He said it himself now: 'I love you, Ma. But I love my friends, too. I think . . . I think you're making yourself cry.'

'Eddie, you hurt me so much,' she whispered, and fresh tears doubled his pale face, trebled it. If her tears a few moments ago had been calculated, these were not. In her own peculiar way she was tough — she had seen her husband into his grave without cracking up, she had gotten a job in a depressed job-market where it wasn't easy to get a job, she had raised her son, and when it had been necessary, she had fought for him. These were the fi rst totally unaffected and uncalculated tears she had wept in years, perhaps since Eddie had gotten the bronchitis when he was five and she had been so sure he would die as he lay there in his bed of pain, glowing bright with fever, whooping and coughing and gasping for breath. She wept now because of that terribly adult, somehow alien expression on his face. She was afraid for him, but she was also, in some way, afraid of him, afraid of that aura that seemed to surround him . . . which seemed to demand something of her.

'Don't make me have to choose between you and my friends, Ma,' Eddie said. His voice was uneven, strained, but still under control. 'Because that's not fair.'

'They're bad friends, Eddie!' she cried in a near-frenzy. 'I know that, I feel that with all my heart, they'll bring you nothing but pain and grief!' And the most horrible thing of all was that she did sense that; some part of her had intuited it in the eyes of the Denbrough boy, who had stood before her with his hands in his pockets, his red hair flaming in the summer sun. His eyes had been so grave, so strange and distant . . . like Eddie's eyes now.

And hadn't that same aura been around him as was around Eddie now? The same, but even stronger? She thought yes.

'Ma — '

She stood up so suddenly she almost knocked the straight-backed chair over. 'I'll come back this evening,' she said. 'It's the shock, the accident, the pain, those things, that make you talk this way. I know it. You . . . you . . . ' She groped, and found her original text in the flying confusion of her mind. 'You've had a bad accident, but you're going to be just fine. And you'll see I'm right, Eddie. They're bad friends. Not our sort. Not for you. You think it over and ask yourself if your ma ever told you wrong before. You think about it and . . . and . . . '

I'm running! she thought with a sick and hurtful dismay. I'm running away from my ownson! Oh God, please don't let this be!

'Ma.'

For a moment she almost fled anyway, scared of him now, oh yes, he was more than Eddie; she sensed the others in him, his 'friends' and something else, something that was beyond even them, and she was afraid it might flash out at her. It was as if he were in the grip of something, some dreadful fever, as he had been in the grip of the bronchitis that time when he was five, when he had almost died.

She paused, her hand on the doorknob, not wanting to hear what he might say . . . and when he said it, it was so unexpected that for a moment she didn't really understand it. When comprehension crashed down, it came like a loose load of cement, and for a moment she thought she would faint.

Eddie said: 'Mr Keene said my asthma medicine is just water.'

'What? What?' She turned blazing eyes on him.

'Just water. With some stuff added to make it taste like medicine. He said it was a pla –cee-bo.'

'That's a lie! That is nothing but a solid lie! Why would Mr Keene want to tell you a lie like that? Well, there are other drug-stores in Derry, I guess. I gue ss — '

'I've had time to think about it,' Eddie said, softly and implacably, his eyes never leaving hers, 'and I think he's telling the truth.'

'Eddie, I tell you he's not! ' The panic was back, fluttering.

'What I think,' Eddie said, 'is that it must be the truth or there would be some kind of warning on the bottle, like if you take too much it will kill you or at least make you sick. Even — '

'Eddie, I don't want to hear this!' she cried, and clapped her hands to her ears. 'You're . . . you're . . . you're just not yourself and that's all that it is!'

'Even if it's something you can just go in and buy without a prescription, they put special instructions on it,' he went on, not raising his voice. His gray eyes lay on hers, and she couldn't seem to drop her gaze, or even move it. 'Even if it's just Vicks cough syrup . . . or your Geritol.'

He paused for a moment. Her hands dropped from her ears; it seemed too much work to hold them up. They seemed very heavy.

'And it's like . . . yo u must have known that, too, Ma.'

'Eddie!' She nearly wailed it.

'Because,' he went on, as if she had not spoken at all — he was frowning now, concentrating on the problem, 'because your folks are supposed to know about medicines. Why, I use that aspirator five, sometimes six times a day. And you wouldn't let me do that if you thought it could, like, hurt me. Because it's your job to protect me. I know it is, because that's what you always say. So . . . did you know, Ma? Did you know it was just water?'

She said nothing. Her lips were trembling. It felt as if her whole face was trembling. She was no longer crying. She felt too scared to cry.

'Because if you did,' E d d i e s a i d , s t i l l f r o w n i n g , ' i f y o u did know, I'd want to know why. I can figure some things out, but not why my ma would want me to think water was medicine . . . or that I had asthma here' — he pointed to his chest — 'when Mr Keene says I only have it up here' — and he pointed to his head.

She thought she would explain everything then. She would explain it quietly and logically. How she had thought he was going to die when he was five, and how that would have driven her crazy after losing Frank only two years before. How she came to understand that you could only protect your child through watchfulness and love, that you must tend a child as you tended a garden, fertilizing, weeding, and yes, occasionally pruning and thinning, as

much as that hurt. She would tell him that sometimes it was better for a child — particularly a delicate child like Eddie — to think he was sick than to really get sick. And she would finish by talking to him about the deadly foolishness of doctors and the wonderful power of love; she would tell him that she knew he had asthma, and it didn't matter what th e doctors thought or what they gave him for it. She would tell him you could make medicine with more than a malicious meddling druggist's mortar and pestle. Eddie, she would say, it's medicine becauseyour mother's love makes it medicine, and in just that way, for as long as you want me and let me, I can do that. This is a power that God gives to loving caring mothers. Please, Eddie, please, my heart's own love, you must believe me.

But in the end she said nothing. Her fright was too great.

'But ma ybe we don't even have to talk about it,' Eddie went on. 'Mr Keene might have been joking with me. Sometimes grownups . . . you know, they like to play jokes on kids. Because kids believe almost anything. It's mean to do that to kids, but sometimes grownups do it.'

'Yes,' Sonia Kaspbrak said eagerly. 'They like to joke and sometimes they're stupid . . . mean . . . and . . . and . . . '

'So I'll kind of keep an eye out for Bill and the rest of my friends,' Eddie said, 'and keep right on using my asthma medicine. That's probably best, don't you think?'

She realized only now, when it was too late, how neatly — h o w c r u e l l y — she had been trapped. What he was doing was almost blackmail, but what choice did she have? She wanted to ask him how he could be so calculating, so manipulative. She opened her mouth to ask . . . and then closed it again. It was too likely that, in his present mood, he might answer.