E.D. quartz that had been a gift from a record company repsaid that it was 509 P.M. on May 28th, 1985. It would, of course, be three hours later where Mike was calling from. Dark already. He felt a prickle of gooseflesh at that and he began to move, to do things. First, of course, he put on a recordnot hunting, just grabbing blindly among the thousands racked on the shelves. Rock and roll was almost as much a part of his life as the Voices, and it was hard for him to do anything without music playingand the louder the better. The record he grabbed turned out to be a Motown retrospective. Marvin Gaye, one of the newer members of what Rich sometimes called The AllDead Band, came on singing I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Ooohhoo, I bet youre wondrin how I knew.... Not bad, Rich said. He even smiled a little. This was bad, and it had admittedly knocked him for a loop, but he felt that he was going to be able to handle it. No sweat. He began getting ready to go back home. And at some point during the next hour it occurred to him that it was as if he had died and had yet been allowed to make all of his own final business dispositions ... not to mention his own funeral arrangements. And he felt as if he was doing pretty good. He tried the travel agent he used, thinking she would probably be on the freeway and headed home by now but taking a shot on the offchance. For a wonder, he caught her in. He told her what he needed and she asked him for fifteen minutes. I owe you one, Carol, he said. They had progressed from Mr. Tozier and Ms. Feeny to Rich and Carol over the last three yearspretty chummy, considering they had never met face to face. All right, pay off, she said. Can you do Kinky Briefcase for me? Without even pausingif you had to pause to find your Voice, there was usually no Voice there to be foundRich said Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, hereI had a fellow come in the other day who wanted to know what the worst thing was about getting AIDS. His voice had dropped slightly; at the same time its rhythm had speeded up and become jauntyit was clearly an American voice and yet it somehow conjured up images of a wealthy British colonial chappie who was as charming, in his muddled way, as he was addled. Rich hadnt the slightest idea who Kinky Briefcase really was, but he was sure he always wore white suits, read Esquire, and drank things which came in tall glasses and smelled like coconutscented shampoo. I told him right awaytrying to explain to your mother how you picked it up from a Haitian girl. Until next time, this is Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, saying You need my card if you cant get hard.  Carol Feeny screamed with laughter. Thats perfect! Perfect! My boyfriend says he doesnt believe you can just do those voices, he says its got to be a voicefilter gadget or something Just talent, my dear, Rich said. Kinky Briefcase was gone. W. C. Fields, top hat, red nose, golfbags and all, was here. Im so stuffed with talent I have to plug up all my bodily orifices to keep it from just running out like ... well, just running out. She went off into another screamy gale of laughter, and Rich closed his eyes. He could feel the beginnings of a headache. Be a dear and see what you can do, would you? he asked, still being W. C. Fields, and hung up on her laughter. Now he had to go back to being himself, and that was hardit got harder to do that every year. It was easier to be brave when you were someone else. He was trying to pick out a pair of good loafers and had about decided to stick with sneakers when the phone rang again. It was Carol Feeny, back in record time. He felt an instant urge to fall into the Buford Kissdrivel Voice and fought it off. She had been able to get him a firstclass seat on the American Airlines redeye nonstop from LAX to Boston. He would leave L.A. at 903 P.M. and arrive at Logan about five oclock tomorrow morning. Delta would fly him out of Boston at 730 A.M. and into Bangor, Maine, at 820. She had gotten him a fullsized sedan from Avis, and it was only twentysix miles from the Avis counter at Bangor International Airport to the Derry town line. Only twentysix miles? Rich thought. Is that all, Carol? Well, maybe it isin miles, anyway. But you dont have the slightest idea how far it really is to Derry, and I dont, either. But oh God, oh dear God, I am going to find out. I didnt try for a room because you didnt tell me how long youd be there, she said. Do you Nolet me take care of that, Rich said, and then Buford Kissdrivel took over. Youve been a peach, my deah. A Jawja peach, a cawse. He hung up gently on heralways leave em laughingand then dialed 2075551212 for State of Maine Directory Assistance. He wanted a number for the Derry Town House. God, there was a name from the past. He hadnt thought of the Derry Town House inwhat?ten years? twenty? twentyfive years, even? Crazy as it seemed, he guessed it had been at least twentyfive years, and if Mike hadnt called, he supposed he might never have thought of it again in his life. And yet there had been a time in his life when he had walked past that great red brick pile every dayand on more than one occasion he had run past it, with Henry Bowers and Belch Huggins and that other big boy, Victor SomebodyorOther, in hot pursuit, all of them yelling little pleasantries like Were gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonna getcha, you little smartass! Gonna getcha, you foureyed faggot! Had they ever gotten him? Before Rich could remember, an operator was asking him what city, please. In Derry, operator Derry! God! Even the word felt strange and forgotten in his mouth; saying it was like kissing an antique. do you have a number for the Derry Town House? One moment, sir. No way. Itll be gone. Razed in an urbanrenewal program. Changed into an Elks Hall or a BowlaDrome or an Electric Dreamscape Video Arcade. Or maybe burned down one night when the odds finally ran out on some drunk shoe salesman smoking in bed. All gone, Richiejust like the glasses Henry Bowers always used to rag you about. Whats that Springsteen song say? Glory days... gone in the wink of a young girls eye. What young girl? Why, Bev, of course. Bev ... Changed the Town House might be, but gone it apparently was not, because a blank, robotic voice now came on the line and said The ... number ... is ... 9 ... 4 ... I...8...2...8...2. Repeat ... the... number ... is ... But Rich had gotten it the first time. It was a pleasure to hang up on that droning voiceit was too easy to imagine some great globular Directory Assistance monster buried somewhere in the earth, sweating rivets and holding thousands of telephones in thousands of jointed chromium tentaclesthe Ma Bell version of Spideys nemesis, Dr. Octopus. Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence. Still standing. To paraphrase Paul Simon, still standing after all these years. He dialed the hotel he had last seen through the hornrimmed spectacles of his childhood. Dialing that number, 12079418282, was fatally easy. He held the telephone to his ear, looking out his studys wide picture window. The surfers were gone; a couple was walking slowly up the beach, hand in hand, where they had been. The couple could have been a poster on the wall of the travel agency where Carol Feeny worked, that was how perfect they were. Except, that was, for the fact they were both wearing glasses. Gonna getcha, fuckface! Gonna break your glasses! Criss, his mind sent up abruptly. His last name was Criss. Victor Criss. Oh Christ, that was nothing he wanted to know, not at this late date, but it didnt seem to matter in the slightest. Something was happening down there in the vaults, down there where Rich Tozier kept his own personal collection of Golden Oldies. Doors were opening. Only theyre not records down there, are they? Down there youre not Rich Records Tozier, hotshot KLAD deejay and the Man of a Thousand Voices, are you? And those things that are opening ... they arent exactly doors, are they? He tried to shake these thoughts off. Thing to remember is that Im okay. Im okay, youre okay, Rich Toziers okay. Could use a cigarette, is all. He had quit four years ago but he could use one now, all right. Theyre not records but dead bodies. You buried them deep but now theres some kind of crazy earthquake going on and the ground is spitting them up to the surface. Youre not Rich Records Tozier down there; down there youre just Richie FourEyes Tozier and youre with your buddies and youre so scared it feels like your balls are turning into Welchs grape jelly. Those arent doors, and theyre not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. Theyre cracking open and the vampires you thought were dead are all flying out again. A cigarette, just one. Even a Carlton would do, for Christs sweet sake. Gonna getcha, foureyes! Gonna make you EAT that fuckin bookbag! Town House, a male voice with a Yankee tang said; it had travelled all the way across New England, the Midwest, and under the casinos of Las Vegas to reach his ear. Rich asked the voice if he could reserve a suite of rooms at the Town House, beginning tomorrow. The voice told him he could, and then asked him for how long. I cant say. Ive got He paused briefly, minutely. What did he have, exactly? In his minds eye he saw a boy with a tartan bookbag running from the tough guys; he saw a boy who wore glasses, a thin boy with a pale face that had somehow seemed to scream Hit me! Go on and hit me! in some mysterious way to every passing bully. Heres my lips! Mash them back against my teeth! Heres my nose! Bloody it for sure and break it if you can! Box an ear so it swells up like a cauliflower! Split an eyebrow! Heres my chin, go for the knockout button! Here are my eyes, so blue and so magnified behind these hateful, hateful glasses, these hornrimmed specs one bow of which is held on with adhesive tape. Break the specs! Drive a shard of glass into one of these eyes and close it forever! What the hell! He closed his eyes and said Ive got business in Derry, you see. I dont know how long the transaction will take. How about three days, with an option to renew? An option to renew? the deskclerk asked doubtfully, and Rich waited patiently for the fellow to work it over in his mind. Oh, I get you! Thats very good! Thank you, and I... ah ... hope you can vote for us in Novembah, John F. Kennedy said. Jackie wants to ... ah ... do ovuh the ... ah ... Oval Office, and Ive got a job all lined up for my ... ah ... brothah Bobby. Mr. Tozier? Yes. Okay ... somebody else got on the line there for a few seconds. Just an old pol from the D.O.P., Rich thought. Thats Dead Old Party, in case you should wonder. Dont worry about it. A shudder worked through him, and he told himself again, almost desperately Youre okay, Rich. I heard it, too, Rich said. Must have been a line crossover. How we looking on that room? Oh, theres no problem with that, the clerk said. We do business here in Derry, but it really never booms. Is that so? Oh, ayuh, the clerk agreed, and Rich shuddered again. He had forgotten that, toothat simple northern New Englandism for yes. Oh, ayuh. Gonna getcha, creep! the ghostly voice of Henry Bowers screamed, and he felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse. He gave the Town House clerk his American Express number and hung up. Then he called Steve Covall, the KLAD program director. Whats up, Rich? Steve asked. The last Arbitron ratings had shown KLAD at the top of the cannibalistic Los Angeles FMrock market, and ever since then Steve had been in an excellent moodthank God for small favors. Well, you might be sorry you asked, he told Steve. Im taking a powder. Taking He could hear the frown in Steves voice. I dont think I get you, Rich. I have to put on my boogie shoes. Im going away. What do you