Doctor Sleep

^{CHAPTER ONE} WELCOME TO TEENYTOWN

After Wilmington, the daily drinking stopped.

He’d go a week, sometimes two, without anything stronger than diet soda. He’d wake up without a hangover, which was good. He’d wake up thirsty and miserable—wanting—which wasn’t. Then there would come a night. Or a weekend. Sometimes it was a Budweiser ad on TV that set him off—fresh-faced young people with nary a beergut among them, having cold ones after a vigorous volleyball game. Sometimes it was seeing a couple of nice-looking women having after-work drinks outside some pleasant little café, the kind of place with a French name and lots of hanging plants. The drinks were almost always the kind that came with little umbrellas. Sometimes it was a song on the radio. Once it was Styx, singing “Mr. Roboto.” When he was dry, he was completely dry. When he drank, he got drunk. If he woke up next to a woman, he thought of Deenie and the kid in the Braves t-shirt. He thought of the seventy dollars. He even thought of the stolen blanket, which he had left in the stormdrain. Maybe it was still there. If so, it would be moldy now.

Sometimes he got drunk and missed work. They’d keep him on for awhile—he was good at what he did—but then would come a day. When it did, he would say thank you very much and board a bus. Wilmington became Albany and Albany became Utica. Utica became New Paltz. New Paltz gave way to Sturbridge, where he got drunk at an outdoor folk concert and woke up the next day in jail with a broken wrist. Next up was Weston, after that came a nursing home on Martha’s Vineyard, and boy, that gig didn’t last long. On his third day the head nurse smelled booze on his breath and it was seeya, wouldn’t want to beya. Once he crossed the path of the True Knot without realizing it. Not in the top part of his mind, anyway, although lower down—in the part that shone—there was something. A smell, fading and unpleasant, like the smell of burned rubber on a stretch of turnpike where there has been a bad accident not long before.

From Martha’s Vineyard he took MassLines to Newburyport. There he found work in a don’t-give-much-of-a-shit veterans’ home, the kind of place where old soldiers were sometimes left in wheelchairs outside empty consulting rooms until their peebags overflowed onto the floor. A lousy place for patients, a better one for frequent fuckups like himself, although Dan and a few others did as well by the old soldiers as they could. He even helped a couple get over when their time came. That job lasted awhile, long enough for the Saxophone President to turn the White House keys over to the Cowboy President.

Dan had a few wet nights in Newburyport, but always with the next day off, so it was okay. After one of these mini-sprees, he woke up thinking at least I left the food stamps. That brought on the old psychotic gameshow duo.

Sorry, Deenie, you lose, but nobody leaves empty-handed. What have we got for her, Johnny?

Well, Bob, Deenie didn’t win any money, but she’s leaving with our new home game, several grams of cocaine, and a great big wad of FOOD STAMPS!

What Dan got was a whole month without booze. He did it, he guessed, as a weird kind of penance. It occurred to him more than once that if he’d had Deenie’s address, he would have sent her that crappy seventy bucks long ago. He would have sent her twice that much if it could have ended the memories of the kid in the Braves t-shirt and the reaching starfish hand. But he didn’t have the address, so he stayed sober instead. Scourging himself with whips. Dry ones.

Then one night he passed a drinking establishment called the Fisherman’s Rest and through the window spied a good-looking blonde sitting alone at the bar. She was wearing a tartan skirt that ended at mid-thigh and she looked lonely and he went in and it turned out she was newly divorced and wow, that was a shame, maybe she’d like some company, and three days later he woke up with that same old black hole in his memory. He went to the veterans’ center where he had been mopping floors and changing lightbulbs, hoping for a break, but no dice. Don’t-give-much-of-a-shit wasn’t quite the same as don’t-give-any-shit; close but no cigar. Leaving with the few items that had been in his locker, he recalled an old Bobcat Goldthwait line: “My job was still there, but somebody else was doing it.” So he boarded another bus, this one headed for New Hampshire, and before he got on, he bought a glass container of intoxicating liquid.

He sat all the way in back in the Drunk Seat, the one by the toilet. Experience had taught him that if you intended to spend a bus trip getting smashed, that was the seat to take. He reached into the brown paper sack, loosened the cap on the glass container of intoxicating liquid, and smelled the brown smell. That smell could talk, although it only had one thing to say: Hello, old friend.

He thought Canny.

He thought Mama.

He thought of Tommy going to school by now. Always assuming good old Uncle Randy hadn’t killed him.

He thought, The only one who can put on the brakes is you.

This thought had come to him many times before, but now it was followed by a new one. You don’t have to live this way if you don’t want to. You can, of course… but you don’t have to.

That voice was so strange, so unlike any of his usual mental dialogues, that he thought at first he must be picking it up from someone else—he could do that, but he rarely got uninvited transmissions anymore. He had learned to shut them off. Nevertheless he looked up the aisle, almost positive he would see someone looking back at him. No one was. Everyone was sleeping, talking with their seatmates, or staring out at the gray New England day.

You don’t have to live this way if you don’t want to.

If only that were true. Nevertheless, he tightened the cap on the bottle and put it on the seat beside him. Twice he picked it up. The first time he put it down. The second time he reached into the bag and unscrewed the cap again, but as he did, the bus pulled into the New Hampshire welcome area just across the state line. Dan filed into the Burger King with the rest of the passengers, pausing only long enough to toss the paper bag into one of the trash containers. Stenciled on the side of the tall green can were the words IF YOU NO LONGER NEED IT, LEAVE IT HERE.

Wouldn’t that be nice, Dan thought, hearing the clink as it landed. Oh God, wouldn’t that be nice.

An hour and a half later, the bus passed a sign reading WELCOME TO FRAZIER, WHERE THERE’S A REASON FOR EVERY SEASON! And, below that, HOME OF TEENYTOWN!

The bus stopped at the Frazier Community Center to take on passengers, and from the empty seat next to Dan, where the bottle had rested for the first part of the trip, Tony spoke up. Here was a voice Dan recognized, although Tony hadn’t spoken so clearly in years.

(this is the place)

As good as any, Dan thought.

He grabbed his duffel from the overhead rack and got off. He stood on the sidewalk and watched the bus pull away. To the west, the White Mountains sawed at the horizon. In all his wanderings he had avoided mountains, especially the jagged monsters that broke the country in two. Now he thought, I’ve come back to the high country after all. I guess I always knew I would. But these mountains were gentler than the ones that still sometimes haunted his dreams, and he thought he could live with them, at least for a little while. If he could stop thinking about the kid in the Braves t-shirt, that is. If he could stop using the booze. There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

A snow flurry, fine as wedding lace, danced across the air. He could see that the shops lining the wide main street catered mostly to the skiers who’d come in December and the summer people who’d come in June. There would probably be leaf-peepers in September and October, too, but this was what passed for spring in northern New England, an edgy eight weeks chrome-plated with cold and damp. Frazier apparently hadn’t figured out a reason for this season yet, because the main drag—Cranmore Avenue—was all but deserted.

Dan slung the duffel over his shoulder and strolled slowly north. He stopped outside a wrought-iron fence to look at a rambling Victorian home flanked on both sides by newer brick buildings. These were connected to the Victorian by covered walkways. There was a turret at the top of the mansion on the left side, but none on the right, giving the place a queerly unbalanced look that Dan sort of liked. It was as if the big old girl were saying Yeah, part of me fell off. What the fuck. Someday it’ll happen to you. He started to smile. Then the smile died.

Tony was in the window of the turret room, looking down at him. He saw Dan looking up and waved. The same solemn wave Dan remembered from his childhood, when Tony had come often. Dan closed his eyes, then opened them. Tony was gone. Had never been there in the first place, how could he have been? The window was boarded up.

The sign on the lawn, gold letters on a green background the same shade as the house itself, read HELEN RIVINGTON HOUSE.

They have a cat in there, he thought. A gray cat named Audrey.

This turned out to be partly right and partly wrong. There was a cat, and it was gray, but it was a neutered tom and its name wasn’t Audrey.

Dan looked at the sign for a long time—long enough for the clouds to part and send down a biblical beam—and then he walked on. Although the sun was now bright enough to twinkle the chrome of the few slant-parked cars in front of Olympia Sports and the Fresh Day Spa, the snow still swirled, making Dan think of something his mother had said during similar spring weather, long ago, when they had lived in Vermont: The devil’s beating his wife.

A block or two up from the hospice, Dan stopped again. Across the street from the town municipal building was the Frazier town common. There was an acre or two of lawn, just beginning to show green, a bandstand, a softball field, a paved basketball half-court, picnic tables, even a putting green. All very nice, but what interested him was a sign reading

It didn’t take a genius to see that Teenytown was a teeny replica of Cranmore Avenue. There was the Methodist church he had passed, its steeple rising all of seven feet into the air; there was the Music Box Theater; Spondulicks Ice Cream; Mountain Books; Shirts & Stuff; the Frazier Gallery, Fine Prints Our Specialty. There was also a perfect waist-high miniature of the single-turreted Helen Rivington House, although the two flanking brick buildings had been omitted. Perhaps, Dan thought, because they were butt-ugly, especially compared to the centerpiece.

Beyond Teenytown was a miniature train with TEENYTOWN RAILWAY painted on passenger cars that were surely too small to hold anyone larger than toddler size. Smoke was puffing from the stack of a bright red locomotive about the size of a Honda Gold Wing motorcycle. He could hear the rumble of a diesel engine. Printed on the side of the loco, in old-fashioned gold flake letters, was THE HELEN RIVINGTON. Town patroness, Dan supposed. Somewhere in Frazier there was probably a street named after her, too.

He stood where he was for a bit, although the sun had gone back in and the day had grown cold enough for him to see his breath. As a kid he’d always wanted an electric train set and had never had one. Yonder in Teenytown was a jumbo version kids of all ages could love.

He shifted his duffel bag to his other shoulder and crossed the street. Hearing Tony again—and seeing him—was unsettling, but right now he was glad he’d stopped here. Maybe this really was the place he’d been looking for, the one where he’d finally find a way to right his dangerously tipped life.

You take yourself with you, wherever you go.

He pushed the thought into a mental closet. It was a thing he was good at. There was all sorts of stuff in that closet.

A cowling surrounded the locomotive on both sides, but he spied a footstool standing beneath one low eave of the Teenytown Station, carried it over, and stood on it. The driver’s cockpit contained two sheepskin-covered bucket seats. It looked to Dan as if they had been scavenged from an old Detroit muscle car. The cockpit and controls also looked like modified Detroit stock, with the exception of an old-fashioned Z-shaped shifter jutting up from the floor. There was no shift pattern; the original knob had been replaced with a grinning skull wearing a bandanna faded from red to pallid pink by years of gripping hands. The top half of the steering wheel had been cut off, so that what remained looked like the steering yoke of a light plane. Painted in black on the dashboard, fading but legible, was TOP SPEED 40 DO NOT EXCEED.

“Like it?” The voice came from directly behind him.

Dan wheeled around, almost falling off the stool. A big weathered hand gripped his forearm, steadying him. It was a guy who looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, wearing a padded denim jacket and a red-checked hunting cap with the earflaps down. In his free hand was a toolkit with PROPERTY OF FRAZIER MUNICIPAL DEPT Dymo-taped across the top.

“Hey, sorry,” Dan said, stepping off the stool. “I didn’t mean to—”

“S’all right. People stop to look all the time. Usually model-train buffs. It’s like a dream come true for em. We keep em away in the summer when the place is jumpin and the Riv runs every hour or so, but this time of year there’s no we, just me. And I don’t mind.” He stuck out his hand. “Billy Freeman. Town maintenance crew. The Riv’s my baby.”

Dan took the offered hand. “Dan Torrance.”

Billy Freeman eyed the duffel. “Just got off the bus, I ’magine. Or are you ridin your thumb?”

“Bus,” Dan said. “What does this thing have for an engine?”

“Well now, that’s interesting. Probably never heard of the Chevrolet Veraneio, didja?”

He hadn’t, but knew anyway. Because Freeman knew. Dan didn’t think he’d had such a clear shine in years. It brought a ghost of delight that went back to earliest childhood, before he had discovered how dangerous the shining could be.

“Brazilian Suburban, wasn’t it? Turbodiesel.”

Freeman’s bushy eyebrows shot up and he grinned. “Goddam right! Casey Kingsley, he’s the boss, bought it at an auction last year. It’s a corker. Pulls like a sonofabitch. The instrument panel’s from a Suburban, too. The seats I put in myself.”

The shine was fading now, but Dan got one last thing. “From a GTO Judge.”

Freeman beamed. “That’s right. Found em in a junkyard over Sunapee way. The shifter’s a high-hat from a 1961 Mack. Nine-speed. Nice, huh? You lookin for work or just lookin?”

Dan blinked at the sudden change of direction. Was he looking for work? He supposed he was. The hospice he’d passed on his amble up Cranmore Avenue would be the logical place to start, and he had an idea—didn’t know if it was the shining or just ordinary intuition—that they’d be hiring, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to go there just yet. Seeing Tony in the turret window had been unsettling.

Also, Danny, you want to be a little bit farther down the road from your last drink before you show up there askin for a job application form. Even if the only thing they got is runnin a buffer on the night shift.

Dick Hallorann’s voice. Christ. Dan hadn’t thought of Dick in a long time. Maybe not since Wilmington.

With summer coming—a season for which Frazier most definitely had a reason—people would be hiring for all sorts of things. But if he had to choose between a Chili’s at the local mall and Teenytown, he definitely chose Teenytown. He opened his mouth to answer Freeman’s question, but Hallorann spoke up again before he could.

You’re closing in on the big three-oh, honey. You could be runnin out of chances.

Meanwhile, Billy Freeman was looking at him with open and artless curiosity.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m looking for work.”

“Workin in Teenytown, wouldn’t last long, y’know. Once summer comes and the schools let out, Mr. Kingsley hires local. Eighteen to twenty-two, mostly. The selectmen expect it. Also, kids work cheap.” He grinned, exposing holes where a couple of teeth had once resided. “Still, there are worse places to make a buck. Outdoor work don’t look so good today, but it won’t be cold like this much longer.”

No, it wouldn’t be. There were tarps over a lot of stuff on the common, but they’d be coming off soon, exposing the superstructure of small-town resort summer: hotdog stands, ice cream booths, a circular something that looked to Dan like a merry-go-round. And there was the train, of course, the one with the teeny passenger cars and the big turbodiesel engine. If he could stay off the sauce and prove trustworthy, Freeman or the boss—Kingsley—might let him drive it a time or two. He’d like that. Farther down the line, when the municipal department hired the just-out-of-school local kids, there was always the hospice.

If he decided to stay, that was.

You better stay somewhere, Hallorann said—this was Dan’s day for hearing voices and seeing visions, it seemed. You better stay somewhere soon, or you won’t be able to stay anywhere.

He surprised himself by laughing. “It sounds good to me, Mr. Freeman. It sounds really good.”

“Done any grounds maintenance?” Billy Freeman asked. They were walking slowly along the flank of the train. The tops of the cars only came up to Dan’s chest, making him feel like a giant.

“I can weed, plant, and paint. I know how to run a leaf blower and a chainsaw. I can fix small engines if the problem isn’t too complicated. And I can manage a riding mower without running over any little kids. The train, now… that I don’t know about.”

“You’d need to get cleared by Kingsley for that. Insurance and shit. Listen, have you got references? Mr. Kingsley won’t hire without em.”

“A few. Mostly janitorial and hospital orderly stuff. Mr. Freeman—”

“Just Billy’ll do.”

“Your train doesn’t look like it could carry passengers, Billy. Where would they sit?”

Billy grinned. “Wait here. See if you think this is as funny as I do. I never get tired of it.”

Freeman went back to the locomotive and leaned in. The engine, which had been idling lazily, began to rev and send up rhythmic jets of dark smoke. There was a hydraulic whine along the whole length of The Helen Rivington. Suddenly the roofs of the passenger wagons and the yellow caboose—nine cars in all—began to rise. To Dan it looked like the tops of nine identical convertibles all going up at the same time. He bent down to look in the windows and saw hard plastic seats running down the center of each car. Six in the passenger wagons and two in the caboose. Fifty in all.

When Billy came back, Dan was grinning. “Your train must look very weird when it’s full of passengers.”

“Oh yeah. People laugh their asses off and burn yea film, takin pitchers. Watch this.”

There was a steel-plated step at the end of each passenger car. Billy used one, walked down the aisle, and sat. A peculiar optical illusion took hold, making him look larger than life. He waved grandly to Dan, who could imagine fifty Brobdingnagians, dwarfing the train upon which they rode, pulling grandly out of Teenytown Station.

As Billy Freeman rose and stepped back down, Dan applauded. “I’ll bet you sell about a billion postcards between Memorial Day and Labor Day.”

“Bet your ass.” Billy rummaged in his coat pocket, brought out a battered pack of Duke cigarettes—a cut-rate brand Dan knew well, sold in bus stations and convenience stores all over America—and held it out. Dan took one. Billy lit them up.

“I better enjoy it while I can,” Billy said, looking at his cigarette. “Smoking’ll be banned here before too many more years. Frazier Women’s Club’s already talkin about it. Bunch of old biddies if you ask me, but you know what they say—the hand that rocks the fuckin cradle rules the fuckin world.” He jetted smoke from his nostrils. “Not that most of them have rocked a cradle since Nixon was president. Or needed a Tampax, for that matter.”

“Might not be the worst thing,” Dan said. “Kids copy what they see in their elders.” He thought of his father. The only thing Jack Torrance had liked better than a drink, his mother had once said, not long before she died, was a dozen drinks. Of course what Wendy had liked was her cigarettes, and they had killed her. Once upon a time Dan had promised himself he’d never get going with that habit, either. He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes.

Billy Freeman looked at him, one eye squinted mostly shut. “I get feelins about people sometimes, and I got one about you.” He pronounced got as gut, in the New England fashion. “Had it even before you turned around and I saw your face. I think you might be the right guy for the spring cleanin I’m lookin at between now and the end of May. That’s how it feels to me, and I trust my feelins. Prob’ly crazy.”

Dan didn’t think it was crazy at all, and now he understood why he had heard Billy Freeman’s thoughts so clearly, and without even trying. He remembered something Dick Hallorann had told him once—Dick, who had been his first adult friend. Lots of people have got a little of what I call the shining, but mostly it’s just a twinkle—the kind of thing that lets em know what the DJ’s going to play next on the radio or that the phone’s gonna ring pretty soon.

Billy Freeman had that little twinkle. That gleam.

“I guess this Cary Kingsley would be the one to talk to, huh?”

“Casey, not Cary. But yeah, he’s the man. He’s run municipal services in this town for twenty-five years.”

“When would be a good time?”

“Right about now, I sh’d think.” Billy pointed. “Yonder pile of bricks across the street’s the Frazier Municipal Building and town offices. Mr. Kingsley’s in the basement, end of the hall. You’ll know you’re there when you hear disco music comin down through the ceiling. There’s a ladies’ aerobics class in the gym every Tuesday and Thursday.”

“All right,” Dan said, “that’s just what I’m going to do.”

“Got your references?”

“Yes.” Dan patted the duffel, which he had leaned against Teenytown Station.

“And you didn’t write them yourself, nor nothin?”

Danny smiled. “No, they’re straight goods.”

“Then go get im, tiger.”

“Okay.”

“One other thing,” Billy said as Dan started away. “He’s death on drinkin. If you’re a drinkin man and he asts you, my advice is… lie.”

Dan nodded and raised his hand to show he understood. That was a lie he had told before.

Judging by his vein-congested nose, Casey Kingsley had not always been death on drinkin. He was a big man who didn’t so much inhabit his small, cluttered office as wear it. Right now he was rocked back in the chair behind his desk, going through Dan’s references, which were neatly kept in a blue folder. The back of Kingsley’s head almost touched the downstroke of a plain wooden cross hanging on the wall beside a framed photo of his family. In the picture, a younger, slimmer Kingsley posed with his wife and three bathing-suited kiddos on a beach somewhere. Through the ceiling, only slightly muted, came the sound of the Village People singing “YMCA,” accompanied by the enthusiastic stomp of many feet. Dan imagined a gigantic centipede. One that had recently been to the local hairdresser and was wearing a bright red leotard about nine yards long.

“Uh-huh,” Kingsley said. “Uh-huh… yeah… right, right, right…”

There was a glass jar filled with hard candies on the corner of his desk. Without looking up from Dan’s thin sheaf of references, he took off the top, fished one out, and popped it into his mouth. “Help yourself,” he said.

“No, thank you,” Dan said.

A queer thought came to him. Once upon a time, his father had probably sat in a room like this, being interviewed for the position of caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. What had he been thinking? That he really needed a job? That it was his last chance? Maybe. Probably. But of course, Jack Torrance had had hostages to fortune. Dan did not. He could drift on for awhile if this didn’t work out. Or try his luck at the hospice. But… he liked the town common. He liked the train, which made adults of ordinary size look like Goliaths. He liked Teenytown, which was absurd and cheerful and somehow brave in its self-important small-town-America way. And he liked Billy Freeman, who had a pinch of the shining and probably didn’t even know it.

Above them, “YMCA” was replaced by “I Will Survive.” As if he had just been waiting for a new tune, Kingsley slipped Dan’s references back into the folder’s pocket and passed them across the desk.

He’s going to turn me down.

But after a day of accurate intuitions, this one was off the mark. “These look fine, but it strikes me that you’d be a lot more comfortable working at Central New Hampshire Hospital or the hospice here in town. You might even qualify for Home Helpers—I see you’ve got a few medical and first aid qualifications. Know your way around a defibrillator, according to these. Heard of Home Helpers?”

“Yes. And I thought about the hospice. Then I saw the town common, and Teenytown, and the train.”

Kingsley grunted. “Probably wouldn’t mind taking a turn at the controls, would you?”

Dan lied without hesitation. “No, sir, I don’t think I’d care for that.” To admit he’d like to sit in the scavenged GTO driver’s seat and lay his hands on that cut-down steering wheel would almost certainly lead to a discussion of his driver’s license, then to a further discussion of how he’d lost it, and then to an invitation to leave Mr. Casey Kingsley’s office forthwith. “I’m more of a rake-and-lawnmower guy.”

“More of a short-term employment guy, too, from the looks of this paperwork.”

“I’ll settle someplace soon. I’ve worked most of the wanderlust out of my system, I think.” He wondered if that sounded as bullshitty to Kingsley as it did to him.

“Short term’s about all I can offer you,” Kingsley said. “Once the schools are out for the summer—”

“Billy told me. If I decide to stay once summer comes, I’ll try the hospice. In fact, I might put in an early application, unless you’d rather I don’t do that.”

“I don’t care either way.” Kingsley looked at him curiously. “Dying people don’t bother you?”

Your mother died there, Danny thought. The shine wasn’t gone after all, it seemed; it was hardly even hiding. You were holding her hand when she passed. Her name was Ellen.

“No,” he said. Then, with no reason why, he added: “We’re all dying. The world’s just a hospice with fresh air.”

“A philosopher, yet. Well, Mr. Torrance, I think I’m going to take you on. I trust Billy’s judgment—he rarely makes a mistake about people. Just don’t show up late, don’t show up drunk, and don’t show up with red eyes and smelling of weed. If you do any of those things, down the road you’ll go, because the Rivington House won’t have a thing to do with you—I’ll make sure of it. Are we clear on that?”

Dan felt a throb of resentment

(officious prick)

but suppressed it. This was Kingsley’s playing field and Kingsley’s ball. “Crystal.”

“You can start tomorrow, if that suits. There are plenty of rooming houses in town. I’ll make a call or two if you want. Can you stand paying ninety a week until your first paycheck comes in?”

“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Kingsley.”

Kingsley waved a hand. “In the meantime, I’d recommend the Red Roof Inn. My ex-brother-in-law runs it, he’ll give you a rate. We good?”

“We are.” It had all happened with remarkable speed, the way the last few pieces drop into a complicated thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Dan told himself not to trust the feeling.

Kingsley rose. He was a big man and it was a slow process. Dan also got to his feet, and when Kingsley stuck his ham of a hand over the cluttered desk, Dan shook it. Now from overhead came the sound of KC and the Sunshine Band telling the world that’s the way they liked it, oh-ho, uh-huh.

“I hate that boogie-down shit,” Kingsley said.

No, Danny thought. You don’t. It reminds you of your daughter, the one who doesn’t come around much anymore. Because she still hasn’t forgiven you.

“You all right?” Kingsley asked. “You look a little pale.”

“Just tired. It was a long bus ride.”

The shining was back, and strong. The question was, why now?

Three days into the job, ones Dan spent painting the bandstand and blowing last fall’s dead leaves off the common, Kingsley ambled across Cranmore Avenue and told him he had a room on Eliot Street, if he wanted it. Private bathroom part of the deal, tub and shower. Eighty-five a week. Dan wanted it.

“Go on over on your lunch break,” Kingsley said. “Ask for Mrs. Robertson.” He pointed a finger that was showing the first gnarls of arthritis. “And don’t you fuck up, Sunny Jim, because she’s an old pal of mine. Remember that I vouched for you on some pretty thin paper and Billy Freeman’s intuition.”

Dan said he wouldn’t fuck up, but the extra sincerity he tried to inject into his voice sounded phony to his own ears. He was thinking of his father again, reduced to begging jobs from a wealthy old friend after losing his teaching position in Vermont. It was strange to feel sympathy for a man who had almost killed you, but the sympathy was there. Had people felt it necessary to tell his father not to fuck up? Probably. And Jack Torrance had fucked up anyway. Spectacularly. Five stars. Drinking was undoubtedly a part of it, but when you were down, some guys just seemed to feel an urge to walk up your back and plant a foot on your neck instead of helping you to stand. It was lousy, but so much of human nature was. Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

“And see if Billy can find some boots that’ll fit you. He’s squirreled away about a dozen pairs in the equipment shed, although the last time I looked, only half of them matched.”

The day was sunny, the air balmy. Dan, who was working in jeans and a Utica Blue Sox t-shirt, looked up at the nearly cloudless sky and then back at Casey Kingsley.

