The taxi-driver honked again.

'Will you call?' she asked him tremulously.

'If I can.'

'Eddie, can't you please tell me what it is?'

And suppose he did? How far would it go toward setting her mind at rest?

Many, I got a call from Mike Hanlon tonight, and we talked for awhile, but everything we said boiled down to two things. 'It's started again,' Mike said; 'Will you come?' Mike said. And now I've got a fever, Marty, only it's a fever you can't damp down with aspirin, and I've got a shortness of breath the goddamned aspirator won't touch, because that shortness of breath isn't in my throat or my lungs — it is around my heart. I'll come back to you if I can, Marty, but I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight.

Yes — my, yes! That would surely set her mind at rest!

'No,' he said. 'I guess I can't 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 city — a big black woman-shadow 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.

I'm back, Eddie! the asthma yelled gleefully. I'm back and oh, I dunno, this time I just might killya! Why not? Gotta do it sometime, you know! Can't fuck around with you forever!

Eddie's 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 shoe-store X-ray 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 Hockstetter's 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 Hockstetter — 'I 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 back-snapping jerk to find himself not in the sewers under Derry, Maine, but in an Amtrak club-car 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 litten 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 moon's ghost-glow.

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 Seven-Elevens 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?

Ed die considered this somehow even more possible. He shivered. I am remembering myboyhood 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 it's not a train; it's 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 Beverly's breasts press against his shoulder as she reached over him to get it. He flopped back on his pillow, wonder ing 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 Beverly's voice, sharp and curious — 'Whaaat?' — drilled into his ear like an ice-pick 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. Whore's hair. Her eyes did not stutter to his face to read the emotional weather there, and Tom Rogan didn't like that. He sat up. His head was starting to ache. Shit, it had probably already been aching, but when you were asleep you didn't know it.

He went into the bathroom, urinated for what felt lik e 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 dock-walloper than the president and general manager of Beverly Fashions, Inc.), he looked over his shoulder and yelled crossly: 'If it's that bull dyke Lesley, tell her to go eat out some model and let us sleep!'