Doctor Sleep

^{CHAPTER SEVEN} “HAVE YOU SEEN ME?”

On an August morning in 2013, Concetta Reynolds awoke early in her Boston condo apartment. As always, the first thing she was aware of was that there was no dog curled up in the corner, by the dresser. Betty had been gone for years now, but Chetta still missed her. She put on her robe and headed for the kitchen, where she intended to make her morning coffee. This was a trip she had made thousands of times before, and she had no reason to believe this one would be any different. Certainly it never crossed her mind to think it would prove to be the first link in a chain of malignant events. She didn’t stumble, she would tell her granddaughter, Lucy, later that day, nor did she bump into anything. She just heard an unimportant snapping sound from about halfway down her body on the right-hand side and then she was on the floor with warm agony rushing up and down her leg.

She lay there for three minutes or so, staring at her faint reflection in the polished hardwood floor, willing the pain to subside. At the same time she talked to herself. Stupid old woman, not to have a companion. David’s been telling you for the last five years that you’re too old to live alone and now he’ll never let you hear the end of it.

But a live-in companion would have needed the room she’d set aside for Lucy and Abra, and Chetta lived for their visits. More than ever, now that Betty was gone and all the poetry seemed to be written out of her. And ninety-seven or not, she’d been getting around well and feeling fine. Good genes on the female side. Hadn’t her own momo buried four husbands and seven children and lived to be a hundred and two?

Although, truth be told (if only to herself), she hadn’t felt quite so fine this summer. This summer things had been… difficult.

When the pain finally did abate—a bit—she began crawling down the short hall toward the kitchen, which was now filling up with dawn. She found it was harder to appreciate that lovely rose light from floor level. Each time the pain became too great, she stopped with her head laid on one bony arm, panting. During these rest stops she reflected on the seven ages of man, and how they described a perfect (and perfectly stupid) circle. This had been her mode of locomotion long ago, during the fourth year of World War I, also known as—how funny—the War to End All Wars. Then she had been Concetta Abruzzi, crawling across the dooryard of her parents’ farm in Davoli, intent on capturing chickens that easily outpaced her. From those dusty beginnings she had gone on to lead a fruitful and interesting life. She had published twenty books of poetry, taken tea with Graham Greene, dined with two presidents, and—best of all—had been gifted with a lovely, brilliant, and strangely talented great-granddaughter. And what did all those wonderful things lead to?

More crawling, that was what. Back to the beginning. Dio mi benedica.

She reached the kitchen and eeled her way through an oblong of sun to the little table where she took most of her meals. Her cell phone was on it. Chetta grabbed one leg of the table and shook it until her phone slid to the edge and dropped off. And, meno male, landed unbroken. She punched in the number they told you to call when shit like this happened, then waited while a recorded voice summed up all the absurdity of the twenty-first century by telling her that her call was being recorded.

And finally, praise Mary, an actual human voice.

“This is 911, what is your emergency?”

The woman on the floor who had once crawled after the chickens in southern Italy spoke clearly and coherently in spite of the pain. “My name is Concetta Reynolds, and I live on the third floor of a condominium at Two nineteen Marlborough Street. I seem to have broken my hip. Can you send an ambulance?”

“Is there anyone with you, Mrs. Reynolds?”

“For my sins, no. You’re speaking to a stupid old lady who insisted she was fine to live alone. And by the way, these days I prefer Ms.”

Lucy got the call from her grandmother shortly before Concetta was wheeled into surgery. “I’ve broken my hip, but they can fix it,” she told Lucy. “I believe they put in pins and such.”

“Momo, did you fall?” Lucy’s first thought was for Abra, who was away at summer camp for another week.

“Oh yes, but the break that caused the fall was completely spontaneous. Apparently this is quite common in people my age, and since there are ever so many more people my age than there used to be, the doctors see a lot of it. There’s no need for you to come immediately, but I think you’ll want to come quite soon. It seems that we’ll need to have a talk about various arrangements.”

Lucy felt a coldness in the pit of her stomach. “What sort of arrangements?”

Now that she was loaded with Valium or morphine or whatever it was they’d given her, Concetta felt quite serene. “It seems that a broken hip is the least of my problems.” She explained. It didn’t take long. She finished by saying, “Don’t tell Abra, cara. I’ve had dozens of emails from her, even an actual letter, and it sounds like she’s enjoying her summer camp a great deal. Time enough later for her to find her old momo’s circling the drain.”

Lucy thought, If you really believe I’ll have to tell her—

“I can guess what you’re thinking without being psychic, amore, but maybe this time bad news will give her a miss.”

“Maybe,” Lucy said.

She had barely hung up when the phone rang. “Mom? Mommy?” It was Abra, and she was crying. “I want to come home. Momo’s got cancer and I want to come home.”

Following her early return from Camp Tapawingo in Maine, Abra got an idea of what it would be like to shuttle between divorced parents. She and her mother spent the last two weeks of August and the first week of September in Chetta’s Marlborough Street condo. The old woman had come through her hip surgery quite nicely, and had decided against a longer hospital stay, or any sort of treatment for the pancreatic cancer the doctors had discovered.

“No pills, no chemotherapy. Ninety-seven years are enough. As for you, Lucia, I refuse to allow you to spend the next six months bringing me meals and pills and the bedpan. You have a family, and I can afford round-the-clock care.”

“You’re not going to live the end of your life among strangers,” Lucy said, speaking in her she-who-must-be-obeyed voice. It was the one both Abra and her father knew not to argue with. Not even Concetta could do that.

There was no discussion about Abra staying; on September ninth, she was scheduled to start the eighth grade at Anniston Middle School. It was David Stone’s sabbatical year, which he was using to write a book comparing the Roaring Twenties to the Go-Go Sixties, and so—like a good many of the girls with whom she’d gone to Camp Tap—Abra shuttled from one parent to the other. During the week, she was with her father. On the weekends, she shipped down to Boston, to be with her mom and Momo. She thought that things could not get worse… but they always can, and often do.

Although he was working at home now, David Stone never bothered to walk down the driveway and get the mail. He claimed the U.S. Postal Service was a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that had ceased to have any relevance around the turn of the century. Every now and then a package turned up, sometimes books he’d ordered to help with his work, more often something Lucy had ordered from a catalogue, but otherwise he claimed it was all junkola.

When Lucy was home, she retrieved the post from the mailbox by the gate and looked the stuff over while she had her mid-morning coffee. It was mostly crap, and it went directly into what Dave called the Circular File. But she wasn’t home that early September, so it was Abra—now the nominal woman of the house—who checked the box when she got off the school bus. She also washed the dishes, did a load of laundry for herself and her dad twice a week, and set the Roomba robo-vac going, if she remembered. She did these chores without complaint because she knew that her mother was helping Momo and that her father’s book was very important. He said this one was POPULAR instead of ACADEMIC. If it was successful, he might be able to stop teaching and write full-time, at least for awhile.

On this day, the seventeenth of September, the mailbox contained a Walmart circular, a postcard announcing the opening of a new dental office in town (WE GUARANTEE MILES OF SMILES!), and two glossy come-ons from local Realtors selling time shares at the Mount Thunder ski resort.

There was also a local bulk-mail rag called The Anniston Shopper. This had a few wire-service stories on the front two pages and a few local stories (heavy on regional sports) in the middle. The rest was ads and coupons. If she had been home, Lucy would have saved a few of these latter and then tossed the rest of the Shopper into the recycling bin. Her daughter would never have seen it. On this day, with Lucy away in Boston, Abra did.

She thumbed through it as she idled her way up the driveway, then turned it over. On the back page there were forty or fifty photographs not much bigger than postage stamps, most in color, a few in black and white. Above them was this heading:

For a moment Abra thought it was some sort of contest, like a scavenger hunt. Then she realized these were missing children, and it was as if a hand had grasped the soft lining of her stomach and squeezed it like a washcloth. She had bought a three-pack of Oreos in the caf at lunch, and had saved them for the bus ride home. Now she seemed to feel them being wadded up toward her throat by that clutching hand.