“Yeah, I know how it looks, but this is mountain country, pal. NOAA claims we’re going to have a nor’easter, and it’ll drop maybe a foot. Won’t last long—poor man’s fertilizer is what New Hampshire folks call April snow—but there’s also gonna be gale-force winds. So they say. I hope you can use a snowblower as well as a leaf blower.” He paused. “I also hope your back’s okay, because you and Billy’ll be picking up plenty of dead limbs tomorrow. Might be cutting up some fallen trees, too. You okay with a chainsaw?”

“Yes, sir,” Dan said.

“Good.”

Dan and Mrs. Robertson came to amicable terms; she even offered him an egg salad sandwich and a cup of coffee in the communal kitchen. He took her up on it, expecting all the usual questions about what had brought him to Frazier and where he had been before. Refreshingly, there were none. Instead she asked him if he had time to help her close the shutters on the downstairs windows in case they really did get what she called “a cap o’ wind.” Dan agreed. There weren’t many mottoes he lived by, but one was always get in good with the landlady; you never know when you might have to ask her for a rent extension.

Back on the common, Billy was waiting with a list of chores. The day before, the two of them had taken the tarps off all the kiddie rides. That afternoon they put them back on, and shuttered the various booths and concessions. The day’s final job was backing the Riv into her shed. Then they sat in folding chairs beside the Teenytown station, smoking.

“Tell you what, Danno,” Billy said, “I’m one tired hired man.”

“You’re not the only one.” But he felt okay, muscles limber and tingling. He’d forgotten how good outdoors work could be when you weren’t also working off a hangover.

The sky had scummed over with clouds. Billy looked up at them and sighed. “I hope to God it don’t snow n blow as hard as the radio says, but it probably will. I found you some boots. They don’t look like much, but at least they match.”

Dan took the boots with him when he walked across town to his new accommodations. By then the wind was picking up and the day was growing dark. That morning, Frazier had felt on the edge of summer. This evening the air held the face-freezing dampness of coming snow. The side streets were deserted and the houses buttoned up.

Dan turned the corner from Morehead Street onto Eliot and paused. Blowing down the sidewalk, attended by a skeletal scutter of last year’s autumn leaves, was a battered tophat, such as a magician might wear. Or maybe an actor in an old musical comedy, he thought. Looking at it made him feel cold in his bones, because it wasn’t there. Not really.

He closed his eyes, slow-counted to five with the strengthening wind flapping the legs of his jeans around his shins, then opened them again. The leaves were still there, but the tophat was gone. It had just been the shining, producing one of its vivid, unsettling, and usually senseless visions. It was always stronger when he’d been sober for a little while, but never as strong as it had been since coming to Frazier. It was as if the air here were different, somehow. More conducive to those strange transmissions from Planet Elsewhere. Special.

The way the Overlook was special.

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t believe that.”

A few drinks and it all goes away, Danny. Do you believe that?

Unfortunately, he did.

Mrs. Robertson’s was a rambling old Colonial, and Dan’s third-floor room had a view of the mountains to the west. That was a panorama he could have done without. His recollections of the Overlook had faded to hazy gray over the years, but as he unpacked his few things, a memory surfaced… and it was a kind of surfacing, like some nasty organic artifact (the decayed body of a small animal, say) floating to the surface of a deep lake.

It was dusk when the first real snow came. We stood on the porch of that big old empty hotel, my dad in the middle, my mom on one side, me on the other. He had his arms around us. It was okay then. He wasn’t drinking then. At first the snow fell in perfectly straight lines, but then the wind picked up and it started to blow sideways, drifting against the sides of the porch and coating those—

He tried to block it off, but it got through.

—those hedge animals. The ones that sometimes moved around when you weren’t looking.

He turned away from the window, his arms rashed out in gooseflesh. He’d gotten a sandwich from the Red Apple store and had planned to eat it while he started the John Sandford paperback he’d also picked up at the Red Apple, but after a few bites he rewrapped the sandwich and put it on the windowsill, where it would stay cold. He might eat the rest later, although he didn’t think he’d be staying up much past nine tonight; if he got a hundred pages into the book, he’d be doing well.

Outside, the wind continued to rise. Every now and then it gave a bloodcurdling scream around the eaves that made him look up from his book. Around eight thirty, the snow began. It was heavy and wet, quickly coating his window and blocking his view of the mountains. In a way, that was worse. The snow had blocked the windows in the Overlook, too. First just on the first floor… then on the second… and finally on the third.

Then they had been entombed with the lively dead.

My father thought they’d make him the manager. All he had to do was show his loyalty. By giving them his son.

“His only begotten son,” Dan muttered, then looked around as if someone else had spoken… and indeed, he did not feel alone. Not quite alone. The wind shrieked down the side of the building again, and he shuddered.

Not too late to go back down to the Red Apple. Grab a bottle of something. Put all these unpleasant thoughts to bed.

No. He was going to read his book. Lucas Davenport was on the case, and he was going to read his book.

He closed it at quarter past nine and got into another rooming-house bed. I won’t sleep, he thought. Not with the wind screaming like that.

But he did.

He was sitting at the mouth of the stormdrain, looking down a scrubgrass slope at the Cape Fear River and the bridge that spanned it. The night was clear and the moon was full. There was no wind, no snow. And the Overlook was gone. Even if it hadn’t burned to the ground during the tenure of the Peanut Farmer President, it would have been over a thousand miles from here. So why was he so frightened?

Because he wasn’t alone, that was why. There was someone behind him.

“Want some advice, Honeybear?”

The voice was liquid, wavering. Dan felt a chill go rushing down his back. His legs were colder still, prickled out in starpoints of gooseflesh. He could see those white bumps because he was wearing shorts. Of course he was wearing shorts. His brain might be that of a grown man, but it was currently sitting on top of a five-year-old’s body.

Honeybear. Who—?

But he knew. He had told Deenie his name, but she didn’t use it, just called him Honeybear instead.

You don’t remember that, and besides, this is just a dream.

Of course it was. He was in Frazier, New Hampshire, sleeping while a spring snowstorm howled outside Mrs. Robertson’s rooming house. Still, it seemed wiser not to turn around. And safer—that, too.

“No advice,” he said, looking out at the river and the full moon. “I’ve been advised by experts. The bars and barbershops are full of them.”

“Stay away from the woman in the hat, Honeybear.”

What hat? he could have asked, but really, why bother? He knew the hat she was talking about, because he had seen it blowing down the sidewalk. Black as sin on the outside, lined with white silk on the inside.

“She’s the Queen Bitch of Castle Hell. If you mess with her, she’ll eat you alive.”

He turned his head. He couldn’t help it. Deenie was sitting behind him in the stormdrain with the bum’s blanket wrapped around her naked shoulders. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks. Her face was bloated and dripping. Her eyes were cloudy. She was dead, probably years in her grave.

You’re not real, Dan tried to say, but no words came out. He was five again, Danny was five, the Overlook was ashes and bones, but here was a dead woman, one he had stolen from.

“It’s all right,” she said. Bubbling voice coming from a swollen throat. “I sold the coke. Stepped on it first with a little sugar and got two hundred.” She grinned, and water spilled through her teeth. “I liked you, Honeybear. That’s why I came to warn you. Stay away from the woman in the hat.”

“False face,” Dan said… but it was Danny’s voice, the high, frail, chanting voice of a child. “False face, not there, not real.”

He closed his eyes as he had often closed them when he had seen terrible things in the Overlook. The woman began to scream, but he wouldn’t open his eyes. The screaming went on, rising and falling, and he realized it was the scream of the wind. He wasn’t in Colorado and he wasn’t in North Carolina. He was in New Hampshire. He’d had a bad dream, but the dream was over.

According to his Timex, it was two in the morning. The room was cold, but his arms and chest were slimy with sweat.

Want some advice, Honeybear?

“No,” he said. “Not from you.”

She’s dead.

There was no way he could know that, but he did. Deenie—who had looked like the goddess of the Western world in her thigh-high leather skirt and cork sandals—was dead. He even knew how she had done it. Took pills, pinned up her hair, climbed into a bathtub filled with warm water, went to sleep, slid under, drowned.

The roar of the wind was dreadfully familiar, loaded with hollow threat. Winds blew everywhere, but it only sounded like this in the high country. It was as if some angry god were pounding the world with an air mallet.

I used to call his booze the Bad Stuff, Dan thought. Only sometimes it’s the Good Stuff. When you wake up from a nightmare that you know is at least fifty percent shining, it’s the Very Good Stuff.

One drink would send him back to sleep. Three would guarantee not just sleep but dreamless sleep. Sleep was nature’s doctor, and right now Dan Torrance felt sick and in need of strong medicine.

Nothing’s open. You lucked out there.

Well. Maybe.

He turned on his side, and something rolled against his back when he did. No, not something. Someone. Someone had gotten into bed with him. Deenie had gotten into bed with him. Only it felt too small to be Deenie. It felt more like a—

He scrambled out of bed, landed awkwardly on the floor, and looked over his shoulder. It was Deenie’s little boy, Tommy. The right side of his skull was caved in. Bone splinters protruded through bloodstained fair hair. Gray scaly muck—brains—was drying on one cheek. He couldn’t be alive with such a hellacious wound, but he was. He reached out to Dan with one starfish hand.

“Canny,” he said.

The screaming began again, only this time it wasn’t Deenie and it wasn’t the wind.

This time it was him.

When he woke for the second time—real waking, this time—he wasn’t screaming at all, only making a kind of low growling deep in his chest. He sat up, gasping, the bedclothes puddled around his waist. There was no one else in his bed, but the dream hadn’t yet dissolved, and looking wasn’t enough. He threw back the bedclothes, and that still wasn’t enough. He ran his hands down the bottom sheet, feeling for fugitive warmth, or a dent that might have been made by small hips and buttocks. Nothing. Of course not. So then he looked under the bed and saw only his borrowed boots.

The wind was blowing less strongly now. The storm wasn’t over, but it was winding down.

He went to the bathroom, then whirled and looked back, as if expecting to surprise someone. There was just the bed, with the covers now lying on the floor at the foot. He turned on the light over the sink, splashed his face with cold water, and sat down on the closed lid of the commode, taking long breaths, one after the other. He thought about getting up and grabbing a cigarette from the pack lying beside his book on the room’s one small table, but his legs felt rubbery and he wasn’t sure they’d hold him. Not yet, anyway. So he sat. He could see the bed and the bed was empty. The whole room was empty. No problem there.

Only… it didn’t feel empty. Not yet. When it did, he supposed he would go back to bed. But not to sleep. For this night, sleep was done.

Seven years before, working as an orderly in a Tulsa hospice, Dan had made friends with an elderly psychiatrist who was suffering from terminal liver cancer. One day, when Emil Kemmer had been reminiscing (not very discreetly) about a few of his more interesting cases, Dan had confessed that ever since childhood, he had suffered from what he called double dreaming. Was Kemmer familiar with the phenomenon? Was there a name for it?

Kemmer had been a large man in his prime—the old black-and-white wedding photo he kept on his bedside table attested to that—but cancer is the ultimate diet program, and on the day of this conversation, his weight had been approximately the same as his age, which was ninety-one. His mind had still been sharp, however, and now, sitting on the closed toilet and listening to the dying storm outside, Dan remembered the old man’s sly smile.

“Usually,” he had said in his heavy German accent, “I am paid for my diagnoses, Daniel.”

Dan had grinned. “Guess I’m out of luck, then.”

“Perhaps not.” Kemmer studied Dan. His eyes were bright blue. Although he knew it was outrageously unfair, Dan couldn’t help imagining those eyes under a Waffen-SS coal-scuttle helmet. “There’s a rumor in this deathhouse that you are a kid with a talent for helping people die. Is this true?”

“Sometimes,” Dan said cautiously. “Not always.” The truth was almost always.

“When the time comes, will you help me?”

“If I can, of course.”

“Good.” Kemmer sat up, a laboriously painful process, but when Dan moved to help, Kemmer had waved him away. “What you call double dreaming is well known to psychiatrists, and of particular interest to Jungians, who call it false awakening. The first dream is usually a lucid dream, meaning the dreamer knows he is dreaming—”

“Yes!” Dan cried. “But the second one—”

“The dreamer believes he is awake,” Kemmer said. “Jung made much of this, even ascribing precognitive powers to these dreams… but of course we know better, don’t we, Dan?”

“Of course,” Dan had agreed.

“The poet Edgar Allan Poe described the false awakening phenomenon long before Carl Jung was born. He wrote, ‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.’ Have I answered your question?”

“I think so. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Now I believe I could drink a little juice. Apple, please.”

Precognitive powers… but of course we know better.

Even if he hadn’t kept the shining almost entirely to himself over the years, Dan would not have presumed to contradict a dying man… especially one with such coldly inquisitive blue eyes. The truth, however, was that one or both of his double dreams were often predictive, usually in ways he only half understood or did not understand at all. But as he sat on the toilet seat in his underwear, now shivering (and not just because the room was cold), he understood much more than he wanted to.

Tommy was dead. Murdered by his abusive uncle, most likely. The mother had committed suicide not long after. As for the rest of the dream… or the phantom hat he’d seen earlier, spinning down the sidewalk…

Stay away from the woman in the hat. She’s the Queen Bitch of Castle Hell.

“I don’t care,” Dan said.

If you mess with her, she’ll eat you alive.

He had no intention of meeting her, let alone messing with her. As for Deenie, he wasn’t responsible for either her short-fused brother or her child neglect. He didn’t even have to carry around the guilt about her lousy seventy dollars anymore; she had sold the cocaine—he was sure that part of the dream was absolutely true—and they were square. More than square, actually.

What he cared about was getting a drink. Getting drunk, not to put too fine a point on it. Standing-up, falling-down, pissy-assed drunk. Warm morning sunshine was good, and the pleasant feeling of muscles that had been worked hard, and waking up in the morning without a hangover, but the price—all these crazy dreams and visions, not to mention the random thoughts of passing strangers that sometimes found their way past his defenses—was too high.

Too high to bear.

He sat in the room’s only chair and read his John Sandford novel by the light of the room’s only lamp until the two town churches with bells rang in seven o’clock. Then he pulled on his new (new to him, anyway) boots and duffel coat. He headed out into a world that had changed and softened. There wasn’t a sharp edge anywhere. The snow was still falling, but gently now.

I should get out of here. Go back to Florida. Fuck New Hampshire, where it probably even snows on the Fourth of July in odd-numbered years.

Hallorann’s voice answered him, the tone as kind as he remembered from his childhood, when Dan had been Danny, but there was hard steel underneath. You better stay somewhere, honey, or you won’t be able to stay anywhere.

“Fuck you, oldtimer,” he muttered.

He went back to the Red Apple because the stores that sold hard liquor wouldn’t be open for at least another hour. He walked slowly back and forth between the wine cooler and the beer cooler, debating, and finally decided if he was going to get drunk, he might as well do it as nastily as possible. He grabbed two bottles of Thunderbird (eighteen percent alcohol, a good enough number when whiskey was temporarily out of reach), started up the aisle to the register, then stopped.

Give it one more day. Give yourself one more chance.

He supposed he could do that, but why? So he could wake up in bed with Tommy again? Tommy with half of his skull caved in? Or maybe next time it would be Deenie, who had lain in that tub for two days before the super finally got tired of knocking, used his passkey, and found her. He couldn’t know that, if Emil Kemmer had been here he would have agreed most emphatically, but he did. He did know. So why bother?

Maybe this hyperawareness will pass. Maybe it’s just a phase, the psychic equivalent of the DTs. Maybe if you just give it a little more time…

But time changed. That was something only drunks and junkies understood. When you couldn’t sleep, when you were afraid to look around because of what you might see, time elongated and grew sharp teeth.

“Help you?” the clerk asked, and Dan knew

( fucking shining fucking thing)

that he was making the clerk nervous. Why not? With his bed head, dark-circled eyes, and jerky, unsure movements, he probably looked like a meth freak who was deciding whether or not to pull out his trusty Saturday night special and ask for everything in the register.

“No,” Dan said. “I just realized I left my wallet home.”

He put the green bottles back in the cooler. As he closed it, they spoke to him gently, as one friend speaks to another: See you soon, Danny.

Billy Freeman was waiting for him, bundled up to the eyebrows. He held out an old-fashioned ski hat with ANNISTON CYCLONES embroidered on the front.

“What the hell are the Anniston Cyclones?” Dan asked.

“Anniston’s twenty miles north of here. When it comes to football, basketball, and baseball, they’re our archrivals. Someone sees that on ya, you’ll probably get a snowball upside your head, but it’s the only one I’ve got.”

Dan hauled it on. “Then go, Cyclones.”

“Right, fuck you and the hoss you rode in on.” Billy looked him over. “You all right, Danno?”

“Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“I hear that. Damn wind really screamed, didn’t it? Sounded like my ex when I suggested a little Monday night lovin might do us good. Ready to go to work?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Good. Let’s dig in. Gonna be a busy day.”

It was indeed a busy day, but by noon the sun had come out and the temperature had climbed back into the mid-fifties. Teenytown was filled with the sound of a hundred small waterfalls as the snow melted. Dan’s spirits rose with the temperature, and he even caught himself singing (“Young man! I was once in your shoes!”) as he followed his snowblower back and forth in the courtyard of the little shopping center adjacent to the common. Overhead, flapping in a mild breeze far removed from the shrieking wind of the night before, was a banner reading HUGE SPRING BARGAINS AT TEENYTOWN PRICES!

There were no visions.

After they clocked out, he took Billy to the Chuck Wagon and ordered them steak dinners. Billy offered to buy the beer. Dan shook his head. “Staying away from alcohol. Reason being, once I start, it’s sometimes hard to stop.”

“You could talk to Kingsley about that,” Billy said. “He got himself a booze divorce about fifteen years ago. He’s all right now, but his daughter still don’t talk to him.”

They drank coffee with the meal. A lot of it.

Dan went back to his third-floor Eliot Street lair tired, full of hot food and glad to be sober. There was no TV in his room, but he had the last part of the Sandford novel, and lost himself in it for a couple of hours. He kept an ear out for the wind, but it did not rise. He had an idea that last night’s storm had been winter’s final shot. Which was fine with him. He turned in at ten and fell asleep almost immediately. His early morning visit to the Red Apple now seemed hazy, as if he had gone there in a fever delirium and the fever had now passed.

He woke in the small hours, not because the wind was blowing but because he had to piss like a racehorse. He got up, shuffled to the bathroom, and turned on the light inside the door.

The tophat was in the tub, and full of blood.

“No,” he said. “I’m dreaming.”

Maybe double dreaming. Or triple. Quadruple, even. There was something he hadn’t told Emil Kemmer: he was afraid that eventually he would get lost in a maze of phantom nightlife and never be able to find his way out again.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Only this was real. So was the hat. No one else would see it, but that changed nothing. The hat was real. It was somewhere in the world. He knew it.

From the corner of his eye, he saw something written on the mirror over the sink. Something written in lipstick.

I must not look at it.

Too late. His head was turning; he could hear the tendons in his neck creaking like old doorhinges. And what did it matter? He knew what it said. Mrs. Massey was gone, Horace Derwent was gone, they were securely locked away in the boxes he kept far back in his mind, but the Overlook was still not done with him. Written on the mirror, not in lipstick but in blood, was a single word:

REDRUM

Beneath it, lying in the sink, was a bloodstained Atlanta Braves t-shirt.

It will never stop, Danny thought. The Overlook burned and the most terrible of its revenants went into the lockboxes, but I can’t lock away the shining, because it isn’t just inside me, it is me. Without booze to at least stun it, these visions will go on until they drive me insane.

He could see his face in the mirror with REDRUM floating in front of it, stamped on his forehead like a brand. This was not a dream. There was a murdered child’s shirt in his washbasin and a hatful of blood in his tub. Insanity was coming. He could see its approach in his own bulging eyes.

Then, like a flashlight beam in the dark, Hallorann’s voice: Son, you may see things, but they’re like pictures in a book. You weren’t helpless in the Overlook when you were a child, and you’re not helpless now. Far from it. Close your eyes and when you open them, all this crap will be gone.

He closed his eyes and waited. He tried to count off the seconds, but only made it to fourteen before the numbers were lost in the roaring confusion of his thoughts. He half expected hands—perhaps those of whoever owned the hat—to close around his neck. But he stood there. There was really nowhere else to go.

Summoning all his courage, Dan opened his eyes. The tub was empty. The washbasin was empty. There was nothing written on the mirror.

But it will be back. Next time maybe it’ll be her shoes—those cork sandals. Or I’ll see her in the tub. Why not? That’s where I saw Mrs. Massey, and they died the same way. Except I never stole Mrs. Massey’s money and ran out on her.

“I gave it a day,” he told the empty room. “I did that much.”

Yes, and although it had been a busy day, it had also been a good day, he’d be the first to admit it. The days weren’t the problem. As for the nights…

The mind was a blackboard. Booze was the eraser.

Dan lay awake until six. Then he dressed and once more made the trek to the Red Apple. This time he did not hesitate, only instead of extracting two bottles of Bird from the cooler, he took three. What was it they used to say? Go big or go home. The clerk bagged the bottles without comment; he was used to early wine purchasers. Dan strolled to the town common, sat on one of the benches in Teenytown, and took one of the bottles out of the bag, looking down at it like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull. Through the green glass, what was inside looked like rat poison instead of wine.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Dan said, and loosened the cap.

This time it was his mother who spoke up. Wendy Torrance, who had smoked right to the bitter end. Because if suicide was the only option, you could at least choose your weapon.

Is this how it ends, Danny? Is this what it was all for?

He turned the cap widdershins. Then tightened it. Then back the other way. This time he took it off. The smell of the wine was sour, the smell of jukebox music and crappy bars and pointless arguments followed by fistfights in parking lots. In the end, life was as stupid as one of those fights. The world wasn’t a hospice with fresh air, the world was the Overlook Hotel, where the party never ended. Where the dead were alive forever. He raised the bottle to his lips.

Is this why we fought so hard to get out of that damned hotel, Danny? Why we fought to make a new life for ourselves? There was no reproach in her voice, only sadness.

Danny tightened the cap again. Then loosened it. Tightened it. Loosened it.

He thought: If I drink, the Overlook wins. Even though it burned to the ground when the boiler exploded, it wins. If I don’t drink, I go crazy.

He thought: All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

He was still tightening the cap and loosening it when Billy Freeman, who had awakened early with the vague, alarmed sense that something was wrong, found him.

“Are you going to drink that, Dan, or just keep jerking it off?”

“Drink it, I guess. I don’t know what else to do.”

So Billy told him.

Casey Kingsley wasn’t entirely surprised to see his new hire sitting outside his office when he arrived at quarter past eight that morning. Nor was he surprised to see the bottle Torrance was holding in his hands, first twisting the cap off, then putting it back on and turning it tight again—he’d had that special look from the start, the thousand-yard Kappy’s Discount Liquor Store stare.

Billy Freeman didn’t have as much shine as Dan himself, not even close, but a bit more than just a twinkle. On that first day he had called Kingsley from the equipment shed as soon as Dan headed across the street to the Municipal Building. There was a young fella looking for work, Billy said. He wasn’t apt to have much in the way of references, but Billy thought he was the right man to help out until Memorial Day. Kingsley, who’d had experiences—good ones—with Billy’s intuitions before, had agreed. I know we’ve got to have someone, he said.

Billy’s reply had been peculiar, but then Billy was peculiar. Once, two years ago, he had called an ambulance five minutes before that little kid had fallen off the swings and fractured his skull.

He needs us more than we need him, Billy had said.

And here he was, sitting hunched forward as if he were already riding his next bus or barstool, and Kingsley could smell the wine from twelve yards down the hallway. He had a gourmet’s nose for such scents, and could name each one. This was Thunderbird, as in the old saloon rhyme: What’s the word? Thunderbird!… What’s the price? Fifty twice! But when the young guy looked up at him, Kingsley saw the eyes were clear of everything but desperation.

“Billy sent me.”

Kingsley said nothing. He could see the kid gathering himself, struggling with it. It was in his eyes; it was in the way his mouth turned down at the corners; mostly it was the way he held the bottle, hating it and loving it and needing it all at the same time.

At last Dan brought out the words he had been running from all his life.

“I need help.”

He swiped an arm across his eyes. As he did, Kingsley bent down and grasped the bottle of wine. The kid held on for a moment… then let go.

“You’re sick and you’re tired,” Kingsley said. “I can see that much. But are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?”

Dan looked up at him, throat working. He struggled some more, then said, “You don’t know how much.”

“Maybe I do.” Kingsley produced a vast key ring from his vast trousers. He stuck one in the lock of the door with FRAZIER MUNICIPAL SERVICES painted on the frosted glass. “Come on in. Let’s talk about it.”

^{CHAPTER TWO} BAD NUMBERS

The elderly poet with the Italian given name and the absolutely American surname sat with her sleeping great-granddaughter in her lap and watched the video her granddaughter’s husband had shot in the delivery room three weeks before. It began with a title card: ABRA ENTERS THE WORLD! The footage was jerky, and David had kept away from anything too clinical (thank God), but Concetta Reynolds saw the sweat-plastered hair on Lucia’s brow, heard her cry out “I am!” when one of the nurses exhorted her to push, and saw the droplets of blood on the blue drape—not many, just enough to make what Chetta’s own grandmother would have called “a fair show.” But not in English, of course.

The picture jiggled when the baby finally came into view and she felt gooseflesh chase up her back and arms when Lucy screamed, “She has no face!”

Sitting beside Lucy now, David chuckled. Because of course Abra did have a face, a very sweet one. Chetta looked down at it as if to reassure herself of that. When she looked back up, the new baby was being placed in the new mother’s arms. Thirty or forty jerky seconds later, another title card appeared: HAPPY BIRTHDAY ABRA RAFAELLA STONE!

David pushed STOP on the remote.

“You’re one of the very few people who will ever get to see that,” Lucy announced in a firm, take-no-prisoners voice. “It’s embarrassing.”

“It’s wonderful,” Dave said. “And there’s one person who gets to see it for sure, and that’s Abra herself.” He glanced at his wife, sitting next to him on the couch. “When she’s old enough. And if she wants to, of course.” He patted Lucy’s thigh, then grinned at his granny-in-law, a woman for whom he had respect but no great love. “Until then, it goes in the safe deposit box with the insurance papers, the house papers, and my millions in drug money.”

Concetta smiled to show she got the joke but thinly, to show she didn’t find it particularly funny. In her lap, Abra slept and slept. In a way, all babies were born with a caul, she thought, their tiny faces drapes of mystery and possibility. Perhaps it was a thing to write about. Perhaps not.