mean, going away? According to the log I have right here in front of me, youre on the air tomorrow from two in the afternoon until six P.M., just like always. In fact, youre interviewing Clarence Clemons in the studio at four. You know Clarence Clemons, Rich? As in Come on and blow, Big Man? Clemons can talk to Mike OHara as well as he can to me. Clarence doesnt want to talk to Mike, Rich. Clarence doesnt want to talk to Bobby Russell. He doesnt want to talk to me. Clarence is a big fan of Buford Kissdrivel and Wyatt the Homicidal BagBoy. He wants to talk to you, my friend. And I have no interest in having a pissedoff twohundredandfiftypound saxophone player who was once almost drafted by a pro football team running amok in my studio. I dont think he has a history of running amok, Rich said. I mean, were talking Clarence Clemons here, not Keith Moon. There was silence on the line. Rich waited patiently. Youre not serious, are you? Steve finally asked. He sounded plaintive. I mean, unless your mother just died or youve got to have a brain tumor out or something, this is called crapping out. I have to go, Steve. Is your mother sick? Did she Godforbid die? She died ten years ago. Have you got a brain tumor? Not even a rectal polyp. This is not funny, Rich. No. Youre being a fucking busher, and I dont like it. I dont like it either, but I have to go. Where? Why? What is this? Talk to me, Rich! Someone called me. Someone I used to know a long time ago. In another place. Back then something happened. I made a promise. We all promised that we would go back if the something started happening again. And I guess it has. What something are we talking about, Rich? Id just as soon not say. Also, youll think Im crazy if I tell you the truth I dont remember. When did you make this famous promise? A long time ago. In the summer of 1958. There was another long pause, and he knew Steve Covall was trying to decide if Rich Records Tozier, aka Buford Kissdrivel, aka Wyatt the Homicidal BagBoy, etc., etc., was having him on or was having some kind of mental breakdown. You would have been just a kid, Steve said flatly. Eleven. Going on twelve. Another long pause. Rich waited patiently. All right, Steve said. Ill shift the rotationput Mike in for you. I can call Chuck Foster to pull a few shifts, I guess, if I can find what Chinese restaurant hes currently holed up in. Ill do it because we go back a long way together. But Im never going to forget you bushed out on me, Rich. Oh, get down off it, Rich said, but the headache was getting worse. He knew what he was doing; did Steve really think he didnt? I need a few days off, is all. Youre acting like I took a shit on our FCC charter. A few days off for what? The reunion of your Cub Scout pack in Shithouse Falls, North Dakota, or Pussyhump City, West Virginia? Actually I think Shithouse Falls is in Arkansas, bo, Buford Kissdrivel said in his big hollowbarrel Voice, but Steve was not to be diverted. Because you made a promise when you were eleven? Kids dont make serious promises when theyre eleven, for Christs sake! And its not even that, Rich, and you know it. This is not an insurance company; this is not a law office. This is showbusiness, be it ever so humble, and you fucking well know it. If you had given me a weeks notice, I wouldnt be holding this phone in one hand and a bottle of Mylanta in the other. You are putting my balls to the wall, and you know it, so dont you insult my intelligence! Steve was nearly screaming now, and Rich closed his eyes. Im never going to forget it, Steve had said, and Rich supposed he never would. But Steve had also said kids didnt make serious promises when they were eleven, and that wasnt true at all. Rich couldnt remember what the promise had beenwasnt sure he wanted to rememberbut it had been plenty serious. Steve, I have to. Yeah. And I told you I could handle it. So go ahead. Go ahead, you busher. Steve, this is rid But Steve had already hung up. Rich put the phone down. He had barely started away from it when it began to ring again, and he knew without picking it up that it was Steve again, madder than ever. Talking to him at this point would do no good; things would just get uglier. He slid the switch on the side of the phone to the right, cutting it off in midring. He went upstairs, pulled two suitcases out of the closet, and filled them with a barely glancedat conglomeration of clothesjeans, shirts, underwear, socks. It would not occur to him until later that he had taken nothing but kidclothes. He carried the suitcases back downstairs. On the den wall was a blackandwhite Ansel Adams photograph of Big Sur. Rich swung it back on hidden hinges, exposing a barrel safe. He opened it, pawed his way past the paperworkthe house here, poised cozily between the faultline and the brushfire zone, twenty acres of timberland in Idaho, a bunch of stocks. He had bought the stocks seemingly at randomwhen his broker saw Rich coming, he immediately clutched his headbut the stocks had all risen steadily over the years. He was sometimes surprised by the thought that he was almostnot quite, but almosta rich man. All courtesy of rockandroll music ... and the Voices, of course. House, acres, stocks, insurance policy, even a copy of his last will and testament. The strings that bind you tight to the map of your life, he thought. There was a sudden wild impulse to whip out his Zippo and light it up, the whole whores combine of wherefores and knowyeallmenbythesepresents and thebearerofthiscertificateisentitleds. And he could do it, too. The papers in his safe had suddenly ceased to signify anything. The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing at all supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on. Easy. Burn it up or blow it away, then just take a powder. Behind the papers, which were only currencys second cousins, was the real stuff. The cash. Four thousand dollars in tens, twenties, and fifties. Taking it now, stuffing it into the pocket of his jeans, he wondered if he hadnt somehow known what he was doing when he put the money in herefifty bucks one month, a hundred and twenty the next, maybe only ten the month after that. Rathole money. Takingapowder money. Man, thats scary, he said, barely aware he had spoken. He was looking blankly out the big window at the beach. It was deserted now, the surfers gone, the honeymooners (if that was what they had been) gone, too. Ah, yes, docitall comes back to me now. Remember Stanley Uris, for instance? Bet your fur I do.... Remember how we used to say that, and think it was so cool? Stanley Urine, the big kids called him. Hey, Urine! Hey, you fuckin Christkiller! Where ya goin? One of ya fag friends gonna give you a bee jay? He slammed the safe door shut and swung the picture back into place. When had he last thought of Stan Uris? Five years ago? Ten? Twenty? Rich and his family had moved away from Derry in the spring of 1960, and how fast all of their faces faded, his gang, that pitiful bunch of losers with their little clubhouse in what had been known then as the Barrensfunny name for an area as lush with growth as that place had been. Kidding themselves that they were jungle explorers, or Seabees carving out a landing strip on a Pacific atoll while they held off the Japs, kidding themselves that they were dambuilders, cowboys, spacemen on a jungle world, you name it, but whatever you name it, dont lets forget what it really was it was hiding. Hiding from the big kids. Hiding from Henry Bowers and Victor Criss and Belch Huggins and the rest of them. What a bunch of losers they had beenStan Uris with his big Jewboy nose, Bill Denbrough who could say nothing but Hiyo, Silver! without stuttering so badly that it drove you almost dogshit, Beverly Marsh with her bruises and her cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of her blouse, Ben Hanscom who had been so big he looked like a human version of Moby Dick, and Richie Tozier with his thick glasses and his A averages and his wise mouth and his face which just begged to be pounded into new and exciting shapes. Was there a word for what they had been? Oh yes. There always was. Le mot juste. In this case lemot juste was wimps. How it came back, how all of it came back ... and now he stood here in his den shivering as helplessly as a homeless mutt caught in a thunderstorm, shivering because the guys he had run with werent all he remembered. There were other things, things he hadnt thought of in years, trembling just below the surface. Bloody things. A darkness. Some darkness. The house on Neibolt Street, and Bill screaming You kkilled my brother, you fuhfuhfucker! Did he remember? Just enough not to want to remember any more, and you could bet your fur on that. A smell of garbage, a smell of shit, and a smell of something else. Something worse than either. It was the stink of the beast, the stink of It, down there in the darkness under Derry where the machines thundered on and on. He remembered George But that was too much and he ran for the bathroom, blundering into his Eames chair on his way and almost falling. He made it ... barely. He slid across the slick tiles to the toilet on his knees like some weird breakdancer, gripped the edges, and vomited everything in his guts. Even then it wouldnt stop; suddenly he could see Georgie Denbrough as if he had last seen him yesterday, Georgie who had been the start of it all, Georgie who had been murdered in the fall of 1957. Georgie had died right after the flood, one of his arms had been ripped from its socket, and Rich had blocked all of that out of his memory. But sometimes those things come back, oh yes indeedy, they come back, sometimes they come back. The spasm passed and Rich groped blindly for the flush. Water roared. His early supper, regurgitated in hot chunks, vanished tastefully down the drain. Into the sewers. Into the pound and stink and darkness of the sewers. He closed the lid, laid his forehead against it, and began to cry. It was the first time he had cried since his mother died in 1975. Without even thinking of what he was doing, he cupped his hands under his eyes, and the contact lenses he wore slipped out and lay glistening in his palms. Forty minutes later, feeling huskedout and somehow cleansed, he threw his suitcases into the trunk of his MG and backed it out of the garage. The light was fading. He looked at his house with the new plantings, he looked at the beach, at the water, which had taken on the cast of pale emeralds broken by a narrow track of beaten gold. And a conviction stole over him that he would never see any of this again, that he was a dead man walking. Going home now, Rich Tozier whispered to himself. Going home, God help me, going home. He put the car in gear and went, feeling again how easy it had been to slip through an unsuspected fissure in what he had considered a solid lifehow easy it was to get over onto the dark side, to sail out of the blue and into the black. Out of the blue and into the black, yes, that was it. Where anything might be waiting. 