it anymore. Your asthma medicine works on your mind rather than your body. Your asthma is the
result of a nervous tightening of the diaphragm that is ordered by your mind
. . . or your mother.
“You are not sick. ”
A terrible silence descended.
Eddie sat in his chair, his mind whirling. For a moment he considered the possibility that Mr. Keene might be telling the truth, but there were
ramifications in such an idea that he could not face. Yet why would Mr. Keene lie, especially about something so serious?
Mr. Keene sat and smiled his bright dry heartless desert smile.
I do have asthma, I do. The day that Henry Bowers punched me in the nose, the day Bill and I were trying to make a dam in the Barrens, I almost died. Am I supposed to think that my mind was just . . . just making all of that up?
But why would he lie? (It was only years later, in the library, that Eddie asked himself the more terrible question: Why would he tell me the truth? )
Dimly he heard Mr. Keene saying: “I’ve kept my eye on you, Eddie. I told you all this because you’re old enough to understand, but also because I’ve noticed you’ve finally made some friends. They are good friends, aren’t they? ”
“Yes, ” Eddie said.
Mr. Keene tilted his chair back (it made that cricketlike noise again), and closed one eye in what might or might not have been a wink. “And I’ll bet your mother doesn’t like them much, does she? ”
“She likes them fine, ” Eddie said, thinking of the cutting things his mother had said about Richie Tozier (He has a foul mouth . . . and I’ve smelled his breath, Eddie . . . I think he smokes), her sniffing remark not to loan any money to Stan Uris because he was a Jew, her outright dislike of Bill Denbrough and “that fatboy. ”
He repeated to Mr. Keene: “She likes them a lot. ”
“Does she? ” Mr. Keene said, still smiling. “Well, maybe she’s right and maybe she’s wrong, but at least you have friends. Maybe you ought to talk to them about this problem of yours. This . . . this mental weakness. See what they have to say. ”
Eddie didn’t reply. He was through talking to Mr. Keene; that seemed safer. And he was afraid that if he didn’t get out of here soon, he really would cry.
“Well!” Mr. Keene said, standing up. “I think that just about finishes us up, Eddie. If I’ve upset you, I’m sorry. I was only doing my duty as I saw it. I—”
But before he could say any more, Eddie had snatched up his aspirator and the white bag of pills and nostrums and had fled. One of his feet skidded in the ice-creamy mess on the floor and he almost fell. Then he was running, bolting from the Center Street Drug Store in spite of his whistling breath. Ruby stared after him over her movie magazine, her mouth open.
Behind him he seemed to sense Mr. Keene standing in the doorway of his office and watching his graceless retreat over the prescription counter, gaunt and neat and thoughtful and smiling. Smiling that dry desert smile.
He paused outside on the three-way corner of Kansas, Main, and Center. He took another deep pull from his aspirator while sitting on the low stone wall by the bus-stop—his throat was now positively slimy with that medicinal taste
(nothing but water with some camphor thrown in)
and he thought that if he had to use the aspirator again today he would probably puke his guts.
He slipped it into his pocket and watched the traffic pass back and forth, headed up Main Street and down Up-Mile Hill. He tried not to think. The sun beat down on his head, blaringly hot. Each passing car threw bright
darts of reflection into his eyes, and a headace was starting in his temples. He couldn’t find a way to stay angry at Mr. Keene, but he had no trouble at all feeling bad for Eddie Kaspbrak. He felt real bad for Eddie Kaspbrak. He supposed that Bill Denbrough never wasted time feeling sorry for himself, but Eddie just couldn’t seem to help it.
More than anything else he wanted to do exactly what Mr. Keene had suggested: go down to the Barrens and tell his friends everything, see what they would say, find out what answers they had. But he couldn’t do that
now. His mother would expect him home with her medicines soon
(your mind . . . or your mother)
and if he wasn’t there
(your mother is determined you are ill)
trouble would follow. She would assume he had been with Bill or Richie or “the Jewboy, ” as she called Stan (insisting that she meant no prejudice by so calling him, but was simply “slapping down the cards”—her phrase for truth-telling in difficult situations). And standing here on this corner, trying hopelessly to sort out his flying thoughts, Eddie knew what she would say if she knew one of his other friends was a Negro and another was a girl—a girl old enough to be getting bosoms.
He started slowly toward Up-Mile Hill, dreading the stiff climb in this heat. It felt almost hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. For the first time he found himself wishing for school to be in again, for a new grade
and a new teacher’s peculiarities to contend with. For this dreadful summer to be over.
He stopped halfway up the hill, not far from where Bill Denbrough would rediscover his bike Silver twenty-seven years later, and pulled his aspirator from his pocket. Hydrox Mist, the label said. Administer as needed.
Something else clicked home. Administer as needed. He was only a kid, still wet behind the ears (as his mother sometimes told him when she was “slapping down the cards”), but even a kid of eleven knew that you didn’t give someone real medicine and then write on the label Administer as needed. If it was real medicine, it would be too easy to kill yourself as you went happy-assholing around and administering as needed. He supposed you could kill yourself with plain old aspirin doing that.
He looked fixedly at the aspirator, unaware of the old lady who glanced curiously at him as she passed on down the hill toward Main Street with her shopping basket over her arm. He felt betrayed. And for one moment he almost cast the plastic squeeze-bottle into the gutter—better yet, he thought, throw it down that sewer-grating. Sure! Why not? Let It have it down there in Its tunnels and dripping sewer-pipes. Have a pla-cee-bo, you hundred- faced creep! He uttered a wild laugh and came within an ace of doing it.
But in the end, habit was simply too strong. He replaced the aspirator in his right front pants pocket and walked on, hardly hearing the occasional blare of a horn or the diesel drone of the Bassey Park bus as it passed him. He
was likewise unaware of how close he was to discovering what being hurt
—really hurt—was all about.
3
When he came out of the Costello Avenue Market twenty-five minutes later with a Pepsi in one hand and two Payday candybars in the other, Eddie was unpleasantly surprised to see Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Moose Sadler, and Patrick Hockstetter kneeling on the crushed gravel to the left of the
little store. For a moment Eddie thought they were shooting craps; then he
saw they were pooling their money on Victor’s baseball shirt. Their summer-school textbooks lay off to one side in an untidy heap.
On an ordinary day Eddie might have simply faded quietly back into the store and asked Mr. Gedreau if he could leave by the back door but this had been no ordinary day. Eddie froze right where he was instead, one hand still holding the screen door with its tin cigarette signs (WINSTON TASTES GOOD, LIKE A CIGARETTE SHOULD, TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES, the bellboy
who was shouting CALL FOR PHILIP MORRIS), the other clutching the brown grocery bag and the white drugstore bag.
Victor Criss saw him and elbowed Henry. Henry looked up; so did Patrick Hockstetter. Moose, whose relays worked more slowly, went on counting out pennies for five seconds or so before the sudden silence sank into him and he also looked up.
Henry stood, brushing loose pieces of gravel from the knees of the biballs he was wearing. There were splints on the sides of his bandaged nose, and
his voice had a nasal foghorning quality. “Well I be go to hell, ” he said. “One of the rock-throwers. Where’s your friends, asshole? They inside? ”
Eddie was shaking his head numbly before he realized this was another mistake.
Henry’s smile broadened. “Well, that’s okay, ” he said. “I don’t mind taking you one by one. Come on down here, asshole. ”
Victor stood beside Henry; Patrick Hockstetter trailed behind them, smiling in a porky vacant way Eddie was familiar with from school. Moose was still getting up.