Don’t look at it if it bothers you, she told herself. It was the stern and lecturely voice she often employed when she was upset or confused (a Momo-voice, although she had never consciously realized this). Just toss it in the garage trashcan with the rest of this gluck. Only she seemed unable not to look at it.

Here was Cynthia Abelard, DOB June 9, 2005. After a moment’s thought, Abra realized DOB stood for date of birth. So Cynthia would be eight now. If she was still alive, that is. She had been missing since 2009. How does somebody lose track of a four-year-old? Abra wondered. She must have really crappy parents. But of course, the parents probably hadn’t lost her. Probably some weirdo had been cruising around the neighborhood, seen his chance, and stolen her.

Here was Merton Askew, DOB September 4, 1998. He had disappeared in 2010.

Here, halfway down the page, was a beautiful little Hispanic girl named Angel Barbera, who had disappeared from her Kansas City home at the age of seven and had already been gone for nine years. Abra wondered if her parents really thought this tiny picture would help them get her back. And if they did, would they still even know her? For that matter, would she know them?

Get rid of that thing, the Momo-voice said. You’ve got enough to worry about without looking at a lot of missing ki—

Her eyes found a picture in the very bottom row, and a little sound escaped her. Probably it was a moan. At first she didn’t even know why, although she almost did; it was like how you sometimes knew the word you wanted to use in an English composition but you still couldn’t quite get it, the damn thing just sat there on the tip of your tongue.

This photo was of a white kid with short hair and a great big goofy-ass grin. It looked like he had freckles on his cheeks. The picture was too small to tell for sure, but

(they’re freckles you know they are)

Abra was somehow sure, anyway. Yes, they were freckles and his big brothers had teased him about them and his mother told him they would go away in time.

“She told him freckles are good luck,” Abra whispered.

Bradley Trevor, DOB March 2, 2000. Missing since July 12, 2011. Race: Caucasian. Location: Bankerton, Iowa. Current Age: 13. And below this—below all these pictures of mostly smiling children: If you think you have seen Bradley Trevor, contact The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Only no one was going to contact them about Bradley, because no one was going to see him. His current age wasn’t thirteen, either. Bradley Trevor had stopped at eleven. He had stopped like a busted wristwatch that shows the same time twenty-four hours a day. Abra found herself wondering if freckles faded underground.

“The baseball boy,” she whispered.

There were flowers lining the driveway. Abra leaned over, hands on her knees, pack all at once far too heavy on her back, and threw up her Oreos and the undigested portion of her school lunch into her mother’s asters. When she was sure she wasn’t going to puke a second time, she went into the garage and tossed the mail into the trash. All the mail.

Her father was right, it was junkola.

The door of the little room her dad used as his study was open, and when Abra stopped at the kitchen sink for a glass of water to rinse the sour-chocolate taste of used Oreos out of her mouth, she heard the keyboard of his computer clicking steadily away. That was good. When it slowed down or stopped completely, he had a tendency to be grumpy. Also, he was more apt to notice her. Today she didn’t want to be noticed.

“Abba-Doo, is that you?” her father half sang.

Ordinarily she would have asked him to please stop using that baby name, but not today. “Yup, it’s me.”

“School go okay?”

The steady click-click-click had stopped. Please don’t come out here, Abra prayed. Don’t come out and look at me and ask me why I’m so pale or something.

“Fine. How’s the book?”

“Having a great day,” he said. “Writing about the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Vo-doe-dee-oh-doe.” Whatever that meant. The important thing was the click-click-click started up again. Thank God.

“Terrific,” she said, rinsing her glass and putting it in the drainer. “I’m going upstairs to start my homework.”

“That’s my girl. Think Harvard in ’18.”

“Okay, Dad.” And maybe she would. Anything to keep herself from thinking about Bankerton, Iowa, in ’11.

Only she couldn’t stop.

Because.

Because what? Because why? Because… well…

Because there are things I can do.

She IM’ed with Jessica for awhile, but then Jessica went to the mall in North Conway to have dinner at Panda Garden with her parents, so Abra opened her social studies book. She meant to go to chapter four, a majorly boresome twenty pages titled “How Our Government Works,” but instead the book had fallen open to chapter five: “Your Responsibilities As a Citizen.”

Oh God, if there was a word she didn’t want to see this afternoon, it was responsibilities. She went into the bathroom for another glass of water because her mouth still tasted blick and found herself staring at her own freckles in the mirror. There were exactly three, one on her left cheek and two on her schnozz. Not bad. She had lucked out in the freckles department. Nor did she have a birthmark, like Bethany Stevens, or a cocked eye like Norman McGinley, or a stutter like Ginny Whitlaw, or a horrible name like poor picked-on Pence Effersham. Abra was a little strange, of course, but Abra was fine, people thought it was interesting instead of just weird, like Pence, who was known among the boys (but girls always somehow found these things out) as Pence the Penis.

And the biggie, I didn’t get cut apart by crazy people who paid no attention when I screamed and begged them to stop. I didn’t have to see some of the crazy people licking my blood off the palms of their hands before I died. Abba-Doo is one lucky ducky.

But maybe not such a lucky ducky after all. Lucky duckies didn’t know things they had no business knowing.

She closed the lid of the toilet, sat on it, and cried quietly with her hands over her face. Being forced to think of Bradley Trevor again and how he died was bad enough, but it wasn’t just him. There were all those other kids to think about, so many pictures that they were crammed together on the last page of the Shopper like the school assembly from hell. All those gap-toothed smiles and all those eyes that knew even less of the world than Abra did herself, and what did she know? Not even “How Our Government Works.”

What did the parents of those missing children think? How did they go on with their lives? Was Cynthia or Merton or Angel the first thing they thought about in the morning and the last thing they thought about at night? Did they keep their rooms ready for them in case they came home, or did they give all their clothes and toys away to the Goodwill? Abra had heard that was what Lennie O’Meara’s parents did after Lennie fell out of a tree and hit his head on a rock and died. Lennie O’Meara, who got as far as the fifth grade and then just… stopped. But of course Lennie’s parents knew he was dead, there was a grave where they could go and put flowers, and maybe that made it different. Maybe not, but Abra thought it would. Because otherwise you’d pretty much have to wonder, wouldn’t you? Like when you were eating breakfast, you’d wonder if your missing

(Cynthia Merton Angel)

was also eating breakfast somewhere, or flying a kite, or picking oranges with a bunch of migrants, or whatever. In the back of your mind you’d have to be pretty sure he or she was dead, that’s what happened to most of them (you only had to watch Action News at Six to know), but you couldn’t be sure.

There was nothing she could do about that uncertainty for the parents of Cynthia Abelard or Merton Askew or Angel Barbera, she had no idea what had happened to them, but that wasn’t true of Bradley Trevor.

She had almost forgotten him, then that stupid newspaper… those stupid pictures… and the stuff that had come back to her, stuff she didn’t even know she knew, as if the pictures had been startled out of her subconscious…

And those things she could do. Things she had never told her parents about because it would worry them, the way she guessed it would worry them if they knew she had made out with Bobby Flannagan—just a little, no sucking face or anything gross like that—one day after school. That was something they wouldn’t want to know. Abra guessed (and about this she wasn’t entirely wrong, although there was no telepathy involved) that in her parents’ minds, she was sort of frozen at eight and would probably stay that way at least until she got boobs, which she sure hadn’t yet—not that you’d notice, anyway.

So far they hadn’t even had THE TALK with her. Julie Vandover said it was almost always your mom who gave you the lowdown, but the only lowdown Abra had gotten lately was on how important it was for her to get the trash out on Thursday mornings before the bus came. “We don’t ask you to do many chores,” Lucy had said, “and this fall it’s especially important for all of us to pitch in.”

Momo had at least approached THE TALK. In the spring, she had taken Abra aside one day and said, “Do you know what boys want from girls, once boys and girls get to be about your age?”

“Sex, I guess,” Abra had said… although all that humble, scurrying Pence Effersham ever seemed to want was one of her cookies, or to borrow a quarter for the vending machines, or to tell her how many times he’d seen The Avengers.

Momo had nodded. “You can’t blame human nature, it is what it is, but don’t give it to them. Period. End of discussion. You can rethink things when you’re nineteen, if you want.”