3 Ben Hanscom Takes a Drink If, on that night of May 28th, 1985, you had wanted to find the man Time magazine had called perhaps the most promising young architect in America (Urban Energy Conservation and the Young Turks, Time, October 15, 1984), you would have had to drive west out of Omaha on Interstate 80 to do it. Youd have taken the Swedholm exit and then Highway 81 to downtown Swedholm (of which there isnt much). There youd turn off on Highway 92 at Buckys HiHat EatEmUp (Chicken Fried Steak Our Specialty) and once out in the country again youd hang a right on Highway 63, which runs straight as a string through the deserted little town of Gatlin and finally into Hemingford Home. Downtown Hemingford Home made downtown Swedholm look like New York City; the business district consisted of eight buildings, five on one side and three on the other. There was the Kleen Kut barber shop (propped in the window a yellowing handlettered sign fully fifteen years old read IF YOUR A HIPPY GET YOUR HAIR CUT SOMEWHERES ELSE), the secondrun movie house, the fiveanddime. There was a branch of the Nebraska Homeowners Bank, a 76 gas station, a Rexall Drug, and the National Farmstead  Hardware Supplywhich was the only business in town which looked halfway prosperous. And, near the end of the main drag, set off a little way from the other buildings like a pariah and resting on the edge of the big empty, you had your basic roadhousethe Red Wheel. If you had gotten that far, you would have seen in the potholed dirt parking lot an aging 1968 Cadillac convertible with double CB antennas on the back. The vanity plate on the front read simply BENS CADDY. And inside, walking toward the bar, you would have found your manlanky, sunburned, dressed in a chambray shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of scuffed engineer boots. There were faint squintlines around the comers of his eyes, but nowhere else. He looked perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was thirtyeight. Hello, Mr. Hanscom, Ricky Lee said, putting a paper napkin on the bar as Ben sat down. Ricky Lee sounded a trifle surprised, and he was. He had never seen Hanscom in the Wheel on a weeknight before. He came in regularly every Friday night for two beers, and every Saturday night for four or five; he always asked after Ricky Lees three boys; he always left the same fivedollar tip under his beer stein when he took off. In terms of both professional conversation and personal regard, he was far and away Ricky Lees favorite customer. The ten dollars a week (and the fifty left under the stein at each Christmastime over the last five years) was fine enough, but the mans company was worth far more. Worthwhile company was always a rarity, but in a honkytonk like this, where talk always came cheap, it was scarcer than hens teeth. Although Hanscoms roots were in New England and he had gone to college in California, there was more than a touch of the extravagant Texan about him. Ricky Lee counted on Ben Hanscoms FridaySaturdaynight stops, because he had learned over the years that he could count on them. Mr. Hanscom might be building a skyscraper in New York (where he already had three of the most talkedabout buildings in the city), a new art gallery in Redondo Beach, or a business building in Salt Lake City, but come Friday night the door leading to the parking lot would open sometime between eight oclock and ninethirty and in he would stroll, as if he lived no farther than the other side of town and had decided to drop in because there was nothing good on TV. He had his own Learjet and a private landing strip on his farm in Junkins. Two years ago he had been in London, first designing and then overseeing the construction of the new BBC communications centera building that was still hotly debated pro and con in the British press (the Guardian Perhaps the most beautiful building to be constructed in London over the last twenty years; the Mirror Other than the face of my motherinlaw after a pubcrawl, the ugliest thing I have ever seen). When Mr. Hanscom took that job, Ricky Lee had thought, Well, Ill see him again sometime. Or maybe hell just forget all about us. And indeed, the Friday night after Ben Hanscom left for England had come and gone with no sign of him, although Ricky Lee found himself looking up quickly every time the door opened between eight and ninethirty. Well, Ill see him again sometime. Maybe. Sometime turned out to be the next night. The door had opened at quarter past nine and in he had ambled, wearing jeans and a GO BAMA teeshirt and his old engineer boots, looking like hed come from no farther away than crosstown. And when Ricky Lee cried almost joyfully Hey, Mr. Hanscom! Christ! What are you doin here?, Mr. Hanscom had looked mildly surprised, as if there was nothing in the least unusual about his being here. Nor had that been a oneshot; he had showed up every Saturday during the twoyear course of his active involvement in the BBC job. He left London each Saturday morning at 1100 A.M. on the Concorde, he told a fascinated Ricky Lee, and arrived at Kennedy in New York at 1015 A.M.fortyfive minutes before he left London, at least by the clock (God, its like time travel, aint it? an impressed Ricky Lee had said). A limousine was standing by to take him over to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, a trip which usually took no more than an hour on Saturday morning. He could be in the cockpit of his Lear before noon with no trouble at all, and touching down in Junkins by twothirty. If you head west fast enough, he told Ricky, the day just seems to go on forever. He would take a twohour nap, spend an hour with his foreman and half an hour with his secretary. He would eat supper and then come on over to the Red Wheel for an hour and a half or so. He always came in alone, he always sat at the bar, and he always left the way he had come in, although God knew there were plenty of women in this part of Nebraska who would have been happy to screw the socks off him. Back at the farm he would catch six hours of sleep and then the whole process would reverse itself. Ricky had never had a customer who failed to be impressed with this story. Maybe hes gay, a woman had told him once. Ricky Lee glanced at her briefly, taking in the carefully styled hair, the carefully tailored clothes which undoubtedly had designer labels, the diamond chips at her ears, the look in her eyes, and knew she was from somewhere back east, probably New York, out here on a brief duty visit to a relative or maybe an old school chum, and couldnt wait to get out again. No, he had replied. Mr. Hanscom aint no sissy. She had taken a pack of Doral cigarettes from her purse and held one between her red, glistening lips until he lit it for her. How do you know? she had asked, smiling a little. I just do, he said. And he did. He thought of saying to her I think hes the most Godawful lonely man I ever met in my life. But he wasnt going to say any such thing to this New York woman who was looking at him like he was some new and amusing type of life. Tonight Mr. Hanscom looked a little pale, a little distracted. Hello, Ricky Lee, he said, sitting down, and then fell to studying his hands. Ricky Lee knew he was slated to spend the next six or eight months in Colorado Springs, overseeing the start of the Mountain States Cultural Center, a sprawling sixbuilding complex which would be cut into the side of a mountain. When its done people are going to say it looks like a giantkid left his toy blocks all over a flight of stairs, Ben had told Ricky Lee. Some will, anyway, and theyll be at least halfright. But I think its going to work. Its the biggest thing Ive ever tried and putting it up is going to be scary as hell, but I think its going to work. Ricky Lee supposed it was possible that Mr. Hanscom had a little touch of stage fright. Nothing surprising about that, and nothing wrong about it, either. When you got big enough to be noticed, you got big enough to come gunning for. Or maybe he just had a touch of the bug. There was a hell of a lively one going around. Ricky Lee got a beer stein from the backbar and reached for the Olympia tap. Dont do that, Ricky Lee. Ricky Lee turned back, surprisedand when Ben Hanscom looked up from his hands, he was suddenly frightened. Because Mr. Hanscom didnt look like he had stage fright, or the virus that was going around, or anything like that. He looked like he had just taken a terrible blow and was still trying to understand whatever it was that had hit him. Someone died. He aint married but every mans got a fambly, and someone in his just bit the dust. Thats what happened, just as sure as shit rolls downhill from a privy.


Someone dropped a quarter into the jukebox, and Barbara Mandrell started to sing about a drunk man and a lonely woman. You okay, Mr. Hanscom? Ben Hanscom looked at Ricky Lee out of eyes that suddenly looked tenno, twentyyears older than the rest of his face, and Ricky Lee was astonished to observe that Mr. Hanscoms hair was graying. He had never noticed any gray in his hair before. Hanscom smiled. The smile was ghastly, horrible. It was like watching a corpse smile. I dont think I am, Ricky Lee. No sir. Not tonight. Not at all. Ricky Lee set the stein down and walked back over to where Hanscom sat. The bar was as empty as a Mondaynight bar far outside of football season can get. There were fewer than twenty paying customers in the place. Annie was sitting by the door into the kitchen, playing cribbage with the shortorder cook. Bad news, Mr. Hanscom? Bad news, thats right. Bad news from home. He looked at Ricky Lee. He looked through Ricky Lee. Im sorry to hear that, Mr. Hanscom. Thank you, Ricky Lee. He fell silent and Ricky Lee was about to ask him if there was anything he could do when Hanscom said Whats your bar whiskey, Ricky Lee? For everyone else in this dump its Four Roses, Ricky Lee said. But for you I think its Wild Turkey. Hanscom smiled a little at that. Thats good of you, Ricky Lee. I think you better grab that stein after all. What you do is fill it up with Wild Turkey. Fill it? Ricky Lee asked, frankly astonished. Christ, Ill have to roll you out of here! Or call an ambulance, he thought. Not tonight, Hanscom said. I dont think so. Ricky Lee looked carefully into Mr. Hanscoms eyes to see if he could possibly be joking, and it took less than a second to see that he wasnt. So he got the stein from the backbar and the bottle of Wild Turkey from one of the shelves below. The neck of the bottle chattered against the rim of the stein as he began to pour. He watched the whiskey gurgle out, fascinated in spite of himself. Ricky Lee decided it was more than just a touch of the Texan that Mr. Hanscom had in him this had to be the biggest goddamned shot of whiskey he ever had poured or ever would pour in his life. Call an ambulance, my ass. He drinks this baby and Ill be calling Parker and Waters in Swedholm for their funeral hack. Nevertheless he brought it back and set it down in front of Hanscom; Ricky Lees father had once told him that if a man was in his right mind, you brought him what he paid for, be it piss or poison. Ricky Lee didnt know if that was good advice or bad, but he knew that if you tended bar for a living, it went a fair piece toward saving you from being chomped into gatorbait by your own conscience. Hanscom looked at the monster drink thoughtfully for a moment and then asked, What do I owe you for a shot like that, Ricky Lee? Ricky Lee shook his head slowly, eyes still on the steinful of whiskey, not wanting to look up and meet those socketed, staring eyes. No, he said. This one is on the house. Hanscom smiled again, this time more naturally. Why, I thank you, Ricky Lee. Now I am going to show you something I learned about in Peru, in 1978. I was working with a guy named Frank Billingsunderstudying with him, I guess youd say. Frank Billings was the best damned architect in the world, I think. He caught a fever and the doctors injected about a billion different antibiotics into him and not a single one of them touched it. He burned for two weeks and then he died. What Im going to show you I learned from the Indians who worked on the project. The local popskull is pretty potent. You take a slug and you think its going down pretty mellow, no problem, and then all at once its like someone lit a blowtorch in your mouth and aimed it down your throat. But the Indians drink it like CocaCola, and I rarely saw one drunk, and I never saw one with a hangover. Never had the sack to try it their way myself. But I think Ill give it a go tonight. Bring me some of those lemon wedges there. Ricky Lee