“Come on, asshole, ” Henry said. “Let’s talk about throwing rocks. Let’s talk about that, you wanna? ”
Now that it was too late Eddie decided it would be wise to go back into the store. Back in the store where there was a grownup. But as he retreated
Henry darted forward and grabbed him. He pulled Eddie’s arm, pulled hard, his smile turning into a snarl. Eddie’s hand was ripped free of the screen door. He was pulled off the steps and would have crashed headlong into the gravel if Victor hadn’t caught him roughly under the arms. Victor threw him. Eddie managed to keep on his feet, but only by whirling around twice. The four boys faced him now over a distance of about ten feet, Henry
slightly ahead of the others, smiling. His hair stood up at the back in a cowlick.
Behind Henry and on his left was Patrick Hockstetter, a genuinely spooky kid. Eddie hadn’t ever seen him with anyone else until today. He was just enough overweight so that his belly always hung slightly over his belt, which had a Red Ryder buckle. His face was perfectly round, and usually as pale as cream. Now he had a slight sunburn. It was heaviest on his nose, which was peeling, but it spread out toward either cheek like
wings. In school, Patrick liked to kill flies with his green plastic SkoolTime ruler and put them in his pencil-box. Sometimes he would show his fly collection to some new kid in the playyard at recess, his heavy lips smiling, his gray-green eyes sober and thoughtful. He never spoke when he exhibited his dead flies, no matter what the new kid might say to him. That expression was on his face now.
“How ya doin, Rock Man? ” Henry asked, advancing across the distance between them. “Got any rocks on you? ”
“Leave me alone, ” Eddie said in a trembling voice.
“ ‘Leave me alone, ’ ” Henry mimicked, waving his hands in mock terror.
Victor laughed. “What are you going to do if I don’t, Rock Man? Huh? ” His hand flashed out, incredibly fast, and exploded against Eddie’s cheek with a gunshot sound. Eddie’s head rocked back. Tears began to pour from his left eye.
“My friends are inside, ” Eddie said.
“ ‘My friends are inside, ’ ” Patrick Hockstetter squealed. “Ooooh!
Ooooh! Ooooh!” He began to circle to Eddie’s right.
Eddie started to turn in that direction, Henry’s hand flashed out again, and this time his other cheek flamed.
Don’t cry, he thought, that’s what they want, but don’t you do it Eddie Bill wouldn’t do it, Bill wouldn’t cry, and don’t you cry, eith—
Victor stepped forward and gave Eddie a hard open-handed push in the middle of his chest. Eddie stumbled half a step backward and then fell sprawling over Patrick, who had crouched directly behind his feet. He thudded to the gravel, scraping his arms. There was a whoof! as the wind rushed out of him.
A moment later Henry Bowers was on top of him, his knees pinning Eddie’s arms, his butt on Eddie’s stomach.
“Got any rocks, Rock Man? ” Henry raved down at him, and Eddie was more frightened by the mad light in Henry’s eyes than he was by the pain in his arms or by his inability to get his breath back. Henry was nuts.
Somewhere close by, Patrick tittered.
“You wanna throw rocks? Huh? I’ll give you rocks! Here! Here’s some rocks!”
Henry swept up a handful of gravel and slammed it down into Eddie’s face. He rubbed the gravel into Eddie’s skin, cutting his cheeks, his eyelids, his lips. Eddie opened his mouth and screamed.
“Want rocks? I’ll give you rocks! Here’s some rocks, Rock Man! You want rocks? Okay! Okay! Okay!”
Gravel slammed into his open mouth, lacerating his gums, grinding against his teeth. He felt sparks fly against his fillings. He screamed again and spat gravel out.
“Want some more rocks? Okay? How about a few more? How about—” “Stop that! Here, here! Stop that! You, boy! Quit on him! Right now!
You hear me? Quit on him!”
Through half-lidded, tear-blurred eyes, Eddie saw a big hand come down and grab Henry by the collar of his shirt and the right strap of his biballs.
The hand gave a yank and Henry was pulled off. He landed in the gravel and got up. Eddie rose more slowly. He was trying to scramble to his feet, but his scrambler seemed temporarily broken. He gasped and spat chunks of bloody gravel out of his mouth.
It was Mr. Gedreau, dressed in his long white apron, and he looked furious. There was no fear in his face, although Henry stood about three
inches taller and probably outweighed him by fifty pounds. There was no fear in his face because he was the grownup and Henry was the kid. Except this time, Eddie thought, that might not mean anything. Mr. Gedreau didn’t understand. He didn’t understand that Henry was nuts.
“You get out of here, ” Mr. Gedreau said, advancing on Henry until he stood toe to toe with the hulking sullen-faced boy. “You get out and you don’t want to come back, either. I don’t hold with bullying. I don’t hold with four against one. What would your mothers think? ”
He swept the others with his hot, angry eyes. Moose and Victor dropped their gazes and examined their sneakers. Patrick only stared at and through Mr. Gedreau with that vacant gray-green look. Mr. Gedreau looked back at
Henry and got just as far as “You get on your bikes and—” when Henry gave him a good hard push.
An expression of surprise that would have been comical in other
circumstances spread across Mr. Gedreau’s face as he flew backward, loose gravel spurting out from under his heels. He struck the steps leading up to
the screen door and sat down hard. “Why you—” he began.
Henry’s shadow fell on him. “Get inside, ” he said.
“You—” Mr. Gedreau said, and this time he stopped on his own. Mr.
Gedreau had finally seen it, Eddie realized—the light in Henry’s eyes. He got up quickly, apron flapping. He went up the stairs as fast as he could, stumbling on the second one from the top and going briefly to one knee. He was up again at once, but that stumble, as brief as it had been, seemed to rob him of the rest of his grownup authority.
He spun around at the top and yelled: “I’m calling the cops!”
Henry made as if to lunge for him, and Mr. Gedreau flinched back. That was the end, Eddie realized. As incredible, as unthinkable as it seemed,
there was no protection for him here. It was time to go.
While Henry was standing at the bottom of the steps and glaring up at Mr. Gedreau and while the others were staring, transfixed (and, except for Patrick Hockstetter, not a little horrified) by this sudden successful defiance of adult authority, Eddie saw his chance. He whirled, took to his heels, and ran.
He was halfway up the block before Henry turned, his eyes blazing. “Get him!” he bellowed.
Asthma or no asthma, Eddie ran them a good race that day. There were spaces, some of them as long as fifty feet, when he couldn’t remember if the soles of his P. F. Flyers had touched the sidewalk or not. For a few moments he even entertained the giddy notion that he might be able to outrun them.
Then, just before he reached Kansas Street and what might have been safety, a little kid on a trike suddenly pedaled out of a driveway and right into Eddie’s path. Eddie tried to swerve, but running full-out as he had been, he might have done better to jump over the kid (the kid’s name, in fact, was Richard Cowan, and he would grow up, marry, and father a son named Frederick Cowan, who would be drowned in a toilet and then be
partially eaten by a thing that rose up from the toilet like black smoke and then took an unthinkable shape), or at least to try.
One of Eddie’s feet caught on the trike’s back deck, where an
adventurous little shit might stand and push the trike along like a scooter. Richard Cowan, whose unborn son would be murdered by It twenty-seven years later, barely rocked on his trike. Eddie, however, went flying. He struck the sidewalk on his shoulder, rebounded, came down again, and skidded ten feet, erasing the skin from his elbows and knees. He was trying to get up when Henry Bowers hit him like a shell from a bazooka and knocked him flat. Eddie’s nose connected briskly with the concrete. Blood flew.
Henry did a quick side-roll like a paratrooper and was up again. He grabbed Eddie by the nape of the neck and by his right wrist. His breath, snorting through his swelled and splinted nose, was warm and moist.
