'Neither of my uniforms fit anymore! They're 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 all — his aspirator — downstairs 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.

'What's happened, Eddie? Who was that on the telephone? Are you in trouble? You are, aren't you? What kind of trouble are you in?'

He walked toward her, zipper-bag 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 can't drive Al Pacino!' she bawled. 'I'll smash into a stop-sign or something, I know I will! Eddie I'm scaaarrred!'

He looked at the Seth Thomas clock on the table by the stairs. Twenty past nine. The canned-sounding Delta clerk had told him he had already missed the last flight north to Maine — that one had left La Guardia at eight-twenty-five. He had called Amtrak and discovered there was a late train to Boston departing Perm Station at eleven-thirty. 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 Eddie's 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 north — Butch said he would have a Cadillac limo gassed and ready for him. So he would go in style, and with no pain-in-the –ass 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 don't worry, Eddie — that's probably how you'll come back. If there's enough of you left to pick up, that is.

'Eddie?'

Nine-twenty. 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 way — like a fugitive — would 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 he'd had to do it three times.

Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home's the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Unfortunately, it's also the place where, once you're in there, they don't 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 I'll tell you what I can,' he said.

Eddie put his two bags — clothes in one, medicine in the other — by 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, Eddie — you're not like other people, you have a very weak system, you have to be careful. That's why you must always wear your rubbers when it rains.

It rained a lot in Derry.

Eddie opened the front-hall closet, got his rubbers off the hook where they hung neatly in a plastic bag, and put them in his clothes suitcase.

That's 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 TV — its 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 compact-disc player. I spent fifteen hundred bucks on a state-of-the-art sound system so that Myra wouldn't 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 wasn't 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 45-rpm-sized laser discs, just as she would have been happy to keep on living in the little four –room house in Queens until they were both old and gray (and, if the truth were told, there was a little snow on Eddie Kaspbrak's 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! Imade it! Now will you please for Christ's 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, ghost –voices.

Didn't you get the note I sent you?

I got it, Mrs Kaspbrak, but —

Well, in case you can't 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 canNOT take phys ed. Eddie is very delicate, and if he runs . . . or jumps . . .

Mrs Kaspbrak, I have the results of Eddie's last physical on file in my office — that's a state requirement. It says that Eddie is a little small for his age, but otherwise he's absolutely normal. So I called your family physician just to be sure and he confirmed —

Are you saying I'm a liar, Coach Black? Is that it? Well, here he is! Here's Eddie, standing right beside me! Can you hear the way he's breathing? CAN you?

Mom . . . please . . . I'm all right . . .

Eddie, you know better than that. I taught you better than that. Don't interrupt your elders.