Concetta had come to America when she was twelve and spoke perfect idiomatic English—not surprising, since she was a graduate of Vassar and professor (now emeritus) of that very subject—but in her head every superstition and old wives’ tale still lived. Sometimes they gave orders, and they always spoke Italian when they did. Chetta believed that most people who worked in the arts were high-functioning schizophrenics, and she was no different. She knew superstition was shit; she also spat between her fingers if a crow or black cat crossed her path.

For much of her own schizophrenia she had the Sisters of Mercy to thank. They believed in God; they believed in the divinity of Jesus; they believed mirrors were bewitching pools and the child who looked into one too long would grow warts. These were the women who had been the greatest influence on her life between the ages of seven and twelve. They carried rulers in their belts—for hitting, not measuring—and never saw a child’s ear they did not desire to twist in passing.

Lucy held out her arms for the baby. Chetta handed her over, not without reluctance. The kid was one sweet bundle.

Twenty miles southeast of where Abra slept in Concetta Reynolds’s arms, Dan Torrance was attending an AA meeting while some chick droned on about sex with her ex. Casey Kingsley had ordered him to attend ninety meetings in ninety days, and this one, a nooner in the basement of Frazier Methodist Church, was his eighth. He was sitting in the first row, because Casey—known in the halls as Big Casey—had ordered him to do that, too.

“Sick people who want to get well sit in front, Danny. We call the back row at AA meetings the Denial Aisle.”

Casey had given him a little notebook with a photo on the front that showed ocean waves crashing into a rock promontory. Printed above the picture was a motto Dan understood but didn’t much care for: NO GREAT THING IS CREATED SUDDENLY.

“You write down every meeting you go to in that book. And anytime I ask to see it, you better be able to haul it out of your back pocket and show me perfect attendance.”

“Don’t I even get a sick day?”

Casey laughed. “You’re sick every day, my friend—you’re a drunk-ass alcoholic. Want to know something my sponsor told me?”

“I think you already did. You can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber, right?”

“Don’t be a smartass, just listen.”

Dan sighed. “Listening.”

“‘Get your ass to a meeting,’ he said. ‘If your ass falls off, put it in a bag and take it to a meeting.’”

“Charming. What if I just forget?”

Casey had shrugged. “Then you find yourself another sponsor, one who believes in forgetfulness. I don’t.”

Dan, who felt like some breakable object that has skittered to the edge of a high shelf but hasn’t quite fallen off, didn’t want another sponsor or changes of any kind. He felt okay, but tender. Very tender. Almost skinless. The visions that had plagued him following his arrival in Frazier had ceased, and although he often thought of Deenie and her little boy, the thoughts were not as painful. At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking thing had no latch, let alone a lock.

Now he began to print a single word on the current page of the little book Casey had given him. He made large, careful letters. He had no idea why he was doing it, or what it meant. The word was ABRA.

Meanwhile, the speaker reached the end of her qualification and burst into tears, through them declaring that even though her ex was a shit and she loved him still, she was grateful to be straight and sober. Dan applauded along with the rest of the Lunch Bunch, then began to color in the letters with his pen. Fattening them. Making them stand out.

Do I know this name? I think I do.

As the next speaker began and he went to the urn for a fresh cup of coffee, it came to him. Abra was the name of a girl in a John Steinbeck novel. East of Eden. He’d read it… he couldn’t remember where. At some stop along the way. Some somewhere. It didn’t matter.

Another thought

(did you save it)

rose to the top of his mind like a bubble and popped.

Save what?

Frankie P., the Lunch Bunch oldtimer who was chairing the meeting, asked if someone wanted to do the Chip Club. When no one raised a hand, Frankie pointed. “How about you, lurking back there by the coffee?”

Feeling self-conscious, Dan walked to the front of the room, hoping he could remember the order of the chips. The first—white for beginners—he had. As he took the battered cookie tin with the chips and medallions scattered inside it, the thought came again.

Did you save it?

That was the day the True Knot, which had been wintering at a KOA campground in Arizona, packed up and began meandering back east. They drove along Route 77 toward Show Low in the usual caravan: fourteen campers, some towing cars, some with lawn chairs or bicycles clamped to the backs. There were Southwinds and Winnebagos, Monacos and Bounders. Rose’s EarthCruiser—seven hundred thousand dollars’ worth of imported rolling steel, the best RV money could buy—led the parade. But slowly, just double-nickeling it.

They were in no hurry. There was plenty of time. The feast was still months away.

“Did you save it?” Concetta asked as Lucy opened her blouse and offered Abra the breast. Abby blinked sleepily, rooted a little, then lost interest. Once your nipples get sore, you won’t offer until she asks, Chetta thought. And at the top of her lungs.

“Save what?” David asked.

Lucy knew. “I passed out right after they put her in my arms. Dave says I almost dropped her. There was no time, Momo.”

“Oh, that goop over her face.” David said it dismissively. “They stripped it off and threw it away. Damn good thing, if you ask me.” He was smiling, but his eyes challenged her. You know better than to go on with this, they said. You know better, so just drop it.

She did know better… and didn’t. Had she been this two-minded when she was younger? She couldn’t remember, although it seemed she could remember every lecture on the Blessed Mysteries and the everlasting pain of hell administered by the Sisters of Mercy, those banditti in black. The story of the girl who had been struck blind for peeping at her brother while he was naked in the tub and the one about the man who had been struck dead for blaspheming against the pope.

Give them to us when they’re young and it doesn’t matter how many honors classes they’ve taught, or how many books of poetry they’ve written, or even that one of those books won all the big prizes. Give them to us when they’re young… and they’re ours forever.

“You should have saved il amnio. It’s good luck.”

She spoke directly to her granddaughter, cutting David out entirely. He was a good man, a good husband to her Lucia, but fuck his dismissive tone. And double-fuck his challenging eyes.

“I would have, but I didn’t have a chance, Momo. And Dave didn’t know.” Buttoning her blouse again.

Chetta leaned forward and touched the fine skin of Abra’s cheek with the tip of her finger, old flesh sliding across new. “Those born with il amnio are supposed to have double sight.”

“You don’t actually believe that, do you?” David asked. “A caul is nothing but a scrap of fetal membrane. It…”

He was saying more, but Concetta paid no attention. Abra had opened her eyes. In them was a universe of poetry, lines too great to ever be written. Or even remembered.

“Never mind,” Concetta said. She raised the baby and kissed the smooth skull where the fontanelle pulsed, the magic of the mind so close beneath. “What’s done is done.”

One night about five months after the not-quite-argument over Abra’s caul, Lucy dreamed her daughter was crying—crying as if her heart would break. In this dream, Abby was no longer in the master bedroom of the house on Richland Court but somewhere down a long corridor. Lucy ran in the direction of the weeping. At first there were doors on both sides, then seats. Blue ones with high backs. She was on a plane or maybe an Amtrak train. After running for what seemed like miles, she came to a bathroom door. Her baby was crying behind it. Not a hungry cry, but a frightened cry. Maybe

(oh God, oh Mary)

a hurt cry.

Lucy was terribly afraid the door would be locked and she would have to break it down—wasn’t that the kind of thing that always happened in bad dreams?—but the knob twisted and she opened it. As she did, a new fear struck her: What if Abra was in the toilet? You read about that happening. Babies in toilets, babies in Dumpsters. What if she were drowning in one of those ugly steel bowls they had on public conveyances, up to her mouth and nose in disinfected blue water?

But Abra lay on the floor. She was naked. Her eyes, swimming with tears, stared at her mother. Written on her chest in what looked like blood was the number 11.

David Stone dreamed he was chasing his daughter’s cries up an endless escalator that was running—slowly but inexorably—in the wrong direction. Worse, the escalator was in a mall, and the mall was on fire. He should have been choking and out of breath long before he reached the top, but there was no smoke from the fire, only a hell of flames. Nor was there any sound other than Abra’s cries, although he saw people burning like kerosene-soaked torches. When he finally made it to the top, he saw Abby lying on the floor like someone’s cast-off garbage. Men and women ran all around her, unheeding, and in spite of the flames, no one tried to use the escalator even though it was going down. They simply sprinted aimlessly in all directions, like ants whose hill has been torn open by a farmer’s harrow. One woman in stilettos almost stepped on his daughter, a thing that would almost surely have killed her.

Abra was naked. Written on her chest was the number 175.

The Stones woke together, both initially convinced that the cries they heard were a remnant of the dreams they had been having. But no, the cries were in the room with them. Abby lay in her crib beneath her Shrek mobile, eyes wide, cheeks red, tiny fists pumping, howling her head off.

A change of diapers did not quiet her, nor did the breast, nor did what felt like miles of laps up and down the hall and at least a thousand verses of “The Wheels on the Bus.” At last, very frightened now—Abby was her first, and Lucy was at her wits’ end—she called Concetta in Boston. Although it was two in the morning, Momo answered on the second ring. She was eighty-five, and her sleep was as thin as her skin. She listened more closely to her wailing great-granddaughter than to Lucy’s confused recital of all the ordinary remedies they had tried, then asked the pertinent questions. “Is she running a fever? Pulling at one of her ears? Jerking her legs like she has to make merda?”

“No,” Lucy said, “none of that. She’s a little warm from crying, but I don’t think it’s a fever. Momo, what should I do?”

Chetta, now sitting at her desk, didn’t hesitate. “Give her another fifteen minutes. If she doesn’t quiet and begin feeding, take her to the hospital.”

“What? Brigham and Women’s?” Confused and upset, it was all Lucy could think of. It was where she had given birth. “That’s a hundred and fifty miles!”

“No, no. Bridgton. Across the border in Maine. That’s a little closer than CNH.”

“Are you sure?”

“Am I looking at my computer right now?”

Abra did not quiet. The crying was monotonous, maddening, terrifying. When they arrived at Bridgton Hospital, it was quarter of four, and Abra was still at full volume. Rides in the Acura were usually better than a sleeping pill, but not this morning. David thought about brain aneurysms and told himself he was out of his mind. Babies didn’t have strokes… did they?

“Davey?” Lucy asked in a small voice as they pulled up to the sign reading EMERGENCY DROP-OFF ONLY. “Babies don’t have strokes or heart attacks… do they?”

“No, I’m sure they don’t.”

But a new idea occurred to him then. Suppose the kiddo had somehow swallowed a safety pin, and it had popped open in her stomach? That’s stupid, we use Huggies, she’s never even been near a safety pin.

Something else, then. A bobby pin from Lucy’s hair. An errant tack that had fallen into the crib. Maybe even, God help them, a broken-off piece of plastic from Shrek, Donkey, or Princess Fiona.

“Davey? What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

The mobile was fine. He was sure of it.

Almost sure.

Abra continued to scream.

David hoped the doc on duty would give his daughter a sedative, but it was against protocol for infants who could not be diagnosed, and Abra Rafaella Stone seemed to have nothing wrong with her. She wasn’t running a fever, she wasn’t showing a rash, and ultrasound had ruled out pyloric stenosis. An X-ray showed no foreign objects in her throat or stomach, or a bowel obstruction. Basically, she just wouldn’t shut up. The Stones were the only patients in the ER at that hour on a Tuesday morning, and each of the three nurses on duty had a try at quieting her. Nothing worked.

“Shouldn’t you give her something to eat?” Lucy asked the doctor when he came back to check. The phrase Ringer’s lactate occurred to her, something she’d heard on one of the doctor shows she’d watched ever since her teenage crush on George Clooney. But for all she knew, Ringer’s lactate was foot lotion, or an anticoagulant, or something for stomach ulcers. “She won’t take the breast or the bottle.”

“When she gets hungry enough, she’ll eat,” the doctor said, but neither Lucy nor David was much comforted. For one thing, the doctor looked younger than they were. For another (this was far worse), he didn’t sound completely sure. “Have you called your pediatrician?” He checked the paperwork. “Dr. Dalton?”

“Left a message with his service,” David said. “We probably won’t hear from him until mid-morning, and by then this will be over.”

One way or the other, he thought, and his mind—made ungovernable by too little sleep and too much anxiety—presented him with a picture as clear as it was horrifying: mourners standing around a small grave. And an even smaller coffin.

At seven thirty, Chetta Reynolds blew into the examining room where the Stones and their ceaselessly screaming baby daughter had been stashed. The poet rumored to be on the short list for a Presidential Medal of Freedom was dressed in straight-leg jeans and a BU sweatshirt with a hole in one elbow. The outfit showed just how thin she’d become over the last three or four years. No cancer, if that’s what you’re thinking, she’d say if anyone commented on her runway-model thinness, which she ordinarily disguised with billowing dresses or caftans. I’m just in training for the final lap around the track.

Her hair, as a rule braided or put up in complicated swoops arranged to showcase her collection of vintage hair clips, stood out around her head in an unkempt Einstein cloud. She wore no makeup, and even in her distress, Lucy was shocked by how old Concetta looked. Well, of course she was old, eighty-five was very old, but until this morning she had looked like a woman in her late sixties at most. “I would have been here an hour earlier if I’d found someone to come in and take care of Betty.” Betty was her elderly, ailing boxer.

Chetta caught David’s reproachful glance.

“Bets is dying, David. And based on what you could tell me over the phone, I wasn’t all that concerned about Abra.”

“Are you concerned now?” David asked.

Lucy flashed him a warning glance, but Chetta seemed willing to accept the implied rebuke. “Yes.” She held out her hands. “Give her to me, Lucy. Let’s see if she’ll quiet for Momo.”

But Abra would not quiet for Momo, no matter how she was rocked. Nor did a soft and surprisingly tuneful lullabye (for all David knew, it was “The Wheels on the Bus” in Italian) do the job. They all tried the walking cure again, first squiring her around the small exam room, then down the hall, then back to the exam room. The screaming went on and on. At some point there was a commotion outside—someone with actual visible injuries being wheeled in, David assumed—but those in exam room 4 took little notice.

At five to nine, the exam room door opened and the Stones’ pediatrician walked in. Dr. John Dalton was a fellow Dan Torrance would have recognized, although not by last name. To Dan he was just Doctor John, who made the coffee at the Thursday night Big Book meeting in North Conway.

“Thank God!” Lucy said, thrusting her howling child into the pediatrician’s arms. “We’ve been left on our own for hours!”

“I was on my way when I got the message.” Dalton hoisted Abra onto his shoulder. “Rounds here, then over in Castle Rock. You’ve heard about what’s happened, haven’t you?”

“Heard what?” David asked. With the door open, he was for the first time consciously aware of a moderate uproar outside. People were talking in loud voices. Some were crying. The nurse who had admitted them walked by, her face red and blotchy, her cheeks wet. She didn’t even glance at the screaming infant.

“A passenger jet hit the World Trade Center,” Dalton said. “And no one thinks it was an accident.”

That was American Airlines Flight 11. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the Trade Center’s South Tower seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m. At 9:03, Abra Stone abruptly stopped crying. By 9:04, she was sound asleep.

On their ride back to Anniston, David and Lucy listened to the radio while Abra slept peacefully in her car seat behind them. The news was unbearable, but turning it off was unthinkable… at least until a newscaster announced the names of the airlines and the flight numbers of the aircraft: two in New York, one near Washington, one cratered in rural Pennsylvania. Then David finally reached over and silenced the flood of disaster.

“Lucy, I have to tell you something. I dreamed—”

“I know.” She spoke in the flat tone of one who has just suffered a shock. “So did I.”

By the time they crossed back into New Hampshire, David had begun to believe there might be something to that caul business, after all.

In a New Jersey town, on the west bank of the Hudson River, there’s a park named for the town’s most famous resident. On a clear day, it offers a perfect view of Lower Manhattan. The True Knot arrived in Hoboken on September eighth, parking in a private lot which they had four-walled for ten days. Crow Daddy did the deal. Handsome and gregarious, looking about forty, Crow’s favorite t-shirt read I’M A PEOPLE PERSON! Not that he ever wore a tee when negotiating for the True Knot; then it was strictly suit and tie. It was what the rubes expected. His straight name was Henry Rothman. He was a Harvard-educated lawyer (class of ’38), and he always carried cash. The True had over a billion dollars in various accounts across the world—some in gold, some in diamonds, some in rare books, stamps, and paintings—but never paid by check or credit card. Everyone, even Pea and Pod, who looked like kids, carried a roll of ten and twenties.

As Jimmy Numbers had once said, “We’re a cash-and-carry outfit. We pay cash and the rubes carry us.” Jimmy was the True’s accountant. In his rube days he had once ridden with an outfit that became known (long after their war was over) as Quantrill’s Raiders. Back then he had been a wild kid who wore a buffalo coat and carried a Sharps, but in the years since, he had mellowed. These days he had a framed, autographed picture of Ronald Reagan in his RV.

On the morning of September eleventh, the True watched the attacks on the Twin Towers from the parking lot, passing around four pairs of binoculars. They would have had a better view from Sinatra Park, but Rose didn’t need to tell them that gathering early might attract suspicion… and in the months and years ahead, America was going to be a very suspicious nation: if you see something, say something.

Around ten that morning—when crowds had gathered all along the riverbank and it was safe—they made their way to the park. The Little twins, Pea and Pod, pushed Grampa Flick in his wheelchair. Grampa wore his cap stating I AM A VET. His long, baby-fine white hair floated around the cap’s edges like milkweed. There had been a time when he’d told folks he was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. Then it was World War I. Nowadays it was World War II. In another twenty years or so, he expected to switch his story to Vietnam. Verisimilitude had never been a problem; Grampa was a military history buff.

Sinatra Park was jammed. Most folks were silent, but some wept. Apron Annie and Black-Eyed Sue helped in this respect; both were able to cry on demand. The others put on suitable expressions of sorrow, solemnity, and amazement.

Basically, the True Knot fit right in. It was how they rolled.

Spectators came and went, but the True stayed for most of the day, which was cloudless and beautiful (except for the thick billows of dreck rising in Lower Manhattan, that is). They stood at the iron rail, not talking among themselves, just watching. And taking long slow deep breaths, like tourists from the Midwest standing for the first time on Pemaquid Point or Quoddy Head in Maine, breathing deep of the fresh sea air. As a sign of respect, Rose took off her tophat and held it by her side.

At four o’clock they trooped back to their encampment in the parking lot, invigorated. They would return the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. They would return until the good steam was exhausted, and then they would move on again.

By then, Grampa Flick’s white hair would have become iron gray, and he would no longer need the wheelchair.

^{CHAPTER THREE} SPOONS

It was a twenty-mile drive from Frazier to North Conway, but Dan Torrance made it every Thursday night, partly because he could. He was now working at Helen Rivington House, making a decent salary, and he had his driver’s license back. The car he’d bought to go with it wasn’t much, just a three-year-old Caprice with blackwall tires and an iffy radio, but the engine was good and every time he started it up, he felt like the luckiest man in New Hampshire. He thought if he never had to ride another bus, he could die happy. It was January of 2004. Except for a few random thoughts and images—plus the extra work he sometimes did at the hospice, of course—the shining had been quiet. He would have done that volunteer work in any case, but after his time in AA, he also saw it as making amends, which recovering people considered almost as important as staying away from the first drink. If he could manage to keep the plug in the jug another three months, he would be able to celebrate three years sober.

Driving again figured large in the daily gratitude meditations upon which Casey K. insisted (because, he said—and with all the dour certainty of the Program long-timer—a grateful alcoholic doesn’t get drunk), but mostly Dan went on Thursday nights because the Big Book gathering was soothing. Intimate, really. Some of the open discussion meetings in the area were uncomfortably large, but that was never true on Thursday nights in North Conway. There was an old AA saying that went, If you want to hide something from an alcoholic, stick it in the Big Book, and attendance at the North Conway Thursday night meeting suggested that there was some truth in it. Even during the weeks between the Fourth of July and Labor Day—the height of the tourist season—it was rare to have more than a dozen people in the Amvets hall when the gavel fell. As a result, Dan had heard things he suspected would never have been spoken aloud in the meetings that drew fifty or even seventy recovering alkies and druggies. In those, speakers had a tendency to take refuge in the platitudes (of which there were hundreds) and avoid the personal. You’d hear Serenity pays dividends and You can take my inventory if you’re willing to make my amends, but never I fucked my brother’s wife one night when we were both drunk.

At the Thursday night We Study Sobriety meetings, the little enclave read Bill Wilson’s big blue how-to manual from cover to cover, each new meeting picking up where the last meeting had left off. When they got to the end of the book, they went back to “The Doctor’s Statement” and started all over again. Most meetings covered ten pages or so. That took about half an hour. In the remaining half hour, the group was supposed to talk about the material just read. Sometimes they actually did. Quite often, however, the discussion veered off in other directions, like an unruly planchette scurrying around a Ouija board beneath the fingers of neurotic teenagers.

Dan remembered a Thursday night meeting he’d attended when he was about eight months sober. The chapter under discussion, “To Wives,” was full of antique assumptions that almost always provoked a hot response from the younger women in the Program. They wanted to know why, in the sixty-five years or so since the Big Book’s original publication, no one had ever added a chapter called “To Husbands.”

When Gemma T.—a thirtysomething whose only two emotional settings seemed to be Angry and Profoundly Pissed Off—raised her hand on that particular night, Dan had expected a fem-lib tirade. Instead she said, much more quietly than usual, “I need to share something. I’ve been holding onto it ever since I was seventeen, and unless I let go, I’ll never be able to stay away from coke and wine.”

The group waited.

“I hit a man with my car when I was coming home drunk from a party,” Gemma said. “This was back in Somerville. I left him lying by the side of the road. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive. I still don’t. I waited for the cops to come and arrest me, but they never did. I got away with it.”

She had laughed at this the way people do when the joke’s an especially good one, then put her head down on the table and burst into sobs so deep that they shook her rail-thin body. It had been Dan’s first experience with how terrifying “honesty in all our affairs” could be when it was actually put into practice. He thought, as he still did every so often, of how he had stripped Deenie’s wallet of cash, and how the little boy had reached for the cocaine on the coffee table. He was a little in awe of Gemma, but that much raw honesty wasn’t in him. If it came down to a choice between telling that story and taking a drink…

I’d take the drink. No question.

Tonight the reading was “Gutter Bravado,” one of the stories from the section of the Big Book cheerily titled “They Lost Nearly All.” The tale followed a pattern with which Dan had become familiar: good family, church on Sundays, first drink, first binge, business success spoiled by booze, escalating lies, first arrest, broken promises to reform, institutionalization, and the final happy ending. All the stories in the Big Book had happy endings. That was part of its charm.

It was a cold night but overwarm inside, and Dan was edging into a doze when Doctor John raised his hand and said, “I’ve been lying to my wife about something, and I don’t know how to stop.”

That woke Dan up. He liked DJ a lot.

It turned out that John’s wife had given him a watch for Christmas, quite an expensive one, and when she had asked him a couple of nights ago why he wasn’t wearing it, John said he’d left it at the office.

“Only it’s not there. I looked everywhere, and it’s just not. I do a lot of hospital rounds, and if I have to change into scrubs, I use one of the lockers in the doctors’ lounge. There are combo locks, but I hardly ever use them, because I don’t carry much cash and I don’t have anything else worth stealing. Except for the watch, I guess. I can’t remember taking it off and leaving it in a locker—not at CNH or over in Bridgton—but I think I must have. It’s not the expense. It just brings back a lot of the old stuff from the days when I was drinking myself stupid every night and chipping speed the next morning to get going.”

There were nodding heads at this, followed by similar stories of guilt-driven deceit. No one gave advice; that was called “crosstalk,” and frowned on. They simply told their tales. John listened with his head down and his hands clasped between his knees. After the basket was passed (“We are self-supporting through our own contributions”), he thanked everyone for their input. From the look of him, Dan didn’t think said input had helped a whole hell of a lot.

After the Lord’s Prayer, Dan put away the leftover cookies and stacked the group’s tattered Big Books in the cabinet marked FOR AA USE. A few people were still hanging around the butt-can outside—the so-called meeting after the meeting—but he and John had the kitchen to themselves. Dan hadn’t spoken during the discussion; he was too busy having an interior debate with himself.

The shining had been quiet, but that didn’t mean it was absent. He knew from his volunteer work that it was actually stronger than it had been since childhood, though now he seemed to have a greater degree of control over it. That made it less frightening and more useful. His co-workers at Rivington House knew he had something, but most of them called it empathy and let it go at that. The last thing he wanted, now that his life had begun to settle down, was to get a reputation as some sort of parlor psychic. Best to keep the freaky shit to himself.

Doctor John was a good guy, though. And he was hurting.

DJ placed the coffee urn upside down in the dish drainer, used a length of towel hanging from the stove handle to dry his hands, then turned to Dan, offering a smile that looked as real as the Coffee-mate Dan had stored away next to the cookies and the sugar bowl. “Well, I’m off. See you next week, I guess.”

In the end, the decision made itself; Dan simply could not let the guy go looking like that. He held his arms out. “Give it up.”

The fabled AA manhug. Dan had seen many but never given a single one. John looked dubious for a moment, then stepped forward. Dan drew him in, thinking There’ll probably be nothing.

But there was. It came as quickly as it had when, as a child, he had sometimes helped his mother and father find lost things.

“Listen to me, Doc,” he said, letting John go. “You were worried about the kid with Goocher’s.”

John stepped back. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m not saying it right, I know that. Goocher’s? Glutcher’s? It’s some sort of bone thing.”

John’s mouth dropped open. “Are you talking about Norman Lloyd?”

“You tell me.”

“Normie’s got Gaucher’s disease. It’s a lipid disorder. Hereditary and very rare. Causes an enlarged spleen, neurologic disorders, and usually an early, unpleasant death. Poor kid’s basically got a glass skeleton, and he’ll probably die before he’s ten. But how do you know that? From his parents? The Lloyds live way the hell down in Nashua.”

“You were worried about talking to him—the terminal ones drive you crazy. That’s why you stopped in the Tigger bathroom to wash your hands even though your hands didn’t need washing. You took off your watch and put it up on the shelf where they keep that dark red disinfectant shit that comes in the plastic squeeze bottles. I don’t know the name.”

John D. was staring at him as though he had gone mad.

“Which hospital is this kid in?” Dan asked.