brought him four and laid them out neatly on a fresh napkin next to the stein of whiskey. Hanscom picked one of them up, tilted his head back like a man about to administer eyedrops to himself, and then began to squeeze raw lemonjuice into his right nostril. Holy Jesus! Ricky Lee cried, horrified. Hanscoms throat worked. His face flushed ... and then Ricky Lee saw tears running down the flat planes of his face toward his ears. Now the Spinners were on the juke, singing about the rubberbandman. Oh Lord, I just dont know how much of this I can stand, the Spinners sang. Hanscom groped blindly on the bar, found another slice of lemon, and squeezed the juice into his other nostril. Youre gonna fucking kill yourself, Ricky Lee whispered. Hanscom tossed both of the wrungout lemon wedges onto the bar. His eyes were fiery red and he was breathing in hitching, wincing gasps. Clear lemonjuice dripped from both of his nostrils and trickled down to the comers of his mouth. He groped for the stein, raised it, and drank a third of it. Frozen, Ricky Lee watched his adams apple go up and down. Hanscom set the stein aside, shuddered twice, then nodded. He looked at Ricky Lee and smiled a little. His eyes were no longer red. Works about like they said it did. You are so fucking concerned about your nose that you never feel whats going down your throat at all. Youre crazy, Mr. Hanscom, Ricky Lee said. You bet your fur, Mr. Hanscom said. You remember that one, Ricky Lee? We used to say that when we were kids You bet your fur. Did I ever tell you I used to be fat? No sir, you never did, Ricky Lee whispered. He was now convinced that Mr. Hanscom had received some intelligence so dreadful that the man really had gone crazy ... or at least taken temporary leave of his senses. I was a regular butterball. Never played baseball or basketball, always got caught first when we played tag, couldnt keep out of my own way. I was fat, all right. And there were these fellows in my home town who used to take after me pretty regularly. There was a fellow named Reginald Huggins, only everyone called him Belch. A kid named Victor Criss. A few other guys. But the real brains of the combination was a fellow named Henry Bowers. If there has ever been a genuinely evil kid strutting across the skin of the world, Ricky Lee, Henry Bowers was that kid. I wasnt the only kid he used to take after; my problem was, I couldnt run as fast as some of the others. Hanscom unbuttoned his shirt and opened it. Leaning forward, Ricky Lee saw a funny, twisted scar on Mr. Hanscoms stomach, just above his navel. Puckered, white, and old. It was a letter, he saw. Someone had carved the letter H into the mans stomach, probably long before Mr. Hanscom had been a man. Henry Bowers did that to me. About a thousand years ago. Im lucky Im not wearing his whole damned name down there. Mr. Hanscom Hanscom took the other two lemonslices, one in each hand, tilted his head back, and took them like nosedrops. He shuddered wrackingly, put them aside, and took two big swallows from the stein. He shuddered again, took another gulp, and then groped for the padded edge of the bar with his eyes closed. For a moment he held on like a man on a sailboat clinging to the rail for support in a heavy sea. Then he opened his eyes again and smiled at Ricky Lee. I could ride this bull all night, he said. Mr. Hanscom, I wish you wouldnt do that anymore, Ricky Lee said nervously. Annie came over to the waitresses stand with her tray and called for a couple of Millers. Ricky Lee drew them and took them down to her. His legs felt rubbery. Is Mr. Hanscom all right, Ricky Lee? Annie asked. She was looking past Ricky Lee and he turned to follow her gaze. Mr. Hanscom was leaning over the bar, carefully picking lemonslices out of the caddy where Ricky Lee kept the drink garnishes. I dont know, he said. I dont think so. Well get your thumb out of your ass and do something about it. Annie was, like most other women, partial to Ben Hanscom. I dunno. My daddy always said that if a mans in his right mind Your daddy didnt have the brains God gave a gopher, Annie said. Never mind your daddy. You got to put a stop to that, Ricky Lee. Hes going to kill himself. Thus given his marching orders, Ricky Lee went back down to where Ben Hanscom sat. Mr. Hanscom, I really think youve had en Hanscom tilted his head back. Squeezed. Actually sniffed the lemonjuice back this time, as if it were cocaine. He gulped whiskey as if it were water. He looked at Ricky Lee solemnly. Bingbang, I saw the whole gang, dancing on my livingroom rug, he said, and then laughed. There was maybe two inches of whiskey left in the stein. That is enough, Ricky Lee said, and reached for the stein. Hanscom moved it gently out of his reach. Damage has been done, Ricky Lee, he said. The damage has been done, boy. Mr. Hanscom, please Ive got something for your kids, Ricky Lee. Damn if I didnt almost forget! He was wearing a faded denim vest, and now he reached something out of one of its pockets. Ricky Lee heard a muted clink. My dad died when I was four, Hanscom said. There was no slur at all in his voice. Left us a bunch of debts and these. I want your kiddos to have them, Ricky Lee. He put three cartwheel silver dollars on the bar, where they gleamed under the soft lights. Ricky Lee caught his breath. Mr. Hanscom, thats very kind, but I couldnt There used to be four, but I gave one of them to Stuttering Bill and the others. Bill Denbrough, that was his real name. Stuttering Bills just what we used to call him ... just a thing we used to say, like You bet your fur. He was one of the best friends I ever hadI did have a few, you know, even a fat kid like me had a few. Stuttering Bills a writer now. Ricky Lee barely heard him. He was looking at the cartwheels, fascinated. 1921, 1923, and 1924. God knew what they were worth now, just in terms of the pure silver they contained. I couldnt, he said again. But I insist. Mr. Hanscom took hold of the stein and drained it. He should have been flat on his keister, but his eyes never left Ricky Lees. Those eyes were watery, and very bloodshot, but Ricky Lee would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they were also the eyes of a sober man. Youre scaring me a little, Mr. Hanscom, Ricky Lee said. Two years ago Gresham Arnold, a rumdum of some local repute, had come into the Red Wheel with a roll of quarters in his hand and a twentydollar bill stuck into the band of his hat. He handed the roll to Annie with instructions to feed the quarters into the jukebox by fours. He put the twenty on the bar and instructed Ricky Lee to set up drinks for the house. This rumdum, this Gresham Arnold, had long ago been a star basketball player for the Hemingford Rams, leading them to their first (and most likely last) highschool team championship. In 1961 that had been. An almost unlimited future seemed to lie ahead of the young man. But he had flunked out of L.S.U. his first semester, a victim of drink, drugs, and allnight parties. He came home, cracked up the yellow convertible his folks had given him as a graduation present, and got a job as head salesman in his daddys John Deere dealership. Five years passed. His father could not bear to fire him, and so he finally sold the dealership and retired to Arizona, a man haunted and made old before his time by the inexplicable and apparently irreversible degeneration of his son. While the dealership still belonged to his daddy and he was at least pretending to work, Arnold had made some effort to keep the booze at arms length; afterward, it got him completely. He could get mean, but he had been just as sweet as horehound candy the night he brought in the quarters and set up drinks for the house, and everyone had thanked him kindly, and Annie kept playing Moe Bandy songs because Gresham Arnold liked ole Moe Bandy. He sat there at the baron the very stool where Mr. Hanscom was sitting now, Ricky Lee realized with steadily deepening uneaseand drank three or four bourbonandbitters, and sang along with the juke, and caused no trouble, and went home when Ricky Lee closed the Wheel up, and hanged himself with his belt in an upstairs closet. Gresham Arnolds eyes that night had looked a little bit like Ben Hanscoms eyes looked right now. Scaring you a bit, am I? Hanscom asked, his eyes never leaving Ricky Lees. He pushed the stein away and then folded his hands neatly in front of those three silver cartwheels. I probably am. But youre not as scared as I am, Ricky Lee. Pray to Jesus you never are. Well, whats the matter? Ricky Lee asked. Maybe He wet his lips. Maybe I can give you a help. The matter? Ben Hanscom laughed. Why, not too much. I had a call from an old friend tonight. Guy named Mike Hanlon. Id forgotten all about him, Ricky Lee, but that didnt scare me much. After all, I was just a kid when I knew him, and kids forget things, dont they? Sure they do. You bet your fur. What scared me was getting about halfway over here and realizing that it wasnt just Mike Id forgotten aboutId forgotten everything about being a kid. Ricky Lee only looked at him. He had no idea what Mr. Hanscom was talking aboutbut the man was scared, all right. No question about that. It sat funny on Ben Hanscom, but it was real. I mean Id forgotten all about it,  he said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar for emphasis. Did you ever hear, Ricky Lee, of having an amnesia so complete you didnt even know you had amnesia? Ricky Lee shook his head. Me either. But there I was, tooling along in the Caddy tonight, and all of a sudden it hit me. I remembered Mike Hanlon, but only because he called me on the phone. I remembered Derry, but only because that was where he was calling from. Derry? But that was all. It hit me that I hadnt even thought about being a kid since ... since I dont even know when. And then, just like that, it all started to flood back in. Like what we did with the fourth silver dollar. What did you do with it, Mr. Hanscom? Hanscom looked at his watch, and suddenly slipped down from his stool. He staggered a bitthe slightest bit. That was all. Cant let the time get away from me, he said. Im flying tonight. Ricky Lee looked instantly alarmed, and Hanscom laughed. Flying but not driving the plane. Not this time. United Airlines, Ricky Lee. Oh. He supposed his relief showed on his face, but he didnt care. Where are you going? Hanscoms shirt was still open. He looked thoughtfully down at the puckered white lines of the old scar on his belly and then began to button the shirt over it. Thought I told you that, Ricky Lee. Home. Im going home. Give those cartwheels to your kids. He started toward the door, and something about the way he walked, even the way he hitched at the sides of his pants, terrified Ricky Lee. The resemblance to the late and mostly unlamented Gresham Arnold was suddenly so acute it was nearly like seeing a ghost. Mr. Hanscom! he cried in alarm. Hanscom turned back, and Ricky Lee stepped quickly backward. His ass hit the backbar and glassware gossiped briefly as the bottles knocked together. He stepped back because he was suddenly convinced that Ben Hanscom was dead. Yes, Ben Hanscom was lying dead someplace, in a ditch or an attic or possibly in a closet with a belt noosed around his neck and the toes of his fourhundreddollar cowboy boots dangling an inch or two above the floor, and this thing standing near the juke and staring back at him was a ghost. For a momentjust a moment, but it was plenty long enough to cover his working heart with a rime of icehe was convinced he could see tables and chairs right through the man. What is it, Ricky Lee? Nuhnnuh. Nothin. Ben Hanscom looked out at Ricky Lee from eyes which had darkpurple crescents beneath them. His cheeks burned with liquor; his nose looked red and sore. Nothin, Ricky Lee whispered again, but he couldnt take his eyes from that face, the face of a man who has died deep in sin and now stands hard by hells smoking side door. I was fat and we were poor, Ben Hanscom said. I remember that now. And I remember that either a girl named Beverly or Stuttering Bill saved my life with a silver dollar. Im scared almost insane by whatever else I may remember before tonights over, but how scared I am doesnt matter, because its going to come anyway. Its all there, like a great big bubble thats growing in my mind. But Im going, because all Ive ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world. Maybe thats why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for ... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you. You gonna be back this weekend, though, aint you? Ricky Lee asked through numbed lips. In his increasing distress this was all he could find to hold on to. You gonna be back this weekend just like always, aint you? I dont know, Mr. Hanscom said, and smiled a terrible smile. Im going a lot farther than London this time, Ricky Lee. Mr. Hanscom! You give those cartwheels to your kids, he repeated, and slipped out into the night. What the blue hell? Annie asked, but Ricky Lee ignored her. He flipped up the bars partition and ran over to one of the windows which looked out on the parking lot. He saw the headlights of Mr. Hanscoms Caddy come on, heard the engine rev. It pulled out of the dirt lot, kicking up a roostertail of dust behind it. The taillights dwindled away to red points down Highway 63, and the Nebraska nightwind began to pull the hanging dust apart. He took on a boxcar full of booze and you let him get in that big car of his and drive away, Annie said. Way to go, Ricky Lee. Never mind. Hes going to kill himself. And although this had been Ricky Lees own thought less than five minutes ago, he turned to her when the taillights winked out of sight and shook his head. I dont think so, he said. Although the way he looked tonight, it might be better for him if he did. What did he say to you? He shook his head. It was all confused in his mind, and the sum total of it seemed to mean nothing. It doesnt matter. But I dont think were ever going to see that old boy again. 4 Eddie Kaspbrak Takes His Medicine If you would know all there is to know about an American man or woman of the middle class as the millennium nears its end, you would need only to look in his or her medicine cabinetor so it has been said. But dear Lord, get a look into this one as Eddie Kaspbrak slides it open, mercifully sliding aside his white face and wide, staring eyes. On the top shelf theres Anacin, Excedrin, Excedrin P.M., Contac, Gelusil, Tylenol, and a large blue jar of Vicks, looking like a bit of brooding deep twilight under glass. There is a bottle of Vivarin, a bottle of Serutan (Thats Natures spelled backwards, the ads on Lawrence Welk used to say when Eddie Kaspbrak was but a wee slip of a lad), and two bottles of Phillips Milk of Magnesiathe regular, which tastes like liquid chalk, and the new mint flavor, which tastes like mintflavored liquid chalk. Here is a large bottle of Rolaids standing chummily close to a large bottle of Turns. The Turns are standing next to a large bottle of orangeflavored DiGel tablets. The three of them look like a trio of strange piggybanks, stuffed with pills instead of dimes. Second shelf, and dig the vites you got your E, your C, your C with rosehips. You got Bsimple and Bcomplex and B12. Theres LLysine, which is supposed to do something about those embarrassing skin problems, and lecithin, which is supposed to do something about that embarrassing cholesterol buildup in and around the Big Pump. Theres iron, calcium, and cod liver oil. Theres OneADay multiples, Myadec multiples, Centrum multiples. And sitting up on top of the cabinet itself is a gigantic bottle of Geritol, just for good measure. Moving right along to Eddies third shelf, we find the utility infielders of the patentmedicine world. ExLax. Carters Little Pills. Those two keep Eddie Kaspbrak moving the mail. Here, nearby, is Kaopectate, PeptoBismol, and Preparation H in case the mail moves too fast or too painfully. Also some Tucks in a screwtop jar just to keep everything tidy after the mail has gone through, be it just an advertising circular or two addressed to OCCUPANT or a big old specialdelivery package. Here is Formula 44 for coughs, Nyquil and Dristan for colds, and a big bottle of castor oil. Theres a tin of Sucrets in case Eddies throat gets sore, and theres a quartet of mouthwashes Chloraseptic, Cpacol, Cpestat in the spray bottle, and of course good old Listerine, often imitated but never duplicated. Visine and Murine for the eyes. Cortaid and Neosporin ointment for the skin (the second line of defense if the LLysine doesnt live up to expectations), a tube of Oxy5 and a plastic bottle of OxyWash (because Eddie would definitely rather have a few less cents than a few more zits), and some tetracyline pills. And off to one side, clustered like bitter conspirators, are three bottles of coaltar shampoo. The bottom shelf is almost deserted, but the stuff which is here means serious businessyou could cruise on this stuff, okay. On this stuff you could fly higher than Ben Hanscoms jet and crash harder than Thurman Munsons. Theres Valium, Percodan, Elavil, and Darvon Complex. There is also another Sucrets box on this low shelf, but there are no Sucrets in it. If you opened that one you would find six Quaaludes. Eddie Kaspbrak believed in the Boy Scout motto. He was swinging a blue totebag as he came into the bathroom. He set it on the sink, unzipped it, and then, with trembling hands, he began to spill bottles and jars and tubes and squeezebottles and spraybottles into it. Under other circumstances he would have taken them out handful by careful handful, but there was no time for such niceties now. The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright. Eddie? Myra called up from downstairs. Eddie, what are you dooooing? Eddie dropped the Sucrets box containing the ludes into the bag. The medicine cabinet was now entirely empty except for Myras Midol and a small, almost usedup tube of Blistex. He paused for a moment and then grabbed the Blistex. He started to zip the bag closed, debated, and then threw in the Midol as well. She could always buy more. Eddie? from halfway up the stairs now. Eddie zipped the bag the rest of the way closed and then left the bathroom, swinging it by his side. He was a short man with a timid, rabbity sort of face. Much of his hair was gone; what was left grew in listless, piebald patches. The weight of the bag pulled him noticeably to one side. An extremely large woman was climbing slowly to the second floor. Eddie could hear the stairs creak protestingly under her. What are you DOOOOOOOOING? Eddie did not need a shrink to tell him that he had, in a sense, married his mother. Myra Kaspbrak was huge. She had only been big when Eddie married her five years ago, but he sometimes thought his subconscious had seen the potential for hugeness in her; God knew his own mother had been a whopper. And she looked somehow more huge than ever as she reached the secondfloor landing. She was wearing a white nightgown which swelled, comberlike, at bosom and hip. Her face, devoid of makeup, was white and shiny. She looked badly frightened. I have to go away for awhile, Eddie said. What do you mean, you have to go away? What was that telephone call? Nothing, he said, fleeing abruptly down the hallway to their walkin closet. He put the totebag down, opened the closets foldback door, and raked aside the halfdozen identical black suits which hung there, as conspicuous as a thundercloud among the other, more brightly colored, clothes. He always wore one of the black suits when he was working. He bent into the closet, smelling mothballs and wool, and pulled out one of the suitcases from the back. He opened it and began throwing clothes in. Her shadow fell over him. Whats this about, Eddie? Where are you going? You tell me! I cant tell you. She stood there, watching him, trying to decide what to say next, or what to do. The thought of simply bundling him into the closet and then standing with her back against the door until this madness had passed crossed her mind, but she was unable to bring herself to do it, although she certainly could have; she was three inches taller than Eddie and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. She couldnt think of what to do or say, because this was so utterly unlike him. She could not have been any more dismayed and frightened if she had walked into the television room and found their new bigscreen TV floating in the air. You cant go, she heard herself saying. You promised youd get me Al Pacinos autograph. It was an absurdityGod knew it wasbut at this point even an absurdity was better than nothing. Youll still get it, Eddie said. Youll have to drive him yourself. Oh, here was a new terror to join those already circling in her poor dazzled head. She uttered a small scream. I cantI never Youll have to, he said. He was examining his shoes now. Theres no one else. Neither of my uniforms fit anymore! Theyre too tight in the tits! Have Delores let one of them out, he said implacably. He threw two pairs of shoes back, found an empty shoebox, and popped a third pair into it. Good black shoes, plenty of use left in them still, but looking just a bit too worn to wear on the job. When you drove rich people around New York for a living, many of them famous rich people, everything had to look just right. These shoes no longer looked just right ... but he supposed they would do for where he was going. And for whatever he might have to do when he got there. Maybe Richie Tozier would But then the blackness threatened and he felt his throat beginning to close up. Eddie realized with real panic that he had packed the whole damned drugstore and had left the most important thing of allhis aspiratordownstairs on top of the stereo cabinet. He banged the suitcase closed and latched it. He looked around at Myra, who was standing there in the hallway with her hand pressed against the short thick column of her neck as if she were the one with the asthma. She was staring at him, her face full of perplexity and terror, and he might have felt sorry for her if his heart had not already been so filled with terror for himself. Whats happened, Eddie? Who was that on the telephone? Are you in trouble? You are, arent you? What kind of trouble are you in? He walked toward her, zipperbag in one hand and suitcase in the other, standing more or less straight now that he was more evenly weighted. She moved in front of him, blocking off the stairway, and at first he thought she would not give way. Then, when his face was about to crash into the soft roadblock of her breasts, she did give way ... fearfully. As he walked past, never slowing, she burst into miserable tears. I cant drive Al Pacino! she bawled. Ill smash into a stopsign or something, I know I will! Eddie Im scaaarrred! He looked at the Seth Thomas clock on the table by the stairs. Twenty past nine. The cannedsounding Delta clerk had told him he had already missed the last flight north to Mainethat one had left La Guardia at eighttwentyfive. He had called Amtrak and discovered there was a late train to Boston departing Penn Station at eleventhirty. It would drop him off at South Station, where he could take a cab to the offices of Cape Cod Limousine on Arlington Street. Cape Cod and Eddies company, Royal Crest, had worked out a useful and friendly reciprocal arrangement over the years. A quick call to Butch Carrington in Boston had taken care of his transportation northButch said he would have a Cadillac limo gassed and ready for him. So he would go in style, and with no painintheass client sitting in the back seat, stinking the air up with a big cigar and asking if Eddie knew where he could score a broad or a few grams of coke or both. Going in style, all right, he thought. Only way you could go in more style would be if you were going in a hearse. But dont worry, Eddiethats probably how youll come back. If theres enough of you left to pick up, that is. Eddie? Ninetwenty. Plenty of time to talk to her, plenty of time to be kind. Ah, but it would have been so much better if this had been her whist night, if he could have just slipped out, leaving a note under one of the magnets on the refrigerator door (the refrigerator door was where he left all his notes for Myra, because there she never missed them). Leaving that waylike a fugitivewould not have been good, but this was even worse. This was like having to leave home all over again, and that had been so hard hed had to do it three times. Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said homes the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Unfortunately, its also the place where, once youre in there, they dont ever want to let you out. He stood at the head of the stairs, forward motion temporarily spent, filled with fear, breath wheezing noisily in and out of the pinhole his throat had become, and regarded his weeping wife. Come on downstairs with me and Ill tell you what I can, he said. Eddie put his two bagsclothes in one, medicine in the otherby the door in the front hall. He remembered something else then ... or rather the ghost of his mother, who had been dead many years but who still spoke frequently in his mind, remembered for him. You know when your feet get wet you always get a cold, Eddieyoure not like other people, you have a very weak system, you have to be careful. Thats why you must always wear your rubbers when it rains. It rained a lot in Derry. Eddie opened the fronthall closet, got his rubbers off the hook where they hung neatly in a plastic bag, and put them in his clothes suitcase. Thats a good boy, Eddie. He and Myra had been watching TV when the shit hit the fan. Eddie went into the television room and pushed the button which lowered the screen of the MuralVision TVits screen was so big that it made Freeman McNeil look like a visitor from Brobdingnag on Sunday afternoons. He picked up the telephone and called a taxi. The dispatcher told him it would probably be fifteen minutes. Eddie said that was no problem. He hung up and grabbed his aspirator off the top of their expensive Sony compactdisc player. I spent fifteen hundred bucks on a stateoftheart sound system so that Myra wouldnt miss a single golden note on her Barry Manilow records and her Supremes Greatest Hits, he thought, and then felt a flush of guilt. That wasnt fair, and he damn well knew it. Myra would have been just as happy with her old scratchy records as she was with the new 45rpmsized laser discs, just as she would have been happy to keep on living in the little fourroom house in Queens until they were both old and gray (and, if the truth were told, there was a little snow on Eddie Kaspbraks mountain already). He had bought the luxury sound system for the same reasons that he had bought this low fieldstone house on Long Island, where the two of them often rattled around like the last two peas in a can because he had been able to, and because they were ways of appeasing the soft, frightened, often bewildered, always implacable voice of his mother; they were ways of saying I made it, Ma! Look at all this! I made it! Now will you please for Christs sake shut up awhile? Eddie stuffed the aspirator into his mouth and, like a man miming suicide, pulled the trigger. A cloud of awful licorice taste roiled and boiled its way down his throat, and Eddie breathed deeply.


He could feel breathing passages which had almost closed start to open up again. The tightness in his chest started to ease, and suddenly he heard voices in his mind, ghostvoices. Didnt you get the note I sent you? I got it, Mrs. Kaspbrak, but Well, in case you cant read, Coach Black, let me tell you in person. Are you ready? Mrs. Kaspbrak Good. Here it comes, from my lips to your ears. Ready? My Eddie cannot take physical education. I repeat he can NOT take phys ed. Eddie is very delicate, and if he runs ... or jumps ... Mrs. Kaspbrak, I have the results of Eddies last physical on file in my officethats a state requirement. It says that Eddie is a little small for his age, but otherwise hes absolutely normal. So I called your family physician just to be sure and he confirmed Are you saying Im a liar, Coach Black? Is that it? Well, here he is! Heres Eddie, standing right beside me! Can you hear the way hes breathing? CAN you? Mom ... please ... Im all right ... Eddie, you know better than that. I taught you better than that. Dont interrupt your elders. I hear him, Mrs. Kaspbrak, but Do you? Good! I thought maybe you were deaf! He sounds like a truck going uphill in low gear, doesnt he? And if that isnt asthma Mom, Ill be Be quiet, Eddie, dont interrupt me again. If that isnt asthma, Coach Black, then Im Queen Elizabeth! Mrs. Kaspbrak, Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physicaleducation classes. He loves to play games, and he runs quite fast. In my conversation with Dr. Baynes, the word psychosomatic came up. I wonder if youve considered the possibility that that my son is crazy? Is that what youre trying to say? ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY THAT MY SON IS CRAZY???? No, but Hes delicate. Mrs. Kaspbrak My son is very delicate. Mrs. Kaspbrak, Dr. Baynes confirmed that he could find nothing at all physically wrong, Eddie finished. The memory of that humiliating encounter, his mother screaming at Coach Black in the Derry Elementary School gymnasium while he gasped and cringed at her side and the other kids huddled around one of the baskets and watched, had recurred to him tonight for the first time in years. Nor was that the only memory which Mike Hanlons call was going to bring back, he knew. He could feel many others, as bad or even worse, crowding and jostling like salemad shoppers bottlenecked in a departmentstore doorway. But soon the bottleneck would break and they would be along. He was quite sure of that. And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. HalfPrice. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go. Nothing physically wrong, he repeated, took a deep shuddery breath, and stuffed the aspirator into his pocket. Eddie, Myra said. Please tell me what all of this is about! Teartracks shone on her chubby cheeks. Her hands twisted restlessly together like a pair of pink and hairless animals at play. Once, shortly before actually proposing marriage, he had taken a picture of Myra which she had given him and had put it next to one of his mother, who had died of congestive heartfailure at the age of sixtyfour. At the time of her death Eddies mother had topped the scales at over four hundred poundsfour hundred and six, to be exact. She had become something nearly monstrous by thenher body had seemed nothing more than boobs and butt and belly, all overtopped by her pasty, perpetually dismayed face. But the picture of her which he put next to Myras picture had been taken in 1944, two years before he had been born (You were a very sickly baby, the ghostmom now whispered in his ear. Many times we despaired of your life ...). In 1944 his mother had been a relatively svelte one hundred and eighty pounds. He had made that comparison, he supposed, in a lastditch effort to stop himself from committing psychological incest. He looked from Mother to Myra and back again to Mother. They could have been sisters. The resemblance was that close. Eddie looked at the two nearly identical pictures and promised himself he would not do this crazy thing. He knew that the boys at work were already making jokes about Jack Sprat and his wife, but they didnt know the half of it. The jokes and snide remarks he could take, but did he really want to be a clown in such a Freudian circus as this? No. He did not. He would break it off with Myra. He would let her down gently because she was really very sweet and had had even less experience with men than hed had with women. And then, after she had finally sailed over the horizon of his life, he could maybe take those tennis lessons hed been thinking of for such a long time (Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physicaleducation classes) or there were the pool memberships they were selling at the U.N. Plaza Hotel (Eddie loves to play games) not to mention that health club which had opened up on Third Avenue across from the garage ... (Eddie runs quite fast he runs quite fast when youre not here runs quite fast when theres nobody around to remind him of how delicate he is and I see in his face Mrs. Kaspbrak that he knows even now at the age of nine he knows that the biggest favor in the world he could do himself would be to run fast in any direction youre not going let him go Mrs. Kaspbrak let him RUN) But in the end he had married Myra anyway. In the end the old ways and the old habits had simply been too strong. Home was the place where, when you have to go there, they have to chain you up. Oh, he might have beaten his mothers ghost. It would have been hard but he was quite sure he could have done that much, if that had been all which needed doing. It was Myra herself who had ended up tipping the scales away from independence. Myra had condemned him with solicitude, had nailed him with concern, had chained him with sweetness. Myra, like his mother, had reached the final, fatal insight into his character Eddie was all the more delicate because he sometimes suspected he was not delicate at all; Eddie needed to be protected from his own dim intimations of possible bravery. On rainy days Myra always took his rubbers out of the plastic bag in the closet and put them by the coatrack next to the door. Beside his plate of unbuttered wheat toast each morning was a dish of what might have been taken at a casual glance for a multicolored presweetened childrens cereal, but which a closer look would have revealed to be a whole spectrum of vitamins (most of which Eddie had in his medicinebag right now). Myra, like Mother, understood, and there had really been no chance for him. As a young unmarried man he had left his mother three times and returned home to her three times. Then, four years after his mother had died in the front hall of her Queens apartment, blocking the front door so completely with her bulk that the Medcu guys (called by the people downstairs when they heard the monstrous thud of Mrs. Kaspbrak going down for the final count) had had to break in through the locked door between the apartments kitchen and the service stairwell, he had returned home for a fourth and final time. At least he had believed then it was for the final timehome again, home again, jiggetyjog; home again, home again, with Myra the hog. A hog she was, but she was a sweet hog, and he loved her, and there had really been no chance for him at all. She had drawn him to her with the fatal, hypnotizing snakes eye of understanding. Home again forever, he had thought then. But maybe I was wrong, he thought. Maybe this isnt home, nor ever wasmaybehome is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark. He shuddered helplessly, as if he had gone outside without his rubbers and caught a terrible chill. Eddie, please! She was beginning to weep again. Tears were her final defense, just as they had always been his mothers the soft weapon which paralyzes, which turns kindness and tenderness into fatal chinks in ones armor. Not that hed ever worn much armor anywaysuits of armor did not seem to fit him very well. Tears had been more than a defense for his mother; they had been a weapon. Myra had rarely used her own tears so cynically ... but, cynically