That had been a little embarrassing, but at least it was straight and clear. There was nothing clear about the thing in her head. That was her birthmark, invisible but real. Her parents no longer talked about the crazy shit that had happened when she was little. Maybe they thought the thing that had caused that stuff was almost gone. Sure, she’d known Momo was sick, but that wasn’t the same as the crazy piano music, or turning on the water in the bathroom, or the birthday party (which she barely remembered) when she had hung spoons all over the kitchen ceiling. She had just learned to control it. Not completely, but mostly.

And it had changed. Now she rarely saw things before they happened. Or take moving stuff around. When she was six or seven, she could have concentrated on her pile of schoolbooks and lifted them all the way to the ceiling. Nothing to it. Easy as knitting kitten-britches, as Momo liked to say. Now, even if it was only a single book, she could concentrate until it felt like her brains were going to come splooshing out her ears, and she might only be able to shove it a few inches across her desk. That was on a good day. On many, she couldn’t even flutter the pages.

But there were other things she could do, and in many cases far better than she’d been able to as a little kid. Looking into people’s heads, for instance. She couldn’t do it with everyone—some people were entirely enclosed, others only gave off intermittent flashes—but many people were like windows with the curtains pulled back. She could look in anytime she felt like it. Mostly she didn’t want to, because the things she discovered were sometimes sad and often shocking. Finding out that Mrs. Moran, her beloved sixth-grade teacher, was having AN AFFAIR had been the biggest mind-blower so far, and not in a good way.

These days she mostly kept the seeing part of her mind shut down. Learning to do that had been difficult at first, like learning to skate backwards or print with her left hand, but she had learned. Practice didn’t make perfect (not yet, at least), but it sure helped. She still sometimes looked, but always tentatively, ready to pull back at the first sign of something weird or disgusting. And she never peeked into her parents’ minds, or into Momo’s. It would have been wrong. Probably it was wrong with everyone, but it was like Momo herself had said: You can’t blame human nature, and there was nothing more human than curiosity.

Sometimes she could make people do things. Not everyone, not even half of everyone, but a lot of people were very open to suggestions. (Probably they were the same ones who thought the stuff they sold on TV really would take away their wrinkles or make their hair grow back.) Abra knew this was a talent that could grow if she exercised it like a muscle, but she didn’t. It scared her.

There were other things, too, some for which she had no name, but the one she was thinking about now did have one. She called it far-seeing. Like the other aspects of her special talent, it came and went, but if she really wanted it—and if she had an object to fix upon—she could usually summon it.

I could do that now.

“Shut up, Abba-Doo,” she said in a low, strained voice. “Shut up, Abba-Doo-Doo.”

She opened Early Algebra to tonight’s homework page, which she had bookmarked with a sheet on which she had written the names Boyd, Steve, Cam, and Pete at least twenty times each. Collectively they were ’Round Here, her favorite boy band. So hot, especially Cam. Her best friend, Emma Deane, thought so, too. Those blue eyes, that careless tumble of blond hair.

Maybe I could help. His parents would be sad, but at least they’d know.

“Shut up, Abba-Doo. Shut up, Abba-Doo-Doo-For-Brains.”

If 5x - 4 = 26, what does x equal?

“Sixty zillion!” she said. “Who cares?”

Her eyes fell on the names of the cute boys in ’Round Here, written in the pudgy cursive she and Emma affected (“Writing looks more romantic that way,” Emma had decreed), and all at once they looked stupid and babyish and all wrong. They cut him up and licked his blood and then they did something even worse to him. In a world where something like that could happen, mooning over a boy band seemed worse than wrong.

Abra slammed her book shut, went downstairs (the click-click-click from her dad’s study continued unabated) and out to the garage. She retrieved the Shopper from the trash, brought it up to her room, and smoothed it flat on her desk.

All those faces, but right now she cared about only one.

Her heart was thumping hard-hard-hard. She had been scared before when she consciously tried to far-see or thought-read, but never scared like this. Never even close.

What are you going to do if you find out?

That was a question for later, because she might not be able to. A sneaking, cowardly part of her mind hoped for that.

Abra put the first two fingers of her left hand on the picture of Bradley Trevor because her left hand was the one that saw better. She would have liked to get all her fingers on it (and if it had been an object, she would have held it), but the picture was too small. Once her fingers were on it she couldn’t even see it anymore. Except she could. She saw it very well.

Blue eyes, like Cam Knowles’s in ’Round Here. You couldn’t tell from the picture, but they were that same deep shade. She knew.

Right-handed, like me. But left-handed like me, too. It was the left hand that knew what pitch was coming next, fastball or curveb—

Abra gave a little gasp. The baseball boy had known things.

The baseball boy really had been like her.

Yes, that’s right. That’s why they took him.

She closed her eyes and saw his face. Bradley Trevor. Brad, to his friends. The baseball boy. Sometimes he turned his cap around because that way it was a rally cap. His father was a farmer. His mother cooked pies and sold them at a local restaurant, also at the family farmstand. When his big brother went away to college, Brad took all his AC/DC discs. He and his best friend, Al, especially liked the song “Big Balls.” They’d sit on Brad’s bed and sing it together and laugh and laugh.

He walked through the corn and a man was waiting for him. Brad thought he was a nice man, one of the good guys, because the man—

“Barry,” Abra whispered in a low voice. Behind her closed lids, her eyes moved rapidly back and forth like those of a sleeper in the grip of a vivid dream. “His name was Barry the Chunk. He fooled you, Brad. Didn’t he?”

But not just Barry. If it had been just him, Brad might have known. It had to be all of the Flashlight People working together, sending the same thought: that it would be okay to get into Barry the Chunk’s truck or camper-van or whatever it was, because Barry was good. One of the good guys. A friend.

And they took him…

Abra went deeper. She didn’t bother with what Brad had seen because he hadn’t seen anything but a gray rug. He was tied up with tape and lying facedown on the floor of whatever Barry the Chunk was driving. That was okay, though. Now that she was tuned in, she could see wider than him. She could see—

His glove. A Wilson baseball glove. And Barry the Chunk—

Then that part flew away. It might swoop back or it might not.

It was night. She could smell manure. There was a factory. Some kind of

(it’s busted)

factory. There was a whole line of vehicles going there, some small, most big, a couple of them enormous. The headlights were off in case someone was looking, but there was a three-quarters moon in the sky. Enough light to see by. They went down a potholed and bumpy tar road, they went past a water tower, they went past a shed with a broken roof, they went through a rusty gate that was standing open, they went past a sign. It went by so fast she couldn’t read it. Then the factory. A busted factory with busted smokestacks and busted windows. There was another sign and thanks to the moonlight this one she could read: NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF THE CANTON COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPT.

They were going around the back, and when they got there they were going to hurt Brad the baseball boy and go on hurting him until he was dead. Abra didn’t want to see that part so she made everything go backwards. That was a little hard, like opening a jar with a really tight cap, but she could do it. When she got back where she wanted, she let go.

Barry the Chunk liked that glove because it reminded him of when he was a little boy. That’s why he tried it on. Tried it on and smelled the oil Brad used to keep it from getting stiff and bopped his fist in the pocket a few ti—

But now things were reeling forward and she forgot about Brad’s baseball glove again.

Water tower. Shed with broken roof. Rusty gate. And then the first sign. What did it say?

Nope. Still too quick, even with the moonlight. She rewound again (now beads of sweat were standing out on her forehead) and let go. Water tower. Shed with broken roof. Get ready, here it comes. Rusty gate. Then the sign. This time she could read it, although she wasn’t sure she understood it.

Abra grabbed the sheet of notepaper on which she had curlicued all those stupid boy names and turned it over. Quickly, before she forgot, she scrawled down everything she had seen on that sign: ORGANIC INDUSTRIES and ETHANOL PLANT #4 and FREEMAN, IOWA and CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

Okay, now she knew where they had killed him, and where—she was sure—they had buried him, baseball glove and all. What next? If she called the number for Missing and Exploited Children, they would hear a little kid’s voice and pay no attention… except maybe to give her telephone number to the police, who would probably have her arrested for trying to prank on people who were already sad and unhappy. She thought of her mother next, but with Momo sick and getting ready to die, it was out of the question. Mom had enough to worry about without this.

