by Stephen King
Henry did a quick side-roll like a paratrooper and was up again. He grabbed Eddie by the nape of the neck and by his right wrist. His breath, snorting through his swelled and splinted nose, was warm and moist.
"Want rocks, Rock Man? Sure! Shit!" He jerked Eddie's wrist halfway up his back. Eddie yelled. "Rocks for the Rock Man, right, Rock Man?" He jerked Eddie's wrist up even higher. Eddie screamed. Behind him, dimly, he could hear the others approaching, and the little kid on the trike starting to bawl. Join the club, kid, he thought, and in spite of the pain, in spite of the tears and the fear, he brayed a huge donkeylike hee-haw of laughter.
"You think this is funny?" Henry asked, sounding suddenly astounded rather than furious. "You think this is funny?" And did Henry also sound scared? Years later Eddie would think Yes, scared, he sounded scared.
Eddie twisted his wrist in Henry's grip. He was slick with sweat and he almost got away. Perhaps that was why Henry shoved Eddie's wrist up harder this time than before. Eddie heard a crack in his arm like the sound of winterwood giving under an accumulated plate of ice. The pain that rolled out of his fractured arm was gray and huge. He shrieked, but the sound seemed distant. The color was washing out of the world, and when Henry let go of him and pushed, he seemed to float toward the sidewalk. It took a long time to get down to that old sidewalk. He had a good look at every single crack in it as he glided down. He had a chance to admire the way the July sun glinted off the flecks of mica in that old sidewalk. He had a chance to note the remains of a very old hopscotch grid that had been done in pink chalk on that old sidewalk. Then, for just a moment, it swam and looked like something else. It looked like a turtle.
He might have fainted then, but he struck on his newly broken arm, and this fresh pain was sharp, bright, hot, terrible. He felt the splintered ends of the greenstick fracture grind together. He bit his tongue, bringing fresh blood. He rolled over on his back and saw Henry, Victor, Moose, and Patrick standing over him. They looked impossibly tall, impossibly high up, like pallbearers peering into a grave.
"You like that, Rock Man?" Henry asked, his voice drifting down over a distance, floating through clouds of pain. "You like that action, Rock Man? You like that jobbanobba?"
Patrick Hockstetter giggled.
"Your father's crazy," Eddie heard himself say, "and so are you."
Henry's grin faded so fast it might have been slapped off his face. He drew his foot back to kick ... and then a siren rose in the still hot afternoon. Henry paused. Victor and Moose looked around uneasily.
"Henry, I think we better get out of here," Moose said.
"I know damn well I'm getting out of here," Victor said. How far away their voices seemed! Like the clown's balloons, they seemed to float. Victor took off toward the library, cutting into McCarron Park to get off the street.
Henry hesitated a moment longer, perhaps hoping the cop-car was on some other business and he could continue with his own. But the siren rose again, closer. "You got lucky, fuckface," he said. He and Moose took off after Victor.
Patrick Hockstetter waited for a moment. "Here's a little something extra for you," he whispered in his low, husky voice. He inhaled and spat a large green lunger into Eddie's upturned, sweating, bloody face. Splat. "Don't eat it all at once if you don't want," Patrick said, smiling his liverish unsettling smile. "Save some for later, if you want."
Then he turned slowly and was also gone.
Eddie tried to wipe the lunger off with his good arm, but even that little movement made the pain flare again.
Now when you started off for the drugstore, you never thought you'd end up on the Costello Avenue sidewalk with a busted arm and Patrick Hockstetter's snot running down your face, did you? You never even got to drink your Pepsi. Life's full of surprises, isn't it?
Incredibly, he laughed again. It was a weak sound, and it hurt his broken arm to laugh, but it felt good. And there was something else: no asthma. His breathing was okay, at least for now. A good thing, too. He never would have been able to get to his aspirator. Never in a thousand years.
The siren was very close now, whooping and whooping. Eddie closed his eyes and saw red under his eyelids. Then the red turned black as a shadow fell over him. It was the little kid with the trike.
"You okay?" the little kid asked.
"Do I look okay?" Eddie asked.
"No, you look terrible," the little kid said, and pedaled off, singing "The Farmer in the Dell."