or not, he realized she was trying to use them that way now ... and she was succeeding. He couldnt let her. It would be too easy to think of how lonely it was going to be, sitting in a seat on that train as it barrelled north toward Boston through the darkness, his suitcase overhead and his totebag full of nostrums between his feet, the fear sitting on his chest like a rancid Vickspack. Too easy to let Myra take him upstairs and make love to him with aspirins and an alcoholrub. And put him to bed, where they might or might not make a franker sort of love. But he had promised. Promised. Myra, listen to me, he said, making his voice purposely dry, purposely matteroffact. She looked at him with her wet, naked, terrified eyes. He thought he would try now to explainas best he could; he would tell her about how Mike Hanlon had called and told him that it had started again, and yes, he thought most of the others were coming. But what came out of his mouth was much saner stuff. Go down to the office first thing in the morning. Talk to Phil. Tell him I had to take off and that youll drive Pacino Eddie, I just cant! she wailed. Hes a big star! If I get lost hell shout at me, I know he will, hell shout, they all do when the driver gets lost ... and ... and Ill cry ... there could be an accident ... there probably will be an accident ... Eddie ... Eddie, you have to stay home.... For Gods sake! Stop it! She recoiled from his voice, hurt; although Eddie gripped his aspirator, he would not use it. She would see that as a weakness, one she could use against him. Dear God, if You are there, please believe me when I say I dont want to hurt Myra. I dont want to cut her, dont even want to bruise her. But I promised, we all promised, we swore in blood, please help me God because I have to do this.... I hate it when you shout at me, Eddie, she whispered. Myra, I hate it when I have to, he said, and she winced. There you go, Eddieyouhurt her again. Why dont you just punch her around the room a few times? That would probably be kinder. And quicker. Suddenlyprobably it was the thought of punching someone around the room which caused the image to comehe saw the face of Henry Bowers. It was the first time he had thought of Bowers in years, and it did nothing for his peace of mind. Nothing at all. He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and said You wont get lost, and he wont shout at you. Mr. Pacino is very nice, very understanding. He had never driven Pacino before in his life, but contented himself with knowing that at least the law of averages was on the side of this lieaccording to popular myth most celebrities were shitheels, but Eddie had driven enough of them to know it usually wasnt true. There were, of course, exceptions to the ruleand in most cases the exceptions were real monstrosities. He hoped fervently for Myras sake that Pacino wasnt one of these. Is he? she asked timidly. Yes. He is. How do you know? Demetrios drove him two or three times when he worked at Manhattan Limousine, Eddie said glibly. He said Mr. Pacino always tipped at least fifty dollars. I wouldnt care if he only tipped me fifty cents, as long as he didnt shout at me. Myra, its all as easy as onetwothree. One, you make the pickup at the Saint Regis tomorrow at seven P.M. and take him over to the ABC Building. Theyre retaping the last act of this play Pacinos inAmerican Buffalo, I think its called. Two, you take him back to the Saint Regis around eleven. Three, you go back to the garage, turn in the car, and sign the greensheet. Thats all? Thats all. You can do it standing on your head, Marty. She usually giggled at this pet name, but now she only looked at him with a painful childlike solemnity. What if he wants to go out to dinner instead of back to the hotel? Or for drinks? Or for dancing? I dont think he will, but if he does, you take him. If it looks like hes going to party all night, you can call Phil Thomas on the radiophone after midnight. By then hell have a driver free to relieve you. Id never stick you with something like this in the first place if I had a driver who was free, but I got two guys out sick, Demetrios on vacation, and everyone else booked up solid. Youll be snug in your own bed by one in the morning, Martyone in the morning at the very, very latest. I applesolutely guarantee it. She didnt laugh at applesolutely, either. He cleared his throat and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Instantly the ghostmom whispered Dont sit that way, Eddie. Its bad for your posture, and it cramps your lungs. You have very delicate lungs. He sat up straight again, hardly aware he was doing it. This better be the only time I have to drive, she nearly moaned. Ive turned into such a horse in the last two years, and my uniforms look so bad now. Its the only time, I swear. Who called you, Eddie? As if on cue, lights swept across the wall; a horn honked once as the cab turned into the driveway. He felt a surge of relief. They had spent the fifteen minutes talking about Pacino instead of Derry and Mike Hanlon and Henry Bowers, and that was good. Good for Myra, and good for him as well. He did not want to spend any time thinking or talking about those things until he had to. Eddie stood up. Its my cab. She got up so fast she tripped over the hem of her own nightgown and fell forward. Eddie caught her, but for a moment the issue was in grave doubt she outweighed him by a hundred pounds. And she was beginning to blubber again. Eddie, you have to tell me! I cant. Theres no time. You never kept anything from me before, Eddie, she wept. And Im not now. Not really. I dont remember it all. At least, not yet. The man who called wasisan old friend. He Youll get sick, she said desperately, following him as he walked toward the front hall again. I know you will. Let me come, Eddie, please, Ill take care of you, Pacino can get a cab or something, it wont kill him, what do you say, okay? Her voice was rising, becoming frantic, and to Eddies horror she began to look more and more like his mother, his mother as she had looked in the last months before she died old and fat and crazy. Ill rub your back and see that you get your pills.... I ... Ill help you.... I wont talk if you dont want me to but you can tell me everything.... Eddie ... Eddie, please dont go! Eddie, please! Pleeeeeease! He was striding down the hall to the front door now, walking blind, head down, moving as a man moves against a high wind. He was wheezing again. When he picked up the bags each of them seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He could feel her plump pink hands on him, touching, exploring, pulling with helpless desire but no real strength, trying to seduce him with her sweet tears of concern, trying to draw him back. Im not going to make it! he thought desperately. The asthma was worse now, worse than it had been since he was a kid. He reached for the doorknob but it seemed to be receding from him, receding into the blackness of outer space. If you stay Ill make you a sourcream coffeecake, she babbled. Well have popcorn.... Ill make your favorite turkey dinner.... Ill make it for breakfast tomorrow morning if you want ... Ill start right now ... and giblet gravy .... Eddie please Im scared youre scaring me so bad! She grabbed his collar and pulled him backward, like a beefy cop putting the grab on a suspicious fellow who is trying to flee. With a final fading effort, Eddie kept going ... and when he was at the absolute end of his strength and ability to resist, he felt her grip trail away. She gave one final wail. His fingers closed around the doorknobhow blessedly cool it was! He pulled the door open and saw a Checker cab sitting out there, an ambassador from the land of sanity. The night was clear. The stars were bright and lucid. He turned back to Myra, whistling and wheezing. You need to understand that this isnt something I want to do, he said. If I had a choiceany choice at allI wouldnt go. Please understand that, Marty. Im going but Ill be coming back. Oh but that felt like a lie. When? How long? A week. Or maybe ten days. Surely no longer than that. A week! she screamed, clutching at her bosom like a diva in a bad opera. A week! Ten days! Please, Eddie! Pleeeeeee Marty, stop. Okay? Just stop. For a wonder, she did stopped and stood looking at him with her wet, bruised eyes, not angry at him, only terrified for him and, coincidentally, for herself. And for perhaps the first time in all the years he had known her, he felt that he could love her safely. Was that part of the going away? He supposed it was. No ... you could flush the supposed. He knew it was. Already he felt like something living in the wrong end of a telescope. But it was maybe all right. Was that what he meant? That he had finally decided it was all right to love her? That it was all right even though she looked like his mother when his mother had been younger and even though she ate brownies in bed while watching Hardcastle and McCormick or Falcon Crest and the crumbs always got on his side and even though she wasnt all that bright and even though she understood and condoned his remedies in the medicine cabinet because she kept her own in the refrigerator? Or was it ... Could it be that ... These other ideas were all things he had considered in one way or another, at one time or another, during his oddly entwined lives as a son and a lover and a husband; now, on the point of leaving home for what felt like the absolutely last time, a new possibility came to him, and startled wonder brushed him like the wing of some large bird. Could it be that Myra was even more frightened than he was? Could it be that his mother had been? Another Derry memory came shooting up from his subconscious like a balefully fizzing firework. There had been a shoe store downtown on Center Street. The Shoeboat. His mother had taken him there one dayhe thought he could have been no more than five or sixand told him to sit still and be good while she got a pair of white pumps for a wedding. So he sat still and was good while his mother talked with Mr. Gardener, who was one of the shoeclerks, but he was only five (or maybe six), and after his mother had rejected the third pair of white pumps Mr. Gardener showed her, Eddie got bored and walked over to the far corner to look at something he had spotted there. At first he thought it was just a big crate standing on end. When he got closer he decided it was some kind of desk. But it sure was the kookiest desk he had ever seen. It was so narrow! It was made of bright polished wood with lots of curvy inlaid lines and carved doojiggers in it. Also, there was a little flight of three stairs leading up to it, and he had never seen a desk with stairs. When he got right up to it, he saw that there was a slot at the bottom of the deskthing, a button on one side, and on top of itentrancing!was something that looked exactly like Captain Videos Spacescope. Eddie walked around to the other side and there was a sign. He must have been at least six, because he had been able to read it, softly whispering each word aloud DO YOUR SHOES FIT RIGHT? CHECK AND SEE! He went back around, climbed the three steps to the little platform, and then stuck his foot into the slot at the bottom of the shoechecker. Did his shoes fit right? Eddie didnt know, but he was wild to check and see. He socked his face into the rubber faceguard and thumbed the button. Green light flooded his eyes. Eddie gasped. He could see a foot floating inside a shoe filled with green smoke. He wiggled his toes, and the toes he was looking at wiggled right backthey were his, all right, just as he had suspected. And then he realized it was not just his toes he could see; he could see his bones, too! The bones in his foot! He crossed his great toe over his second toe (as if sneakily warding off the consequences