“Elliot. The time-frame’s about right, and I did stop in the bathroom near the Pedes nursing station to wash my hands.” He paused, frowning. “And yeah, I guess there are Milne characters on the walls in that one. But if I’d taken off my watch, I’d remem…” He trailed off.

“You do remember,” Dan said, and smiled. “Now you do. Don’t you?”

John said, “I checked the Elliot lost and found. Bridgton and CNH, too, for that matter. Nothing.”

“Okay, so maybe somebody came along, saw it, and stole it. If so, you’re shit out of luck… but at least you can tell your wife what happened. And why it happened. You were thinking about the kid, worrying about the kid, and you forgot to put your watch back on before you left the can. Simple as that. And hey, maybe it’s still there. That’s a high shelf, and hardly anybody uses what’s in those plastic bottles, because there’s a soap dispenser right beside the sink.”

“It’s Betadine on that shelf,” John said, “and up high so the kids can’t reach it. I never noticed. But… Dan, have you ever been in Elliot?”

This wasn’t a question he wanted to answer. “Just check the shelf, Doc. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

Dan arrived early at the following Thursday’s We Study Sobriety meeting. If Doctor John had decided to trash his marriage and possibly his career over a missing seven-hundred-dollar watch (alkies routinely trashed marriages and careers over far less), someone would have to make the coffee. But John was there. So was the watch.

This time it was John who initiated the manhug. An extremely hearty one. Dan almost expected to receive a pair of Gallic kisses on the cheeks before DJ let him go.

“It was right where you said it would be. Ten days, and still there. It’s like a miracle.”

“Nah,” Dan said. “Most people rarely look above their own eyeline. It’s a proven fact.”

“How did you know?”

Dan shook his head. “I can’t explain it. Sometimes I just do.”

“How can I thank you?”

This was the question Dan had been waiting and hoping for. “By working the Twelfth Step, dummocks.”

John D. raised his eyebrows.

“Anonymity. In words of one syllable, keep ya fuckin mouth shut.”

Understanding broke on John’s face. He grinned. “I can do that.”

“Good. Now make the coffee. I’ll put out the books.”

In most New England AA groups, anniversaries are called birthdays and celebrated with a cake and an after-meeting party. Shortly before Dan was due to celebrate his third year of sobriety in this fashion, David Stone and Abra’s great-grandmother came to see John Dalton—known in some circles as either Doctor John or DJ—and invite him to another third birthday party. This was the one the Stones were throwing for Abra.

“That’s very kind,” John said, “and I’ll be more than happy to drop by if I can. Only why do I feel there’s a little more to it?”

“Because there is,” Chetta said. “And Mr. Stubborn here has decided that it’s finally time to talk about it.”

“Is there a problem with Abra? If there is, fill me in. Based on her last checkup, she’s fine. Fearsomely bright. Social skills terrific. Verbal skills through the roof. Reading, ditto. Last time she was here she read me Alligators All Around. Probably rote memory, but still remarkable for a child who’s not yet three. Does Lucy know you’re here?”

“Lucy and Chetta are the ones who ganged up on me,” David said. “Lucy’s home with Abra, making cupcakes for the party. When I left, the kitchen looked like hell in a high wind.”

“So what are we saying here? That you want me at her party in an observational capacity?”

“That’s right,” Concetta said. “None of us can say for sure that something will happen, but it’s more likely to when she’s excited, and she’s very excited about her party. All her little pals from daycare are coming, and there’s going to be a fellow who does magic tricks.”

John opened a desk drawer and took out a yellow legal pad. “What kind of something are you expecting?”

David hesitated. “That’s… hard to say.”

Chetta turned to face him. “Go on, caro. Too late to back out now.” Her tone was light, almost gay, but John Dalton thought she looked worried. He thought they both did. “Begin with the night she started crying and wouldn’t stop.”

David Stone had been teaching American history and twentieth-century European history to undergraduates for ten years, and knew how to organize a story so the interior logic was hard to miss. He began this one by pointing out that their infant daughter’s marathon crying spree had ended almost immediately after the second jetliner had struck the World Trade Center. Then he doubled back to the dreams in which his wife had seen the American Airlines flight number on Abra’s chest and he had seen the United Airlines number.

“In Lucy’s dream, she found Abra in an airplane bathroom. In mine, I found her in a mall that was on fire. Draw your own conclusions about that part. Or not. To me, those flight numbers seem pretty conclusive. But of what, I don’t know.” He laughed without much humor, raised his hands, then dropped them again. “Maybe I’m afraid to know.”

John Dalton remembered the morning of 9/11—and Abra’s nonstop crying jag—very well. “Let me get this straight. You believe your daughter—who was then only five months old—had a premonition of those attacks and somehow sent word to you telepathically.”

“Yes,” Chetta said. “Put very succinctly. Bravo.”

“I know how it sounds,” David said. “Which is why Lucy and I kept it to ourselves. Except for Chetta, that is. Lucy told her that night. Lucy tells her momo everything.” He sighed. Concetta gave him a cool look.

“You didn’t get one of these dreams?” John asked her.

She shook her head. “I was in Boston. Out of her… I don’t know… transmitting range?”

“It’s been almost three years since 9/11,” John said. “I assume other stuff has happened since then.”

A lot of other stuff had happened, and now that he had managed to speak of the first (and most unbelievable) thing, Dave found himself able to talk about the rest easily enough.

“The piano. That was next. You know Lucy plays?”

John shook his head.

“Well, she does. Since she was in grammar school. She’s not great or anything, but she’s pretty good. We’ve got a Vogel that my parents gave her as a wedding present. It’s in the living room, which is also where Abra’s playpen used to be. Well, one of the presents I gave Lucy for Christmas in 2001 was a book of Beatles tunes arranged for piano. Abra used to lie in her playpen, goofing with her toys and listening. You could tell by the way she smiled and kicked her feet that she liked the music.”

John didn’t question this. Most babies loved music, and they had their ways of letting you know.

“The book had all the hits—‘Hey Jude,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ ‘Let It Be’—but the one Abra liked best was one of the minor songs, a B-side called ‘Not a Second Time.’ Do you know it?”

“Not offhand,” John said. “I might if I heard it.”

“It’s upbeat, but unlike most of the Beatles’ fast stuff, it’s built around a piano riff rather than the usual guitar sound. It isn’t a boogie-woogie, but close. Abra loved it. She wouldn’t just kick her feet when Lucy played that one, she’d actually bicycle them.” Dave smiled at the memory of Abra on her back in her bright purple onesie, not yet able to walk but crib-dancing like a disco queen. “The instrumental break is almost all piano, and it’s simple as pie. The left hand just picks out the notes. There are only twenty-nine—I counted. A kid could play it. And our kid did.”

John raised his eyebrows until they almost met his hairline.

“It started in the spring of 2002. Lucy and I were in bed, reading. The weather report was on TV, and that comes about halfway through the eleven p.m. newscast. Abra was in her room—fast asleep, as far as we knew. Lucy asked me to turn off the TV because she wanted to go to sleep. I clicked the remote, and that’s when we heard it. The piano break of ‘Not a Second Time,’ those twenty-nine notes. Perfect. Not a single miss, and coming from downstairs.

“Doc, we were scared shitless. We thought we had an intruder in the house, only what kind of burglar stops to play a little Beatles before grabbing the silverware? I don’t have a gun and my golf clubs were in the garage, so I just picked up the biggest book I could find and went down to confront whoever was there. Pretty stupid, I know. I told Lucy to grab the phone and dial 911 if I yelled. But there was no one, and all the doors were locked. Also, the cover was down over the piano keys.

“I went back upstairs and told Lucy I hadn’t found anything or anyone. We went down the hall to check the baby. We didn’t talk about it, we just did it. I think we knew it was Abra, but neither of us wanted to say it right out loud. She was awake, just lying there in her crib and looking at us. You know the wise little eyes that they have?”

John knew. As if they could tell you all the secrets of the universe, if they were only able to talk. There were times when he thought that might even be so, only God had arranged things in such a way so that by the time they could get beyond goo-goo-ga-ga, they had forgotten it all, the way we forget even our most vivid dreams a couple of hours after waking.

“She smiled when she saw us, closed her eyes, and dropped off. The next night it happened again. Same time. Those twenty-nine notes from the living room… then silence… then down to Abra’s room and finding her awake. Not fussing, not even sucking her bink, just looking at us through the bars of her crib. Then off to sleep.”

“This is the truth,” John said. Not really questioning, only wanting to get it straight. “You’re not pulling my leg.”

David didn’t smile. “Not even twitching the cuff of your pants.”

John turned to Chetta. “Have you heard it yourself?”

“No. Let David finish.”

“We got a couple of nights off, and… you know how you say that the secret of successful parenting is always make a plan?”

“Sure.” This was John Dalton’s chief sermon to new parents. How are you going to handle night feedings? Draw up a schedule so someone’s always on call and no one gets too ragged. How are you going to handle bathing and feeding and dressing and playtime so the kid has a regular—and hence comforting—routine? Draw up a schedule. Make a plan. Do you know how to handle an emergency? Anything from a collapsed crib to a choking incident? If you make a plan, you will, and nineteen times out of twenty, things will turn out fine.

“So that’s what we did. For the next three nights I slept on the sofa right across from the piano. On the third night the music started just as I was snugging down for the night. The cover on the Vogel was closed, so I hustled over and raised it. The keys weren’t moving. Which didn’t surprise me much, because I could tell the music wasn’t coming from the piano.”

“Beg pardon?”

“It was coming from above it. From thin air. By then, Lucy was in Abra’s room. The other times we hadn’t said anything, we were too stunned, but this time she was ready. She told Abra to play it again. There was a little pause… and then she did. I was standing so close I almost could have snatched those notes out of the air.”

Silence in John Dalton’s office. He had stopped writing on the pad. Chetta was looking at him gravely. At last he said, “Is this still going on?”

“No. Lucy took Abra on her lap and told her not to play anymore at night, because we couldn’t sleep. And that was the end of it.” He paused to consider. “Almost the end. Once, about three weeks later, we heard the music again, but very soft and coming from upstairs this time. From her room.”

“She was playing to herself,” Concetta said. “She woke up… she couldn’t get back to sleep right away… so she played herself a little lullaby.”

One Monday afternoon just about a year after the fall of the Twin Towers, Abra—walking by now and with recognizable words beginning to emerge from her all-but-constant gabble—teetered her way to the front door and plopped down there with her favorite doll in her lap.

“Whatcha doon, sweetheart?” Lucy asked. She was sitting at the piano, playing a Scott Joplin rag.

“Dada!” Abra announced.

“Honey, Dada won’t be home until supper,” Lucy said, but fifteen minutes later the Acura pulled up the drive and Dave got out, hauling his briefcase. There had been a water-main break in the building where he taught his Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes, and everything had been canceled.

“Lucy told me about that,” Concetta said, “and of course I already knew about the 9/11 crying jag and the phantom piano. I took a run up there a week or two later. I told Lucy not to say a word to Abra about my visit. But Abra knew. She planted herself in front of the door ten minutes before I showed up. When Lucy asked who was coming, Abra said, ‘Momo.’”

“She does that a lot,” David said. “Not every time someone’s coming, but if it’s someone she knows and likes… almost always.”

In the late spring of 2003, Lucy found her daughter in their bedroom, tugging at the second drawer of Lucy’s dresser.

“Mun!” she told her mother. “Mun, mun!”

“I don’t get you, sweetie,” Lucy said, “but you can look in the drawer if you want to. It’s just some old underwear and leftover cosmetics.”

But Abra had no interest in the drawer, it seemed; didn’t even look in it when Lucy pulled it out to show her what was inside.

“Hind! Mun!” Then, drawing a deep breath. “Mun hind, Mama!”

Parents never become absolutely fluent in Baby—there’s not enough time—but most learn to speak it to some degree, and Lucy finally understood that her daughter’s interest wasn’t in the contents of the dresser but in something behind it.

Curious, she pulled it out. Abra darted into the space immediately. Lucy, thinking that it would be dusty in there even if there weren’t bugs or mice, made a swipe for the back of the baby’s shirt and missed. By the time she got the dresser out far enough to slip into the gap herself, Abra was holding up a twenty-dollar bill that had found its way through the hole between the dresser’s surface and the bottom of the mirror. “Look!” she said gleefully. “Mun! My mun!”

“Nope,” Lucy said, plucking it out of the small fist, “babies don’t get mun because they don’t need mun. But you did just earn yourself an ice cream cone.”

“I-keem!” Abra shouted. “My i-keem!”

“Now tell Doctor John about Mrs. Judkins,” David said. “You were there for that.”

“Indeed I was,” Concetta said. “That was some Fourth of July weekend.”

By the summer of 2003, Abra had begun speaking in—more or less—full sentences. Concetta had come to spend the holiday weekend with the Stones. On the Sunday, which happened to be July sixth, Dave had gone to the 7-Eleven to buy a fresh canister of Blue Rhino for the backyard barbecue. Abra was playing with blocks in the living room. Lucy and Chetta were in the kitchen, one of them checking periodically on Abra to make sure she hadn’t decided to pull out the plug on the TV and chew it or go climbing Mount Sofa. But Abra showed no interest in those things; she was busy constructing what looked like a Stonehenge made out of her plastic toddler blocks.

Lucy and Chetta were unloading the dishwasher when Abra began to scream.

“She sounded like she was dying,” Chetta said. “You know how scary that is, right?”

John nodded. He knew.

“Running doesn’t come naturally to me at my age, but I ran like Wilma Rudolph that day. Beat Lucy to the living room by half a length. I was so convinced the kid was hurt that for a second or two I actually saw blood. But she was okay. Physically, anyhow. She ran to me and threw her arms around my legs. I picked her up. Lucy was with me by then, and we managed to get her soothed a little. ‘Wannie!’ she said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Wannie fall down!’ I didn’t know who Wannie was, but Lucy did—Wanda Judkins, the lady across the street.”

“She’s Abra’s favorite neighbor,” David said, “because she makes cookies and usually brings one over for Abra with her name written on it. Sometimes in raisins, sometimes in frosting. She’s a widow. Lives alone.”

“So we went across,” Chetta resumed, “me in the lead and Lucy holding Abra. I knocked. No one answered. ‘Wannie in the dinner room!’ Abra said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Help Wannie, Mama! She hurted herself and blood is coming out!’

“The door was unlocked. We went in. First thing I smelled was burning cookies. Mrs. Judkins was lying on the dining room floor next to a stepladder. The rag she’d been using to dust out the moldings was still in her hand, and there was blood, all right—a puddle of it around her head in a kind of halo. I thought she was finished—I couldn’t see her breathing—but Lucy found a pulse. The fall fractured her skull, and there was a small brain-bleed, but she woke up the next day. She’ll be at Abra’s birthday party. You can say hello to her, if you come.” She looked at Abra Stone’s pediatrician unflinchingly. “The doctor at the ER said that if she’d lain there much longer, she would have either died or ended up in a persistent vegetative state… far worse than death, in my humble opinion. Either way, the kid saved her life.”

John tossed his pen on top of the legal pad. “I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s more,” Dave said, “but the other stuff’s hard to quantify. Maybe just because Lucy and I have gotten used to it. The way, I guess, you’d get used to living with a kid who was born blind. Except this is almost the opposite of that. I think we knew even before the 9/11 thing. I think we knew there was something almost from the time we brought her home from the hospital. It’s like…”

He huffed out a breath and looked at the ceiling, as if for inspiration. Concetta squeezed his arm. “Go on. At least he hasn’t called for the men with the butterfly nets yet.”

“Okay, it’s like there’s always a wind blowing through the house, only you can’t exactly feel it or see what it’s doing. I keep thinking the curtains are going to billow and the pictures are going to fly off the walls, but they never do. Other stuff does happen, though. Two or three times a week—sometimes two or three times a day—the circuit breakers trip. We’ve had two different electricians out, on four different occasions. They check the circuits and tell us everything is hunky-dory. Some mornings we come downstairs and the cushions from the chairs and the sofa are on the floor. We tell Abra to put her toys away before bed and unless she’s overtired and cranky, she’s very good about it. But sometimes the toybox will be open the next morning and some of the toys will be back on the floor. Usually the blocks. They’re her favorites.”

He paused for a moment, now looking at the eye chart on the far wall. John thought Concetta would prod him to go on, but she kept silent.

“Okay, this is totally weird, but I swear to you it happened. One night when we turned on the TV, The Simpsons were on every channel. Abra laughed like it was the biggest joke in the world. Lucy freaked out. She said, ‘Abra Rafaella Stone, if you’re doing that, stop it right now!’ Lucy hardly ever speaks sharply to her, and when she does, Abra just dissolves. Which is what happened that night. I turned off the TV, and when I turned it on again, everything was back to normal. I could give you half a dozen other things… incidents… phenomena… but most of it’s so small you’d hardly even notice.” He shrugged. “Like I say, you get used to it.”

John said, “I’ll come to the party. After all that, how can I resist?”

“Probably nothing will happen,” Dave said. “You know the old joke about how to stop a leaky faucet, don’t you? Call the plumber.”

Concetta snorted. “If you really believe that, sonny-boy, I think you might get a surprise.” And, to Dalton: “Just getting him here was like pulling teeth.”

“Give it a rest, Momo.” Color had begun to rise in Dave’s cheeks.

John sighed. He had sensed the antagonism between these two before. He didn’t know the cause of it—some kind of competition for Lucy, perhaps—but he didn’t want it breaking out into the open now. Their bizarre errand had turned them into temporary allies, and that was the way he wanted to keep it.

“Save the sniping.” He spoke sharply enough so they looked away from each other and back at him, surprised. “I believe you. I’ve never heard of anything remotely like this before…”

Or had he? He trailed off, thinking of his lost watch.

“Doc?” David said.

“Sorry. Brain cramp.”

At this they both smiled. Allies again. Good.

“Anyway, no one’s going to send for the men in the white coats. I accept you both as level-headed folks, not prone to hysteria or hallucination. I might guess some bizarre form of Munchausen syndrome was at work if it was just one person claiming these… these psychic outbreaks… but it’s not. It’s all three of you. Which raises the question, what do you want me to do?”

Dave seemed at a loss, but his grandmother-in-law was not. “Observe her, the way you would any child with a disease—”

The color had begun to leave David Stone’s cheeks, but now it rushed back. Slammed back. “Abra is not sick,” he snapped.

She turned to him. “I know that! Cristo! Will you let me finish?”

Dave put on a longsuffering expression and raised his hands. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“Just don’t jump down my throat, David.”

John said, “If you insist on bickering, children, I’ll have to send you to the Quiet Room.”

Concetta sighed. “This is very stressful. For all of us. I’m sorry, Davey, I used the wrong word.”

“No prob, cara. We’re in this together.”

She smiled briefly. “Yes. Yes, we are. Observe her as you’d observe any child with an undiagnosed condition, Dr. Dalton. That’s all we can ask, and I think it’s enough for now. You may have some ideas. I hope so. You see…”

She turned to David Stone with an expression of helplessness that John thought was probably rare on that firm face.

“We’re afraid,” Dave said. “Me, Lucy, Chetta—scared to death. Not of her, but for her. Because she’s just little, do you see? What if this power of hers… I don’t know what else to call it… what if it hasn’t topped out yet? What if it’s still growing? What do we do then? She could… I don’t know…”

“He does know,” Chetta said. “She could lose her temper and hurt herself or someone else. I don’t know how likely that is, but just thinking it could happen…” She touched John’s hand. “It’s awful.”

Dan Torrance knew he would be living in the turret room of the Helen Rivington House from the moment he had seen his old friend Tony waving to him from a window that on second look turned out to be boarded shut. He asked Mrs. Clausen, the Rivington’s chief supervisor, about the room six months or so after going to work at the hospice as janitor/orderly… and unofficial doctor in residence. Along with his faithful sidekick Azzie, of course.

“That room’s junk from one end to the other,” Mrs. Clausen had said. She was a sixtysomething with implausibly red hair. She was possessed of a sarcastic, often dirty mouth, but she was a smart and compassionate administrator. Even better, from the standpoint of HRH’s board of directors, she was a tremendously effective fund-raiser. Dan wasn’t sure he liked her, but he had come to respect her.

“I’ll clean it out. On my own time. It would be better for me to be right here, don’t you think? On call?”

“Danny, tell me something. How come you’re so good at what you do?”

“I don’t really know.” This was at least half true. Maybe even seventy percent. He had lived with the shining all his life and still didn’t understand it.

“Junk aside, the turret’s hot in the summer and cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey in the winter.”

“That can be rectified,” Dan had said.

“Don’t talk to me about your rectum.” Mrs. Clausen peered sternly at him from above her half-glasses. “If the board knew what I was letting you do, they’d probably have me weaving baskets in that assisted living home down in Nashua. The one with the pink walls and the piped-in Mantovani.” She snorted. “Doctor Sleep, indeed.”

“I’m not the doctor,” Dan said mildly. He knew he was going to get what he wanted. “Azzie’s the doctor. I’m just his assistant.”

“Azreel’s the fucking cat,” she said. “A raggedy-ass stray that wandered in off the street and got adopted by guests who have now all gone to the Great Who Knows. All he cares about is his twice-daily bowl of Friskies.”

To this Dan hadn’t responded. There was no need, because they both knew it wasn’t true.

“I thought you had a perfectly good place on Eliot Street. Pauline Robertson thinks the sun shines out of your asshole. I know because I sing with her in the church choir.”

“What’s your favorite hymn?” Dan asked. “‘What a Fucking Friend We Have in Jesus’?”

She showed the Rebecca Clausen version of a smile. “Oh, very well. Clean out the room. Move in. Have it wired for cable, put in quadraphonic sound, set up a wetbar. What the hell do I care, I’m only the boss.”

“Thanks, Mrs. C.”

“Oh, and don’t forget the space heater, okay? See if you can’t find something from a yard sale with a nice frayed cord. Burn the fucking place down some cold February night. Then they can put up a brick monstrosity to match the abortions on either side of us.”

Dan stood up and raised the back of his hand to his forehead in a half-assed British salute. “Whatever you say, boss.”

She waved a hand at him. “Get outta here before I change my mind, doc.”

He did put in a space heater, but the cord wasn’t frayed and it was the kind that shut off immediately if it tipped over. There was never going to be any air-conditioning in the third-floor turret room, but a couple of fans from Walmart placed in the open windows provided a nice cross-draft. It got plenty hot just the same on summer days, but Dan was almost never there in the daytime. And summer nights in New Hampshire were usually cool.

Most of the stuff that had been stashed up there was disposable junk, but he kept a big grammar school–style blackboard he found leaning against one wall. It had been hidden for fifty years or more behind an ironmongery of ancient and grievously wounded wheelchairs. The blackboard was useful. On it he listed the hospice’s patients and their room numbers, erasing the names of the folks who passed away and adding names as new folks checked in. In the spring of 2004, there were thirty-two names on the board. Ten were in Rivington One and twelve in Rivington Two—these were the ugly brick buildings flanking the Victorian home where the famous Helen Rivington had once lived and written thrilling romance novels under the pulsating name of Jeannette Montparsse. The rest of the patients were housed on the two floors below Dan’s cramped but serviceable turret apartment.

Was Mrs. Rivington famous for anything besides writing bad novels? Dan had asked Claudette Albertson not long after starting work at the hospice. They were in the smoking area at the time, practicing their nasty habit. Claudette, a cheerful African American RN with the shoulders of an NFL left tackle, threw back her head and laughed.

“You bet! For leaving this town a shitload of money, honey! And giving away this house, of course. She thought old folks should have a place where they could die with dignity.”

And in Rivington House, most of them did. Dan—with Azzie to assist—was now a part of that. He thought he had found his calling. The hospice now felt like home.

On the morning of Abra’s birthday party, Dan got out of bed and saw that all the names on his blackboard had been erased. Written where they had been, in large and straggling letters, was a single word:

hEll

Dan sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear for a long time, just looking. Then he got up and put one hand on the letters, smudging them a little, hoping for a shine. Even a little twinkle. At last he took his hand away, rubbing chalkdust on his bare thigh.

“Hello yourself,” he said… and then: “Would your name be Abra, by any chance?”

Nothing. He put on his robe, got his soap and towel, and went down to the staff shower on two. When he came back, he picked up the eraser he’d found to go with the board and began erasing the word. Halfway through, a thought

(daddy says we’ll have balloons)

came to him, and he stopped, waiting for more. But no more came, so he finished erasing the board and then began replacing the names and room numbers, working from that Monday’s attendance memo. When he came back upstairs at noon, he half expected the board to be erased again, the names and numbers replaced by hEll, but all was as he had left it.

Abra’s birthday party was in the Stones’ backyard, a restful sweep of green grass with apple and dogwood trees that were just coming into blossom. At the foot of the yard was a chainlink fence and a gate secured by a combination padlock. The fence was decidedly unbeautiful, but neither David nor Lucy cared, because beyond it was the Saco River, which wound its way southeast, through Frazier, through North Conway, and across the border into Maine. Rivers and small children did not mix, in the Stones’ opinion, especially in the spring, when this one was wide and turbulent with melting snows. Each year the local weekly reported at least one drowning.

Today the kids had enough to occupy them on the lawn. The only organized game they could manage was a brief round of follow-the-leader, but they weren’t too young to run around (and sometimes roll around) on the grass, to climb like monkeys on Abra’s playset, to crawl through the Fun Tunnels David and a couple of the other dads had set up, and to bat around the balloons now drifting everywhere. These were all yellow (Abra’s professed favorite color), and there were at least six dozen, as John Dalton could attest. He had helped Lucy and her grandmother blow them up. For a woman in her eighties, Chetta had an awesome set of lungs.

There were nine kids, counting Abra, and because at least one of every parental set had come, there was plenty of adult supervision. Lawn chairs had been set up on the back deck, and as the party hit cruising speed, John sat in one of these next to Concetta, who was dolled up in designer jeans and her WORLD’S BEST GREAT-GRAMMA sweatshirt. She was working her way through a giant slice of birthday cake. John, who had taken on a few pounds of ballast during the winter, settled for a single scoop of strawberry ice cream.

“I don’t know where you put it,” he said, nodding at the rapidly disappearing cake on her paper plate. “There’s nothing to you. You’re a stuffed string.”

“Maybe so, caro, but I’ve got a hollow leg.” She surveyed the roistering children and fetched a deep sigh. “I wish my daughter could have lived to see this. I don’t have many regrets, but that’s one of them.”