Abra got up, went to the window, and stared out at her street, at the Lickety-Split convenience store on the corner (which the older kids called the Lickety-Spliff, because of all the dope that got smoked behind it, where the Dumpsters were), and the White Mountains poking up at a clear blue late summer sky. She had begun to rub her mouth, an anxiety tic her parents were trying to break her of, but they weren’t here, so boo on that. Boo all over that.

Dad’s right downstairs.

She didn’t want to tell him, either. Not because he had to finish his book, but because he wouldn’t want to get involved in something like this even if he believed her. Abra didn’t have to read his mind to know that.

So who?

Before she could think of the logical answer, the world beyond her window began to turn, as if it were mounted on a gigantic disc. A low cry escaped her and she clutched at the sides of the window, bunching the curtains in her fists. This had happened before, always without warning, and she was terrified each time it did, because it was like having a seizure. She was no longer in her own body, she was far-being instead of far-seeing, and what if she couldn’t get back?

The turntable slowed, then stopped. Now instead of being in her bedroom, she was in a supermarket. She knew because ahead of her was the meat counter. Over it (this sign easy to read, thanks to bright fluorescents) was a promise: AT SAM’S, EVERY CUT IS A BLUE RIBBON COWBOY CUT! For a moment or two the meat counter drew closer because the turntable had slid her into someone who was walking. Walking and shopping. Barry the Chunk? No, not him, although Barry was near; Barry was how she had gotten here. Only she had been drawn away from him by someone much more powerful. Abra could see a cart loaded with groceries at the bottom of her vision. Then the forward movement stopped and there was this sensation, this

(rummaging prying)

crazy feeling of someone INSIDE HER, and Abra suddenly understood that for once she wasn’t alone on the turntable. She was looking toward a meat counter at the end of a supermarket aisle, and the other person was looking out her window at Richland Court and the White Mountains beyond.

Panic exploded inside her; it was as if gasoline had been poured on a fire. Not a sound escaped her lips, which were pressed together so tightly that her mouth was only a stitch, but inside her head she produced a scream louder than anything of which she would ever have believed herself capable:

(NO! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!)

When David felt the house rumble and saw the overhead light fixture in his study swaying on its chain, his first thought was

(Abra)

that his daughter had had one of her psychic outbursts, though there hadn’t been any of that telekinetic crap in years, and never anything like this. As things settled back to normal, his second—and, to his mind, far more reasonable—thought was that he had just experienced his first New Hampshire earthquake. He knew they happened from time to time, but… wow!

He got up from his desk (not neglecting to hit SAVE before he did), and ran into the hall. From the foot of the stairs he called, “Abra! Did you feel that?”

She came out of her room, looking pale and a little scared. “Yeah, sorta. I… I think I…”

“It was an earthquake!” David told her, beaming. “Your first earthquake! Isn’t that neat?”

“Yes,” Abra said, not sounding very thrilled. “Neat.”

He looked out the living room window and saw people standing on their stoops and lawns. His good friend Matt Renfrew was among them. “I’m gonna go across the street and talk to Matt, hon. You want to come with?”

“I guess I better finish my math.”

David started toward the front door, then turned to look up at her. “You’re not scared, are you? You don’t have to be. It’s over.”

Abra only wished it was.

Rose the Hat was doing a double shop, because Grampa Flick was feeling poorly again. She saw a few other members of the True in Sam’s, and nodded to them. She stopped awhile in canned goods to talk to Barry the Chink, who had his wife’s list in one hand. Barry was concerned about Flick.

“He’ll bounce back,” Rose said. “You know Grampa.”

Barry grinned. “Tougher’n a boiled owl.”

Rose nodded and got her cart rolling again. “You bet he is.”

Just an ordinary weekday afternoon at the supermarket, and as she took her leave of Barry, she at first mistook what was happening to her for something mundane, maybe low sugar. She was prone to sugar crashes, and usually kept a candybar in her purse. Then she realized someone was inside her head. Someone was looking.

Rose had not risen to her position as head of the True Knot by being indecisive. She halted with her cart pointed toward the meat counter (her planned next stop) and immediately leaped into the conduit some nosy and potentially dangerous person had established. Not a member of the True, she would have known any one of them immediately, but not an ordinary rube, either.

No, this was far from ordinary.

The market swung away and suddenly she was looking out at a mountain range. Not the Rockies, she would have recognized those. These were smaller. The Catskills? The Adirondacks? It could have been either, or some other. As for the looker… Rose thought it was a child. Almost certainly a girl, and one she had encountered before.

I have to see what she looks like, then I can find her anytime I want to. I have to get her to look in a mir—

But then a thought as loud as a shotgun blast in a closed room

(NO! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!)

wiped her mind clean and sent her staggering against shelves of canned soups and vegetables. They went cascading to the floor, rolling everywhere. For a moment or two Rose thought she was going to follow them, swooning like the dewy heroine of a romance novel. Then she was back. The girl had broken the connection, and in rather spectacular fashion.

Was her nose bleeding? She wiped it with her fingers and checked. No. Good.

One of the stockboys came rushing up. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

“Fine. Just felt a little faint for a second or two. Probably from the tooth extraction I had yesterday. It’s passed off now. I’ve made a mess, haven’t I? Sorry. Good thing it was cans instead of bottles.”

“No problem, no problem at all. Would you like to come up front and sit down on the taxi bench?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Rose said. And it wasn’t, but she was done shopping for the day. She rolled her cart two aisles over and left it there.

She had brought her Tacoma (old but reliable) down from the high-country campground west of Sidewinder, and once she was in the cab, she pulled her phone out of her purse and hit speed dial. It rang at the other end just a single time.

“What’s up, Rosie-girl?” Crow Daddy.

“We’ve got a problem.”

Of course it was also an opportunity. A kid with enough in her boiler to set off a blast like that—to not only detect Rose but send her reeling—wasn’t just a steamhead but the find of the century. She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.

“Talk to me.” All business now.

“A little over two years ago. The kid in Iowa. Remember him?”

“Sure.”

“You also remember me telling you we had a looker?”

“Yeah. East Coast. You thought it was probably a girl.”

“It was a girl, all right. She just found me again. I was in Sam’s, minding my own business, and then all at once there she was.”

“Why, after all this time?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. But we have to have her, Crow. We have to have her.”

“Does she know who you are? Where we are?”

Rose had thought about this while walking to the truck. The intruder hadn’t seen her, of that much she was sure. The kid had been on the inside looking out. As to what she had seen? A supermarket aisle. How many of those were there in America? Probably a million.

“I don’t think so, but that’s not the important part.”

“Then what is?”

“Remember me telling you she was big steam? Huge steam? Well, she’s even bigger than that. When I tried to turn it around on her, she blew me out of her head like I was a piece of milkweed fluff. Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before. I would have said it was impossible.”

“Is she potential True or potential food?”

“I don’t know.” But she did. They needed steam—stored steam—a lot more than they needed fresh recruits. Besides, Rose wanted no one in the True with that much power.

“Okay, how do we find her? Any ideas?”

Rose thought of what she’d seen through the girl’s eyes before she had been so unceremoniously booted back to Sam’s Supermarket in Sidewinder. Not much, but there had been a store…

She said, “The kids call it the Lickety-Spliff.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, never mind. I need to think about it. But we’re going to have her, Crow. We’ve got to have her.”

There was a pause. When he spoke again, Crow sounded cautious. “The way you’re talking, there might be enough to fill a dozen canisters. If, that is, you really don’t want to try Turning her.”

Rose gave a distracted, yapping laugh. “If I’m right, we don’t have enough canisters to store the steam from this one. If she was a mountain, she’d be Everest.” He made no reply. Rose didn’t need to see him or poke into his mind to know he was flabbergasted. “Maybe we don’t have to do either one.”

“I don’t follow.”

Of course he didn’t. Long-think had never been Crow’s specialty. “Maybe we don’t have to Turn her or kill her. Think cows.”

“Cows.”