“Want rocks, Rock Man? Sure! Shit!” He jerked Eddie’s wrist halfway up his back. Eddie yelled. “Rocks for the Rock Man, right, Rock Man? ” He jerked Eddie’s wrist up even higher. Eddie screamed. Behind him, dimly, he could hear the others approaching, and the little kid on the trike starting to bawl. Join the club, kid, he thought, and in spite of the pain, in spite of the
tears and the fear, he brayed a huge donkeylike hee-haw of laughter.
“You think this is funny? ” Henry asked, sounding suddenly astounded rather than furious. “You think this is funny? ” And did Henry also sound scared? Years later Eddie would think Yes, scared, he sounded scared.
Eddie twisted his wrist in Henry’s grip. He was slick with sweat and he almost got away. Perhaps that was why Henry shoved Eddie’s wrist up harder this time than before. Eddie heard a crack in his arm like the sound of winterwood giving under an accumulated plate of ice. The pain that rolled out of his fractured arm was gray and huge. He shrieked, but the sound seemed distant. The color was washing out of the world, and when Henry let go of him and pushed, he seemed to float toward the sidewalk. It took a long time to get down to that old sidewalk. He had a good look at every single crack in it as he glided down. He had a chance to admire the way the July sun glinted off the flecks of mica in that old sidewalk. He had a chance to note the remains of a very old hopscotch grid that had been
done in pink chalk on that old sidewalk. Then, for just a moment, it swam and looked like something else. It looked like a turtle.
He might have fainted then, but he struck on his newly broken arm, and this fresh pain was sharp, bright, hot, terrible. He felt the splintered ends of the greenstick fracture grind together. He bit his tongue, bringing fresh blood. He rolled over on his back and saw Henry, Victor, Moose, and
Patrick standing over him. They looked impossibly tall, impossibly high up, like pallbearers peering into a grave.
“You like that, Rock Man? ” Henry asked, his voice drifting down over a distance, floating through clouds of pain. “You like that action, Rock Man? You like that jobba-nobba? ”
Patrick Hockstetter giggled.
“Your father’s crazy, ” Eddie heard himself say, “and so are you. ”
Henry’s grin faded so fast it might have been slapped off his face. He
drew his foot back to kick . . . and then a siren rose in the still hot afternoon. Henry paused. Victor and Moose looked around uneasily.
“Henry, I think we better get out of here, ” Moose said.
“I know damn well I’m getting out of here, ” Victor said. How far away their voices seemed! Like the clown’s balloons, they seemed to float. Victor took off toward the library, cutting into McCarron Park to get off the street.
Henry hesitated a moment longer, perhaps hoping the cop-car was on
some other business and he could continue with his own. But the siren rose again, closer. “You got lucky, fuckface, ” he said. He and Moose took off after Victor.
Patrick Hockstetter waited for a moment. “Here’s a little something extra for you, ” he whispered in his low, husky voice. He inhaled and spat a large green lunger into Eddie’s upturned, sweating, bloody face. Splat. “Don’t eat it all at once if you don’t want, ” Patrick said, smiling his liverish unsettling smile. “Save some for later, if you want. ”
Then he turned slowly and was also gone.
Eddie tried to wipe the lunger off with his good arm, but even that little movement made the pain flare again.
Now when you started off for the drugstore, you never thought you’d end up on the Costello Avenue sidewalk with a busted arm and Patrick
Hockstetter’s snot running down your face, did you? You never even got to drink your Pepsi. Life’s full of surprises, isn’t it?
Incredibly, he laughed again. It was a weak sound, and it hurt his broken arm to laugh, but it felt good. And there was something else: no asthma. His
breathing was okay, at least for now. A good thing, too. He never would have been able to get to his aspirator. Never in a thousand years.
The siren was very close now, whooping and whooping. Eddie closed his eyes and saw red under his eyelids. Then the red turned black as a shadow fell over him. It was the little kid with the trike.
“You okay? ” the little kid asked. “Do I look okay? ” Eddie asked.
“No, you look terrible, ” the little kid said, and pedaled off, singing “The Farmer in the Dell. ”
Eddie began to giggle. Here was the cop-car; he could hear the squeal of its brakes. He found himself hoping vaguely that Mr. Nell would be in it, even though he knew Mr. Nell was a foot patrolman.
Why in the name of God are you giggling?
He didn’t know, any more than he knew why he should feel, in spite of the pain, such intense relief. Was it maybe just because he was still alive, that the worst he had suffered was a broken arm, and there were still some pieces to pick up? He settled for that, but years later, sitting in the Derry
Library with a glass of gin and prune juice in front of him and his aspirator near at hand, he told the others he thought it was something more than that; he had been old enough to feel that something more, but not to understand or define it.
I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life, he would tell the others. It wasn’t what I thought it would be at all. It didn’t put an end to me as a person. I think . . . it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain.
Eddie turned his head weakly to the right and saw large black Firestone tires, blinding chrome hubcaps, and pulsing blue lights. He heard Mr. Nell’s voice then, thickly Irish, impossibly Irish, more like Richie’s Irish Cop
Voice than Mr. Nell’s real voice . . . but perhaps that was the distance: “Holy Jaysus, it’s the Kaspbrak bye!”
At this point Eddie floated away.
4
And, with one exception, stayed away for quite awhile.
There was a brief period of consciousness in the ambulance. He saw Mr. Nell sitting across from him, tipping a drink from his little brown bottle and reading a paperback called I the Jury. The girl on the cover had the biggest bosoms Eddie had ever seen. His eyes shifted past Mr. Nell to the driver up front. The driver peered around at Eddie with a big leering grin, his skin livid with greasepaint and talcum powder, his eyes shiny as new quarters. It was Pennywise.
“Mr. Nell, ” Eddie husked.
Mr. Nell looked up and smiled. “How are you feelin, me bye? ” “. . . driver . . . the driver . . . ”
“Yes, we’ll be there in a jig, ” Mr. Nell said, and handed him the little brown bottle. “Suck some of this. It’ll make ye feel better. ”
Eddie drank what tasted like liquid fire. He coughed, hurting his arm. He looked toward the front and saw the driver again. Just some guy with a crewcut. No clown.
He drifted off again.
Much later there was the Mergency Room and a nurse wiping blood and dirt and snot and gravel off his face with a cold cloth. It stung, but it felt wonderful at the same time. He heard his mother bugling and clarioning outside, and he tried to tell the nurse not to let her in, but no words would come out, no matter how hard he tried.
“. . . if he’s dying, I want to know!” his mother was bellowing. “You hear me? It’s my right to know, and it’s my right to see him! I can sue you, you know! I know lawyers, plenty of lawyers! Some of my best friends are
lawyers!”
“Don’t try to talk, ” the nurse said to Eddie. She was young, and he could feel her bosoms pressing against his arm. For a moment he had this crazy
idea that the nurse was Beverly Marsh, and then he drifted away again.
When he came back his mother was in the room, talking to Dr. Handor at a mile-a-minute clip. Sonia Kaspbrak was a huge woman. Her legs, encased in support hose, were trunklike but weirdly smooth. Her face was pale now except for hectic flaring blots of rouge.
“Ma, ” Eddie managed, “. . . all right . . . I’m all right
“You’re not, you’re not, ” Mrs. Kaspbrak moaned. She wrung her hands.
Eddie heard her knuckles crack and grind. He began to feel his breath
shorten up as he looked at her, seeing what a state she was in, how this latest escapade of his had hurt her. He wanted to tell her to take it easy or she’d have a heart attack, but he couldn’t. His throat was too dry. “You’re not all right, you’ve had a serious accident, a very serious accident, but you will be all right, I promise you that, Eddie, you will be all right, even if we need to bring in every specialist in the book, oh Eddie . . . Eddie . . . your poor arm . . . ”
She burst into honking sobs. Eddie saw that the nurse who had washed his face was looking at her without much sympathy.