John decided not to venture out on this conversational limb. Lucy’s mother had died in a car accident when Lucy was younger than Abra was now. This he knew from the family history the Stones had filled out jointly.

In any case, Chetta turned the conversation herself. “Do you know what I like about em at this age?”

“Nope.” John liked them at all ages… at least until they turned fourteen. When they turned fourteen their glands went into hyperdrive, and most of them felt obliged to spend the next five years being boogersnots.

“Look at them, Johnny. It’s the kiddie version of that Edward Hicks painting, The Peaceable Kingdom. You’ve got six white ones—of course you do, it’s New Hampshire—but you’ve also got two black ones and one gorgeous Korean American baby who looks like she should be modeling clothes in the Hanna Andersson catalogue. You know the Sunday school song that goes ‘Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight’? That’s what we have here. Two hours, and not one of them has raised a fist or given a push in anger.”

John—who had seen plenty of toddlers who kicked, pushed, punched, and bit—gave a smile in which cynicism and wistfulness were exactly balanced. “I wouldn’t expect anything different. They all go to L’il Chums. It’s the smart-set daycare in these parts, and they charge smart-set prices. That means their parents are all at least upper-middle, they’re all college grads, and they all practice the gospel of Go Along to Get Along. These kids are your basic domesticated social animals.”

John stopped there because she was frowning at him, but he could have gone farther. He could have said that, until the age of seven or thereabouts—the so-called age of reason—most children were emotional echo chambers. If they grew up around people who got along and didn’t raise their voices, they did the same. If they were raised by biters and shouters… well…

Twenty years of treating little ones (not to mention raising two of his own, now away at good Go Along to Get Along prep schools) hadn’t destroyed all the romantic notions he’d held when first deciding to specialize in pediatric medicine, but those years had tempered them. Perhaps kids really did come into the world trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth had so confidently proclaimed, but they also shit in their pants until they learned better.

A silvery run of bells—like those on an ice cream truck—sounded in the afternoon air. The kids turned to see what was up.

Riding onto the lawn from the Stones’ driveway was an amiable apparition: a young man on a wildly oversize red tricycle. He was wearing white gloves and a zoot suit with comically wide shoulders. In one lapel was a boutonniere the size of a hothouse orchid. His pants (also oversize) were currently hiked up to his knees as he worked the pedals. The handlebars were hung with bells, which he rang with one finger. The trike rocked from side to side but never quite fell over. On the newcomer’s head, beneath a huge brown derby, was a crazy blue wig. David Stone was walking behind him, carrying a large suitcase in one hand and a fold-up table in the other. He looked bemused.

“Hey, kids! Hey, kids!” the man on the trike shouted. “Gather round, gather round, because the show is about to start!” He didn’t need to ask them twice; they were already flocking toward the trike, laughing and shouting.

Lucy came over to John and Chetta, sat down, and blew hair out of her eyes with a comical foof of her lower lip. She had a smudge of chocolate frosting on her chin. “Behold the magician. He’s a street performer in Frazier and North Conway during the summer season. Dave saw an ad in one of those freebie newspapers, auditioned the guy, and hired him. His name is Reggie Pelletier, but he styles himself The Great Mysterio. Let’s see how long he can hold their attention once they’ve all had a good close look at the fancy trike. I’m thinking three minutes, tops.”

John thought she might be wrong about that. The guy’s entrance had been perfectly calculated to capture the imaginations of little ones, and his wig was funny rather than scary. His cheerful face was unmarked by greasepaint, and that was also good. Clowns, in John’s opinion, were highly overrated. They scared the shit out of kids under six. Kids over that age merely found them boring.

My, you’re in a bilious mood today.

Maybe because he’d come ready to observe some sort of freaky-deaky, and nothing had transpired. To him, Abra seemed like a perfectly ordinary little kid. Cheerier than most, maybe, but good cheer seemed to run in the family. Except when Chetta and Dave were sniping at each other, that was.

“Don’t underestimate the attention spans of the wee folk.” He leaned past Chetta and used his napkin to wipe the smudge of frosting from Lucy’s chin. “If he has an act, he’ll hold them for fifteen minutes, at least. Maybe twenty.”

“If he does,” Lucy said skeptically.

It turned out that Reggie Pelletier, aka The Great Mysterio, did have an act, and a good one. While his faithful assistant, The Not-So-Great Dave, set up his table and opened the suitcase, Mysterio asked the birthday girl and her guests to admire his flower. When they drew close, it shot water into their faces: first red, then green, then blue. They screamed with sugar-fueled laughter.

“Now, boys and girls… ooh! Ahh! Yike! That tickles!”

He took off his derby and pulled out a white rabbit. The kids gasped. Mysterio passed the bunny to Abra, who stroked it and then passed it on without having to be told. The rabbit didn’t seem to mind the attention. Maybe, John thought, it had snarked up a few Valium-laced pellets before the show. The last kid handed it back to Mysterio, who popped it into his hat, passed a hand over it, and then showed them the inside of the derby. Except for the American flag lining, it was empty.

“Where did the bunny go?” little Susie Soong-Bartlett asked.

“Into your dreams, darlin,” Mysterio said. “It’ll hop there tonight. Now who wants a magic scarf?”

There were cries of I do, I do from boys and girls alike. Mysterio produced them from his fists and passed them out. This was followed by more tricks in rapid-fire succession. By Dalton’s watch, the kids stood around Mysterio in a bug-eyed semicircle for at least twenty-five minutes. And just as the first signs of restiveness began to appear in the audience, Mysterio wrapped things up. He produced five plates from his suitcase (which, when he showed it, had appeared to be as empty as his hat) and juggled them, singing “Happy Birthday to You” as he did it. All the kids joined in, and Abra seemed almost to levitate with joy.

The plates went back into the suitcase. He showed it to them again so they could see it was empty, then produced half a dozen spoons from it. These he proceeded to hang on his face, finishing with one on the tip of his nose. The birthday girl liked that one; she sat down on the grass, laughing and hugging herself with glee.

“Abba can do that,” she said (she was currently fond of referring to herself in the third person—it was what David called her “Rickey Henderson phase”). “Abba can do spoongs.”

“Good for you, honey,” Mysterio said. He wasn’t really paying attention, and John couldn’t blame him for that; he had just put on one hell of a kiddie matinee, his face was red and damp with sweat in spite of the cool breeze blowing up from the river, and he still had his big exit to make, this time pedaling the oversize trike uphill.

He bent and patted Abra’s head with one white-gloved hand. “Happy birthday to you, and thank all you kids for being such a good aud—”

From inside the house came a large and musical jangling, not unlike the sound of the bells hanging from the Godzilla-trike’s handlebars. The kids only glanced in that direction before turning to watch Mysterio pedal away, but Lucy got up to see what had fallen over in the kitchen.

Two minutes later she came back outside. “John,” she said. “You better look at this. I think it’s what you came to see.”

John, Lucy, and Concetta stood in the kitchen, looking up at the ceiling and saying nothing. None of them turned when Dave joined them; they were hypnotized. “What—” he began, then saw what. “Holy shit.”

To this no one replied. David stared a little longer, trying to get the sense of what he was seeing, then left. A minute or two later he returned, leading his daughter by the hand. Abra was holding a balloon. Around her waist, worn like a sash, was the scarf she’d received from The Great Mysterio.

John Dalton dropped to one knee beside her. “Did you do that, honey?” It was a question to which he felt sure he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear what she had to say. He wanted to know how much she was aware of.

Abra first looked at the floor, where the silverware drawer lay. Some of the knives and forks had bounced free when the drawer shot from its socket, but they were all there. Not the spoons, however. The spoons were hanging from the ceiling, as if drawn upward and held by some exotic magnetic attraction. A couple swung lazily from the overhead light fixtures. The biggest, a serving spoon, dangled from the exhaust hood of the stove.

All kids had their own self-comforting mechanisms. John knew from long experience that for most it was a thumb socked securely in the mouth. Abra’s was a little different. She cupped her right hand over the lower half of her face and rubbed her lips with her palm. As a result, her words were muffled. John took the hand away—gently. “What, honey?”

In a small voice she said, “Am I in trouble? I… I…” Her small chest began to hitch. She tried to put her comfort-hand back, but John held it. “I wanted to be like Minstrosio.” She began to weep. John let her hand go and it went to her mouth, rubbing furiously.

David picked her up and kissed her cheek. Lucy put her arms around them both and kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “No, honey, no. No trouble. You’re fine.”

Abra buried her face against her mother’s neck. As she did it, the spoons fell. The clatter made them all jump.

Two months later, with summer just beginning in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, David and Lucy Stone sat in John Dalton’s office, where the walls were papered with smiling photographs of the children he had treated over the years—many now old enough to have kids of their own.

John said, “I hired a computer-savvy nephew of mine—at my own expense, and don’t worry about it, he works cheap—to see if there were any other documented cases like your daughter’s, and to research them if there were. He restricted his search to the last thirty years and found over nine hundred.”

David whistled. “That many!”

John shook his head. “Not that many. If it were a disease—and we don’t need to revisit that discussion, because it’s not—it would be as rare as elephantiasis. Or Blaschko’s lines, which basically turns those who have it into human zebras. Blaschko’s affects about one in every seven million. This thing of Abra’s would be on that order.”

“What exactly is Abra’s thing?” Lucy had taken her husband’s hand and was holding it tightly. “Telepathy? Telekinesis? Some other tele?”

“Those things clearly play a part. Is she telepathic? Since she knows when people are coming to visit, and knew Mrs. Judkins had been hurt, the answer seems to be yes. Is she telekinetic? Based on what we saw in your kitchen on the day of her birthday party, the answer is a hard yes. Is she psychic? A precognate, if you want to fancy it up? We can’t be so sure of that, although the 9/11 thing and the story of the twenty-dollar bill behind the dresser are both suggestive. But what about the night your television showed The Simpsons on all the channels? What do you call that? Or what about the phantom Beatles tune? It would be telekinesis if the notes came from the piano… but you say they didn’t.”

“So what’s next?” Lucy asked. “What do we watch out for?”

“I don’t know. There’s no predictive path to follow. The trouble with the field of psychic phenomena is that it isn’t a field at all. There’s too much charlatanry and too many people who are just off their damn rockers.”

“So you can’t tell us what to do,” Lucy said. “That’s the long and short of it.”

John smiled. “I can tell you exactly what to do: keep on loving her. If my nephew is right—and you have to remember that A, he’s only seventeen, and B, he’s basing his conclusions on unstable data—you’re apt to keep seeing weird stuff until she’s a teenager. Some of it may be gaudy weird stuff. Around thirteen or fourteen, it’ll plateau and then start to subside. By the time she’s in her twenties, the various phenomena she’s generating will probably be negligible.” He smiled. “But she’ll be a terrific poker player all her life.”

“What if she starts seeing dead people, like the little boy in that movie?” Lucy asked. “What do we do then?”

“Then I guess you’d have proof of life after death. In the meantime, don’t buy trouble. And keep your mouths shut, right?”

“Oh, you bet,” Lucy said. She managed a smile, but given the fact she’d nibbled most of her lipstick off, it didn’t look very confident. “The last thing we want is our daughter on the cover of Inside View.”

“Thank God none of the other parents saw that thing with the spoons,” David said.

“Here’s a question,” John said. “Do you think she knows how special she is?”

The Stones exchanged a look.

“I… don’t think so,” Lucy said at last. “Although after the spoons… we made sort of a big deal about it…”

“A big deal in your mind,” John said. “Probably not hers. She cried a little, then went back out with a smile on her face. There was no shouting, scolding, spanking, or shaming. My advice is to let it ride for the time being. When she gets a little older, you can caution her about not doing any of her special tricks at school. Treat her as normal, because mostly she is. Right?”

“Right,” David said. “And it’s not like she’s got spots, or swellings, or a third eye.”

“Oh yes she does,” Lucy said. She was thinking of the caul. “She does so have a third eye. You can’t see it—but it’s there.”

John stood up. “I’ll get all my nephew’s printouts and send them to you, if you’d like that.”

“I would,” David said. “Very much. I think dear old Momo would, too.” He wrinkled his nose a bit at this. Lucy saw it and frowned.

“In the meantime, enjoy your daughter,” John told them. “From everything I’ve seen, she’s a very enjoyable child. You’re going to get through this.”

For awhile, it seemed he was right.

^{CHAPTER FOUR} PAGING DOCTOR SLEEP

It was January of 2007. In the turret room of Rivington House, Dan’s space heater was running full blast, but the room was still cold. A nor’easter, driven by a fifty-mile-an-hour gale, had blown down from the mountains, piling five inches of snow an hour on the sleeping town of Frazier. When the storm finally eased the following afternoon, some of the drifts against the north and east sides of the buildings on Cranmore Avenue would be twelve feet deep.

Dan wasn’t bothered by the cold; nestled beneath two down comforters, he was warm as tea and toast. Yet the wind had found its way inside his head just as it found its way under the sashes and doorsills of the old Victorian he now called home. In his dream, he could hear it moaning around the hotel where he had spent one winter as a little boy. In his dream, he was that little boy.

He’s on the second floor of the Overlook. Mommy is sleeping and Daddy’s in the basement, looking at old papers. He’s doing RESEARCH. The RESEARCH is for the book he’s going to write. Danny isn’t supposed to be up here, and he’s not supposed to have the passkey that’s clutched in one hand, but he hasn’t been able to stay away. Right now he’s staring at a firehose that’s bolted to the wall. It’s folded over and over on itself, and it looks like a snake with a brass head. A sleeping snake. Of course it’s not a snake—that’s canvas he’s looking at, not scales—but it sure does look like a snake.

Sometimes it is a snake.

“Go on,” he whispers to it in this dream. He’s trembling with terror, but something drives him on. And why? Because he’s doing his own RESEARCH, that’s why. “Go on, bite me! You can’t, can you? Because you’re just a stupid HOSE!”

The nozzle of the stupid hose stirs, and all at once, instead of looking at it sideways, Danny is looking into its bore. Or maybe into its mouth. A single clear drop appears below the black hole, elongating. In it he can see his own wide eyes reflected back at him.

A drop of water or a drop of poison?

Is it a snake or a hose?

Who can say, my dear Redrum, Redrum my dear? Who can say?

It buzzes at him, and terror jumps up his throat from his rapidly beating heart. Rattlesnakes buzz like that.

Now the nozzle of the hose-snake rolls away from the stack of canvas it’s lying on and drops to the carpet with a dull thud. It buzzes again and he knows he should step back before it can rush forward and bite him, but he’s frozen he can’t move and it’s buzzing—

“Wake up, Danny!” Tony calls from somewhere. “Wake up, wake up!”

But he can wake up no more than he can move, this is the Overlook, they are snowed in, and things are different now. Hoses become snakes, dead women open their eyes, and his father… oh dear God WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE BECAUSE MY FATHER IS GOING CRAZY.

The rattlesnake buzzes. It buzzes. It

Dan heard the wind howling, but not outside the Overlook. No, outside the turret of Rivington House. He heard snow rattle against the north-facing window. It sounded like sand. And he heard the intercom giving off its low buzz.

He threw back the comforters and swung his legs out, wincing as his warm toes met the cold floor. He crossed the room, almost prancing on the balls of his feet. He turned on the desk lamp and blew out his breath. No visible vapor, but even with the space heater’s element coils glowing a dull red, the room temperature tonight had to be in the mid-forties.

Buzz.

He pushed TALK on the intercom and said, “I’m here. Who’s there?”

“Claudette. I think you’ve got one, doc.”

“Mrs. Winnick?” He was pretty sure it was her, and that would mean putting on his parka, because Vera Winnick was in Rivington Two, and the walkway between here and there would be colder than a witch’s belt buckle. Or a well-digger’s tit. Or whatever the saying was. Vera had been hanging by a thread for a week now, comatose, in and out of Cheyne-Stokes respiration, and this was exactly the sort of night the frail ones picked to go out on. Usually at 4 a.m. He checked his watch. Only 3:20, but that was close enough for government work.

Claudette Albertson surprised him. “No, it’s Mr. Hayes, right down here on the first floor with us.”

“Are you sure?” Dan had played a game of checkers with Charlie Hayes just that afternoon, and for a man with acute myelogenous leukemia, he’d seemed as lively as a cricket.

“Nope, but Azzie’s in there. And you know what you say.”

What he said was Azzie was never wrong, and he had almost six years’ worth of experience on which to base that conclusion. Azreel wandered freely around the three buildings that made up the Rivington complex, spending most of his afternoons curled up on a sofa in the rec room, although it wasn’t unusual to see him draped across one of the card tables—with or without a half-completed jigsaw puzzle on it—like a carelessly thrown stole. All the residents seemed to like him (if there had been complaints about the House housecat, they hadn’t reached Dan’s ears), and Azzie liked them all right back. Sometimes he would jump up in some half-dead oldster’s lap… but lightly, never seeming to hurt. Which was remarkable, given his size. Azzie was a twelve-pounder.

Other than during his afternoon naps, Az rarely stayed in one location for long; he always had places to go, people to see, things to do. (“That cat’s a playa,” Claudette had once told Danny.) You might see him visiting the spa, licking a paw and taking a little heat. Relaxing on a stopped treadmill in the Health Suite. Sitting atop an abandoned gurney and staring into thin air at those things only cats can see. Sometimes he stalked the back lawn with his ears flattened against his skull, the very picture of feline predation, but if he caught birds and chipmunks, he took them into one of the neighboring yards or across to the town common and dismembered them there.

The rec room was open round-the-clock, but Azzie rarely visited there once the TV was off and the residents were gone. When evening gave way to night and the pulse of Rivington House slowed, Azzie became restless, patrolling the corridors like a sentry on the edge of enemy territory. Once the lights dimmed, you might not even see him unless you were looking right at him; his unremarkable mouse-colored fur blended in with the shadows.

He never went into the guest rooms unless one of the guests was dying.

Then he would either slip in (if the door was unlatched) or sit outside with his tail curled around his haunches, waowing in a low, polite voice to be admitted. When he was, he would jump up on the guest’s bed (they were always guests at Rivington House, never patients) and settle there, purring. If the person so chosen happened to be awake, he or she might stroke the cat. To Dan’s knowledge, no one had ever demanded that Azzie be evicted. They seemed to know he was there as a friend.

“Who’s the doctor on call?” Dan asked.

“You,” Claudette promptly came back.

“You know what I mean. The real doctor.”

“Emerson, but when I phoned his service, the woman told me not to be silly. Everything’s socked in from Berlin to Manchester. She said that except for the ones on the turnpikes, even the plows are waiting for daylight.”

“All right,” Dan said. “I’m on my way.”

After working at the hospice for awhile, Dan had come to realize there was a class system even for the dying. The guest accommodations in the main house were bigger and more expensive than those in Rivington One and Two. In the Victorian manse where Helen Rivington had once hung her hat and written her romances, the rooms were called suites and named after famous New Hampshire residents. Charlie Hayes was in Alan Shepard. To get there, Dan had to pass the snack alcove at the foot of the stairs, where there were vending machines and a few hard plastic chairs. Fred Carling was plopped down in one of these, munching peanut butter crackers and reading an old issue of Popular Mechanics. Carling was one of three orderlies on the midnight-to-eight shift. The other two rotated to days twice a month; Carling never did. A self-proclaimed night owl, he was a beefy time-server whose arms, sleeved out in a tangle of tats, suggested a biker past.

“Well lookit here,” he said. “It’s Danny-boy. Or are you in your secret identity tonight?”

Dan was still only half awake and in no mood for joshing. “What do you know about Mr. Hayes?”

“Nothing except the cat’s in there, and that usually means they’re going to go tits-up.”

“No bleeding?”

The big man shrugged. “Well yeah, he had a little noser. I put the bloody towels in a plague-bag, just like I’m s’posed to. They’re in Laundry A, if you want to check.”

Dan thought of asking how a nosebleed that took more than one towel to clean up could be characterized as little, and decided to let it go. Carling was an unfeeling dolt, and how he’d gotten a job here—even on the night shift, when most of the guests were either asleep or trying to be quiet so they wouldn’t disturb anyone else—was beyond Dan. He suspected somebody might have pulled a wire or two. It was how the world worked. Hadn’t his own father pulled a wire to get his final job, as caretaker at the Overlook Hotel? Maybe that wasn’t proof positive that who you knew was a lousy way to get a job, but it certainly seemed suggestive.

“Enjoy your evening, Doctor Sleeeep,” Carling called after him, making no effort to keep his voice down.

At the nurses’ station, Claudette was charting meds while Janice Barker watched a small TV with the sound turned down low. The current program was one of those endless ads for colon cleanser, but Jan was watching with her eyes wide and her mouth hung ajar. She started when Dan tapped his fingernails on the counter and he realized she hadn’t been fascinated but half asleep.

“Can either of you tell me anything substantive about Charlie? Carling knows from nothing.”

Claudette glanced down the hall to make sure Fred Carling wasn’t in view, then lowered her voice, anyway. “That man’s as useless as boobs on a bull. I keep hoping he’ll get fired.”

Dan kept his similar opinion to himself. Constant sobriety, he had discovered, did wonders for one’s powers of discretion.

“I checked him fifteen minutes ago,” Jan said. “We check them a lot when Mr. Pussycat comes to visit.”

“How long’s Azzie been in there?”

“He was meowing outside the door when we came on duty at midnight,” Claudette said, “so I opened it for him. He jumped right up on the bed. You know how he does. I almost called you then, but Charlie was awake and responsive. When I said hi, he hi’d me right back and started petting Azzie. So I decided to wait. About an hour later, he had a nosebleed. Fred cleaned him up. I had to tell him to put the towels in a plague-bag.”

Plague-bags were what the staff called the dissolvable plastic sacks in which clothing, linen, and towels contaminated with bodily fluids or tissue were stored. It was a state regulation that was supposed to minimize the spread of blood-borne pathogens.

“When I checked him forty or fifty minutes ago,” Jan said, “he was asleep. I gave him a shake. He opened his eyes, and they were all bloodshot.”

“That’s when I called Emerson,” Claudette said. “And after I got the big no-way-Jose from the girl on service, I called you. Are you going down now?”

“Yes.”

“Good luck,” Jan said. “Ring if you need something.”

“I will. Why are you watching an infomercial for colon cleanser, Jannie? Or is that too personal?”

She yawned. “At this hour, the only other thing on is an infomercial for the Ahh Bra. I already have one of those.”

The door of the Alan Shepard Suite was standing half open, but Dan knocked anyway. When there was no response, he pushed it all the way open. Someone (probably one of the nurses; it almost certainly hadn’t been Fred Carling) had cranked up the bed a little. The sheet was pulled to Charlie Hayes’s chest. He was ninety-one, painfully thin, and so pale he hardly seemed to be there at all. Dan had to stand still for thirty seconds before he could be absolutely sure the old man’s pajama top was going up and down. Azzie was curled beside the scant bulge of one hip. When Dan came in, the cat surveyed him with those inscrutable eyes.

“Mr. Hayes? Charlie?”

Charlie’s eyes didn’t open. The lids were bluish. The skin beneath them was darker, a purple-black. When Dan got to the side of the bed, he saw more color: a little crust of blood beneath each nostril and in one corner of the folded mouth.

Dan went into the bathroom, took a facecloth, wetted it in warm water, wrung it out. When he returned to Charlie’s bedside, Azzie got to his feet and delicately stepped to the other side of the sleeping man, leaving Dan a place to sit down. The sheet was still warm from Azzie’s body. Gently, Dan wiped the blood from beneath Charlie’s nose. As he was doing the mouth, Charlie opened his eyes. “Dan. It’s you, isn’t it? My eyes are a little blurry.”

Bloody was what they were.

“How are you feeling, Charlie? Any pain? If you’re in pain, I can get Claudette to bring you a pill.”

“No pain,” Charlie said. His eyes shifted to Azzie, then went back to Dan. “I know why he’s here. And I know why you’re here.”

“I’m here because the wind woke me up. Azzie was probably just looking for some company. Cats are nocturnal, you know.”

Dan pushed up the sleeve of Charlie’s pajama top to take a pulse, and saw four purple bruises lined up on the old man’s stick of a forearm. Late-stage leukemia patients bruised if you even breathed on them, but these were finger-bruises, and Dan knew perfectly well where they had come from. He had more control over his temper now that he was sober, but it was still there, just like the occasional strong urge to take a drink.

Carling, you bastard. Wouldn’t he move quick enough for you? Or were you just mad to have to be cleaning up a nosebleed when all you wanted to do was read magazines and eat those fucking yellow crackers?

He tried not to show what he was feeling, but Azzie seemed to sense it; he gave a small, troubled meow. Under other circumstances, Dan might have asked questions, but now he had more pressing matters to deal with. Azzie was right again. He only had to touch the old man to know.

“I’m pretty scared,” Charlie said. His voice was little more than a whisper. The low, steady moan of the wind outside was louder. “I didn’t think I would be, but I am.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of.”

Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse—there was really no point—he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s twin sons at four, on swings. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how her ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me” from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes. At times like this, Dan knew what he was for. At times like this he regretted none of the pain and sorrow and anger and horror, because they had brought him here to this room while the wind whooped outside. Charlie Hayes had come to the border.

“I’m not scared of hell. I lived a decent life, and I don’t think there is such a place, anyway. I’m scared there’s nothing.” He struggled for breath. A pearl of blood was swelling in the corner of his right eye. “There was nothing before, we all know that, so doesn’t it stand to reason that there’s nothing after?”

“But there is.” Dan wiped Charlie’s face with the damp cloth. “We never really end, Charlie. I don’t know how that can be, or what it means, I only know that it is.”

“Can you help me get over? They say you can help people.”

“Yes. I can help.” He took Charlie’s other hand, as well. “It’s just going to sleep. And when you wake up—you will wake up—everything is going to be better.”

“Heaven? Do you mean heaven?”

“I don’t know, Charlie.”

The power was very strong tonight. He could feel it flowing through their clasped hands like an electric current and cautioned himself to be gentle. Part of him was inhabiting the faltering body that was shutting down and the failing senses

(hurry up please)

that were turning off. He was inhabiting a mind

(hurry up please it’s time)

that was still as sharp as ever, and aware it was thinking its last thoughts… at least as Charlie Hayes.

The bloodshot eyes closed, then opened again. Very slowly.