“You can butcher one and get a couple of months’ worth of steaks and hamburgers. But if you keep it alive and take care of it, it will give milk for six years. Maybe even eight.”

Silence. Long. She let it stretch. When he replied, he sounded more cautious than ever. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. We kill em once we’ve got the steam or if they’ve got something we need and they’re strong enough to survive the Turn, we Turn em. The way we Turned Andi back in the eighties. Grampa Flick might say different, if you believe him he remembers all the way back to when Henry the Eighth was killing his wives, but I don’t think the True has ever tried just holding onto a steamhead. If she’s as strong as you say, it could be dangerous.”

Tell me something I don’t know. If you’d felt what I did, you’d call me crazy to even think about it. And maybe I am. But…

But she was tired of spending so much of her time—the whole family’s time—scrambling for nourishment. Of living like tenth-century Gypsies when they should have been living like the kings and queens of creation. Which was what they were.

“Talk to Grampa, if he’s feeling better. And Heavy Mary, she’s been around almost as long as Flick. Snakebite Andi. She’s new, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders. Anyone else you think might have valuable input.”

“Jesus, Rosie. I don’t know—”

“Neither do I, not yet. I’m still reeling. All I’m asking right now is for you to do some spadework. You are the advance man, after all.”

“Okay…”

“Oh, and make sure you talk to Walnut. Ask him what drugs might keep a rube child nice and docile for a long period of time.”

“This girl doesn’t sound like much of a rube to me.”

“Oh, she is. A big old fat rube milk-cow.”

Not exactly true. A great big white whale, that’s what she is.

Rose ended the call without waiting to see if Crow Daddy had anything else to say. She was the boss, and as far as she was concerned, the discussion was over.

She’s a white whale, and I want her.

But Ahab hadn’t wanted his whale just because Moby would provide tons of blubber and almost endless barrels of oil, and Rose didn’t want the girl because she might—given the right drug cocktails and a lot of powerful psychic soothing—provide a nearly endless supply of steam. It was more personal than that. Turn her? Make her part of the True Knot? Never. The kid had kicked Rose the Hat out of her head as if she were some annoying religious goofball going door-to-door and handing out end-of-the-world tracts. No one had ever given her that kind of bum’s rush before. No matter how powerful she was, she had to be taught a lesson.

And I’m just the woman for the job.

Rose the Hat started her truck, pulled out of the supermarket parking lot, and headed for the family-owned Bluebell Campground. It was a really beautiful location, and why not? One of the world’s great resort hotels had once stood there.

But of course, the Overlook had burned to the ground long ago.

The Renfrews, Matt and Cassie, were the neighborhood’s party people, and they decided on the spur of the moment to have an Earthquake Barbecue. They invited everyone on Richland Court, and almost everyone came. Matt got a case of soda, a few bottles of cheap wine, and a beer-ball from the Lickety-Split up the street. It was a lot of fun, and David Stone enjoyed himself tremendously. As far as he could tell, Abra did, too. She hung with her friends Julie and Emma, and he made sure that she ate a hamburger and some salad. Lucy had told him they had to be vigilant about their daughter’s eating habits, because she’d reached the age when girls started to be very conscious about their weight and looks—the age at which anorexia or bulimia were apt to show their skinny, starveling faces.

What he didn’t notice (although Lucy might have, had she been there) was that Abra wasn’t joining in her friends’ apparently nonstop gigglefest. And, after eating a bowl of ice cream (a small bowl), she asked her father if she could go back across the street and finish her homework.

“Okay,” David said, “but thank Mr. and Mrs. Renfrew first.”

This Abra would have done without having to be reminded, but she agreed without saying so.

“You’re very welcome, Abby,” Mrs. Renfrew said. Her eyes were almost preternaturally bright from three glasses of white wine. “Isn’t this cool? We should have earthquakes more often. Although I was talking to Vicky Fenton—you know the Fentons, on Pond Street? That’s just a block over and she said they didn’t feel anything. Isn’t that weird?”

“Sure is,” Abra agreed, thinking that when it came to weird, Mrs. Renfrew didn’t know the half of it.

She finished her homework and was downstairs watching TV with her dad when Mom called. Abra talked to her awhile, then turned the phone over to her father. Lucy said something, and Abra knew what it had been even before Dave glanced at her and said, “Yeah, she’s fine, just blitzed from homework, I think. They give the kids so much now. Did she tell you we had a little earthquake?”

“Going upstairs, Dad,” Abra said, and he gave her an absent wave.

She sat at her desk, turned on her computer, then turned it off again. She didn’t want to play Fruit Ninja and she certainly didn’t want to IM with anyone. She had to think about what to do, because she had to do something.

She put her schoolbooks in her backpack, then looked up and the woman from the supermarket was staring in at her from the window. That was impossible because the window was on the second floor, but she was there. Her skin was unblemished and purest white, her cheekbones high, her dark eyes wide-set and slightly tilted at the corners. Abra thought she might be the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Also, she realized at once, and without a shadow of a doubt, she was insane. Masses of black hair framed her perfect, somehow arrogant face, and streamed down over her shoulders. Staying in place on this wealth of hair in spite of the crazy angle at which it was cocked, was a jaunty tophat of scuffed velvet.

She’s not really there, and she’s not in my head, either. I don’t know how I can be seeing her but I am and I don’t think she kn—

The madwoman in the darkening window grinned, and when her lips spread apart, Abra saw she only had one tooth on top, a monstrous discolored tusk. She understood it had been the last thing Bradley Trevor had ever seen, and she screamed, screamed as loudly as she could… but only inside, because her throat was locked and her vocal cords were frozen.

Abra shut her eyes. When she opened them again, the grinning white-faced woman was gone.

Not there. But she could come. She knows about me and she could come.

In that moment, she realized what she should have known as soon as she saw the abandoned factory. There was really only one person she could call on. Only one who could help her. She closed her eyes again, this time not to hide from a horrible vision looking in at her from the window, but to summon help.

(TONY, I NEED YOUR DAD! PLEASE, TONY, PLEASE!)

Still with her eyes shut—but now feeling the warmth of tears on her lashes and cheeks—she whispered, “Help me, Tony. I’m scared.”

^{CHAPTER EIGHT} ABRA’S THEORY OF RELATIVITY

The last run of the day on The Helen Rivington was called the Sunset Cruise, and many evenings when Dan wasn’t on shift at the hospice, he took the controls. Billy Freeman, who had made the run roughly twenty-five thousand times during his years as a town employee, was delighted to turn them over.

“You never get tired of it, do you?” he asked Dan once.

“Put it down to a deprived childhood.”

It hadn’t been, not really, but he and his mother had moved around a lot after the settlement money ran out, and she had worked a lot of jobs. With no college degree, most of them had been low-paying. She’d kept a roof over their heads and food on the table, but there had never been much extra.

Once—he’d been in high school, the two of them living in Bradenton, not far from Tampa—he’d asked her why she never dated. By then he was old enough to know she was still a very good-looking woman. Wendy Torrance had given him a crooked smile and said, “One man was enough for me, Danny. Besides, now I’ve got you.”

“How much did she know about your drinking?” Casey K. had asked him during one of their meetings at the Sunspot. “You started pretty young, right?”

Dan had needed to give that one some thought. “Probably more than I knew at the time, but we never talked about it. I think she was afraid to bring it up. Besides, I never got in trouble with the law—not then, anyway—and I graduated high school with honors.” He had smiled grimly at Casey over his coffee cup. “And of course I never beat her up. I suppose that made a difference.”

Never got that train set, either, but the basic tenet AAs lived by was don’t drink and things will get better. They did, too. Now he had the biggest little choo-choo a boy could wish for, and Billy was right, it never got old. He supposed it might in another ten or twenty years, but even then Dan thought he’d probably still offer to drive the last circuit of the day, just to pilot the Riv at sunset, out to the turnaround at Cloud Gap. The view was spectacular, and when the Saco was calm (which it usually was once its spring convulsions had subsided), you could see all the colors twice, once above and once below. Everything was silence at the far end of the Riv’s run; it was as if God was holding His breath.

