'Why?'

'Why? Well . . . because I had my medicine.' He looked at Mr Keene the way he looked at Mrs Casey in school when he had given an answer he wasn't quite sure of.

'But you didn't have any medicine,' Mr Keene said. 'You had a placebo. A placebo, Eddie, is something that looks like medicine and tastes like medicine but isn't medicine. A placebo isn't medicine because it has no active ingredients. Or, if it is medicine, it's medicine of a very special sort. Head-medicine.' Mr Keene smiled. 'Do you understand that, Eddie? Head-medicine.'

Eddie understood, all right; Mr Keene was telling him he was crazy. But through numb lips he said, 'No, I don't get you.'

'Let me tell you a little story,' Mr Keene said. 'In 1954, a series of medical tests on ulcer patients was run at DePaul University. One hundred ulcer patients were given pills. They were all told the pills would help their ulcers, but fifty of the patients really got placebos . . . They were, in fact, M&M's given a uniform pink coating.' Mr Keene uttered a strange shrill giggle — that of a man describing a prank rather than an experiment. 'Of those one hundred patients, ninety– three said they felt a definite improvement, and eighty – one showed an improvement. So what do you think? What conclusion do you draw from such an experiment, Eddie?'

'I don't know,' Eddie said faintly.

Mr Keene tapped his head solemnly. 'Most sickness starts in here, that's what I think. I've been in this business a long, long time, and I knew about placebos a mighty stretch of years before those doctors at DePaul University did their study. Usually it's old folks who end up getting the placebos. The old fellow or the old girl will go to the doctor, convinced that they've got heart disease or cancer or diabetes or some damn thing. But in a good many cases it's nothing like that at all. They don't feel good because they're old, that's all. But what's a doctor to do? Tell them they're like watches with wornout mainsprings? Huh! Not likely. Doctors like their fees too much.' And now Mr Keene's face wore an expression somewhere between a smile and a sneer.

Eddie just sat there waiting for it to be over, to be over, to be over. You didn't have any medicine: those words clanged in his mind.

The doctors don't tell them that, and I don't tell them that, either. Wh y bother? Sometimes an old party will come in with a prescription blank that will say it right out: Placebo, or 25 grains Blue Skies, which was how old Doc Pearson used to put it.'

Mr Keene cackled briefly and then sucked on his coffee soda.

'Well, what's wrong with it?' he asked Eddie, and when Eddie only sat there, Mr Keene answered his own question. 'Why, nothing! Nothing at all!

'At least . . . usually.

'Placebos are a blessing for old people. And then there are other cases — folks with cancer, folks with degenerative heart disease, folks with terrible things that we don't understand yet, some of them children just like you, Eddie! In cases like that, if a placebo makes the patient feel better, where is the harm? Do you see the harm, Eddie?'

'No sir,' Eddie said, and looked down at the splatter of chocolate ice cream, soda-water, whipped cream, and broken glass on the floor. In the middle of all this was the maraschino cherry, as accusing as a blood-clot at a crime scene. Looking at this mess made his chest feel tight again.

'Then we're like Ike and Mike! We think alike! Five years ago, when Vernon Maitland had cancer of the esophagus — a painful, painful sort of cancer — and the doctors had run out of anything effective they could give him for his pain, I came by his hospital room with a bottle of sugar-pills. He was a special friend, you see. And I said, "Vern, these are special experimental pain-pills. The doctor doesn't know I'm giving them to you, so for God's sake be careful an d don't tattle on me. They might not work, but I think they will. Take no more than one a day, and only if the pain is especially bad." He thanked me with tears in his eyes. Tears, Eddie! And they worked for him! Yes! They were only sugar-pills, but they killed most of his pain . . . because pain is here.'

Solemnly, Mr Keene tapped his head again.

Eddie said: 'My medicine does so work.'

'I know it does,' Mr Keene replied, and smiled a maddening complacent grownup's smile. 'It works on your chest because it works on your head. HydrOx, Eddie, is water with a dash of camphor thrown in to give it a medicine taste.'

'No,' Eddie said. His breath had begun to whistle again.

Mr Keene drank some of his soda, spooned some of the melting ice cream, and fastidiously wiped his chin with his handkerchief while Eddie used his aspirator again.

'I want to go now,' Eddie said.

'Let me finish, please.'

'No! I want to go, you've got your money and I want to go!'

'Let me finish,' Mr Keene said, so forbiddingly that Eddie sat back in his chair. Grownups could be so hateful in their power sometimes. So hateful.

'Part of the problem here is that your doctor, Russ Handor, is weak. And pan of the problem is that your mother is determined you are ill. You, Eddie, have been caught in the middle.'

'I'm not crazy,' Eddie whispered, the words coming out in a bare husk.

Mr Keene's chair creaked like a monstrous cricket. 'What?'

'I said I'm not crazy!' Eddie shouted. Then, immediately, a miserable blush rose into his face.

Mr Keene smiled. Think what you like, that smile said. Think what you like, and I'll think what I like.

'All I'm telling you, Eddie, is that you're not physically ill. Your lungs don't have asthma; your mind does.'

'You mean I'm crazy.'

Mr Keene leaned forward, looking at him intently over his folded hands.

'I don't know,' he said softly. 'Are you?'

'It's all a lie!' Eddie cried, surprised the words came out so strongly from his tight chest. He was thinking of Bill, how Bill would react to such amazing charges. Bill would know what to say, stutter or not. Bill would know how to be brave. 'All a great big lie! I do have asthma, I do!'

'Yes,' Mr Keene said, and now the dry smile had become a weird skeletal grin. 'But who gave it to you, Eddie?'

Eddie's brain thudded and whirled. Oh, he felt sick, he felt very sick.

'Four years ago, in 1954 — the same year as the DePaul tests, oddly enough — Dr Handor began prescribing this HydrOx for you. That stands for hydrogen and oxygen, the two components of water. I have condoned this deception since then, but I will not condone it anymore. Your asthma medicine works on your mind rather than your body. Your asthma is the result of a nervous tightening of the diaphragm that is ordered by your mind . . . or your mother.

'You are not sick.'

A terrible silence descended.

Eddie sat in his chair, his mind whirling. For a moment he considered the possibility that Mr Keene might be telling the truth, bu t there were ramifi cations in such an idea that he could not face. Yet why would Mr Keene lie, especially about something so serious? ! Mr Keene sat and smiled his bright dry heartless desert smile.

I do have asthma, I do. The day that Henry Bowers punched me in the nose, the day Bill and I were trying to make a dam in the Barrens, I almost died. Am I supposed to think that my mind was just . . . just making all of that up?

But why would he lie? (It was only years later, in the library, that Eddie asked himself the more terrible question: Why would he tell me the truth?)

Dimly he heard Mr Keene saying: 'I've kept my eye on you, Eddie. I told you all this because you're old enough to understand, but also because I've noticed you've finally made some friends. They are good friends, aren't they?'