of telling a lie) and the eldritch bones in the scope made an X that was not white but goblingreen. He could see Then his mother shrieked, a rising sound of panic that cut through the quiet shoe store like a runaway reaperblade, like a firebell, like doom on horseback. He jerked his startled, dismayed face out of the viewer and saw her pelting toward him across the store in her stocking feet, her dress flying out behind her. She knocked a chair over and one of those shoemeasuring things that always tickled his feet went flying. Her bosom heaved. Her mouth was a scarlet O of horror. Faces turned to follow her progress. Eddie get off there! she screamed. Get off there! Those machines give you cancer! Get off there! Eddie! Eddieeeeeee He backed away as if the machine had suddenly grown redhot. In his startled panic he forgot the little flight of stairs behind him. His heels dropped over the top one and he stood there, slowly falling backward, his arms pinwheeling wildly in a losing battle to retain his departing balance. And hadnt he thought with a kind of mad joy Im going to fall! Im going to find out what it feels like to fall and bump my head! Goody for me! ... ? Hadnt he thought that? Or was it only the man imposing his own selfserving adult ideas over whatever his childs mind, always roaring with confused surmises and halfperceived images (images which lost their sense in their very brightness), had thought ... or tried to think? Either way, it was a moot question. He had not fallen. His mother had gotten there in time. His mother had caught him. He had burst into tears, but he had not fallen. Everyone had been looking at them. He remembered that. He remembered Mr. Gardener picking up the shoemeasuring thing and checking the little sliding gadgets on it to make sure they were still okay while another clerk righted the fallen chair and then flapped his arms once, in amused disgust, before putting on his pleasantly neutral salesmans face again. Mostly he remembered his mothers wet cheek and her hot, sour breath. He remembered her whispering over and over in his ear, Dont you ever do that again, dont you ever do that again, dont you ever. It was what his mother chanted to ward off trouble. She had chanted the same thing a year earlier when she discovered the babysitter had taken Eddie to the public pool in Derry Park one stiflingly hot summer daythis had been when the polio scare of the early fifties was just beginning to wind down. She had dragged him out of the pool, telling him he must never do that, never, never, and all the kids had looked as all the clerks and customers were looking now, and her breath had had that same sour tang. She dragged him out of The Shoeboat, shouting at the clerks that she would see them all in court if there was anything wrong with her boy. Eddies terrified tears had continued off and on for the rest of the morning, and his asthma had been particularly bad all day. That night he had lain awake for hours past the time he was usually asleep, wondering exactly what cancer was, if it was worse than polio, if it killed you, how long it took if it did, and how bad it hurt before you died. He also wondered if he would go to hell afterward. The threat had been serious, he knew that much. She had been so scared. That was how he knew. So terrified. Marty, he said across this gulf of years, would you give me a kiss? She kissed him and hugged him so tightly while she was doing it that the bones in his back groaned. If we were in water, he thought, shed drown us both. Dont be afraid, he whispered in her ear. I cant help it! she wailed. I know, he said, and realized that, even though she was hugging him with ribbreaking tightness, his asthma had eased. That whistling note in his breathing was gone. I know, Marty. The taxidriver honked again. Will you call? she asked him tremulously. If I can. Eddie, cant you please tell me what it is? And suppose he did? How far would it go toward setting her mind at rest? Marty, I got a call from Mike Hanlon tonight, and we talked for awhile, but everything we said boiled down to two things. Its started again, Mike said; Will you come? Mike said. And now Ive got a fever, Marty, only its a fever you cant damp down with aspirin, and Ive got a shortness of breath the goddamned aspirator wont touch, because that shortness of breath isnt in my throat or my lungsitis around my heart. Ill come back to you if I can, Marty, but I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mineshaft that is full of caveins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight. Yesmy, yes! That would surely set her mind at rest! No, he said. I guess I cant tell you what it is. And before she could say more, before she could begin again (Eddie, get out of that taxi! They give you cancer!), he was striding away from her, faster and faster. By the time he got to the cab he was almost running. She was still standing in the doorway when the cab backed into the street, still standing there when they started for the citya big black womanshadow cut out of the light spilling from their house. He waved, and thought she raised her hand in return. Where we headed tonight, my friend? the cabbie asked. Penn Station, Eddie said, and his hand relaxed on the aspirator. His asthma had gone to wherever it went to brood between its assaults on his bronchial tubes. He felt ... almost well. But he needed the aspirator worse than ever four hours later, coming out of a light doze all in a single spasmodic jerk that caused the fellow in the business suit across the way to lower his paper and look at him with faintly apprehensive curiosity. Im back, Eddie! the asthma yelled gleefully. Im back and oh, I dunno, this time I just might killya! Why not? Gotta do it sometime, you know! Cant fuck around with you forever! Eddies chest surged and pulled. He groped for the aspirator, found it, pointed it down his throat, and pulled the trigger. Then he sat back in the tall Amtrak seat, shivering, waiting for relief, thinking of the dream from which he had just awakened. Dream? Christ, if that was all. He was afraid it was more memory than dream. In it there had been a green light like the light inside a shoestore Xray machine, and a rotting leper had pursued a screaming boy named Eddie Kaspbrak through tunnels under the earth. He ran and ran (he runs quite fast Coach Black had told his mother and he ran plenty fast with that rotting thing after him oh yes you better believe it you bet your fur) in this dream where he was eleven years old, and then he had smelled something like the death of time, and someone lit a match and he had looked down and seen the decomposing face of a boy named Patrick Hockstetter, a boy who had disappeared in July of 1958, and there were worms crawling in and out of Patrick Hockstetters cheeks, and that gassy, awful smell was coming from inside of Patrick Hockstetter, and in that dream that was more memory than dream he had looked to one side and had seen two schoolbooks that were fat with moisture and overgrown with green mold Roads to Everywhere, and Understanding Our America. They were in their current condition because it was a foul wetness down here (How I Spent My Summer Vacation, a theme by Patrick HockstetterI spent it dead in a tunnel! Moss grew on my books and they swelled up to the size of Sears catalogues!). Eddie opened his mouth to scream and that was when the scabrous fingers of the leper clittered around his cheek and plunged themselves into his mouth and that was when he woke up with that backsnapping jerk to find himself not in the sewers under Derry, Maine, but in an Amtrak clubcar near the head of a train speeding across Rhode Island under a big white moon. The man across the aisle hesitated, almost thought better of speaking, and then did. Are you all right, sir? Oh yes, Eddie said. I fell asleep and had a bad dream. It got my asthma going. I see. The paper went up again. Eddie saw it was the paper his mother had sometimes referred to as The Jew York Times. Eddie looked out the window at a sleeping landscape lit only by the fairy moon. Here and there were houses, or sometimes clusters of them, most dark, a few showing lights. But the lights seemed little, and falsely mocking, compared to the moons ghostglow. He thought the moon talked to him, he thought suddenly. Henry Bowers. God, he was so crazy. He wondered where Henry Bowers was now. Dead? In prison? Drifting across empty plains somewhere in the middle of the country like an incurable virus, sticking up SevenElevens in the deep slumbrous hours between one and four in the morning or maybe killing some of the people stupid enough to slow down for his cocked thumb in order to transfer the dollars in their wallets to his own? Possible, possible. In a state asylum somewhere? Looking up at this moon, which was approaching the full? Talking to it, listening to answers which only he could hear? Eddie considered this somehow even more possible. He shivered. I am remembering my boyhood at last, he thought. I am remembering how I spent my own summer vacation in that dim dead year of 1958. He sensed that now he could fix upon almost any scene from that summer he wanted to, but he did not want to. Oh God if I could only forget it all again. He leaned his forehead against the dirty glass of the window, his aspirator clasped loosely in one hand like a religious artifact, watching as the night flew apart around the train. Going north, he thought, but that was wrong. Not going north. Because its not a train; its a time machine. Not north; back. Back in time. He thought he heard the moon mutter. Eddie Kaspbrak held his aspirator tightly and closed his eyes against sudden vertigo. 5 Beverly Rogan Takes a Whuppin Tom was nearly asleep when the phone rang. He struggled halfway up, leaning toward it, and then felt one of Beverlys breasts press against his shoulder as she reached over him to get it. He flopped back on his pillow, wondering dully who was calling on their unlisted home phone number at this hour of the night. He heard Beverly say hello, and then he drifted off again. He had put away nearly three sixpacks during the baseball game, and he was shagged. Then Beverlys voice, sharp and curiousWhaaat?drilled into his ear like an icepick and he opened his eyes again. He tried to sit up and the phone cord dug into his thick neck. Get that fucking thing off me, Beverly, he said, and she got up quickly and walked around the bed, holding the phone cord up with tented fingers. Her hair was a deep red, and it flowed over her nightgown in natural waves almost to her waist. Whores hair. Her eyes did not stutter to his face to read the emotional weather there, and Tom Rogan didnt like that. He sat up. His head was starting to ache. Shit, it had probably already been aching, but when you were asleep you didnt know it. He went into the bathroom, urinated for what felt like three hours, and then decided that as long as he was up he ought to get another beer and try to take the curse off the impending hangover. Passing back through the bedroom on his way to the stairs, a man in white boxer shorts that flapped like sails below his considerable belly, his arms like slabs (he looked more like a dockwalloper than the president and general manager of Beverly Fashions, Inc.), he looked over his shoulder and yelled crossly If its that bull dyke Lesley, tell her to go eat out some model and let us sleep! Beverly glanced up briefly, shook her head to indicate it wasnt Lesley, and then looked back at the phone. Tom felt the muscles at the back of his neck tighten up. It felt like a dismissal. Dismissed by Milady. Mifuckinlady. This was starting to look like it might turn into a situation. It might be that Beverly needed a short refresher course on who was in charge around here. It was possible. Sometimes she did. She was a slow learner.