The trips between Labor Day and Columbus Day, when the Riv shut down for the winter, were the best of all. The tourists were gone, and the few riders were locals, many of whom Dan could now call by name. On weeknights like tonight, there were less than a dozen paying customers. Which was fine by him.

It was fully dark when he eased the Riv back into its dock at Teenytown Station. He leaned against the side of the first passenger car with his cap (ENGINEER DAN stitched in red above the bill) tipped back on his head, wishing his handful of riders a very good night. Billy was sitting on a bench, the glowing tip of his cigarette intermittently lighting his face. He had to be nearly seventy, but he looked good, had made a complete recovery from his abdominal surgery two years before, and said he had no plans to retire.

“What would I do?” he’d asked on the single occasion Dan had brought the subject up. “Retire to that deathfarm where you work? Wait for your pet cat to pay me a visit? Thanks but no thanks.”

When the last two or three riders had ambled on their way, probably in search of dinner, Billy butted his cigarette and joined him. “I’ll put er in the barn. Unless you want to do that, too.”

“No, go right ahead. You’ve been sitting on your ass long enough. When are you going to give up the smokes, Billy? You know the doctor said they contributed to your little gut problem.”

“I’ve cut down to almost nothing,” Billy said, but with a telltale downward shift in his gaze. Dan could have found out just how much Billy had cut down—he probably wouldn’t even need to touch the guy in order to get that much info—but he didn’t. One day in the summer just past, he’d seen a kid wearing a t-shirt with an octagonal road sign printed on it. Instead of STOP, the sign said TMI. When Danny asked him what it meant, the kid had given him a sympathetic smile he probably reserved strictly for gentlemen of a fortyish persuasion. “Too much information,” he’d said. Dan thanked him, thinking: Story of my life, young fellow.

Everyone had secrets. This he had known from earliest childhood. Decent people deserved to keep theirs, and Billy Freeman was decency personified.

“Want to go for a coffee, Danno? You got time? Won’t take me ten minutes to put this bitch to bed.”

Dan touched the side of the engine lovingly. “Sure, but watch your mouth. This is no bitch, this is a la—”

That was when his head exploded.

When he came back to himself, he was sprawled on the bench where Billy had been smoking. Billy was sitting beside him, looking worried. Hell, looking scared half to death. He had his phone in one hand, with his finger poised over the buttons.

“Put it away,” Dan said. The words came out in a dusty croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m okay.”

“You sure? Jesus Christ, I thought you was havin a stroke. I thought it for sure.”

That’s what it felt like.

For the first time in years Dan thought of Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel’s chef extraordinaire back in the day. Dick had known almost at once that Jack Torrance’s little boy shared his own talent. Dan wondered now if Dick might still be alive. Almost certainly not; he’d been pushing sixty back then.

“Who’s Tony?” Billy asked.

“Huh?”

“You said ‘Please, Tony, please.’ Who’s Tony?”

“A guy I used to know back in my drinking days.” As an improvisation it wasn’t much, but it was the first thing to come into his still-dazed mind. “A good friend.”

Billy looked at the lighted rectangle of his cell a few seconds longer, then slowly folded the phone and put it away. “You know, I don’t believe that for a minute. I think you had one of your flashes. Like on the day you found out about my…” He tapped his stomach.

“Well…”

Billy raised a hand. “Say nummore. As long as you’re okay, that is. And as long as it isn’t somethin bad about me. Because I’d want to know if it was. I don’t s’pose that’s true of everyone, but it is with me.”

“Nothing about you.” Dan stood up and was pleased to discover his legs held him just fine. “But I’m going to take a raincheck on that coffee, if you don’t mind.”

“Not a bit. You need to go back to your place and lie down. You’re still pale. Whatever it was, it hit you hard.” Billy glanced at the Riv. “Glad it didn’t happen while you were up there in the peak-seat, rolling along at forty.”

“Tell me about it,” Dan said.

He crossed Cranmore Avenue to the Rivington House side, meaning to take Billy’s advice and lie down, but instead of turning in at the gate giving on the big old Victorian’s flower-bordered walk, he decided to stroll a little while. He was getting his wind back now—getting himself back—and the night air was sweet. Besides, he needed to consider what had just happened, and very carefully.

Whatever it was, it hit you hard.

That made him think again of Dick Hallorann, and of all the things he had never told Casey Kingsley. Nor would he. The harm he had done to Deenie—and to her son, he supposed, simply by doing nothing—was lodged deep inside, like an impacted wisdom tooth, and there it would stay. But at five, Danny Torrance had been the one harmed—along with his mother, of course—and his father had not been the only culprit. About that Dick had done something. If not, Dan and his mother would have died in the Overlook. Those old things were still painful to think about, still bright with the childish primary colors of fear and horror. He would have preferred never to think of them again, but now he had to. Because… well…

Because everything that goes around comes around. Maybe it’s luck or maybe it’s fate, but either way, it comes back around. What was it Dick said that day he gave me the lockbox? When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. Not that I’m equipped to teach anyone anything, except maybe that if you don’t take a drink, you won’t get drunk.

He’d reached the end of the block; now he turned around and headed back. He had the sidewalk entirely to himself. It was eerie how fast Frazier emptied out once the summer was over, and that made him think of the way the Overlook had emptied out. How quickly the little Torrance family had had the place entirely to themselves.

Except for the ghosts, of course. They never left.

Hallorann had told Danny he was headed to Denver, and from there he’d fly south to Florida. He had asked if Danny would like to help him down to the Overlook’s parking lot with his bags, and Danny had carried one to the cook’s rental car. Just a little thing, hardly more than a briefcase, but he’d needed to use both hands to tote it. When the bags were safely stowed in the trunk and they were sitting in the car, Hallorann had put a name to the thing in Danny Torrance’s head, the thing his parents only half believed in.

You got a knack. Me, I’ve always called it the shining. That’s what my grandmother called it, too. Get you kinda lonely, thinkin you were the only one?

Yes, he had been lonely, and yes, he had believed he was the only one. Hallorann had disabused him of that notion. In the years since, Dan had run across a lot of people who had, in the cook’s words, “a little bit of shine to them.” Billy, for one.

But never anyone like the girl who had screamed into his head tonight. It had felt like that cry might tear him apart.

Had he been that strong? He thought he had been, or almost. On closing day at the Overlook, Hallorann had told the troubled little boy sitting beside him to… what had he said?

He said to give him a blast.

Dan had arrived back at Rivington House and was standing outside the gate. The first leaves had begun to fall, and an evening breeze whisked them around his feet.

And when I asked him what I should think about, he told me anything. “Just think it hard,” he said. So I did, but at the last second I softened it, at least a little. If I hadn’t, I think I might have killed him. He jerked back—no, he slammed back—and bit his lip. I remember the blood. He called me a pistol. And later, he asked about Tony. My invisible friend. So I told him.

Tony was back, it seemed, but he was no longer Dan’s friend. Now he was the friend of a little girl named Abra. She was in trouble just as Dan had been, but grown men who sought out little girls attracted attention and suspicion. He had a good life here in Frazier, and he felt it was one he deserved after all the lost years.

But…

But when he needed Dick—at the Overlook, and later, in Florida, when Mrs. Massey had come back—Dick had come. In AA, people called that kind of thing a Twelfth Step call. Because when the pupil was ready, the teacher would appear.

On several occasions, Dan had gone with Casey Kingsley and some other guys in the Program to pay Twelfth Step calls on men who were over their heads in drugs or booze. Sometimes it was friends or bosses who asked for this service; more often it was relatives who had exhausted every other resource and were at their wits’ end. They’d had a few successes over the years, but most visits ended with slammed doors or an invitation for Casey and his friends to stick their sanctimonious, quasireligious bullshit up their asses. One fellow, a meth-addled veteran of George Bush’s splendid Iraq adventure, had actually waved a pistol at them. Heading back from the Chocorua hole-in-the-wall shack where the vet was denned up with his terrified wife, Dan had said, “That was a waste of time.”

“It would be if we did it for them,” Casey said, “but we don’t. We do it for us. You like the life you’re living, Danny-boy?” It wasn’t the first time he had asked this question, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Yes.” No hesitation on that score. Maybe he wasn’t the president of General Motors or doing nude love scenes with Kate Winslet, but in Dan’s mind, he had it all.