Eddie began to giggle. Here was the cop-car; he could hear the squeal of its brakes. He found himself hoping vaguely that Mr. Nell would be in it, even though he knew Mr. Nell was a foot patrolman.
Why in the name of God are you giggling?
He didn't know, any more than he knew why he should feel, in spite of the pain, such intense relief. Was it maybe just because he was still alive, that the worst he had suffered was a broken arm, and there were still some pieces to pick up? He settled for that, but years later, sitting in the Derry Library with a glass of gin and prune juice in front of him and his aspirator near at hand, he told the others he thought it was something more than that; he had been old enough to feel that something more, but not to understand or define it.
I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life, he would tell the others. It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think ... it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain.
Eddie turned his head weakly to the right and saw large black Firestone tires, blinding chrome hubcaps, and pulsing blue lights. He heard Mr. Nell's voice then, thickly Irish, impossibly Irish, more like Richie's Irish Cop Voice than Mr. Nell's real voice ... but perhaps that was the distance:
"Holy Jaysus, it's the Kaspbrak bye!"
At this point Eddie floated away.
4
And, with one exception, stayed away for quite awhile.
There was a brief period of consciousness in the ambulance. He saw Mr. Nell sitting across from him, tipping a drink from his little brown bottle and reading a paperback called I the Jury. The girl on the cover had the biggest bosoms Eddie had ever seen. His eyes shifted past Mr. Nell to the driver up front. The driver peered around at Eddie with a big leering grin, his skin livid with greasepaint and talcum powder, his eyes shiny as new quarters. It was Pennywise.
"Mr. Nell," Eddie husked.
Mr. Nell looked up and smiled. "How are you feelin, me bye?"
"... driver ... the driver ..."
"Yes, we'll be there in a jig," Mr. Nell said, and handed him the little brown bottle. "Suck some of this. It'll make ye feel better."
Eddie drank what tasted like liquid fire. He coughed, hurting his arm. He looked toward the front and saw the driver again. Just some guy with a crewcut. No clown.
He drifted off again.
Much later there was the Mergency Room and a nurse wiping blood and dirt and snot and gravel off his face with a cold cloth. It stung, but it felt wonderful at the same time. He heard his mother bugling and clarioning outside, and he tried to tell the nurse not to let her in, but no words would come out, no matter how hard he tried.
"... if he's dying, I want to know!" his mother was bellowing. "You hear me? It's my right to know, and it's my right to see him! I can sue you, you know! I know lawyers, plenty of lawyers! Some of my best friends are lawyers!"
"Don't try to talk," the nurse said to Eddie. She was young, and he could feel her bosoms pressing against his arm. For a moment he had this crazy idea that the nurse was Beverly Marsh, and then he drifted away again.
When he came back his mother was in the room, talking to Dr. Handor at a mile-a-minute clip. Sonia Kaspbrak was a huge woman. Her legs, encased in support hose, were trunklike but weirdly smooth. Her face was pale now except for hectic flaring blots of rouge.
"Ma," Eddie managed, "... all right ... I'm all right
"You're not, you're not," Mrs. Kaspbrak moaned. She wrung her hands. Edd
ie heard her knuckles crack and grind. He began to feel his breath shorten up as he looked at her, seeing what a state she was in, how this latest escapade of his had hurt her. He wanted to tell her to take it easy or she'd have a heart attack, but he couldn't. His throat was too dry. "You're not all right, you've had a serious accident, a very serious accident, but you will be all right, I promise you that, Eddie, you will be all right, even if we need to bring in every specialist in the book, oh Eddie ... Eddie ... your poor arm ..."
She burst into honking sobs. Eddie saw that the nurse who had washed his face was looking at her without much sympathy.
All through this aria, Dr. Handor had been stuttering, "Sonia ... please, Sonia ... Sonia ... ?" He was a skinny, limp-looking man with a little mustache that hadn't grown very well and which, in addition, had been clipped unevenly, so it was longer on the left side than on the right. He looked nervous. Eddie remembered what Mr. Keene had told him that morning and felt a certain sorrow for Dr. Handor.
