It

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 ball-bearings. 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 comer 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, bunking, 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: SHOPLIFTING 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 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.