“Think you earned it?”

“No,” Dan said, smiling. “Not really. Can’t earn this.”

“So what was it that got you back to a place where you like getting up in the morning? Was it luck or grace?”

He’d believed that Casey wanted him to say it was grace, but during the sober years he had learned the sometimes uncomfortable habit of honesty. “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay, because when your back’s against the wall, there’s no difference.”

“Abra, Abra, Abra,” he said as he walked up the path to Rivington House. “What have you gotten yourself into, girl? And what are you getting me into?”

He was thinking he’d have to try to get in touch with her by using the shining, which was never completely reliable, but when he stepped into his turret room, he saw that wouldn’t be necessary. Written neatly on his blackboard was this:

He puzzled over her screen name for a few seconds, then got it and laughed. “Good one, kid, good one.”

He powered up his laptop. A moment later, he was looking at a blank email form. He typed in her address and then sat watching the blinking cursor. How old was she? As far as he could calculate by their few previous communications, somewhere between a wise twelve and a slightly naïve sixteen. Probably closer to the former. And here he was, a man old enough to have salt speckles in his stubble if he skipped shaving. Here he was, getting ready to start compu-chatting with her. To Catch a Predator, anyone?

Maybe it’s nothing. It could be; she’s just a kid, after all.

Yes, but one who was damn scared. Plus, he was curious about her. Had been for some time. The same way, he supposed, that Hallorann had been curious about him.

I could use a little bit of grace right now. And a whole lot of luck.

In the SUBJECT box at the top of the email form, Dan wrote Hello Abra. He dropped the cursor, took a deep breath, and typed four words: Tell me what’s wrong.

On the following Saturday afternoon, Dan was sitting in bright sunshine on one of the benches outside the ivy-covered stone building that housed the Anniston Public Library. He had a copy of the Union Leader open in front of him, and there were words on the page, but he had no idea what they said. He was too nervous.

Promptly at two o’clock, a girl in jeans rode up on her bike and lodged it in the rack at the foot of the lawn. She gave him a wave and a big smile.

So. Abra. As in Cadabra.

She was tall for her age, most of that height in her legs. Masses of curly blond hair were held back in a thick ponytail that looked ready to rebel and spray everywhere. The day was a bit chilly, and she was wearing a light jacket with ANNISTON CYCLONES screen-printed on the back. She grabbed a couple of books that were bungee-corded to the rear bumper of her bike, then ran up to him, still with that open smile. Pretty but not beautiful. Except for her wide-set blue eyes. They were beautiful.

“Uncle Dan! Gee, it’s good to see you!” And she gave him a hearty smack on the cheek. That hadn’t been in the script. Her confidence in his basic okayness was terrifying.

“Good to see you, too, Abra. Sit down.”

He had told her they would have to be careful, and Abra—a child of her culture—understood at once. They had agreed that the best thing would be to meet in the open, and there were few places in Anniston more open than the front lawn of the library, which was situated near the middle of the small downtown district.

She was looking at him with frank interest, perhaps even hunger. He could feel something like tiny fingers patting lightly at the inside of his head.

(where’s Tony?)

Dan touched a finger to his temple.

Abra smiled, and that completed her beauty, turned her into a girl who would break hearts in another four or five years.

(HI TONY!)

That was loud enough to make him wince, and he thought again of how Dick Hallorann had recoiled behind the wheel of his rental car, his eyes going momentarily blank.

(we need to talk out loud )

(okay yes)

“I’m your father’s cousin, okay? Not really an uncle, but that’s what you call me.”

“Right, right, you’re Uncle Dan. We’ll be fine as long as my mother’s best friend doesn’t come along. Her name’s Gretchen Silverlake. I think she knows our whole family tree, and there isn’t very much of it.”

Oh, great, Dan thought. The nosy best friend.

“It’s okay,” Abra said. “Her older son’s on the football team, and she never misses a Cyclones game. Almost everyone goes to the game, so stop worrying that someone will think you’re—”

She finished the sentence with a mental picture—a cartoon, really. It blossomed in an instant, crude but clear. A little girl in a dark alley was being menaced by a hulking man in a trenchcoat. The little girl’s knees were knocking together, and just before the picture faded, Dan saw a word balloon form over her head: Eeek, a freak!

“Actually not that funny.”

He made his own picture and sent it back to her: Dan Torrance in jail-stripes, being led away by two big policemen. He had never tried anything like this, and it wasn’t as good as hers, but he was delighted to find he could do it at all. Then, almost before he knew what was happening, she appropriated his picture and made it her own. Dan pulled a gun from his waistband, pointed it at one of the cops, and pulled the trigger. A handkerchief with the word POW! on it shot from the barrel of the gun.

Dan stared at her, mouth open.

Abra put fisted hands to her mouth and giggled. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist. We could do this all afternoon, couldn’t we? And it would be fun.”

He guessed it would also be a relief. She had spent years with a splendid ball but no one to play catch with. And of course it was the same with him. For the first time since childhood—since Hallorann—he was sending as well as receiving.

“You’re right, it would be, but now’s not the time. You need to run through this whole thing again. The email you sent only hit the high spots.”

“Where should I start?”

“How about with your last name? Since I’m your honorary uncle, I probably should know.”

That made her laugh. Dan tried to keep a straight face and couldn’t. God help him, he liked her already.

“I’m Abra Rafaella Stone,” she said. Suddenly the laughter was gone. “I just hope the lady in the hat never finds that out.”

They sat together on the bench outside the library for forty-five minutes, with the autumn sun warm on their faces. For the first time in her life Abra felt unconditional pleasure—joy, even—in the talent that had always puzzled and sometimes terrified her. Thanks to this man, she even had a name for it: the shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.

There was plenty to talk about—volumes of notes to compare—and they had hardly gotten started when a stout fiftyish woman in a tweed skirt came over to say hello. She looked at Dan with curiosity, but not untoward curiosity.

“Hi, Mrs. Gerard. This is my uncle Dan. I had Mrs. Gerard for Language Arts last year.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am. Dan Torrance.”

Mrs. Gerard took his offered hand and gave it a single no-nonsense pump. Abra could feel Dan—Uncle Dan—relaxing. That was good.

“Are you in the area, Mr. Torrance?”

“Just down the road, in Frazier. I work in the hospice there. Helen Rivington House?”

“Ah. That’s good work you do. Abra, have you read The Fixer yet? The Malamud novel I recommended?”

Abra looked glum. “It’s on my Nook—I got a gift card for my birthday—but I haven’t started it yet. It looks hard.”

“You’re ready for hard things,” Mrs. Gerard said. “More than ready. High school will be here sooner than you think, and then college. I suggest you get started today. Nice to have met you, Mr. Torrance. You have an extremely smart niece. But Abra—with brains comes responsibility.” She tapped Abra’s temple to emphasize this point, then mounted the library steps and went inside.

She turned to Dan. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“So far, so good,” Dan agreed. “Of course, if she talks to your parents…”

“She won’t. Mom’s in Boston, helping with my momo. She’s got cancer.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it. Is Momo your”

(grandmother)

(great-grandmother)

“Besides,” Abra said, “we’re not really lying about you being my uncle. In science last year, Mr. Staley told us that all humans share the same genetic plan. He said that the things that make us different are very small things. Did you know that we share something like ninety-nine percent of our genetic makeup with dogs?”

“No,” Dan said, “but it explains why Alpo has always looked so good to me.”

She laughed. “So you could be my uncle or cousin or whatever. All I’m saying.”

“That’s Abra’s theory of relativity, is it?”

“I guess so. And do we need the same color eyes or hairline to be related? We’ve got something else in common that hardly anyone has. That makes us a special kind of relatives. Do you think it’s a gene, like the one for blue eyes or red hair? And by the way, did you know that Scotland has the highest ratio of people with red hair?”

“I didn’t,” Dan said. “You’re a font of information.”

Her smile faded a little. “Is that a put-down?”

“Not at all. I guess the shining might be a gene, but I really don’t think so. I think it’s unquantifiable.”

“Does that mean you can’t figure it out? Like God and heaven and stuff like that?”