At last, gathering himself, Russ Handor managed to say: "If you can't control yourself, you'll have to leave, Sonia."
She whirled on him and he drew back. "I'll do no such thing! Don't you even suggest it! This is my son lying here in agony! My son lying here on his bed of pain!"
Eddie astounded them all by finding his voice. "I want you to leave, Ma. If they're going to do something that'll make me yell, and I think they are, you'll feel better if you go."
She turned to him, astonished ... and hurt. At the sight of the hurt on her face, he felt his chest begin to tighten down inexorably. "I certainly will not!" she cried. "What an awful thing to say, Eddie! You're delirious! You don't understand what you're saying, that's the only explanation!"
"I don't know what the explanation is, and I don't care," the nurse said. "All I know is that we're standing here doing nothing while we should be setting your son's arm."
"Are you suggesting--" Sonia began, her voice rising toward the high, bugling note it took on when she was most upset.
"Please, Sonia," Dr. Handor said. "Let's not have an argument here. Let's help Eddie."
Sonia stood back, but her glowering eyes--the eyes of a mother bear whose cub has been threatened--promised the nurse that there would be trouble later. Possibly even a suit. Then her eyes misted, extinguishing the glower or at least hiding it. She took Eddie's good hand and squeezed it so painfully that he winced.
"It's bad, but you'll be well again soon," she said. "Well again soon, I promise you that."
"Sure, Ma," Eddie wheezed. "Could I have my aspirator?"
"Of course," she said. Sonia Kaspbrak looked at the nurse triumphantly, as if vindicated of some ridiculous criminal charge. "My son has asthma," she said. "It's quite serious, but he copes with it beautifully."
"Good," the nurse said flatly.
His ma held the aspirator for him so he could inhale. A moment later Dr. Handor was feeling Eddie's broken arm. He was as gentle as possible but the pain was still enormous. Eddie felt like screaming and gritted his teeth against it. He was afraid if he screamed his mother would scream, too. Sweat stood out on his forehead in large clear drops.
"You're hurting him," Mrs. Kaspbrak said. "I know you are! There's no need of that! Stop it! There's no need for you to hurt him! He's very delcate, he can't stand that sort of pain!"
Eddie saw the nurse lock her furious eyes with Dr. Handor's tired, worried ones. He saw the wordless conversation that passed between them: Send that woman out of here, doctor. And in the drop of his eyes: I can't. I don't dare.
There was great clarity inside the pain (although, in truth, this was not a clarity that Eddie would want to experience often: the price was too high), and in that unspoken conversation, Eddie accepted everything Mr. Keene had told him. His HydrOx aspirator was filled with nothing more than flavored water. The asthma wasn't in his throat or his chest or his lungs but in his head. Somehow or other he was going to have to deal with that truth.
He looked at his mother, seeing her clear in his pain: each flower on her Lane Bryant dress, the sweat-stains under her arms where the pads she wore had soaked through, the scuff-marks on her shoes. He saw how small her eyes were in their pockets of flesh, and now a terrible thought came to him: those eyes were almost predatory, like the eyes of the leper that had crawled out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. Here I come, that's all right ... it won't do you any good to run, Eddie....
Dr. Handor put his hands gently around Eddie's broken arm and squeezed. The pain exploded.
Eddie drifted away.
5
They gave him some liquid to drink and Dr. Handor set the fracture. He heard Dr. Handor telling his ma that it was a greenstick fracture, no more serious than any childhood break: "It's the sort of break kids get falling out of trees," he said, and Eddie heard his ma respond furiously: "Eddie doesn't climb trees! Now I want the truth! How bad is he?"
Then the nurse was giving him a pill. He felt her bosoms against his shoulder again and was grateful for their comforting pressure. Even through the haze he could see that the nurse was angry and he thought he said, She's not the leper, please don't think that, she's only eating me because she loves me, but perhaps nothing came out because the nurse's angry face didn't change.
He had a faint recollection of being pushed up a corridor in a wheelchair and his mother's voice somewhere behind, fading: "What do you mean, visiting hours? Don't talk to me about visiting hours, that's my son!"