All through this aria, Dr. Handor had been stuttering, “Sonia . . . please,
Sonia . . . Sonia . . . ? ” He was a skinny, limp-looking man with a little mustache that hadn’t grown very well and which, in addition, had been clipped unevenly, so it was longer on the left side than on the right. He looked nervous. Eddie remembered what Mr. Keene had told him that morning and felt a certain sorrow for Dr. Handor.
At last, gathering himself, Russ Handor managed to say: “If you can’t control yourself, you’ll have to leave, Sonia. ”
She whirled on him and he drew back. “I’ll do no such thing! Don’t you even suggest it! This is my son lying here in agony! My son lying here on his bed of pain!”
Eddie astounded them all by finding his voice. “I want you to leave, Ma. If they’re going to do something that’ll make me yell, and I think they are, you’ll feel better if you go. ”
She turned to him, astonished . . . and hurt. At the sight of the hurt on her face, he felt his chest begin to tighten down inexorably. “I certainly will not!” she cried. “What an awful thing to say, Eddie! You’re delirious! You don’t understand what you’re saying, that’s the only explanation!”
“I don’t know what the explanation is, and I don’t care, ” the nurse said. “All I know is that we’re standing here doing nothing while we should be setting your son’s arm. ”
“Are you suggesting—” Sonia began, her voice rising toward the high, bugling note it took on when she was most upset.
“Please, Sonia, ” Dr. Handor said. “Let’s not have an argument here.
Let’s help Eddie. ”
Sonia stood back, but her glowering eyes—the eyes of a mother bear whose cub has been threatened—promised the nurse that there would be
trouble later. Possibly even a suit. Then her eyes misted, extinguishing the glower or at least hiding it. She took Eddie’s good hand and squeezed it so painfully that he winced.
“It’s bad, but you’ll be well again soon, ” she said. “Well again soon, I promise you that. ”
“Sure, Ma, ” Eddie wheezed. “Could I have my aspirator? ”
“Of course, ” she said. Sonia Kaspbrak looked at the nurse triumphantly, as if vindicated of some ridiculous criminal charge. “My son has asthma, ” she said. “It’s quite serious, but he copes with it beautifully. ”
“Good, ” the nurse said flatly.
His ma held the aspirator for him so he could inhale. A moment later Dr.
Handor was feeling Eddie’s broken arm. He was as gentle as possible but the pain was still enormous. Eddie felt like screaming and gritted his teeth against it. He was afraid if he screamed his mother would scream, too.
Sweat stood out on his forehead in large clear drops.
“You’re hurting him, ” Mrs. Kaspbrak said. “I know you are! There’s no need of that! Stop it! There’s no need for you to hurt him! He’s very delcate, he can’t stand that sort of pain!”
Eddie saw the nurse lock her furious eyes with Dr. Handor’s tired, worried ones. He saw the wordless conversation that passed between them: Send that woman out of here, doctor. And in the drop of his eyes: I can’t. I don’t dare.
There was great clarity inside the pain (although, in truth, this was not a clarity that Eddie would want to experience often: the price was too high), and in that unspoken conversation, Eddie accepted everything Mr. Keene had told him. His HydrOx aspirator was filled with nothing more than flavored water. The asthma wasn’t in his throat or his chest or his lungs but in his head. Somehow or other he was going to have to deal with that truth.
He looked at his mother, seeing her clear in his pain: each flower on her Lane Bryant dress, the sweat-stains under her arms where the pads she wore had soaked through, the scuff-marks on her shoes. He saw how small her
eyes were in their pockets of flesh, and now a terrible thought came to him: those eyes were almost predatory, like the eyes of the leper that had crawled out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Here I come, that’s all right . . . it won’t do you any good to run, Eddie. . . .
Dr. Handor put his hands gently around Eddie’s broken arm and squeezed. The pain exploded.
Eddie drifted away.
5
They gave him some liquid to drink and Dr. Handor set the fracture. He heard Dr. Handor telling his ma that it was a greenstick fracture, no more
serious than any childhood break: “It’s the sort of break kids get falling out of trees, ” he said, and Eddie heard his ma respond furiously: “Eddie doesn’t climb trees! Now I want the truth! How bad is he? ”
Then the nurse was giving him a pill. He felt her bosoms against his shoulder again and was grateful for their comforting pressure. Even through the haze he could see that the nurse was angry and he thought he said, She’s not the leper, please don’t think that, she’s only eating me because she loves me, but perhaps nothing came out because the nurse’s angry face didn’t change.
He had a faint recollection of being pushed up a corridor in a wheelchair and his mother’s voice somewhere behind, fading: “What do you mean, visiting hours? Don’t talk to me about visiting hours, that’s my son!”
Fading. He was glad she was fading, glad he was fading. The pain was
gone and the clarity was gone with it. He didn’t want to think. He wanted to drift. He was aware that his right arm felt very heavy. He wondered if they had put it in a cast yet. He couldn’t seem to see if they had or not. He was vaguely aware of radios playing from rooms, of patients who looked like
ghosts in their hospital johnnies walking up and down the wide halls, and that it was hot . . . so very hot. When he was wheeled into his room, he could see the sun going down in an angry orange boil of blood and thought incoherently: Like a great big clown-button.
“Come on, Eddie, you can walk, ” a voice was saying, and he found that he could. He was slid between crisp cool sheets. The voice told him that he would have some pain in the night, but not to ring for a pain-killer unless it got very bad. Eddie asked if he could have a drink of water. The water came
with a straw that had an accordion middle so you could bend it. It was cool and good. He drank it all.
There was pain in the night, a good deal of it. He lay awake in bed, holding the call-button in his left hand but not pressing it. A thunderstorm was going on outside, and when the lightning flashed blue-white, he turned his head away from the windows, afraid he might see a monstrous, grinning face etched across the sky in that electric fire.
At last he slept again, and in his sleep he had a dream. In it he saw Bill, Ben, Richie, Stan, Mike, and Bev—his friends—arriving at the hospital on their bikes (Bill was riding Richie double on Silver). He was surprised to
see that Beverly was wearing a dress—it was a lovely green, the color of
the Caribbean in a National Geographic plate. He couldn’t remember if he had ever seen her in a dress before; all he remembered were jeans and
pedal-pushers and what the girls called “school-sets”: skirts and blouses, the blouses usually white with round collars, the skirts usually brown and pleated and hemmed at mid-shin, so that the scabs on their knees didn’t
show.
In the dream he saw them coming in for the 2:00 P. M. visiting hours and his mother, who had been waiting patiently since eleven, shouting so loudly at them that everyone turned to look at her.
If you think you’re going to go in there, you’ve got another think coming!
Eddie’s mother shouted, and now the clown, who had been sitting here in
the waiting room all along (but way back in one corner, with a copy of Look magazine held up in front of his face until now), jumped up and mimed applause, patting his white-gloved hands together rapidly. He capered and danced, now turning a cartwheel, now executing a neat back-over flip, as Mrs. Kaspbrak ranted at Eddie’s fellow Losers and as they shrank, one by one, behind Bill, who only stood there, pale but outwardly calm, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans (maybe so no one, including Bill himself, would be able to see if they were shaking or not). No one saw the clown except Eddie . . . although a baby who had been sleeping peacefully in his mother’s arms awoke and began to cry lustily.
You’ve done enough damage! Eddie’s ma shouted. I know who those boys were! They’ve been in trouble at school, they’ve even been in trouble with
the police! And just because those boys have something against you is no reason for them to have something against him. I told him so, and he agrees
with me. He wants me to tell you to go away, he’s done with you, he never wants to see any of you again. He doesn’t want your so-called friendship anymore! Any of you! I knew it would lead to trouble, and look at this! My Eddie in the hospital! A boy as delicate as he is . . .