“Yes.” He found himself thinking of Charlie Hayes, and all those before and after Charlie whom he’d seen out of this world in his Doctor Sleep persona. Some people called the moment of death passing on. Dan liked that, because it seemed just about right. When you saw men and women pass on before your eyes—leaving the Teenytown people called reality for some Cloud Gap of an afterlife—it changed your way of thinking. For those in mortal extremis, it was the world that was passing on. In those gateway moments, Dan had always felt in the presence of some not-quite-seen enormity. They slept, they woke, they went somewhere. They went on. He’d had reason to believe that, even as a child.

“What are you thinking?” Abra asked. “I can see it, but I don’t understand it. And I want to.”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said.

“It was partly about the ghostie people, wasn’t it? I saw them once, on the little train in Frazier. It was a dream but I think it was real.”

His eyes widened. “Did you really?”

“Yes. I don’t think they wanted to hurt me—they just looked at me—but they were kind of scary. I think maybe they were people who rode the train in olden days. Have you seen ghostie people? You have, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but not for a very long time.” And some that were a lot more than ghosts. Ghosts didn’t leave residue on toilet seats and shower curtains. “Abra, how much do your parents know about your shine?”

“My dad thinks it’s gone except for a few things—like me calling from camp because I knew Momo was sick—and he’s glad. My mom knows it’s still there, because sometimes she’ll ask me to help her find something she’s lost—last month it was her car keys, she left them on Dad’s worktable in the garage—but she doesn’t know how much is still there. They don’t talk about it anymore.” She paused. “Momo knows. She’s not scared of it like Mom and Dad, but she told me I have to be careful. Because if people found out—” She made a comic face, rolling her eyes and poking her tongue out the corner of her mouth. “Eeek, a freak. You know?”

(yes)

She smiled gratefully. “Sure you do.”

“Nobody else?”

“Well… Momo said I should talk to Dr. John, because he already knew about some of the stuff. He, um, saw something I did with spoons when I was just a little kid. I kind of hung them on the ceiling.”

“This wouldn’t by chance be John Dalton, would it?”

Her face lit up. “You know him?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I found something once for him. Something he lost.”

(a watch!)

(that’s right)

“I don’t tell him everything,” Abra said. She looked uneasy. “I sure didn’t tell him about the baseball boy, and I’d never tell him about the woman in the hat. Because he’d tell my folks, and they’ve got a lot on their minds already. Besides, what could they do?”

“Let’s just file that away for now. Who’s the baseball boy?”

“Bradley Trevor. Brad. Sometimes he used to turn his hat around and call it a rally cap. Do you know what that is?”

Dan nodded.

“He’s dead. They killed him. But they hurt him first. They hurt him so bad.” Her lower lip began to tremble, and all at once she looked closer to nine than almost thirteen.

(don’t cry Abra we can’t afford to attract)

(I know, I know)

She lowered her head, took several deep breaths, and looked up at him again. Her eyes were overbright, but her mouth had stopped trembling. “I’m okay,” she said. “Really. I’m just glad not to be alone with this inside my head.”

He listened carefully as she described what she remembered of her initial encounter with Bradley Trevor two years ago. It wasn’t much. The clearest image she retained was of many crisscrossing flashlight beams illuminating him as he lay on the ground. And his screams. She remembered those.

“They had to light him up because they were doing some kind of operation,” Abra said. “That’s what they called it, anyway, but all they were really doing was torturing him.”

She told him about finding Bradley again on the back page of The Anniston Shopper, with all the other missing children. How she had touched his picture to see if she could find out about him.

“Can you do that?” she asked. “Touch things and get pictures in your head? Find things out?”

“Sometimes. Not always. I used to be able to do it more—and more reliably—when I was a kid.”

“Do you think I’ll grow out of it? I wouldn’t mind that.” She paused, thinking. “Except I sort of would. It’s hard to explain.”

“I know what you mean. It’s our thing, isn’t it? What we can do.”

Abra smiled.

“You’re pretty sure you know where they killed this boy?”

“Yes, and they buried him there. They even buried his baseball glove.” Abra handed him a piece of notebook paper. It was a copy, not the original. She would have been embarrassed for anyone to see how she had written the names of the boys in ’Round Here, not just once but over and over again. Even the way they had been written now seemed all wrong, those big fat letters that were supposed to express not love but luv.

“Don’t get bent out of shape about it,” Dan said absently, studying what she’d printed on the sheet. “I had a thing for Stevie Nicks when I was your age. Also for Ann Wilson, of Heart. You’ve probably never even heard of her, she’s old-school, but I used to daydream about inviting her to one of the Friday night dances at Glenwood Junior High. How’s that for stupid?”

She was staring at him, openmouthed.

“Stupid but normal. Most normal thing in the world, so cut yourself some slack. And I wasn’t peeking, Abra. It was just there. Kind of jumped out in my face.”

“Oh God.” Abra’s cheeks had gone bright red. “This is going to take some getting used to, isn’t it?”

“For both of us, kiddo.” He looked back down at the sheet.

“You got this by… what? Watching it over and over? Rerunning it like a movie?”

“The NO TRESPASSING sign was easy, but the stuff about Organic Industries and the ethanol plant, yeah. Can’t you do that?”

“I never tried. Maybe once, but probably not anymore.”

“I found Freeman, Iowa, on the computer,” she said. “And when I ran Google Earth, I could see the factory. Those places are really there.”

Dan’s thoughts returned to John Dalton. Others in the Program had talked about Dan’s peculiar ability to find things; John never had. Not surprising, really. Doctors took a vow of confidentiality similar to the one in AA, didn’t they? Which in John’s case made it a kind of double coverage.

Abra was saying, “You could call Bradley Trevor’s parents, couldn’t you? Or the sheriff’s office in Canton County? They wouldn’t believe me, but they’d believe a grown-up.”

“I suppose I could.” But of course a man who knew where the body was buried would automatically go to the head of the suspect list, so if he did it, he would have to be very, very careful about the way he did it.

Abra, the trouble you’re getting me into.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

He put his hand over hers and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Don’t be. That’s one you weren’t supposed to hear.”

She straightened. “Oh God, here comes Yvonne Stroud. She’s in my class.”

Dan pulled his hand back in a hurry. He saw a plump, brown-haired girl about Abra’s age coming up the sidewalk. She was wearing a backpack and carrying a looseleaf notebook curled against her chest. Her eyes were bright and inquisitive.

“She’ll want to know everything about you,” Abra said. “I mean everything. And she talks.”

Uh-oh.

Dan looked at the oncoming girl.

(we’re not interesting)

“Help me, Abra,” he said, and felt her join in. Once they were together, the thought instantly gained depth and strength.

(WE’RE NOT A BIT INTERESTING)

“That’s good,” Abra said. “A little more. Do it with me. Like singing.”

(YOU HARDLY SEE US WE’RE NOT INTERESTING AND BESIDES YOU HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO)

Yvonne Stroud hurried along the walk, flipping one hand to Abra in a vague hello gesture but not slowing down. She ran up the library steps and disappeared inside.

“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Dan said.

She looked at him seriously. “According to Abra’s theory of relativity, you really could be. Very similar—” She sent a picture of pants flapping on a clothesline.

(jeans)

Then they were both laughing.

Dan made her go over the turntable thing three times, wanting to make sure he was getting it right.

“You never did that, either?” Abra asked. “The far-seeing thing?”

“Astral projection? No. Does it happen to you a lot?”

“Only once or twice.” She considered. “Maybe three times. Once I went into a girl who was swimming in the river. I was looking at her from the bottom of our backyard. I was nine or ten. I don’t know why it happened, she wasn’t in trouble or anything, just swimming with her friends. That one lasted the longest. It went on for at least three minutes. Is astral projection what you call it? Like outer space?”

“It’s an old term, from séances back a hundred years ago, and probably not a very good one. All it means is an out-of-body experience.” If you could label anything like that at all. “But—I want to make sure I’ve got this straight—the swimming girl didn’t go into you?”

Abra shook her head emphatically, making her ponytail fly. “She didn’t even know I was there. The only time it worked both ways was with that woman. The one who wears the hat. