IT 1986, 1990, and 2017/19... one line at a time!

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'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 — '

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

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'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.'

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'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 guess — '

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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'Ma.'

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

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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 . . . '

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'Ma — '

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

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'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.

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'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.'

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'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 first 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.