The clown capered and jumped and did splits and stood on one hand. Its smile was real enough now, and in his dream Eddie realized that this was of course what the clown wanted, a nice big wedge to drive among them, splitting them apart and destroying any chance of concerted action. In a kind of filthy ecstasy, the clown did a double barrel-roll and burlesqued kissing his mother’s cheek.
Th-Th-Those b-b-b-hoys who dih-did it—Bill began.
Don’t you speak back to me! Mrs. Kaspbrak shrieked. Don’t you dare speak back to me! He’s done with you, I say! Done!
Then an intern came running into the waiting room and told Eddie’s ma she would have to be quiet or leave the hospital. The clown started to fade,
started to wash out, and as it did it began to change. Eddie saw the leper, the mummy, the bird; he saw the werewolf, and a vampire whose teeth were
Gillette Blue-Blades set at crazy angles like mirrors in a carnival mirror- maze; he saw Frankenstein, the creature, and something fleshy and shell- like that opened and closed like a mouth; he saw a dozen other terrible
things, a hundred. But just before the clown washed out completely, he saw the most terrible thing of all: his ma’s face.
No! he tried to scream. No! No! Not her! Not my ma!
But no one looked around; no one heard. And in the dream’s fading moments, he realized with a cold and wormy horror that they couldn’t hear him. He was dead. It had killed him and he was dead. He was a ghost.
6
Sonia Kaspbrak’s sour-sweet triumph at sending Eddie’s so-called friends away evaporated almost as soon as she stepped into Eddie’s private room the next afternoon, on the 21st of July. She could not tell exactly why the
feeling of triumph should fade like that, or why it should be displaced by an unfocused fear; it was something in her son’s pale face, which was not
blurred with pain or anxiety but instead bore an expression she could not remember ever having seen there before. It was sharp, somehow. Sharp and alert and set.
The confrontation between Eddie’s friends and Eddie’s ma had not occurred in the waiting room, as in Eddie’s dream; she had known they would be coming—Eddie’s “friends, ” who were probably teaching him to smoke cigarettes in spite of his asthma, his “friends” who had such an unhealthy hold over him that they were all he talked about when he came home for the evening, his “friends” who got his arm broken. She had told
all of this to Mrs. Van Prett next door. “The time has come, ” Mrs. Kaspbrak had said grimly, “to slap a few cards down on the table. ” Mrs. Van Prett, who had horrible skin-problems and who could almost always be counted upon to agree eagerly, almost pathetically, with everything Sonia Kaspbrak said, in this case had the temerity to disagree.
I should think you’d be glad he’s made some friends, Mrs. Van Prett said as they hung out their washes in the early-morning cool before work—this had been during the first week of July. And he’s safer if he’s with other
children, Mrs. Kaspbrak, don’t you think so? With all that’s going on in this town, and all the poor children that have been murdered?
Mrs. Kaspbrak’s only reply had been an angry sniff (in fact, she couldn’t just then think of an adequate verbal response, although she thought of
dozens—some of them extremely cutting—later on), and when Mrs. Van Prett called her that evening, sounding rather anxious, to ask if Mrs.
Kaspbrak would be going to the Beano down at Saint Mary’s with her like usual, Mrs. Kaspbrak had replied coldly that she believed she would just stay home that evening and put her feet up instead.
Well, she hoped Mrs. Van Prett was satisfied now. She hoped Mrs. Van Prett saw now that the only danger abroad in Derry this summer wasn’t the s*x-maniac killing children and babies. Here was her son, lying on his bed of pain in Derry Home Hospital, he might never be able to use his good right arm again, she had heard of such things, or, God forbid, loose splinters from the break might work through his bloodstream to his heart and
puncture it and kill him, oh of course God would never allow that to happen, but she had heard of it happening, so that meant God could allow such a thing to happen. In certain cases.
So she lingered on the Home Hospital’s long and shady front porch, knowing they would show up, coldly determined to put paid to this so- called “friendship, ” this camaraderie that ended in broken arms and beds of pain, once and for all.
Eventually they came, as she had known they would, and to her horror she saw that one of them was a nigger. Not that she had anything against niggers; she thought they had every right to ride where they wanted to on the buses down south, and eat at white lunch-counters, and should not be made to sit in nigger heaven at the movies unless they bothered white
(women)
people, but she also believed firmly in what she called the Bird Theory: Blackbirds flew with other blackbirds, not with the robins. Grackles roosted with grackles; they did not mix in with the bluebirds or the nightingales. To each his own was her motto, and seeing Mike Hanlon pedal up with the
others just as if he belonged there caused her resolution, like her anger and her dismay, to grow apace. She thought reproachfully, as if Eddie were here and could listen to her: You never told me that one of your “friends” was a nigger.
Well, she thought, twenty minutes later, stepping into the hospital room where her son lay with his arm in a huge cast that was strapped to his chest (it hurt her heart just to look at it), she had sent them packing in jig time . . . no pun intended. None of them except for the Denbrough boy, the one who had such a horrible stutter, had had the nerve to so much as speak back to her. The girl, whoever she was, had flashed a pair of decidedly slutty jade’s eyes at Sonia—from Lower Main Street or someplace even worse, had been Sonia Kaspbrak’s opinion—but she had wisely kept her mouth shut. If she had dared so much as to let out a peep, Sonia would have given her a piece of her mind; would have told her what sort of girls ran with the boys. There were names for girls like that, and she would not have her son associated,
now or ever, with the girls who bore them.
The others had done no more than look down at their shuffling feet. That was about what she had expected. When she was done saying what she had to say, they had gotten on their bikes and ridden away. The Denbrough boy had the Tozier boy riding double behind him on a huge, unsafe-looking bike, and with an interior shudder Mrs. Kaspbrak had wondered how many
times her Eddie had ridden on that dangerous bike, risking his arms and his legs and his neck and his life.
I did this for you, Eddie, she thought as she walked into the hospital with her head firmly up. I know you may feel a bit disappointed at first; that’s natural enough. But parents know better than their children; the reason God made parents in the first place was to guide, instruct . . . and protect. After his initial disappointment, he would understand. And if she felt a certain relief now, it was of course on Eddie’s behalf and not on her own.
Relief was only to be expected when you had saved your son from bad companions.
Except that her sense of relief was marred by fresh unease now, looking into Eddie’s face. He was not asleep, as she had thought he would be.
Instead of a drugged doze from which he would wake disoriented, dimwitted, and psychologically vulnerable, there was this sharp, watchful look, so different from Eddie’s usual soft tentative glance. Like Ben Hanscom (although Sonia did not know this), Eddie was the sort of boy who would look quickly into a face, as if to test the emotional weather brewing there, and glance just as quickly away. But he was looking at her steadily now (perhaps it’s the medication, she thought, of course that’s it; I’ll have to consult with Dr. Handor about his medication), and she was the one who felt a need to glance aside. He looks like he’s been waiting for me, she thought, and it was a thought that should have made her happy—a boy waiting for his mother must surely be one of God’s most favored creations
—
“You sent my friends away. ” The words came out flatly, with no doubt or question in them.
She flinched almost guiltily, and certainly the first thought to flash through her mind was a guilty one—How does he know that? He can’t
know that!— and she was immediately furious with herself (and him) for feeling that way. So she smiled at him.
“How are we feeling today, Eddie? ”
That was the right response. Someone—some foolish candy-striper, or perhaps even that incompetent and antagonistic nurse from the day before
—had been carrying tales. Someone.
“How are we feeling? ” she asked again when he didn’t respond. She thought he hadn’t heard her. She’d never read in any of her medical
literature of a broken bone affecting the sense of hearing, but she supposed it was possible, anything was possible.
