It

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 Uttered.

“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.P. 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.

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