But she knew one thing. Yes. One thing for sure: she would never never never set foot into Mr Nosy-Parker Keene's drugstore again in her life.

His voice, oddly shy now, interrupted her thoughts. 'Ma?'

She looked up and saw it was Eddie again, just Eddie, and she went to him gladly.

'Can I have a hug, Ma?'

She hugged him, but carefully, so as not to hurt his broken arm (or dislodge any loose bone-fragments so they could run an evil race around his bloodstream and then lodge in his heart — what mother would kill her son with love?), and Eddie hugged her back.

7

As far as Eddie was concerned, his ma left just in time. During the horrible confrontation with her he had felt his breath piling up and up and up in his lungs and throat, still and tideless, stale and brackish, threatening to poison him.

He held on until the door had snicked shut behind her and then he began to gasp and wheeze. The sour air working in his tight throat jabbed up and down like a warm poker. He grabbed for his aspirator, hurting his arm but not caring. He triggered a long blast down his throat. He breathed deep of the camphor taste, thinking: It doesn't matter if it's a pla-cee-bo,words don't matter if a thing works.

He lay back against his pillows, eyes closed, breathing freely for the first time since she had come in. He was scared, plenty scared. The things he had said to her, the way he had acted — it had been him and yet it hadn't been him at all. There had been something working in him, working through him, some force . . . and his mother had felt it, too. He had seen it in her eyes and in her trembling lips. He had no sense that this power was an evil one, but its enormous strength was frightening. It was like getting on an amusement-park ride that was really dangerous and realizing you couldn't get off until it was over, come what might.

No turning around, Eddie thought, feeling the hot, itchy weight of the cast that encased his broken arm. No one goes home until we get to the end. But God I'm so scared, so scared. And he knew that the truest reason for demanding she not cut him off from his friends was something he could never have told her: I can't face this alone.

He cried a little then, and then drifted off into a restless sleep. He dreamed of a darkness in which machinery — pumping machinery — ran on and on.

8

It was threatening showers again that evening when Bill and the rest of the Losers returned to the hospital. Eddie was not surprised to see them come filing in. He had known they would be back.

It had been hot all day — it was generally agreed later that that third week of July was the hottest of an exceptionally hot summer — and the thunderheads began to build up around four in the afternoon, purple-black and colossal, pregnant with rain, loaded with lightnings. People went about their errands quickly and a little uneasily, with one eye always cocked at the sky. Most agreed it would rain good and hard by dinnertime, washing some of the thick humidity out of the ear. Derry's parks and playgrounds, underpopulated all summer, were totally deserted that evening by six. The rain had still not fallen, and the 'swings hung moveless and shadeless in a light that was a queer flat yellow. Thunder rumbled thickly — that, a barking dog, and the low mutter of traffic on Outer Main Street were the only sounds that drifted in through Eddie's window until the Losers came.

Bill was first, followed by Richie. Beverly and Stan followed them, then Mike Ben came last. He looked excruciatingly uncomfortable in a white trurtleneck sweater.

They came to his bed, solemn. Not even Richie was smiling.

Their faces, Eddie thought, fascinated. Jeezum-crow, their faces!

He was seeing in them what his mother had seen in him that afternoon: that odd combination of power and helplessness. The yellow stormlight lay on their skins, making their faces seem ghost-like, distant, shadowy.

We're passing over, Eddie thought. Passing over into something new — we're on the border. But what's on the other side? Where are we going? Where?

'H-h-Hello, Eh-Eh –Eddie,' Bill said. 'How you d-d-doin?'

'Okay, Big Bill,' Eddie said, and tried to smile.

'Had a day yesterday, I guess,' Mike said. Thunder rumbled behind his voice. Neither the overhead light nor the bedside lamp was on in Eddie's room, and all of them seemed to fade in and out of the bruised light. Eddie thought of that light all over Derry right now, lying long and still across McCarron Park, falling through the holes in the roof of the Kissing Bridge in smudged lackadaisical rays, making the Kenduskeag look like smoky glass as ifcut its broad shallow path through the Barrens; he thought of seesaws standing at dead angles behind Derry Elementary as the thunderheads piled up and up; he thought of this thundery yellow light, and the stillness, as if the whole town had fallen asleep . . . or died.

'Yes,' he said. 'It was a big day.'

'My f-folks are g-going out to a muh-muh-movie the night a-a-after n-next,' Bill said. 'When the p-pic –hictures change. We're g-going to m-make them then. The suh –suh –suh — '

'Silver balls,' Richie said.

'I thought — '

'It's better this way,' Ben said quietly. 'I still think we could have made the bullets, but thinking isn't good enough. If we were grownups — '

'Oh yeah, the world would be peachy if we were grownups,' Beverly said. 'Grownups can make anything they want, can't they? Grownups can do anything they want, and it always comes out right.' She laughed, a jagged nervous sound. 'Bill wants me to shoot It. Can you feature that, Eddie? Just call me Beverly Oakley.'

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Eddie said, but he thought he did — he was getting some kind of picture, anyway.

Ben explained. They would melt down one of his silver dollars and make two silver balls a little smaller than ball-bearings. And then, if there really was a werewolf residing at 29 Neibolt Street, Beverly would put a silver ball into Its head with Bill's Bullseye slingshot. Goodbye werewolf. And if they were right about one creature who wore many faces, goodbye It.

There must have been some sort of expression on Eddie's face, because Richie laughed and nodded.

'I know how you feel, man. I thought Bill must have lost his few remaining marbles when he started talking about using his slingshot instead of his dad's gun. But this afternoon — ' He stopped and cleared his throat. This afternoon after your ma blew us out of the water was how he had been about to start, and that obviously wouldn't do. 'This afternoon we went down to the dump. Bill brought his Bullseye. Look.' From his back pocket Richie took a flattened can which had once held Del Monte pineapple chunks. There was a ragged hole about two inches in diameter through the middle of it. 'Beverly did that with a rock, from twenty feet away. Looks like a .38 to me. De Trashmouth was convinced. And when de Trashmouth is convinced, de Trashmouth is convinced.'

'Killing cans is one thing,' Beverly said. 'If it was something else . . . something alive . . . Bill, you should be the one. Really.'

'N-no,' Bill said. 'We a-a-all t-took turns. You suh-suh-saw how it w-w-went.'

'How did it go?' Eddie asked.

Bill explained, slowly and haltingly, while Beverly looked out the window with her lips pressed so tightly together they were white. She was, for reasons she could not explain even to herself, more than afraid: she was deeply embarrassed by what had happened today. On the way over here tonight she had argued again, passionately, that they try to make the bullets after all . . . not because she was any more sure than Bill or Richie that they would actually work when the time came, but because — if something did happen out at that house — the weapon would be in