Eddie still didn’t respond.
She came farther into the room, hating the tentative, almost timid feeling inside her, dstrusting it because she had never felt tentative or timid around Eddie before. She felt anger as well, although that was still nascent. What right did he have to make her feel that way, after all she had done for him, after all she had sacrificed for him?
“I’ve talked to Dr. Handor, and he assures me that you’re going to be perfectly all right, ” Sonia said briskly, sitting down in the straight-backed wooden chair by the bed. “Of course if there’s the slightest problem, we’ll go to see a specialist in Portland. In Boston, if that’s what it takes. ” She smiled, as if conferring a great favor. Eddie did not smile back. And still he did not reply.
“Eddie, are you hearing me? ”
“You sent my friends away, ” he repeated.
“Yes, ” she said, dropping the pretense, and said no more. Two could play at that game. She simply looked back at him.
But a strange thing happened; a terrible thing, really. Eddie’s eyes seemed to . . . to grow, somehow. The flecks of gray in them seemed actually to be moving, like racing stormclouds. She became aware suddenly that he was not “in a snit, ” or “having a poopie, ” or any of those things. He was furious with her . . . and Sonia was suddenly scared, because something more than her son seemed to be in this room. She dropped her eyes and fumbled her purse open. She began searching for a Kleenex.
“Yes, I sent them away, ” she said, and found that her voice was strong enough and steady enough . . . as long as she wasn’t looking at him.
“You’ve been seriously injured, Eddie. You don’t need any visitors right
now except for your own ma, and you don’t need visitors like that, ever. If it hadn’t been for them, you’d be home watching the TV right now, or building on your soapbox racer in the garage. ”
It was Eddie’s dream to build a soapbox racer and take it to Bangor. If he won there, he would be awarded an all-expenses-paid trip to Akron, Ohio, for the National Soapbox Derby. Sonia was perfectly willing to allow him
this dream as long as it seemed to her that completion of the racer, which was made out of orange crates and the wheels from a Choo-Choo Flyer
wagon, was just that—a dream. She certainly had no intention of letting Eddie risk his life in such a dangerous contraption, not in Derry, not in
Bangor, and certainly not in Akron, which (Eddie had informed her) would mean riding in an airplane as well as making a suicidal run down a steep hill in a wheeled orange crate with no brakes. But, as her own mother had often said, what a person didn’t know couldn’t hurt him (her mother had also been fond of saying “Tell the truth and shame the devil, ” but when it came to the recollection of aphorisms Sonia, like most people, could be remarkably selective).
“My friends didn’t break my arm, ” Eddie said in that same flat voice. “I told Dr. Handor last night and I told Mr. Nell when he came in this morning. Henry Bowers broke my arm. Some other kids were with him, but Henry did it. If I’d been with my friends, it never would have happened. It happened because I was alone. ”
This made Sonia think of Mrs. Van Prett’s comment about how it was safer to have friends, and that brought the rage back like a tiger. She snapped her head up. “That doesn’t matter and you know it! What do you think, Eddie? That your ma fell off a hay truck yesterday? Is that what you think? I know well enough why the Bowers boy broke your arm. That Paddy cop was at our house, too. That big boy broke your arm because you and your ’friends’ crossed him somehow. Now do you think that would
have happened if you’d listened to me and stayed away from them in the first place? ”
“No—I think that something even worse might have happened,” Eddie said.
“Eddie, you don’t mean that. ”
“I mean it, ” he said, and she felt that power coming off him, coming out of him, in waves. “Bill and the rest of my friends will be back, Ma. That’s something I know. And when they come, you’re not going to stop them.
You’re not going to say a word to them. They’re my friends, and you’re not going to steal my friends just because you’re scared of being alone. ”
She stared at him, flabbergasted and terrified. Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, wetting the powder there. “This is how you talk to your mother now, I guess, ” she said through her sobs. “Maybe this is the way your ‘friends’ talk to their folks. I guess you learned it from them. ”
She felt safer in her tears. Usually when she cried Eddie cried, too. A low weapon, some might say, but were there really any low weapons when it
came to protecting her son? She thought not.
She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes, feeling both unutterably sad, bereft, betrayed . . . and sure. Eddie would not be able to stand against such a flood of tears and sorrow. That cold sharp look would leave his face. Perhaps he would begin to gasp and wheeze a little bit, and
that would be a sign, as it was always a sign, that the fight was over and that she had won another victory . . . for him, of course. Always for him.
She was so shocked to see that same expression on his face—it had, if anything, deepened—that her voice caught in mid-sob. There was sorrow under his expression, but even that was frightening: it struck her in some way as an adult sorrow, and thinking of Eddie as adult in any way always caused a panicky little bird to flutter inside her mind. This was how she felt on the infrequent occasions when she wondered what would happen to her if Eddie didn’t want to go to Derry Business College or the University of Maine in Orono or Husson in Bangor so he could come home every day after his classes were done, what would happen if he met a girl, fell in love, wanted to get married. Where’s the place for me in any of that? the panicky bird-voice would cry when these strange, almost nightmarish thoughts
came. Where would my place be in a life like that? I love you, Eddie! I love
you! I take care of you and I love you! You don’t know how to cook, or change your sheets, or wash your underwear! Why should you? I know those things for you! I know because I love you!
He said it himself now: “I love you, Ma. But I love my friends, too. I think . . . I think you’re making yourself cry. ”
“Eddie, you hurt me so much, ” she whispered, and fresh tears doubled
his pale face, trebled it. If her tears a few moments ago had been calculated, these were not. In her own peculiar way she was tough—she had seen her husband into his grave without cracking up, she had gotten a job in a depressed job-market where it wasn’t easy to get a job, she had raised her son, and when it had been necessary, she had fought for him. These were
the first totally unaffected and uncalculated tears she had wept in years,
perhaps since Eddie had gotten the bronchitis when he was five and she had been so sure he would die as he lay there in his bed of pain, glowing bright with fever, whooping and coughing and gasping for breath. She wept now
because of that terribly adult, somehow alien expression on his face. She was afraid for him, but she was also, in some way, afraid of him, afraid of that aura that seemed to surround him . . . which seemed to demand something of her.
“Don’t make me have to choose between you and my friends, Ma, ”
Eddie said. His voice was uneven, strained, but still under control. “Because that’s not fair. ”
“They’re bad friends, Eddie!” she cried in a near-frenzy. “I know that, I feel that with all my heart, they’ll bring you nothing but pain and grief!” And the most horrible thing of all was that she did sense that; some part of her had intuited it in the eyes of the Denbrough boy, who had stood before her with his hands in his pockets, his red hair flaming in the summer sun.
His eyes had been so grave, so strange and distant . . . like Eddie’s eyes now.
And hadn’t that same aura been around him as was around Eddie now?
The same, but even stronger? She thought yes. “Ma—”
She stood up so suddenly she almost knocked the straight-backed chair over. “I’ll come back this evening, ” she said.
“It’s the shock, the accident, the pain, those things, that make you talk this way. I know it. You . . . you . . . ” She groped, and found her original text in the flying confusion of her mind. “You’ve had a bad accident, but you’re going to be just fine. And you’ll see I’m right, Eddie. They’re bad
friends. Not our sort. Not for you. You think it over and ask yourself if your ma ever told you wrong before. You think about it and . . . and . . . ”
I’m running! she thought with a sick and hurtful dismay. I’m running away from my own son! Oh God, please don’t let this be!
“Ma. ”
For a moment she almost fled anyway, scared of him now, oh yes, he was more than Eddie; she sensed the others in him, his “friends” and something else, something that was beyond even them, and she was afraid it might flash out at her. It was as if he were in the grip of something, some dreadful fever, as he had been in the grip of the bronchitis that time when he was five, when he had almost died.
She paused, her hand on the doorknob, not wanting to hear what he might say . . . and when he said it, it was so unexpected that for a moment she
didn’t really understand it. When comprehension crashed down, it came like a loose load of cement, and for a moment she thought she would faint.
Eddie said: “Mr. Keene said my asthma medicine is just water. ” “What? What? ” She turned blazing eyes on him.
“Just water. With some stuff added to make it taste like medicine. He said it was a pla-cee-bo. ”
“That’s a lie! That is nothing but a solid lie! Why would Mr. Keene want to tell you a lie like that? Well, there are other drugstores in Derry, I guess. I guess—”
“I’ve had time to think about it, ” Eddie said, softly and implacably, his eyes never leaving hers, “and I think he’s telling the truth. ”
“Eddie, I tell you he’s not!” The panic was back, fluttering.
“What I think, ” Eddie said, “is that it must be the truth or there would be some kind of warning on the bottle, like if you take too much it will kill you or at least make you sick. Even—”
“Eddie, I don’t want to hear this!” she cried, and clapped her hands to her ears. “You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re just not yourself and that’s all that it is!”
“Even if it’s something you can just go in and buy without a prescription, they put special instructions on it, ” he went on, not raising his voice. His gray eyes lay on hers, and she couldn’t seem to drop her gaze, or even move it. “Even if it’s just Vicks cough syrup . . . or your Geritol. ”
He paused for a moment. Her hands dropped from her ears; it seemed too much work to hold them up. They seemed very heavy.
“And it’s like . . . you must have known that, too, Ma. ” “Eddie!” She nearly wailed it.
“Because, ” he went on, as if she had not spoken at all—he was frowning now, concentrating on the problem, “because your folks are supposed to
know about medicines. Why, I use that aspirator five, sometimes six times a day. And you wouldn’t let me do that if you thought it could, like, hurt me.
Because it’s your job to protect me. I know it is, because that’s what you always say. So . . . did you know, Ma? Did you know it was just water? ”
She said nothing. Her lips were trembling. It felt as if her whole face was trembling. She was no longer crying. She felt too scared to cry.
“Because if you did, ” Eddie said, still frowning, “if you did know, I’d
want to know why. I can figure some things out, but not why my ma would
want me to think water was medicine . . . or that I had asthma here”—he pointed to his chest—“when Mr. Keene says I only have it up here—” and he pointed to his head.
She thought she would explain everything then. She would explain it quietly and logically. How she had thought he was going to die when he
was five, and how that would have driven her crazy after losing Frank only two years before. How she came to understand that you could only protect your child through watchfulness and love, that you must tend a child as you tended a garden, fertilizing, weeding, and yes, occasionally pruning and thinning, as much as that hurt. She would tell him that sometimes it was better for a child—particularly a delicate child like Eddie—to think he was sick than to really get sick. And she would finish by talking to him about
the deadly foolishness of doctors and the wonderful power of love; she would tell him that she knew he had asthma, and it didn’t matter what the doctors thought or what they gave him for it. She would tell him you could make medicine with more than a malicious meddling druggist’s mortar and pestle. Eddie, she would say, it’s medicine because your mother’s love
makes it medicine, and in just that way, for as long as you want me and let me, I can do that. This is a power that God gives to loving caring mothers. Please, Eddie, please, my heart’s own love, you must believe me.
But in the end she said nothing. Her fright was too great.
“But maybe we don’t even have to talk about it, ” Eddie went on. “Mr.
Keene might have been joking with me. Sometimes grownups . . . you
know, they like to play jokes on kids. Because kids believe almost anything. It’s mean to do that to kids, but sometimes grownups do it. ”
“Yes, ” Sonia Kaspbrak said eagerly. “They like to joke and sometimes they’re stupid . . . mean . . . and . . . and. . . ”
“So I’ll kind of keep an eye out for Bill and the rest of my friends, ”
Eddie said, “and keep right on using my asthma medicine. That’s probably best, don’t you think? ”
She realized only now, when it was too late, how neatly—how cruelly— she had been trapped. What he was doing was almost blackmail, but what
choice did she have? She wanted to ask him how he could be so calculating, so manipulative. She opened her mouth to ask . . . and then closed it again. It was too likely that, in his present mood, he might answer.
But she knew one thing. Yes. One thing for sure: she would never never
never set foot into Mr. Nosy-Parker Keene’s drugstore again in her life.
His voice, oddly shy now, interrupted her thoughts. “Ma? ” She looked up and saw it was Eddie again, just Eddie, and she went to him gladly.
“Can I have a hug, Ma? ”
She hugged him, but carefully, so as not to hurt his broken arm (or
dislodge any loose bone-fragments so they could run an evil race around his bloodstream and then lodge in his heart—what mother would kill her son with love? ), and Eddie hugged her back.
7
As far as Eddie was concerned, his ma left just in time. During the horrible confrontation with her he had felt his breath piling up and up and up in his lungs and throat, still and tideless, stale and brackish, threatening to poison him.
He held on until the door had snicked shut behind her and then he began to gasp and wheeze. The sour air working in his tight throat jabbed up and down like a warm poker. He grabbed for his aspirator, hurting his arm but not caring. He triggered a long blast down his throat. He breathed deep of
the camphor taste, thinking: It doesn’t matter if it’s a placee-bo, words don’t matter if a thing works.
He lay back against his pillows, eyes closed, breathing freely for the first time since she had come in. He was scared, plenty scared. The things he had said to her, the way he had acted—it had been him and yet it hadn’t been him at all. There had been something working in him, working through him, some force . . . and his mother had felt it, too. He had seen it in her eyes and in her trembling lips. He had no sense that this power was an evil one, but
its enormous strength was frightening. It was like getting on an amusement- park ride that was really dangerous and realizing you couldn’t get off until it was over, come what might.
No turning around, Eddie thought, feeling the hot, itchy weight of the cast that encased his broken arm. No one goes home until we get to the end. But God I’m so scared, so scared. And he knew that the truest reason for
demanding she not cut him off from his friends was something he could never have told her: I can’t face this alone.
He cried a little then, and then drifted off into a restless sleep. He dreamed of a darkness in which machinery—pumping machinery—ran on and on.
8
It was threatening showers again that evening when Bill and the rest of the Losers returned to the hospital. Eddie was not surprised to see them come filing in. He had known they would be back.
It had been hot all day—it was generally agreed later that that third week of July was the hottest of an exceptionally hot summer—and the
thunderheads began to build up around four in the afternoon, purple-black and colossal, pregnant with rain, loaded with lightnings. People went about their errands quickly and a little uneasily, with one eye always cocked at the sky. Most agreed it would rain good and hard by dinnertime, washing some of the thick humidity out of the air. Derry’s parks and playgrounds, underpopulated all summer, were totally deserted that evening by six. The rain had still not fallen, and the swings hung moveless and shade-less in a light that was a queer flat yellow. Thunder rumbled thickly—that, a barking dog, and the low mutter of traffic on Outer Main Street were the only
sounds that drifted in through Eddie’s window until the Losers came.
Bill was first, followed by Richie. Beverly and Stan followed them, then Mike. Ben came last. He looked excruciatingly uncomfortable in a white turtleneck sweater.
They came to his bed, solemn. Not even Richie was smiling. Their faces,
Eddie thought, fascinated. Jeezum-crow, their faces!
He was seeing in them what his mother had seen in him that afternoon: that odd combination of power and helplessness. The yellow stormlight lay on their skins, making their faces seem ghostlike, distant, shadowy.
We’re passing over, Eddie thought. Passing over into something new— we’re on the border. But what’s on the other side? Where are we going?
Where?
“H-h-Hello, Eh-Eh-Eddie, ” Bill said. “How you d-d-doin? ” “Okay, Big Bill, ” Eddie said, and tried to smile.
“Had a day yesterday, I guess, ” Mike said. Thunder rumbled behind his voice. Neither the overhead light nor the bedside lamp was on in Eddie’s room, and all of them seemed to fade in and out of the bruised light. Eddie thought of that light all over Derry right now, lying long and still across McCarron Park, falling through the holes in the roof of the Kissing Bridge in smudged lackadaisical rays, making the Kenduskeag look like smoky
glass as it cut its broad shallow path through the Barrens; he thought of seesaws standing at dead angles behind Derry Elementary as the
thunderheads piled up and up; he thought of this thundery yellow light, and the stillness, as if the whole town had fallen asleep . . . or died.
“Yes, ” he said. “It was a big day. ”
“My f-folks are g-going out to a muh-muh-movie the night a-a-after n- next, ” Bill said. “When the p-pic-hictures change. We’re g-going to m- make them then. The suh-suh-suh—”
“Silver balls, ” Richie said. “I thought—”
“It’s better this way, ” Ben said quietly. “I still think we could have made the bullets, but thinking isn’t good enough. If we were grownups—”
“Oh yeah, the world would be peachy if we were grownups,” Beverly said. “Grownups can make anything they want, can’t they? Grownups can do anything they want, and it always comes out right. ” She laughed, a jagged nervous sound. “Bill wants me to shoot It. Can you feature that,
Eddie? Just call me Beverly Oakley. ”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, ” Eddie said, but he thought he did—he was getting some kind of picture, anyway.
Ben explained. They would melt down one of his silver dollars and make two silver balls a little smaller than ball-bearings. And then, if there really was a werewolf residing at 29 Neibolt Street, Beverly would put a silver ball into Its head with Bill’s Bullseye slingshot. Goodbye werewolf. And if they were right about one creature who wore many faces, goodbye It.
There must have been some sort of expression on Eddie’s face, because Richie laughed and nodded.
“I know how you feel, man. I thought Bill must have lost his few remaining marbles when he started talking about using his slingshot instead
of his dad’s gun. But this afternoon—” He stopped and cleared his throat.
This afternoon after your ma blew us out of the water was how he had been about to start, and that obviously wouldn’t do. “This afternoon we went down to the dump. Bill brought his Bullseye. Look. ” From his back pocket Richie took a flattened can which had once held Del Monte pineapple chunks. There was a ragged hole about two inches in diameter through the middle of it. “Beverly did that with a rock, from twenty feet away. Looks
like a . 38 to me. De Trashmouth was convinced. And when de Trashmouth is convinced, de Trashmouth is convinced. ”
“Killing cans is one thing, ” Beverly said. “If it was something else . . . something alive . . . Bill, you should be the one. Really. ”
“N-no, ” Bill said. “We a-a-all t-took turns. You suh-suh-saw how it w-w- went. ”
“How did it go? ” Eddie asked.
Bill explained, slowly and haltingly, while Beverly looked out the
window with her lips pressed so tightly together they were white. She was, for reasons she could not explain even to herself, more than afraid: she was deeply embarrassed by what had happened today. On the way over here tonight she had argued again, passionately, that they try to make the bullets after all . . . not because she was any more sure than Bill or Richie that they would actually work when the time came, but because—if something did happen out at that house—the weapon would be in
(Bill’s)
someone else’s hands.
But facts were facts. They had each taken ten rocks and shot the Bullseye at ten cans set up twenty feet away. Richie had gotten one out of ten (and
his one hit was really only a nick), Ben had gotten two, Bill four, Mike five.
Beverly, shooting almost casually and appearing to aim not at all, had banged nine of the ten cans dead center. The tenth fell over when the rock she fired bounced off the rim.
“But first w-w-w-we g-gotta make the uh-uh-ammo. ”
“Night after next? I should be out by then, ” Eddie said. His mother would protest that . . . but he didn’t think she would protest too much. Not after this afternoon.
“Does your arm hurt? ” Beverly asked. She was wearing a pink dress (not the dress he had seen in his dream; perhaps she had worn that this
afternoon, when Ma sent them away) on which she had appliquéd small flowers. And silk or nylon hose; she looked very adult but also somehow very childlike, like a girl playing dress-up. Her expression was dreamy and distant. Eddie thought: I bet that’s how she looks when she’s sleeping.
“Not too much, ” he said.
They talked for awhile, their voices punctuated by thunder. Eddie did not ask them about what had happened when they came to the hospital earlier that day, and none of them mentioned it. Richie took out his yo-yo, made it sleep once or twice, then put it back.
Conversation lagged, and in one of the pauses there was a brief click that made Eddie look around. Bill had something in his hand, and for a moment Eddie felt his heart speed up in alarm. For that brief moment he thought it was a knife. But then Stan turned on the room’s overhead, dispelling the gloom, and he saw it was only a ballpoint pen. In the light they all looked natural again, real, only his friends.
“I thought we ought to sign your cast, ” Bill said. His eyes met Eddie’s squarely.
But that’s not it, Eddie thought with sudden and alarming clarity. It’s a contract. It’s a contract, Big Bill, isn’t it, or the closest we’ll ever get to one. He was frightened . . . and then ashamed and angry at himself. If he had broken his arm before this summer, who would have signed the cast?
Anyone besides his mother, and perhaps Dr. Handor? His aunts in Haven?
These were his friends, and his mother was wrong: they weren’t bad friends. Maybe, he thought, there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends—maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only
people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.
“Okay, ” Eddie said, a little hoarsely. “Okay, that’d be real good, Big Bill. ”
So Bill leaned solemnly over his bed and wrote his name on the hillocky plaster of Paris that encased Eddie’s mending arm, the letters large and looping. Richie signed with a flourish. Ben’s handwriting was as narrow as he was wide, the letters slanting backward. They looked ready to fall over at
the slightest push. Mike Hanlon’s writing was large and awkward because he was lefthanded and the angle was bad for him. He signed above Eddie’s elbow and circled his name. When Beverly bent over him, he could smell some light flowery perfume on her. She signed in a round Palmer-method script. Stan came last, and wrote his name in tight-packed little letters by Eddie’s wrist.
They all stepped back then, as if aware of what they had done. Outside, thunder muttered heavily again. Lightning washed the hospital’s wooden exterior in brief stuttering light.
“That’s it? ” Eddie asked.
Bill nodded. “C-C-Come oh-oh-over to my h-house a-after suh-hupper day a-a-after t-tomorrow if you c-c-can, o-okay? ”
Eddie nodded, and the subject was closed.
There was another period of desultory, almost aimless conversation. Some of it was about the dominant topic in Derry that July—the trial of
Richard Macklin for the bludgeon-murder of his stepson Dorsey, and the disappearance of Dorsey’s older brother, Eddie Corcoran. Macklin would
not break down and confess, weeping, on the witness stand for another two days, but the Losers were in agreement that Macklin probably had nothing to do with Eddie’s disappearance. The boy had either run away . . . or It had gotten him.
They left around quarter of seven, and the rain still had not fallen. It continued to threaten until long after Eddie’s ma had come, made her visit, and gone home again (she had been horrified at the signatures on Eddie’s cast, and even more horrified at his determination to leave the hospital the following day—she had been envisioning a stay of a week or more in
absolute quiet, so that the ends of the break could “set together, ” as she said).
Eventually the stormclouds broke apart and drifted away. Not so much as a drop of rain had fallen in Derry. The humidity remained, and people slept on porches and on lawns and in sleeping bags in back fields that night.
The rain came the next day, not long after Beverly saw something terrible happen to Patrick Hockstetter.