“Everything’s all right,” Dan said. “You only need sleep. Sleep will make you better.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Yes. I call it sleep, and it’s safe to sleep.”

“Don’t go.”

“I won’t. I’m with you.” So he was. It was his terrible privilege.

Charlie’s eyes closed again. Dan closed his own and saw a slow blue pulse in the darkness. Once… twice… stop. Once… twice… stop. Outside the wind was blowing.

“Sleep, Charlie. You’re doing fine, but you’re tired and you need to sleep.”

“I see my wife.” The faintest of whispers.

“Do you?”

“She says…”

There was no more, just a final blue pulse behind Dan’s eyes and a final exhalation from the man on the bed. Dan opened his eyes, listened to the wind, and waited for the last thing. It came a few seconds later: a dull red mist that rose from Charlie’s nose, mouth, and eyes. This was what an old nurse in Tampa—one who had about the same twinkle as Billy Freeman—called “the gasp.” She said she had seen it many times.

Dan saw it every time.

It rose and hung above the old man’s body. Then it faded.

Dan slid up the right sleeve of Charlie’s pajamas, and felt for a pulse. It was just a formality.

Azzie usually left before it was over, but not tonight. He was standing on the counterpane beside Charlie’s hip, staring at the door. Dan turned, expecting to see Claudette or Jan, but no one was there.

Except there was.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

“Are you the little girl who writes on my blackboard sometimes?”

No response. But someone was there, all right.

“Is your name Abra?”

Faint, almost inaudible because of the wind, there came a ripple of piano notes. Dan might have believed it was his imagination (he could not always tell the difference between that and the shining) if not for Azzie, whose ears twitched and whose eyes never left the empty doorway. Someone was there, watching.

“Are you Abra?”

There was another ripple of notes, then silence again. Except this time it was absence. Whatever her name was, she was gone. Azzie stretched, leaped down from the bed, and left without a look back.

Dan sat where he was a little longer, listening to the wind. Then he lowered the bed, pulled the sheet up over Charlie’s face, and went back to the nurses’ station to tell them there had been a death on the floor.

When his part of the paperwork was complete, Dan walked down to the snack alcove. There was a time he would have gone there on the run, fists already clenched, but those days were gone. Now he walked, taking long slow breaths to calm his heart and mind. There was a saying in AA, “Think before you drink,” but what Casey K. told him during their once-a-week tête-à-têtes was to think before he did anything. You didn’t get sober to be stupid, Danny. Keep it in mind the next time you start listening to that itty-bitty shitty committee inside your head.

But those goddam fingermarks.

Carling was rocked back in his chair, now eating Junior Mints. He had swapped Popular Mechanics for a photo mag with the latest bad-boy sitcom star on the cover.

“Mr. Hayes has passed on,” Dan said mildly.

“Sorry to hear it.” Not looking up from the magazine. “But that is what they’re here for, isn’t i—”

Dan lifted one foot, hooked it behind one of the tilted front legs of Carling’s chair, and yanked. The chair spun away and Carling landed on the floor. The box of Junior Mints flew out of his hand. He stared up at Dan unbelievingly.

“Have I got your attention?”

“You sonofa—” Carling started to get up. Dan put his foot on the man’s chest and pushed him back against the wall.

“I see I have. Good. It would be better right now if you didn’t get up. Just sit there and listen to me.” Dan bent forward and clasped his knees with his hands. Tight, because all those hands wanted to do right now was hit. And hit. And hit. His temples were throbbing. Slow, he told himself. Don’t let it get the better of you.

But it was hard.

“The next time I see your fingermarks on a patient, I’ll photograph them and go to Mrs. Clausen and you’ll be out on the street no matter who you know. And once you’re no longer a part of this institution, I’ll find you and beat the living shit out of you.”

Carling got to his feet, using the wall to support his back and keeping a close eye on Dan as he did it. He was taller, and outweighed Dan by a hundred pounds at least. He balled his fists. “I’d like to see you try. How about now?”

“Sure, but not here,” Dan said. “Too many people trying to sleep, and we’ve got a dead man down the hall. One with your marks on him.”

“I didn’t do nothing but go to take his pulse. You know how easy they bruise when they got the leukemia.”

“I do,” Dan agreed, “but you hurt him on purpose. I don’t know why, but I know you did.”

There was a flicker in Carling’s muddy eyes. Not shame; Dan didn’t think the man was capable of feeling that. Just unease at being seen through. And fear of being caught. “Big man. Doctor Sleeeep. Think your shit don’t stink?”

“Come on, Fred, let’s go outside. More than happy to.” And this was true. There was a second Dan inside. He wasn’t as close to the surface anymore, but he was still there and still the same ugly, irrational sonofabitch he’d always been. Out of the corner of his eye Dan could see Claudette and Jan standing halfway down the hall, their eyes wide and their arms around each other.

Carling thought it over. Yes, he was bigger, and yes, he had more reach. But he was also out of shape—too many overstuffed burritos, too many beers, much shorter wind than he’d had in his twenties—and there was something worrisome in the skinny guy’s face. He’d seen it before, back in his Road Saints days. Some guys had lousy circuit breakers in their heads. They tripped easy, and once they did, those guys would burn on until they burned out. He had taken Torrance for some mousy little geek who wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful, but he saw that he’d been wrong about that. His secret identity wasn’t Doctor Sleep, it was Doctor Crazy.

After considering this carefully, Fred said, “I wouldn’t waste my time.”

Dan nodded. “Good. Save us both getting frostbite. Just remember what I said. If you don’t want to go to the hospital, keep your hands to yourself from now on.”

“Who died and left you in charge?”

“I don’t know,” Dan said. “I really don’t.”

Dan went back to his room and back to bed, but he couldn’t sleep. He had made roughly four dozen deathbed visits during his time at Rivington House, and usually they left him calm. Not tonight. He was still trembling with rage. His conscious mind hated that red storm, but some lower part of him loved it. Probably it went back to plain old genetics; nature triumphing over nurture. The longer he stayed sober, the more old memories surfaced. Some of the clearest were of his father’s rages. He had been hoping that Carling would take him up on it. Would go outside into the snow and wind, where Dan Torrance, son of Jack, would give that worthless puppy his medicine.

God knew he didn’t want to be his father, whose bouts of sobriety had been the white-knuckle kind. AA was supposed to help with anger, and mostly it did, but there were times like tonight when Dan realized what a flimsy barrier it was. Times when he felt worthless, and the booze seemed like all he deserved. At times like that he felt very close to his father.

He thought: Mama.

He thought: Canny.

He thought: Worthless pups need to take their medicine. And you know where they sell it, don’t you? Damn near everywhere.

The wind rose in a furious gust, making the turret groan. When it died, the blackboard girl was there. He could almost hear her breathing.

He lifted one hand out from beneath the comforters. For a moment it only hung there in the cold air, and then he felt hers—small, warm—slip into it. “Abra,” he said. “Your name is Abra, but sometimes people call you Abby. Isn’t that right?”

No answer came, but he didn’t really need one. All he needed was the sensation of that warm hand in his. It only lasted for a few seconds, but it was long enough to soothe him. He closed his eyes and slept.

Twenty miles away, in the little town of Anniston, Abra Stone lay awake. The hand that had enfolded hers held on for a moment or two. Then it turned to mist and was gone. But it had been there. He had been there. She had found him in a dream, but when she woke, she had discovered the dream was real. She was standing in the doorway of a room. What she had seen there was terrible and wonderful at the same time. There was death, and death was scary, but there had also been helping. The man who was helping hadn’t been able to see her, but the cat had. The cat had a name like hers, but not exactly.

He didn’t see me but he felt me. And we were together just now. I think I helped him, like he helped the man who died.

That was a good thought. Holding onto it (as she had held the phantom hand), Abra rolled over on her side, hugged her stuffed rabbit to her chest, and went to sleep.

^{CHAPTER FIVE} THE TRUE KNOT

The True Knot wasn’t incorporated, but if it had been, certain side o’ the road communities in Maine, Florida, Colorado, and New Mexico would have been referred to as “company towns.” These were places where all the major businesses and large plots of land could be traced back, through a tangle of holding companies, to them. The True’s towns, with colorful names like Dry Bend, Jerusalem’s Lot, Oree, and Sidewinder, were safe havens, but they never stayed in those places for long; mostly they were migratory. If you drive the turnpikes and main-traveled highways of America, you may have seen them. Maybe it was on I-95 in South Carolina, somewhere south of Dillon and north of Santee. Maybe it was on I-80 in Nevada, in the mountain country west of Draper. Or in Georgia, while negotiating—slowly, if you know what’s good for you—that notorious Highway 41 speedtrap outside Tifton.

How many times have you found yourself behind a lumbering RV, eating exhaust and waiting impatiently for your chance to pass? Creeping along at forty when you could be doing a perfectly legal sixty-five or even seventy? And when there’s finally a hole in the fast lane and you pull out, holy God, you see a long line of those damn things, gas hogs driven at exactly ten miles an hour below the legal speed limit by bespectacled golden oldies who hunch over their steering wheels, gripping them like they think they’re going to fly away.

Or maybe you’ve encountered them in the turnpike rest areas, when you stop to stretch your legs and maybe drop a few quarters into one of the vending machines. The entrance ramps to those rest stops always divide in two, don’t they? Cars in one parking lot, long-haul trucks and RVs in another. Usually the lot for the big rigs and RVs is a little farther away. You might have seen the True’s rolling motorhomes parked in that lot, all in a cluster. You might have seen their owners walking up to the main building—slow, because many of them look old and some of them are pretty darn fat—always in a group, always keeping to themselves.

Sometimes they pull off at one of the exits loaded with gas stations, motels, and fast-food joints. And if you see those RVs parked at McDonald’s or Burger King, you keep on going because you know they’ll all be lined up at the counter, the men wearing floppy golf hats or long-billed fishing caps, the women in stretch pants (usually powder-blue) and shirts that say things like ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDCHILDREN! or JESUS IS KING or HAPPY WANDERER. You’d rather go half a mile farther down the road, to the Waffle House or Shoney’s, wouldn’t you? Because you know they’ll take forever to order, mooning over the menu, always wanting their Quarter Pounders without the pickles or their Whoppers without the sauce. Asking if there are any interesting tourist attractions in the area, even though anyone can see this is just another nothing three-stoplight burg where the kids leave as soon as they graduate from the nearest high school.

You hardly see them, right? Why would you? They’re just the RV People, elderly retirees and a few younger compatriots living their rootless lives on the turnpikes and blue highways, staying at campgrounds where they sit around in their Walmart lawnchairs and cook on their hibachis while they talk about investments and fishing tournaments and hotpot recipes and God knows what. They’re the ones who always stop at fleamarkets and yardsales, parking their damn dinosaurs nose-to-tail half on the shoulder and half on the road, so you have to slow to a crawl in order to creep by. They are the opposite of the motorcycle clubs you sometimes see on those same turnpikes and blue highways; the Mild Angels instead of the wild ones.

They’re annoying as hell when they descend en masse on a rest area and fill up all the toilets, but once their balky, road-stunned bowels finally work and you’re able to take a pew yourself, you put them out of your mind, don’t you? They’re no more remarkable than a flock of birds on a telephone wire or a herd of cows grazing in a field beside the road. Oh, you might wonder how they can afford to fill those fuel-guzzling monstrosities (because they must be on comfy fixed incomes, how else could they spend all their time driving around like they do), and you might puzzle over why anyone would want to spend their golden years cruising all those endless American miles between Hoot and Holler, but beyond that, you probably never spare them a thought.

And if you happen to be one of those unfortunate people who’s ever lost a kid—nothing left but a bike in the vacant lot down the street, or a little cap lying in the bushes at the edge of a nearby stream—you probably never thought of them. Why would you? No, it was probably some hobo. Or (worse to consider, but horribly plausible) some sick fuck from your very own town, maybe your very own neighborhood, maybe even your very own street, some sick killer pervo who’s very good at looking normal and will go on looking normal until someone finds a clatter of bones in the guy’s basement or buried in his backyard. You’d never think of the RV People, those midlife pensioners and cheery older folks in their golf hats and sun visors with appliquéd flowers on them.

And mostly you’d be right. There are thousands of RV People, but by 2011 there was only one Knot left in America: the True Knot. They liked moving around, and that was good, because they had to. If they stayed in one place, they’d eventually attract attention, because they don’t age like other people. Apron Annie or Dirty Phil (rube names Anne Lamont and Phil Caputo) might appear to grow twenty years older overnight. The Little twins (Pea and Pod) might snap back from twenty-two to twelve (or almost), the age at which they Turned, but their Turning was long ago. The only member of the True who’s actually young is Andrea Steiner, now known as Snakebite Andi… and even she’s not as young as she looks.

A tottery, grumpy old lady of eighty suddenly becomes sixty again. A leathery old gent of seventy is able to put away his cane; the skin-tumors on his arms and face disappear.

Black-Eyed Susie loses her hitching limp.

Diesel Doug goes from half blind with cataracts to sharp-eyed, his bald spot magically gone. All at once, hey presto, he’s forty-five again.

Steamhead Steve’s crooked back straightens. His wife, Baba the Red, ditches those uncomfortable continence pants, puts on her rhinestone-studded Ariat boots, and says she wants to go out line dancing.

Given time to observe such changes, people would wonder and people would talk. Eventually some reporter would turn up, and the True Knot shied away from publicity the way vampires supposedly shy away from sunlight.

But since they don’t live in one place (and when they stop for an extended period in one of their company towns, they keep to themselves), they fit right in. Why not? They wear the same clothes as the other RV People, they wear the same el cheapo sunglasses, they buy the same souvenir t-shirts and consult the same AAA roadmaps. They put the same decals on their Bounders and ’Bagos, touting all the peculiar places they’ve visited (I HELPED TRIM THE WORLD’S BIGGEST TREE IN CHRISTMASLAND!), and you find yourself looking at the same bumper stickers while you’re stuck behind them (OLD BUT NOT DEAD, SAVE MEDICARE, I’M A CONSERVATIVE AND I VOTE!!), waiting for a chance to pass. They eat fried chicken from the Colonel and buy the occasional scratch ticket in those EZ-on, EZ-off convenience stores where they sell beer, bait, ammo, Motor Trend magazine, and ten thousand kinds of candybars. If there’s a bingo hall in the town where they stop, a bunch of them are apt to go on over, take a table, and play until the last cover-all game is finished. At one of those games, Greedy G (rube name Greta Moore) won five hundred dollars. She gloated over that for months, and although the members of the True have all the money they need, it pissed off some of the other ladies to no end. Token Charlie wasn’t too pleased, either. He said he’d been waiting on B7 for five pulls from the hopper when the G finally bingoed.

“Greedy, you’re one lucky bitch,” he said.

“And you’re one unlucky bastard,” she replied. “One unlucky black bastard.” And went off chortling.

If one of them happens to get speed-trapped or stopped for some minor traffic offense—it’s rare, but it does happen—the cop finds nothing but valid licenses, up-to-date insurance cards, and paperwork in apple-pie order. No voices are raised while the cop’s standing there with his citation book, even if it’s an obvious scam. The charges are never disputed, and all fines are paid promptly. America is a living body, the highways are its arteries, and the True Knot slips along them like a silent virus.

But there are no dogs.

Ordinary RV People travel with lots of canine company, usually those little shit-machines with white fur, gaudy collars, and nasty tempers. You know the kind; they have irritating barks that hurt your ears and ratty little eyes full of disturbing intelligence. You see them sniffing their way through the grass in the designated pet-walking areas of the turnpike rest stops, their owners trailing behind, pooper-scoopers at the ready. In addition to the usual decals and bumper stickers on the motorhomes of these ordinary RV People, you’re apt to see yellow diamond-shaped signs reading POMERANIAN ON BOARD or I MY POODLE.

Not the True Knot. They don’t like dogs, and dogs don’t like them. You might say dogs see through them. To the sharp and watchful eyes behind the cut-rate sunglasses. To the strong and long-muscled hunters’ legs beneath the polyester slacks from Walmart. To the sharp teeth beneath the dentures, waiting to come out.

They don’t like dogs, but they like certain children.

Oh yes, they like certain children very much.

In May of 2011, not long after Abra Stone celebrated her tenth birthday and Dan Torrance his tenth year of AA sobriety, Crow Daddy knocked on the door of Rosie the Hat’s EarthCruiser. The True was currently staying at the Kozy Kampground outside Lexington, Kentucky. They were on their way to Colorado, where they would spend most of the summer in one of their bespoke towns, this one a place Dan sometimes revisited in his dreams. Usually they were in no hurry to get anywhere, but there was some urgency this summer. All of them knew it but none of them talked about it.

Rose would take care of it. She always had.

“Come,” she said, and Crow Daddy stepped in.

When on a business errand, he always stepped out in good suits and expensive shoes polished to a mirror gloss. If he was feeling particularly old-school, he might even carry a walking stick. This morning he was wearing baggy pants held up by suspenders, a strappy t-shirt with a fish on it (KISS MY BASS printed beneath), and a flat workman’s cap, which he swept off as he closed the door behind him. He was her sometime lover as well as her second-in-command, but he never failed to show respect. It was one of many things Rose liked about him. She had no doubt that the True could carry on under his leadership if she died. For awhile, at least. But for another hundred years? Perhaps not. Probably not. He had a silver tongue and cleaned up well when he had to deal with the rubes, but Crow had only rudimentary planning skills, and no real vision.

This morning he looked troubled.

Rose was sitting on the sofa in capri pants and a plain white bra, smoking a cigarette and watching the third hour of Today on her big wall-mounted TV. That was the “soft” hour, when they featured celebrity chefs and actors doing PR for their new movies. Her tophat was cocked back on her head. Crow Daddy had known her for more years than the rubes lived, and he still didn’t know what magic held it at that gravity-defying angle.

She picked up the remote and muted the sound. “Why, it’s Henry Rothman, as I live and breathe. Looking remarkably tasty, too, although I doubt you came to be tasted. Not at quarter of ten in the morning, and not with that look on your face. Who died?”

She meant it as a joke, but the wincing frown that tightened his forehead told her it wasn’t one. She turned the TV off and made a business of butting her cigarette, not wanting him to see the dismay she felt. Once the True had been over two hundred strong. As of yesterday, they numbered forty-one. If she was right about the meaning of that wince, they were one less today.

“Tommy the Truck,” he said. “Went in his sleep. Cycled once, and then boom. Didn’t suffer at all. Which is fucking rare, as you know.”

“Did Nut see him?” While he was still there to be seen, she thought but did not add. Walnut, whose rube driver’s license and various rube credit cards identified him as Peter Wallis of Little Rock, Arkansas, was the True’s sawbones.

“No, it was too quick. Heavy Mary was with him. Tommy woke her up, thrashing. She thought it was a bad dream and gave him an elbow… only by then there was nothing left to poke but his pajamas. It was probably a heart attack. Tommy had a bad cold. Nut thinks that might have been a contributing factor. And you know the sonofabitch always smoked like a chimney.”

“We don’t get heart attacks.” Then, reluctantly: “Of course, we usually don’t get colds, either. He was really wheezing the last few days, wasn’t he? Poor old TT.”

“Yeah, poor old TT. Nut says it’d be impossible to tell anything for sure without an autopsy.”

Which couldn’t happen. By now there would be no body left to cut up.

“How’s Mary taking it?”

“How do you think? She’s broken-fucking-hearted. They go back to when Tommy the Truck was Tommy the Wagon. Almost ninety years. She was the one who took care of him after he Turned. Gave him his first steam when he woke up the next day. Now she says she wants to kill herself.”

Rose was rarely shocked, but this did the job. No one in the True had ever killed themselves. Life was—to coin a phrase—their only reason for living.

“Probably just talk,” Crow Daddy said. “Only…”

“Only what?”

“You’re right about us not usually getting colds, but there have been quite a few just lately. Mostly just sniffles that come and go. Nut says it may be malnutrition. Of course he’s just guessing.”

Rose sat in thought, tapping her fingers against her bare midriff and staring at the blank rectangle of the TV. At last she said, “Okay, I agree that nourishment’s been a bit thin lately, but we took steam in Delaware just a month ago, and Tommy was fine then. Plumped right up.”

“Yeah, but Rosie—the kid from Delaware wasn’t much. More hunchhead than steamhead.”

She’d never thought of it just that way, but it was true. Also, he’d been nineteen, according to his driver’s license. Well past whatever stunted prime he might have had around puberty. In another ten years he’d have been just another rube. Maybe even five. He hadn’t been much of a meal, point taken. But you couldn’t always have steak. Sometimes you had to settle for bean sprouts and tofu. At least they kept body and soul together until you could butcher the next cow.

Except psychic tofu and bean sprouts hadn’t kept Tommy the Truck’s body and soul together, had they?

“There used to be more steam,” Crow said.

“Don’t be daft. That’s like the rubes saying that fifty years ago people were more neighborly. It’s a myth, and I don’t want you spreading it around. People are nervous enough already.”

“You know me better than that. And I don’t think it is a myth, darlin. If you think about it, it stands to reason. Fifty years ago there was more of everything—oil, wildlife, arable land, clean air. There were even a few honest politicians.”

“Yes!” Rose cried. “Richard Nixon, remember him? Prince of the Rubes?”

But he wouldn’t go chasing up this false trail. Crow might be a bit lacking in the vision department, but he was rarely distracted. That was why he was her second. He might even have a point. Who was to say that humans capable of providing the nourishment the True needed weren’t dwindling, just like schools of tuna in the Pacific?

“You better bust open one of the canisters, Rosie.” He saw her eyes widen and raised a hand to stop her from speaking. “Nobody’s saying that out loud, but the whole family’s thinking about it.”

Rose had no doubt they were, and the idea that Tommy had died of complications resulting from malnutrition had a certain horrid plausibility. When steam was in short supply, life grew hard and lost its savor. They weren’t vampires from one of those old Hammer horror pictures, but they still needed to eat.

“And how long since we’ve had a seventh wave?” Crow asked.

He knew the answer to that, and so did she. The True Knot had limited precognitive skills, but when a truly big rube disaster was approaching—a seventh wave—they all felt it. Although the details of the attack on the World Trade Center had only begun to clarify for them in the late summer of 2001, they had known something was going to happen in New York City for months in advance. She could still remember the joy and anticipation. She supposed hungry rubes felt the same way when they smelled a particularly savory meal cooking in the kitchen.

There had been plenty for everybody that day, and in the days following. There might only have been a couple of true steamheads among those who died when the Towers fell, but when the disaster was big enough, agony and violent death had an enriching quality. Which was why the True was drawn to such sites, like insects to a bright light. Locating single rube steamheads was far more difficult, and there were only three of them now with that specialized sonar in their heads: Grampa Flick, Barry the Chink, and Rose herself.

She got up, grabbed a neatly folded boatneck top from the counter, and pulled it over her head. As always, she looked gorgeous in a way that was a bit unearthly (those high cheekbones and slightly tipped eyes) but extremely sexy. She put her hat back on and gave it a tap for good luck. “How many full canisters do you think are left, Crow?”

He shrugged. “A dozen? Fifteen?”

“In that neighborhood,” she agreed. Better that none of them knew the truth, not even her second. The last thing she needed was for the current unease to become outright panic. When people panicked, they ran in all directions. If that happened, the True might disintegrate.

Meanwhile, Crow was looking at her, and closely. Before he could see too much, she said, “Can you four-wall this place tonight?”

“You kidding? With the price of gas and diesel what it is, the guy who owns it can’t fill half his spots, even on weekends. He’ll jump at the chance.”

“Then do it. We’re going to take canister steam. Spread the word.”

“You’ve got it.” He kissed her, caressing one of her breasts as he did so. “This is my favorite top.”

She laughed and pushed him away. “Any top with tits in it is your favorite top. Go on.”

But he lingered, a grin tipping one corner of his mouth. “Is Rattlesnake Girl still sniffin around your door, beautiful?”

She reached down and briefly squeezed him below the belt. “Oh my gosh. Is that your jealous bone I’m feeling?”

“Say it is.”

She doubted it, but was flattered, anyway. “She’s with Sarey now, and the two of them are perfectly happy. But since we’re on the subject of Andi, she can help us. You know how. Spread the word but speak to her first.”

After he left, she locked the EarthCruiser, went to the cockpit, and dropped to her knees. She worked her fingers into the carpet between the driver’s seat and the control pedals. A strip of it came up. Beneath was a square of metal with an embedded keypad. Rose ran the numbers, and the safe popped open an inch or two. She lifted the door the rest of the way and looked inside.

Fifteen or a dozen full canisters left. That had been Crow’s guess, and although she couldn’t read members of the True the way she could read the rubes, Rose was sure he had been purposely lowballing to cheer her up.

If he only knew, she thought.

The safe was lined with Styrofoam to protect the canisters in case of a road accident, and there were forty built-in cradles. On this fine May morning in Kentucky, thirty-seven of the canisters in those cradles were empty.

Rose took one of the remaining full ones and held it up. It was light; if you hefted it, you would have guessed it too was empty. She took the cap off, inspected the valve beneath to make sure the seal was still intact, then reclosed the safe and put the canister carefully—almost reverently—on the counter where her top had been folded.

After tonight there would only be two.

They had to find some big steam and refill at least a few of those empty canisters, and they had to do it soon. The True’s back wasn’t to the wall, not quite yet, but it was only inches away.

The Kozy Kampground owner and his wife had their own trailer, a permanent job set up on painted concrete blocks. April showers had brought lots of May flowers, and Mr. and Mrs. Kozy’s front yard was full of them. Andrea Steiner paused a moment to admire the tulips and pansies before mounting the three steps to the door of the big Redman trailer, where she knocked.

Mr. Kozy opened up eventually. He was a small man with a big belly currently encased in a bright red strappy undershirt. In one hand he held a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. In the other was a mustard-smeared brat wrapped in a slice of spongy white bread. Because his wife was currently in the other room, he paused for a moment to do a visual inventory of the young woman before him, ponytail to sneakers. “Yeah?”

Several in the True had a bit of sleeper talent, but Andi was by far the best, and her Turning had proved of enormous benefit to the True. She still used the ability on occasion to lift cash from the wallets of certain older rube gentlemen who were attracted to her. Rose found this risky and childish, but knew from experience that in time, what Andi called her issues would fade away. For the True Knot, the only issue was survival.

“I just had a quick question,” Andi said.

