"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 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 haytruck 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 drug-stores 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 pla-cee-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.