Fading. He was glad she was fading, glad he was fading. The pain was gone and the clarity was gone with it. He didn't want to think. He wanted to drift. He was aware that his right arm felt very heavy. He wondered if they had put it in a cast yet. He couldn't seem to see if they had or not. He was vaguely aware of radios playing from rooms, of patients who looked like ghosts in their hospital johnnies walking up and down the wide halls, and that it was hot ... so very hot. When he was wheeled into his room, he could see the sun going down in an angry orange boil of blood and thought incoherently: Like a great big clown-button.
"Come on, Eddie, you can walk," a voice was saying, and he found that he could. He was slid between crisp cool sheets. The voice told him that he would have some pain in the night, but not to ring for a pain-killer unless it got very bad. Eddie asked if he could have a drink of water. The water came with a straw that had an accordion middle so you could bend it. It was cool and good. He drank it all.
There was pain in the night, a good deal of it. He lay awake in bed, holding the call-button in his left hand but not pressing it. A thunderstorm was going on outside, and when the lightning flashed blue-white, he turned his head away from the windows, afraid he might see a monstrous, grinning face etched across the sky in that electric fire.
At last he slept again, and in his sleep he had a dream. In it he saw Bill, Ben, Richie, Stan, Mike, and Bev--his friends--arriving at the hospital on their bikes (Bill was riding Richie double on Silver). He was surprised to see that Beverly was wearing a dress--it was a lovely green, the color of the Caribbean in a National Geographic plate. He couldn't remember if he had ever seen her in a dress before; all he remembered were jeans and pedal-pushers and what the girls called "school-sets": skirts and blouses, the blouses usually white with round collars, the skirts usually brown and pleated and hemmed at mid-shin, so that the scabs on their knees didn't show.
In the dream he saw them coming in for the 2:00 P.M. visiting hours and his mother, who had been waiting patiently since eleven, shouting so loudly at them that everyone turned to look at her.
If you think you're going to go in there, you've got another think coming! Eddie's mother shouted, and now the clown, who had been sitting here in the waiting room all along (but way back in one corner, with a copy of Look magazine held up in front of his face until now), jumped up and mimed applause, patting his white-gloved hands together rapidly. He capered and danced, now turning a cartwheel, now executing a neat back-over flip, as Mrs. Kaspbrak ranted at Eddie's fellow Losers and as th
ey shrank, one by one, behind Bill, who only stood there, pale but outwardly calm, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans (maybe so no one, including Bill himself, would be able to see if they were shaking or not). No one saw the clown except Eddie ... although a baby who had been sleeping peacefully in his mother's arms awoke and began to cry lustily.
You've done enough damage! Eddie's ma shouted. I know who those boys were! They've been in trouble at school, they've even been in trouble with the police! And just because those boys have something against you is no reason for them to have something against him. I told him so, and he agrees with me. He wants me to tell you to go away, he's done with you, he never wants to see any of you again. He doesn't want your so-called friendship anymore! Any of you! I knew it would lead to trouble, and look at this! My Eddie in the hospital! A boy as delicate as he is ...
The clown capered and jumped and did splits and stood on one hand. Its smile was real enough now, and in his dream Eddie realized that this was of course what the clown wanted, a nice big wedge to drive among them, splitting them apart and destroying any chance of concerted action. In a kind of filthy ecstasy, the clown did a double barrel-roll and burlesqued kissing his mother's cheek.
Th-Th-Those b-b-b-hoys who dih-did it--Bill began.
Don't you speak back to me! Mrs. Kaspbrak shrieked. Don't you dare speak back to me! He's done with you, I say! Done!
Then an intern came running into the waiting room and told Eddie's ma she would have to be quiet or leave the hospital. The clown started to fade, started to wash out, and as it did it began to change. Eddie saw the leper, the mummy, the bird; he saw the werewolf, and a vampire whose teeth were Gillette Blue-Blades set at crazy angles like mirrors in a carnival mirror-maze; he saw Frankenstein, the creature, and something fleshy and shell-like that opened and closed like a mouth; he saw a dozen other terrible things, a hundred. But just before the clown washed out completely, he saw the most terrible thing of all: his ma's face.
No! he tried to scream. No! No! Not her! Not my ma!