“If it’s about the toilets, darlin, the caca sucker don’t come until Thursday.”

“It’s not about that.”

“What, then?”

“Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to go to sleep?”

Mr. Kozy immediately closed his eyes. The beer and the brat tumbled out of his hands, leaving a mess on the rug. Oh well, Andi thought, Crow fronted the guy twelve hundred. Mr. Kozy can afford a bottle of carpet cleaner. Maybe even two.

Andi took him by the arm and led him into the living room. Here was a pair of chintz-covered Kozy armchairs with TV trays set up in front of them.

“Sit,” she said.

Mr. Kozy sat, eyes shut.

“You like to mess with young girls?” Andi asked him. “You would if you could, wouldn’t you? If you could run fast enough to catch them, anyway.” She surveyed him, hands on hips. “You’re disgusting. Can you say that?”

“I’m disgusting,” Mr. Kozy agreed. Then he began to snore.

Mrs. Kozy came in from the kitchen. She was gnawing on an ice cream sandwich. “Here, now, who are you? What are you telling him? What do you want?”

“For you to sleep,” Andi told her.

Mrs. Kozy dropped her ice cream. Then her knees unhinged and she sat on it.

“Ah, fuck,” Andi said. “I didn’t mean there. Get up.”

Mrs. Kozy got up with the squashed ice cream sandwich sticking to the back of her dress. Snakebite Andi put her arm around the woman’s mostly nonexistent waist and led her to the other Kozy chair, pausing long enough to pull the melting ice cream sandwich off her butt. Soon the two of them sat side by side, eyes shut.

“You’ll sleep all night,” Andi instructed them. “Mister can dream about chasing young girls. Missus, you can dream he died of a heart attack and left you a million-dollar insurance policy. How’s that sound? Sound good?”

She snapped on the TV and turned it up loud. Pat Sajak was being embraced by a woman with enormous jahoobies who had just finished solving the puzzle, which was NEVER REST ON YOUR LAURELS. Andi took a moment to admire the mammoth mammaries, then turned back to the Kozys.

“When the eleven o’clock news is over, you can turn off the TV and go to bed. When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t remember I was here. Any questions?”

They had none. Andi left them and hurried back to the cluster of RVs. She was hungry, had been for weeks, and tonight there would be plenty for everybody. As for tomorrow… it was Rose’s job to worry about that, and as far as Snakebite Andi was concerned, she was welcome to it.

It was full dark by eight o’clock. At nine, the True gathered in the Kozy Kampground’s picnic area. Rose the Hat came last, carrying the canister. A small, greedy murmur went up at the sight of it. Rose knew how they felt. She was plenty hungry herself.

She mounted one of the initial-scarred picnic tables and looked at them one by one. “We are the True Knot.”

“We are the True Knot,” they responded. Their faces were solemn, their eyes avid and hungry. “What is tied may never be untied.”

“We are the True Knot, and we endure.”

“We endure.”

“We are the chosen ones. We are the fortunate ones.”

“We are chosen and fortunate.”

“They are the makers; we are the takers.”

“We take what they make.”

“Take this and use it well.”

“We will use it well.”

Once, early in the last decade of the twentieth century, there had been a boy from Enid, Oklahoma, named Richard Gaylesworthy. I swear that child can read my mind, his mother sometimes said. People smiled at this, but she wasn’t kidding. And maybe not just her mind. Richard got A’s on tests he hadn’t even studied for. He knew when his father was going to come home in a good mood and when he was going to come home fuming about something at the plumbing supply company he owned. Once the boy begged his mother to play the Pick Six lottery because he swore he knew the winning numbers. Mrs. Gaylesworthy refused—they were good Baptists—but later she was sorry. Not all six of the numbers Richard wrote down on the kitchen note-minder board came up, but five did. Her religious convictions had cost them seventy thousand dollars. She had begged the boy not to tell his father, and Richard had promised he wouldn’t. He was a good boy, a lovely boy.

Two months or so after the lottery win that wasn’t, Mrs. Gaylesworthy was shot to death in her kitchen and the good and lovely boy disappeared. His body had long since rotted away beneath the gone-to-seed back field of an abandoned farm, but when Rose the Hat opened the valve on the silver canister, his essence—his steam—escaped in a cloud of sparkling silver mist. It rose to a height of about three feet above the canister, and spread out in a plane. The True stood looking up at it with expectant faces. Most were trembling. Several were actually weeping.

“Take nourishment and endure,” Rose said, and raised her hands until her spread fingers were just below the flat plane of mist. She beckoned. The mist immediately began to sink, taking on an umbrella shape as it descended toward those waiting below. When it enveloped their heads, they began to breathe deeply. This went on for five minutes, during which several of them hyperventilated and swooned to the ground.

Rose felt herself swelling physically and sharpening mentally. Every fragrant odor of this spring night declared itself. She knew that the faint lines around her eyes and mouth were disappearing. The white strands in her hair were turning dark again. Later tonight, Crow would come to her camper, and in her bed they would burn like torches.

They inhaled Richard Gaylesworthy until he was gone—really and truly gone. The white mist thinned and then disappeared. Those who had fainted sat up and looked around, smiling. Grampa Flick grabbed Petty the Chink, Barry’s wife, and did a nimble little jig with her.

“Let go of me, you old donkey!” she snapped, but she was laughing.

Snakebite Andi and Silent Sarey were kissing deeply, Andi’s hands plunged into Sarey’s mouse-colored hair.

Rose leaped down from the picnic table and turned to Crow. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, grinning back at her.

Everything’s cool, that grin said, and so it was. For now. But in spite of her euphoria, Rose thought of the canisters in her safe. Now there were thirty-eight empties instead of thirty-seven. Their backs were a step closer to the wall.

The True rolled out the next morning just after first light. They took Route 12 to I-64, the fourteen RVs in a nose-to-tail caravan. When they reached the interstate they would spread out so they weren’t quite so obviously together, staying in touch by radio in case trouble arose.

Or if opportunity knocked.

Ernie and Maureen Salkowicz, fresh from a wonderful night’s sleep, agreed those RV folks were just about the best they’d ever had. Not only did they pay cash and bus up their sites neat as a pin, someone left an apple bread pudding on the top step of their trailer, with a sweet thank-you note on top. With any luck, the Salkowiczes told each other as they ate their gift dessert for breakfast, they’d come back next year.

“Do you know what?” Maureen said. “I dreamed that lady on the insurance commercials—Flo—sold you a big insurance policy. Wasn’t that a crazy dream?”

Ernie grunted and splooshed more whipped cream onto his bread pudding.

“Did you dream, honey?”

“Nope.”

But his eyes slid away from hers as he said it.

The True Knot’s luck turned for the better on a hot July day in Iowa. Rose was leading the caravan, as she always did, and just west of Adair, the sonar in her head gave a ping. Not a head-blaster by any means, but moderately loud. She hopped on the CB at once to Barry the Chink, who was about as Asian as Tom Cruise.

“Barry, did you feel that? Come back.”

“Yuh.” Barry was not the garrulous type.

“Who’s Grampa Flick riding with today?”

Before Barry could answer, there was a double break on the CB and Apron Annie said, “He’s with me and Long Paul, sweetie. Is it… is it a good one?” Annie sounded anxious, and Rose could understand that. Richard Gaylesworthy had been a very good one, but six weeks was a long time between meals, and he was beginning to wear off.

“Is the old feller compos, Annie?”

Before she could answer, a raspy voice came back, “I’m fine, woman.” And for a guy who sometimes couldn’t remember his own name, Grampa Flick did sound pretty much okay. Testy, sure, but testy was a lot better than befuddled.

A second ping hit her, this one not as strong. As if to underline a point that needed no underlining, Grampa said, “We’re going the wrong fuckin way.”

Rose didn’t bother answering, just clicked another double break on her mike. “Crow? Come back, honeybunch.”

“I’m here.” Prompt as always. Just waiting to be called.

“Pull em in at the next rest area. Except for me, Barry, and Flick. We’ll take the next exit and double back.”

“Will you need a crew?”

“I won’t know until we get closer, but… I don’t think so.”

“Okay.” A pause, then he added: “Shit.”

Rose racked the mike and looked out at the unending acres of corn on both sides of the fourlane. Crow was disappointed, of course. They all would be. Big steamheads presented problems because they were all but immune to suggestion. That meant taking them by force. Friends or family members often tried to interfere. They could sometimes be put to sleep, but not always; a kid with big steam could block even Snakebite Andi’s best efforts in that regard. So sometimes people had to be killed. Not good, but the prize was always worth it: life and strength stored away in a steel canister. Stored for a rainy day. In many cases there was even a residual benefit. Steam was hereditary, and often everyone in the target’s family had at least a little.

While most of the True Knot waited in a pleasantly shady rest area forty miles east of Council Bluffs, the RVs containing the three finders turned around, left the turnpike at Adair, and headed north. Once away from I-80 and out in the toolies, they spread apart and begin working the grid of graveled, well-maintained farm roads that parceled this part of Iowa into big squares. Moving in on the ping from different directions. Triangulating.

It got stronger… a little stronger still… then leveled off. Good steam but not great steam. Ah, well. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Bradley Trevor had been given the day off from his usual farm chores to practice with the local Little League All-Star team. If his pa had refused him this, the coach probably would have led the rest of the boys in a lynch party, because Brad was the team’s best hitter. You wouldn’t think it to look at him—he was skinny as a rake handle, and only eleven—but he was able to tag even the District’s best pitchers for singles and doubles. The meatballers he almost always took deep. Some of it was plain farmboy strength, but by no means all of it. Brad just seemed to know what pitch was coming next. It wasn’t a case of stealing signs (a possibility upon which some of the other District coaches had speculated darkly). He just knew. The way he knew the best location for a new stock well, or where the occasional lost cow had gotten off to, or where Ma’s engagement ring was the time she’d lost it. Look under the floormat of the Suburban, he’d said, and there it was.

That day’s practice was an especially good one, but Brad seemed lost in the ozone during the debriefing afterward, and declined to take a soda from the tub filled with ice when it was offered. He said he thought he better get home and help his ma take in the clothes.

“Is it gonna rain?” Micah Johnson, the coach, asked. They’d all come to trust him on such things.

“Dunno,” Brad said listlessly.

“You feel okay, son? You look a little peaked.”

In fact, Brad didn’t feel well, had gotten up that morning headachey and a bit feverish. That wasn’t why he wanted to go home now, though; he just had a strong sense that he no longer wanted to be at the baseball field. His mind didn’t seem… quite his own. He wasn’t sure if he was here or only dreaming he was—how crazy was that? He scratched absently at a red spot on his forearm. “Same time tomorrow, right?”

Coach Johnson said that was the plan, and Brad walked off with his glove trailing from one hand. Usually he jogged—they all did—but today he didn’t feel like it. His head still ached, and now his legs did, too. He disappeared into the corn behind the bleachers, meaning to take a shortcut back to the farm, two miles away. When he emerged onto Town Road D, brushing silk from his hair with a slow and dreamy hand, a midsize WanderKing was idling on the gravel. Standing beside it, smiling, was Barry the Chink.

“Well, there you are,” Barry said.

“Who are you?”

“A friend. Hop in. I’ll take you home.”

“Sure,” Brad said. Feeling the way he did, a ride would be fine. He scratched at the red spot on his arm. “You’re Barry Smith. You’re a friend. I’ll hop in and you’ll take me home.”

He stepped into the RV. The door closed. The WanderKing drove away.

By the next day the whole county would be mobilized in a hunt for the Adair All-Stars’ centerfielder and best hitter. A State Police spokesman asked residents to report any strange cars or vans. There were many such reports, but they all came to nothing. And although the three RVs carrying the finders were much bigger than vans (and Rose the Hat’s was truly huge), nobody reported them. They were the RV People, after all, and traveling together. Brad was just… gone.

Like thousands of other unfortunate children, he had been swallowed up, seemingly in a single bite.

They took him north to an abandoned ethanol-processing plant that was miles from the nearest farmhouse. Crow carried the boy out of Rose’s EarthCruiser and laid him gently on the ground. Brad was bound with duct tape and weeping. As the True Knot gathered around him (like mourners over an open grave), he said, “Please take me home. I’ll never tell.”

Rose dropped to one knee beside him and sighed. “I would if I could, son, but I can’t.”

His eyes found Barry. “You said you were one of the good guys! I heard you! You said so!”

“Sorry, pal.” Barry didn’t look sorry. What he looked was hungry. “It’s not personal.”

Brad shifted his eyes back to Rose. “Are you going to hurt me? Please don’t hurt me.”

Of course they were going to hurt him. It was regrettable, but pain purified steam, and the True had to eat. Lobsters also felt pain when they were dropped into pots of boiling water, but that didn’t stop the rubes from doing it. Food was food, and survival was survival.

Rose put her hands behind her back. Into one of these, Greedy G placed a knife. It was short but very sharp. Rose smiled down at the boy and said, “As little as possible.”

The boy lasted a long time. He screamed until his vocal cords ruptured and his cries became husky barks. At one point, Rose paused and looked around. Her hands, long and strong, wore bloody red gloves.

“Something?” Crow asked.

“We’ll talk later,” Rose said, and went back to work. The light of a dozen flashlights had turned a piece of ground behind the ethanol plant into a makeshift operating theater.

Brad Trevor whispered, “Please kill me.”

Rose the Hat gave him a comforting smile. “Soon.”

But it wasn’t.

Those husky barks recommenced, and eventually they turned to steam.

At dawn, they buried the boy’s body. Then they moved on.

^{CHAPTER SIX} WEIRD RADIO

It hadn’t happened in at least three years, but some things you don’t forget. Like when your child begins screaming in the middle of the night. Lucy was on her own because David was attending a two-day conference in Boston, but she knew if he’d been there, he would have raced her down the hall to Abra’s room. He hadn’t forgotten, either.

Their daughter was sitting up in bed, her face pale, her hair standing out in a sleep-scruff all around her head, her eyes wide and staring blankly into space. The sheet—all she needed to sleep under during warm weather—had been pulled free and was balled up around her like a crazy cocoon.

Lucy sat beside her and put an arm around Abra’s shoulders. It was like hugging stone. This was the worst part, before she came all the way out of it. Being ripped from sleep by your daughter’s screams was terrifying, but the nonresponsiveness was worse. Between the ages of five and seven, these night terrors had been fairly common, and Lucy was always afraid that sooner or later the child’s mind would break under the strain. She would continue to breathe, but her eyes would never unlock from whatever world it was that she saw and they couldn’t.

It won’t happen, David had assured her, and John Dalton had doubled down on that. Kids are resilient. If she’s not showing any lingering after-effects—withdrawal, isolation, obsessional behavior, bedwetting—you’re probably okay.

But it wasn’t okay for children to wake themselves, shrieking, from nightmares. It wasn’t okay that sometimes wild piano chords sounded from downstairs in the aftermath, or that the faucets in the bathroom at the end of the hall might turn themselves on, or that the light over Abra’s bed sometimes blew out when she or David flipped the switch.

Then her invisible friend had come, and intervals between nightmares had grown longer. Eventually they stopped. Until tonight. Not that it was night anymore, exactly; Lucy could see the first faint glow on the eastern horizon, and thank God for that.

“Abs? It’s Mommy. Talk to me.”

There was still nothing for five or ten seconds. Then, at last, the statue Lucy had her arm around relaxed and became a little girl again. Abra took a long, shuddering breath.

“I had one of my bad dreams. Like in the old days.”

“I kind of figured that, honey.”

Abra could hardly ever remember more than a little, it seemed. Sometimes it was people yelling at each other or hitting with their fists. He knocked the table over chasing after her, she might say. Another time the dream had been of a one-eyed Raggedy Ann doll lying on a highway. Once, when Abra was only four, she told them she had seen ghostie people riding The Helen Rivington, which was a popular tourist attraction in Frazier. It ran a loop from Teenytown out to Cloud Gap, and then back again. I could see them because of the moonlight, Abra told her parents that time. Lucy and David were sitting on either side of her, their arms around her. Lucy still remembered the dank feel of Abra’s pajama top, which was soaked with sweat. I knew they were ghostie people because they had faces like old apples and the moon shone right through.

By the following afternoon Abra had been running and playing and laughing with her friends again, but Lucy had never forgotten the image: dead people riding that little train through the woods, their faces like transparent apples in the moonlight. She had asked Concetta if she had ever taken Abra on the train during one of their “girl days.” Chetta said no. They had been to Teenytown, but the train had been under repairs that day so they rode the carousel instead.

Now Abra looked up at her mother and said, “When will Daddy be back?”

“Day after tomorrow. He said he’d be in time for lunch.”

“That’s not soon enough,” Abra said. A tear spilled from her eye, rolled down her cheek, and plopped onto her pajama top.

“Soon enough for what? What do you remember, Abba-Doo?”

“They were hurting the boy.”

Lucy didn’t want to pursue this, but felt she had to. There had been too many correlations between Abra’s earlier dreams and things that had actually happened. It was David who had spotted the picture of the one-eyed Raggedy Ann in the North Conway Sun, under the heading THREE KILLED IN OSSIPEE CRASH. It was Lucy who had hunted out police blotter items about domestic violence arrests in the days following two of Abra’s people were yelling and hitting dreams. Even John Dalton agreed that Abra might be picking up transmissions on what he called “the weird radio in her head.”

So now she said, “What boy? Does he live around here? Do you know?”

Abra shook her head. “Far away. I can’t remember.” Then she brightened. The speed at which she came out of these fugues was to Lucy almost as eerie as the fugues themselves. “But I think I told Tony. He might tell his daddy.”

Tony, her invisible friend. She hadn’t mentioned him in a couple of years, and Lucy hoped this wasn’t some sort of regression. Ten was a little old for invisible friends.

“Tony’s daddy might be able to stop it.” Then Abra’s face clouded. “I think it’s too late, though.”

“Tony hasn’t been around in awhile, has he?” Lucy got up and fluffed out the displaced sheet. Abra giggled when it floated against her face. The best sound in the world, as far as Lucy was concerned. A sane sound. And the room was brightening all the time. Soon the first birds would begin to sing.

“Mommy, that tickles!”

“Mommies like to tickle. It’s part of their charm. Now, what about Tony?”

“He said he’d come any time I needed him,” Abra said, settling back under the sheet. She patted the bed beside her, and Lucy lay down, sharing the pillow. “That was a bad dream and I needed him. I think he came, but I can’t really remember. His daddy works in a hot spice.”

This was new. “Is that like a chili factory?”

“No, silly, it’s for people who are going to die.” Abra sounded indulgent, almost teacherly, but a shiver went up Lucy’s back.

“Tony says that when people get so sick they can’t get well, they go to the hot spice and his daddy tries to make them feel better. Tony’s daddy has a cat with a name like mine. I’m Abra and the cat is Azzie. Isn’t that weird, but in a funny way?”

“Yes. Weird but funny.”

John and David would both probably say, based on the similarity of the names, that the stuff about the cat was the confabulation of a very bright little ten-year-old girl. But they would only half believe it, and Lucy hardly believed it at all. How many ten-year-olds knew what a hospice was, even if they mispronounced it?

“Tell me about the boy in your dream.” Now that Abra was calmed down, this conversation seemed safer. “Tell me who was hurting him, Abba-Doo.”

“I don’t remember, except he thought Barney was supposed to be his friend. Or maybe it was Barry. Momma, can I have Hoppy?”

Her stuffed rabbit, now sitting in lop-eared exile on the highest shelf in her room. Abra hadn’t slept with him in at least two years. Lucy got the Hopster and put him in her daughter’s arms. Abra hugged the rabbit to her pink pajama top and was asleep almost at once. With luck, she’d be out for another hour, maybe even two. Lucy sat beside her, looking down.

Let this stop for good in another few years, just like John said it would. Better yet, let it stop today, this very morning. No more, please. No more hunting through the local papers to see if some little boy was killed by his stepfather or beaten to death by bullies who were high on glue, or something. Let it end.

“God,” she said in a very low voice, “if you’re there, would you do something for me? Would you break the radio in my little girl’s head?”

When the True headed west again along I-80, rolling toward the town in the Colorado high country where they would spend the summer (always assuming the opportunity to collect some nearby big steam did not come up), Crow Daddy was riding in the shotgun seat of Rose’s EarthCruiser. Jimmy Numbers, the True’s whizbang accountant, was piloting Crow’s Affinity Country Coach for the time being. Rose’s satellite radio was tuned to Outlaw Country and currently playing Hank Jr.’s “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.” It was a good tune, and Crow let it run its course before pushing the OFF button.

“You said we’d talk later. This is later. What happened back there?”

“We had a looker,” Rose said.

“Really?” Crow raised his eyebrows. He had taken as much of the Trevor kid’s steam as any of them, but he looked no younger. He rarely did after eating. On the other hand, he rarely looked older between meals, unless the gap was very long. Rose thought it was a good trade-off. Probably something in his genes. Assuming they still had genes. Nut said they almost certainly did. “A steamhead, you mean.”

She nodded. Ahead of them, I-80 unrolled under a faded blue denim sky dotted with drifting cumulus clouds.

“Big steam?”

“Oh yeah. Huge.”

“How far away?”

“East Coast. I think.”

“You’re saying someone looked in from what, almost fifteen hundred miles away?”

“Could have been even further. Could have been way the hell and gone up in Canada.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Probably a girl, but it was only a flash. Three seconds at most. Does it matter?”

It didn’t. “How many canisters could you fill from a kid with that much steam in the boiler?”

“Hard to say. Three, at least.” This time it was Rose who was lowballing. She guessed the unknown looker might fill ten canisters, maybe even a dozen. The presence had been brief but muscular. The looker had seen what they were doing, and her horror (if it was a her) had been strong enough to freeze Rose’s hands and make her feel a momentary loathing. It wasn’t her own feeling, of course—gutting a rube was no more loathsome than gutting a deer—but a kind of psychic ricochet.

“Maybe we ought to turn around,” Crow said. “Get her while the getting’s good.”

“No. I think this one’s still getting stronger. We’ll let her ripen a bit.”

“Is that something you know or just intuition?”

Rose waggled her hand in the air.

“An intuition strong enough to risk her getting killed by a hit-and-run driver or grabbed by some child-molesting perv?” Crow said this without irony. “Or what about leukemia, or some other cancer? You know they’re susceptible to stuff like that.”

“If you asked Jimmy Numbers, he’d say the actuarial tables are on our side.” Rose smiled and gave his thigh an affectionate pat. “You worry too much, Daddy. We’ll go on to Sidewinder, as planned, then head down to Florida in a couple of months. Both Barry and Grampa Flick think this might be a big year for hurricanes.”

Crow made a face. “That’s like scavenging out of Dumpsters.”

“Maybe, but the scraps in some of those Dumpsters are pretty tasty. And nourishing. I’m still kicking myself that we missed that tornado in Joplin. But of course we get less warning on sudden storms like that.”

“This kid. She saw us.”

“Yes.”

“And what we were doing.”

“Your point, Crow?”

“Could she nail us?”

“Honey, if she’s more than eleven, I’ll eat my hat.” Rose tapped it for emphasis. “Her parents probably don’t know what she is or what she can do. Even if they do, they’re probably minimizing it like hell in their own minds so they don’t have to think about it too much.”

“Or they’ll send her to a psychiatrist who’ll give her pills,” Crow said. “Which will muffle her and make her harder to find.”

Rose smiled. “If I got it right, and I’m pretty sure I did, giving Paxil to this kid would be like throwing a piece of Saran Wrap over a searchlight. We’ll find her when it’s time. Don’t worry.”

“If you say so. You’re the boss.”

“That’s right, honeybunch.” This time instead of patting his thigh, she squeezed his basket. “Omaha tonight?”

“It’s a La Quinta Inn. I reserved the entire back end of the first floor.”

“Good. My intent is to ride you like a roller coaster.”

“We’ll see who rides who,” Crow said. He was feeling frisky from the Trevor kid. So was Rose. So were they all. He turned the radio on again. Got Cross Canadian Ragweed singing about the boys from Oklahoma who rolled their joints all wrong.

The True rolled west.

There were easy AA sponsors, and hard AA sponsors, and then there were ones like Casey Kingsley, who took absolutely zero shit from their pigeons. At the beginning of their relationship, Casey ordered Dan to do ninety-in-ninety, and instructed him to telephone every morning at seven o’clock. When Dan completed his ninety consecutive meetings, he was allowed to drop the morning calls. Then they met three times a week for coffee at the Sunspot Café.

Casey was sitting in a booth when Dan came in on a July afternoon in 2011, and although Casey hadn’t made it to retirement just yet, to Dan his longtime AA sponsor (and first New Hampshire employer) looked very old. Most of his hair was gone, and he walked with a pronounced limp. He needed a hip replacement, but kept putting it off.

Dan said hi, sat down, folded his hands, and waited for what Casey called The Catechism.

“You sober today, Danno?”

“Yes.”

“How did that miracle of restraint happen?”

He recited, “Thanks to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the God of my understanding. My sponsor may also have played a small part.”

“Lovely compliment, but don’t blow smoke up my dress and I won’t blow any up yours.”

Patty Noyes came over with the coffeepot and poured Dan a cup, unasked. “How are you, handsome?”

Dan grinned at her. “I’m good.”

She ruffled his hair, then headed back to the counter, with a little extra swing in her stride. The men followed the sweet tick-tock of her hips, as men do, then Casey returned his gaze to Dan.

“Made any progress with that God-of-my-understanding stuff?”

“Not much,” Dan said. “I’ve got an idea it may be a lifetime work.”

“But you ask for help to stay away from a drink in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“On your knees?”

“Yes.”

“Say thank you at night?”

“Yes, and on my knees.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to remember the drink put me there,” Dan said. It was the absolute truth.

Casey nodded. “That’s the first three steps. Give me the short form.”

“‘I can’t, God can, I think I’ll let Him.’” He added: “The God of my understanding.”

“Which you don’t understand.”

“Right.”

“Now tell me why you drank.”

“Because I’m a drunk.”

“Not because Mommy didn’t give you no love?”

“No.” Wendy had had failings, but her love for him—and his for her—had never wavered.

“Because Daddy didn’t give you no love?”

“No.” Although once he broke my arm, and at the end he almost killed me.

“Because it’s hereditary?”

“No.” Dan sipped his coffee. “But it is. You know that, right?”

“Sure. I also know it doesn’t matter. We drank because we’re drunks. We never get better. We get a daily reprieve based on our spiritual condition, and that’s it.”

“Yes, boss. Are we through with this part?”

“Almost. Did you think about taking a drink today?”

“No. Did you?”

“No.” Casey grinned. It filled his face with light and made him young again. “It’s a miracle. Would you say it’s a miracle, Danny?”

“Yes. I would.”

Patty came back with a big dish of vanilla pudding—not just one cherry on top but two—and stuck it in front of Dan. “Eat that. On the house. You’re too thin.”

“What about me, sweetheart?” Casey asked.

Patty sniffed. “You’re a horse. I’ll bring you a pine tree float, if you want. That’s a glass of water with a toothpick in it.” Having gotten the last word, she sashayed off.

“You still hitting that?” Casey asked as Dan began to eat his pudding.

“Charming,” Dan said. “Very sensitive and New Age.”

“Thanks. Are you still hitting it?”

“We had a thing that lasted maybe four months, and that was three years ago, Case. Patty’s engaged to a very nice boy from Grafton.”

“Grafton,” Casey said dismissively. “Pretty views, shit town. She doesn’t act so engaged when you’re in the house.”

“Casey—”

“No, don’t get me wrong. I’d never advise a pidge of mine to stick his nose—or his dick—into an ongoing relationship. That’s a terrific setup for a drink. But… are you seeing anybody?”

“Is it your business?”

“Happens it is.”

“Not currently. There was a nurse from Rivington House—I told you about her…”

“Sarah something.”

“Olson. We talked a little about moving in together, then she got a great job down at Mass General. We email sometimes.”

“No relationships for the first year, that’s the rule of thumb,” Casey said. “Very few recovering alkies take it seriously. You did. But Danno… it’s time you got regular with somebody.”

“Oh gee, my sponsor just turned into Dr. Phil,” Dan said.

“Is your life better? Better than it was when you showed up here fresh off the bus with your ass dragging and your eyes bleeding?”

“You know it is. Better than I ever could have imagined.”

“Then think about sharing it with somebody. All I’m saying.”

“I’ll make a note of it. Now can we discuss other things? The Red Sox, maybe?”

“I need to ask you something else as your sponsor first. Then we can just be friends again, having a coffee.”

“Okay…” Dan looked at him warily.

“We’ve never talked much about what you do at the hospice. How you help people.”

“No,” Dan said, “and I’d just as soon keep it that way. You know what they say at the end of every meeting, right? ‘What you saw here, what you heard here, when you leave here, let it stay here.’ That’s how I am about the other part of my life.”

“How many parts of your life were affected by your drinking?”

Dan sighed. “You know the answer to that. All of them.”

“So?” And when Dan said nothing: “The Rivington staff calls you Doctor Sleep. Word gets around, Danno.”

Dan was silent. Some of the pudding was left, and Patty would rag him about it if he didn’t eat it, but his appetite had flown. He supposed he’d known this conversation had been coming, and he also knew that, after ten years without a drink (and with a pigeon or two of his own to watch over these days), Casey would respect his boundaries, but he still didn’t want to have it.

“You help people to die. Not by putting pillows over their faces, or anything, nobody thinks that, but just by… I don’t know. Nobody seems to know.”

“I sit with them, that’s all. Talk to them a little. If it’s what they want.”

“Do you work the Steps, Danno?”

If Dan had believed this was a new conversational tack he would have welcomed it, but he knew it was not. “You know I do. You’re my sponsor.”

“Yeah, you ask for help in the morning and say thanks at night. You do it on your knees. So that’s the first three. Four is all that moral inventory shit. How about number five?”

There were twelve in all. After hearing them read aloud at the beginning of every meeting he’d attended, Dan knew them by heart. “‘Admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.’”

“Yuh.” Casey lifted his coffee cup, sipped, and looked at Dan over the rim. “Have you done that one?”

“Most of it.” Dan found himself wishing he were somewhere else. Almost anywhere else. Also—for the first time in quite awhile—he found himself wishing for a drink.

“Let me guess. You’ve told yourself all of your wrongs, and you’ve told the God of your not-understanding all of your wrongs, and you’ve told one other person—that would be me—most of your wrongs. Would that be a bingo?”

Dan said nothing.

“Here’s what I think,” Casey said, “and you’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong. Steps eight and nine are about cleaning up the wreckage we left behind when we were drunk on our asses pretty much twenty-four/seven. I think at least part of your work at the hospice, the important part, is about making those amends. And I think there’s one wrong you can’t quite get past because you’re too fucking ashamed to talk about it. If that’s the case, you wouldn’t be the first, believe me.”

Dan thought: Mama.

Dan thought: Canny.

He saw the red wallet and the pathetic wad of food stamps. He also saw a little money. Seventy dollars, enough for a four-day drunk. Five if it was parceled out carefully and food was kept to a bare nutritional minimum. He saw the money first in his hand and then going into his pocket. He saw the kid in the Braves shirt and the sagging diaper.

He thought: The kid’s name was Tommy.

He thought, not for the first time or the last: I will never speak of this.

“Danno? Is there anything you want to tell me? I think there is. I don’t know how long you’ve been dragging the motherfucker around, but you can leave it with me and walk out of here a hundred pounds lighter. That’s how it works.”

He thought of how the kid had trotted to his mother

(Deenie her name was Deenie)

and how, even deep in her drunken slumber, she had put an arm around him and hugged him close. They had been face-to-face in the morning sun shafting through the bedroom’s dirty window.

“There’s nothing,” he said.

“Let it go, Dan. I’m telling you that as your friend as well as your sponsor.”

Dan gazed at the other man steadily and said nothing.

Casey sighed. “How many meetings have you been at where someone said you’re only as sick as your secrets? A hundred? Probably a thousand. Of all the old AA chestnuts, that’s just about the oldest.”

Dan said nothing.

“We all have a bottom,” Casey said. “Someday you’re going to have to tell somebody about yours. If you don’t, somewhere down the line you’re going to find yourself in a bar with a drink in your hand.”

“Message received,” Dan said. “Now can we talk about the Red Sox?”

Casey looked at his watch. “Another time. I’ve got to get home.”

Right, Dan thought. To your dog and your goldfish.

“Okay.” He grabbed the check before Casey could. “Another time.”

When Dan got back to his turret room, he looked at his blackboard for a long time before slowly erasing what was written there:

When the board was blank again, he asked, “What baseball boy would that be?”

No answer.

“Abra? Are you still here?”

No. But she had been; if he’d come back from his uncomfortable coffee meeting with Casey ten minutes earlier, he might have seen her phantom shape. But had she come for him? Dan didn’t think so. It was undeniably crazy, but he thought she might have come for Tony. Who had been his invisible friend, once upon a time. The one who sometimes brought visions. The one who sometimes warned. The one who had turned out to be a deeper and wiser version of himself.

For the scared little boy trying to survive in the Overlook Hotel, Tony had been a protective older brother. The irony was that now, with the booze behind him, Daniel Anthony Torrance had become an authentic adult and Tony was still a kid. Maybe even the fabled inner child the New Age gurus were always going on about. Dan felt sure that inner-child stuff was brought into service to excuse a lot of selfish and destructive behavior (what Casey liked to call the Gotta-Have-It-Now Syndrome), but he also had no doubt that grown men and women held every stage of their development somewhere in their brains—not just the inner child, but the inner infant, the inner teenager, and the inner young adult. And if the mysterious Abra came to him, wasn’t it natural that she’d hunt past his adult mind, looking for someone her own age?

A playmate?

A protector, even?

If so, it was a job Tony had done before. But did she need protection? Certainly there had been anguish

(they are killing the baseball boy)

in her message, but anguish went naturally with the shining, as Dan had found out long ago. Mere children were not meant to know and see so much. He could seek her out, maybe try to discover more, but what would he say to the parents? Hi, you don’t know me, but I know your daughter, she visits my room sometimes and we’ve gotten to be pretty good pals?

Dan didn’t think they’d sic the county sheriff on him, but he wouldn’t blame them if they did, and given his checkered past, he had no urge to find out. Better to let Tony be her long-distance friend, if that was what was really going on. Tony might be invisible, but at least he was more or less age-appropriate.

Later, he could replace the names and room numbers that belonged on his blackboard. For now he picked the stub of chalk out of the ledge and wrote: Tony and I wish you a happy summer day, Abra! Your OTHER friend, Dan.

He studied this for a moment, nodded, and went to the window. A beautiful late summer afternoon, and still his day off. He decided to go for a walk and try to get the troubling conversation with Casey out of his mind. Yes, he supposed Deenie’s apartment in Wilmington had been his bottom, but if keeping to himself what had happened there hadn’t stopped him from piling up ten years of sobriety, he didn’t see why keeping it to himself should stop him from getting another ten. Or twenty. And why think about years anyway, when the AA motto was one day at a time?

Wilmington was a long time ago. That part of his life was done.

He locked his room when he left, as he always did, but a lock wouldn’t keep the mysterious Abra out if she wanted to visit. When he came back, there might be another message from her on the blackboard.

Maybe we can become pen pals.

Sure, and maybe a cabal of Victoria’s Secret lingerie models would crack the secret of hydrogen fusion.

Grinning, Dan went out.

The Anniston Public Library was having its annual summer book sale, and when Abra asked to go, Lucy was delighted to put aside her afternoon chores and walk down to Main Street with her daughter. Card tables loaded with various donated volumes had been set up on the lawn, and while Lucy browsed the paperback table ($1 EACH, 6 FOR $5, YOU PICK ’EM), looking for Jodi Picoults she hadn’t read, Abra checked out the selections on the tables marked YOUNG ADULTS. She was still a long way from adulthood of even the youngest sort, but she was a voracious (and precocious) reader with a particular love of fantasy and science fiction. Her favorite t-shirt had a huge, complicated machine on the front above the declaration STEAMPUNK RULES.

Just as Lucy was deciding she’d have to settle for an old Dean Koontz and a slightly newer Lisa Gardner, Abra came running over to her. She was smiling. “Mom! Mommy! His name is Dan!”

“Whose name is Dan, sweetheart?”

“Tony’s father! He told me to have a happy summer day!”

Lucy looked around, almost expecting to see a strange man with a boy Abra’s age in tow. There were plenty of strangers—it was summer, after all—but no pairs like that.

Abra saw what she was doing and giggled. “Oh, he’s not here.”

“Then where is he?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But close.”

“Well… I guess that’s good, hon.”

Lucy had just enough time to tousle her daughter’s hair before Abra ran back to renew her hunt for rocketeers, time travelers, and sorcerers. Lucy stood watching her, her own choices hanging forgotten in her hand. Tell David about this when he called from Boston, or not? She thought not.

Weird radio, that was all.

Better to let it pass.

Dan decided to pop into Java Express, buy a couple of coffees, and take one to Billy Freeman over in Teenytown. Although Dan’s employment by the Frazier Municipal Department had been extremely short, the two men had remained friendly over the last ten years. Part of that was having Casey in common—Billy’s boss, Dan’s sponsor—but mostly it was simple liking. Dan enjoyed Billy’s no-bullshit attitude.

He also enjoyed driving The Helen Rivington. Probably that inner-child thing again; he was sure a psychiatrist would say so. Billy was usually willing to turn over the controls, and during the summer season he often did so with relief. Between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, the Riv made the ten-mile loop out to Cloud Gap and back ten times a day, and Billy wasn’t getting any younger.

As he crossed the lawn to Cranmore Avenue, Dan spied Fred Carling sitting on a shady bench in the walkway between Rivington House proper and Rivington Two. The orderly who had once left a set of fingermarks on poor old Charlie Hayes still worked the night shift, and was as lazy and ill-tempered as ever, but he had at least learned to stay clear of Doctor Sleep. That was fine with Dan.

Carling, soon to go on shift, had a grease-spotted McDonald’s bag on his lap and was munching a Big Mac. The two men locked eyes for a moment. Neither said hello. Dan thought Fred Carling was a lazy bastard with a sadistic streak and Carling thought Dan was a holier-than-thou meddler, so that balanced. As long as they stayed out of each other’s way, all would be well and all would be well and all manner of things would be well.

Dan got the coffees (Billy’s with four sugars), then crossed to the common, which was busy in the golden early-evening light. Frisbees soared. Mothers and dads pushed toddlers on swings or caught them as they flew off the slides. A game was in progress on the softball field, kids from the Frazier YMCA against a team with ANNISTON REC DEPARTMENT on their orange shirts. He spied Billy in the train station, standing on a stool and polishing the Riv’s chrome. It all looked good. It looked like home.

If it isn’t, Dan thought, it’s as close as I’m ever going to get. All I need now is a wife named Sally, a kid named Pete, and a dog named Rover.

He strolled up the Teenytown version of Cranmore Avenue and into the shade of Teenytown Station. “Hey Billy, I brought you some of that coffee-flavored sugar you like.”

At the sound of his voice, the first person to offer Dan a friendly word in the town of Frazier turned around. “Why, ain’t you the neighborly one. I was just thinking I could use—oh shitsky, there it goes.”

The cardboard tray had dropped from Danny’s hands. He felt warmth as hot coffee splattered his tennis shoes, but it seemed faraway, unimportant.

There were flies crawling on Billy Freeman’s face.

Billy didn’t want to go see Casey Kingsley the following morning, didn’t want to take the day off, and certainly didn’t want to go see no doctor. He kept telling Dan he felt fine, in the pink, absolutely tip-top. He’d even missed the summer cold that usually hit him in June or July.

Dan, however, had lain sleepless most of the previous night, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He might have if he’d been convinced it was too late, but he didn’t think it was. He had seen the flies before, and had learned to gauge their meaning. A swarm of them—enough to obscure the person’s features behind a veil of nasty, jostling bodies—and you knew there was no hope. A dozen or so meant something might be done. Only a few, and there was time. There had only been three or four on Billy’s face.

He never saw any at all on the faces of the terminal patients in the hospice.

Dan remembered visiting his mother nine months before her death, on a day when she had also claimed to feel fine, in the pink, absolutely tickety-boo. What are you looking at, Danny? Wendy Torrance had asked. Have I got a smudge? She had swiped comically at the tip of her nose, her fingers passing right through the hundreds of deathflies that were covering her from chin to hairline, like a caul.

Casey was used to mediating. Fond of irony, he liked to tell people it was why he made that enormous six-figure annual salary.

First he listened to Dan. Then he listened to Billy’s protests about how there was no way he could leave, not at the height of the season with people already lining up to ride the Riv on its 8 a.m. run. Besides, no doctor would see him on such short notice. It was the height of the season for them, too.

“When’s the last time you had a checkup?” Casey asked once Billy finally ran down. Dan and Billy were standing in front of his desk. Casey was rocked back in his office chair, head resting in its accustomed place just below the cross on the wall, fingers laced together across his belly.

Billy looked defensive. “I guess back in oh-six. But I was fine then, Case. Doc said my blood pressure was ten points lower’n his.”

Casey’s eyes shifted to Dan. They held speculation and curiosity but no disbelief. AA members mostly kept their lips zipped during their various interactions with the wider world, but inside the groups, people talked—and sometimes gossiped—quite freely. Casey therefore knew that Dan Torrance’s talent for helping terminal patients die easily was not his only talent. According to the grapevine, Dan T. had certain helpful insights from time to time. The kind that can’t exactly be explained.

“You’re tight with Johnny Dalton, aren’t you?” he asked Dan now. “The pediatrician?”

“Yes. I see him most Thursday nights, in North Conway.”

“Got his number?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Dan had a whole list of AA contact numbers in the back of the little notebook Casey had given him, which he still carried.

“Call him. Tell him it’s important this yobbo here sees someone right away. Don’t suppose you know what kind of a doctor it is he needs, do you? Sure as hell isn’t a pediatrician at his age.”

“Casey—” Billy began.

“Hush,” Casey said, and returned his attention to Dan. “I think you do know, by God. Is it his lungs? That seems the most likely, the way he smokes.”

Dan decided he had come too far to turn back now. He sighed and said, “No, I think it’s something in his guts.”

“Except for a little indigestion, my guts are—”

“Hush I said.” Then, turning back to Dan: “A gut doctor, then. Tell Johnny D. it’s important.” He paused. “Will he believe you?”

This was a question Dan was glad to hear. He had helped several AAs during his time in New Hampshire, and although he asked them all not to talk, he knew perfectly well that some had, and still did. He was happy to know John Dalton hadn’t been one of them.

“I think so.”

“Okay.” Casey pointed at Billy. “You got the day off, and with pay. Medical leave.”

“The Riv—”

“There’s a dozen people in this town that can drive the Riv. I’ll make some calls, then take the first two runs myself.”

“Your bad hip—”

“Balls to my bad hip. Do me good to get out of this office.”

“But Casey, I feel f—”

“I don’t care if you feel good enough to run a footrace all the way to Lake Winnipesaukee. You’re going to see the doctor and that’s the end of it.”

Billy looked resentfully at Dan. “See the trouble you got me in? I didn’t even get my morning coffee.”

The flies were gone this morning—except they were still there. Dan knew that if he concentrated, he could see them again if he wanted to… but who in Christ’s name would want to?

“I know,” Dan said. “There is no gravity, life just sucks. Can I use your phone, Casey?”

“Be my guest.” Casey stood up. “Guess I’ll toddle on over to the train station and punch a few tickets. You got an engineer’s cap that’ll fit me, Billy?”

“No.”

“Mine will,” Dan said.

For an organization that didn’t advertise its presence, sold no goods, and supported itself with crumpled dollar bills thrown into passed baskets or baseball caps, Alcoholics Anonymous exerted a quietly powerful influence that stretched far beyond the doors of the various rented halls and church basements where it did its business. It wasn’t the old boys’ network, Dan thought, but the old drunks’ network.

He called John Dalton, and John called an internal medicine specialist named Greg Fellerton. Fellerton wasn’t in the Program, but he owed Johnny D. a favor. Dan didn’t know why, and didn’t care. All that mattered was that later that day, Billy Freeman was on the examining table in Fellerton’s Lewiston office. Said office was a seventy-mile drive from Frazier, and Billy bitched the whole way.

“Are you sure indigestion’s all that’s been bothering you?” Dan asked as they pulled into Fellerton’s little parking area on Pine Street.

“Yuh,” Billy said. Then he reluctantly added, “It’s been a little worse lately, but nothin that keeps me up at night.”

Liar, Dan thought, but let it pass. He’d gotten the contrary old sonofabitch here, and that was the hard part.

Dan was sitting in the waiting room, leafing through a copy of OK! with Prince William and his pretty but skinny new bride on the cover, when he heard a lusty cry of pain from down the hall. Ten minutes later, Fellerton came out and sat down beside Dan. He looked at the cover of OK! and said, “That guy may be heir to the British throne, but he’s still going to be as bald as a nine ball by the time he’s forty.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Of course I’m right. In human affairs, the only real king is genetics. I’m sending your friend up to Central Maine General for a CT scan. I’m pretty sure what it’ll show. If I’m right, I’ll schedule Mr. Freeman to see a vascular surgeon for a little cut-and-splice early tomorrow morning.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

Billy was walking up the hall, buckling his belt. His tanned face was now sallow and wet with sweat. “He says there’s a bulge in my aorta. Like a bubble on a car tire. Only car tires don’t yell when you poke em.”

“An aneurysm,” Fellerton said. “Oh, there’s a chance it’s a tumor, but I don’t think so. In any case, time’s of the essence. Damn thing’s the size of a Ping-Pong ball. It’s good you got him in for a look-see. If it had burst without a hospital nearby…” Fellerton shook his head.

The CT scan confirmed Fellerton’s aneurysm diagnosis, and by six that evening, Billy was in a hospital bed, where he looked considerably diminished. Dan sat beside him.

“I’d kill for a cigarette,” Billy said wistfully.

“Can’t help you there.”

Billy sighed. “High time I quit, anyway. Won’t they be missin you at Rivington House?”

“Day off.”

“And ain’t this one hell of a way to spend it. Tell you what, if they don’t murder me with their knives and forks tomorrow morning, I guess I’m going to owe you my life. I don’t know how you knew, but if there’s anything I can ever do for you—I mean anything at all—you just have to ask.”

Dan thought of how he’d descended the steps of an interstate bus ten years ago, stepping into a snow flurry as fine as wedding lace. He thought of his delight when he had spotted the bright red locomotive that pulled The Helen Rivington. Also of how this man had asked him if he liked the little train instead of telling him to get the fuck away from what he had no business touching. Just a small kindness, but it had opened the door to all he had now.

“Billy-boy, I’m the one who owes you, and more than I could ever repay.”

He had noticed an odd fact during his years of sobriety. When things in his life weren’t going so well—the morning in 2008 when he had discovered someone had smashed in the rear window of his car with a rock came to mind—he rarely thought of a drink. When they were going well, however, the old dry thirst had a way of coming back on him. That night after saying goodbye to Billy, on the way home from Lewiston with everything okey-doke, he spied a roadhouse bar called the Cowboy Boot and felt a nearly insurmountable urge to go in. To buy a pitcher of beer and get enough quarters to fill the jukebox for at least an hour. To sit there listening to Jennings and Jackson and Haggard, not talking to anyone, not causing any trouble, just getting high. Feeling the weight of sobriety—sometimes it was like wearing lead shoes—fall away. When he got down to his last five quarters, he’d play “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” six times straight.

He passed the roadhouse, turned in at the gigantic Walmart parking lot just beyond, and opened his phone. He let his finger hover over Casey’s number, then remembered their difficult conversation in the café. Casey might want to revisit that discussion, especially the subject of whatever Dan might be holding back. That was a nonstarter.

Feeling like a man having an out-of-body experience, he returned to the roadhouse and parked in the back of the dirt lot. He felt good about this. He also felt like a man who has just picked up a loaded gun and put it to his temple. His window was open and he could hear a live band playing an old Derailers tune: “Lover’s Lie.” They didn’t sound too bad, and with a few drinks in him, they would sound great. There would be ladies in there who would want to dance. Ladies with curls, ladies with pearls, ladies in skirts, ladies in cowboy shirts. There always were. He wondered what kind of whiskey they had in the well, and God, God, great God, he was so thirsty. He opened the car door, put one foot out on the ground, then sat there with his head lowered.

Ten years. Ten good years, and he could toss them away in the next ten minutes. It would be easy enough to do. Like honey to the bee.

We all have a bottom. Someday you’re going to have to tell somebody about yours. If you don’t, somewhere down the line, you’re going to find yourself in a bar with a drink in your hand.

And I can blame you, Casey, he thought coldly. I can say you put the idea in my head while we were having coffee in the Sunspot.

There was a flashing red arrow over the door, and a sign reading PITCHERS $2 UNTIL 9 PM MILLER LITE COME ON IN.

Dan closed the car door, opened his phone again, and called John Dalton.

“Is your buddy okay?” John asked.

“Tucked up and ready to go tomorrow morning at seven a.m. John, I feel like drinking.”

“Oh, nooo!” John cried in a trembling falsetto. “Not booooze!”

And just like that the urge was gone. Dan laughed. “Okay, I needed that. But if you ever do the Michael Jackson voice again, I will drink.”

“You should hear me on ‘Billie Jean.’ I’m a karaoke monster. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” Through the windshield, Dan could see the Cowboy Boot patrons come and go, probably not talking of Michelangelo.

“Whatever you’ve got, did drinking… I don’t know… shut it up?”

“Muffled it. Put a pillow over its face and made it struggle for air.”

“And now?”

“Like Superman, I use my powers to promote truth, justice, and the American Way.”

“Meaning you don’t want to talk about it.”

“No,” Dan said. “I don’t. But it’s better now. Better than I ever thought it could be. When I was a teenager…” He trailed off. When he’d been a teenager, every day had been a struggle for sanity. The voices in his head were bad; the pictures were frequently worse. He had promised both his mother and himself that he would never drink like his father, but when he finally began, as a freshman in high school, it had been such a huge relief that he had—at first—only wished he’d started sooner. Morning hangovers were a thousand times better than nightmares all night long. All of which sort of led to a question: How much of his father’s son was he? In how many ways?

“When you were a teenager, what?” John asked.

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Listen, I better get moving. I’m sitting in a bar parking lot.”

“Really?” John sounded interested. “Which bar?”

“Place called the Cowboy Boot. It’s two-buck pitchers until nine o’clock.”

“Dan.”

“Yes, John.”

“I know that place from the old days. If you’re going to flush your life down the toilet, don’t start there. The ladies are skanks with meth-mouth and the men’s room smells like moldy jockstraps. The Boot is strictly for when you hit your bottom.”

There it was, that phrase again.

“We all have a bottom,” Dan said. “Don’t we?”

“Get out of there, Dan.” John sounded dead serious now. “Right this second. No more fucking around. And stay on the phone with me until that big neon cowboy boot on the roof is out of your rearview mirror.”

Dan started his car, pulled out of the lot, and back onto Route 11.

“It’s going,” he said. “It’s going… annnd… it’s gone.” He felt inexpressible relief. He also felt bitter regret—how many two-buck pitchers could he have gotten through before nine o’clock?

“Not going to pick up a six or a bottle of wine before you get back to Frazier, are you?”

“No. I’m good.”

“Then I’ll see you Thursday night. Come early, I’m making the coffee. Folgers, from my special stash.”

“I’ll be there,” Dan said.

When he got back to his turret room and flipped on the light, there was a new message on the blackboard.

“That’s good, honey,” Dan said. “I’m glad.”

Buzz. The intercom. He went over and hit TALK.

“Hey there, Doctor Sleep,” Loretta Ames said. “I thought I saw you come in. I guess it’s still technically your day off, but do you want to pay a house call?”

“On who? Mr. Cameron or Mr. Murray?”

“Cameron. Azzie’s been visiting with him since just after dinner.”

Ben Cameron was in Rivington One. Second floor. An eighty-three-year-old retired accountant with congestive heart failure. Hell of a nice guy. Good Scrabble player and an absolute pest at Parcheesi, always setting up blockades that drove his opponents crazy.

“I’ll be right over,” Dan said. On his way out, he paused for a single backward glance at the blackboard. “Goodnight, hon,” he said.

He didn’t hear from Abra Stone for another two years.

During those same two years, something slept in the True Knot’s bloodstream. A little parting gift from Bradley Trevor, aka the baseball boy.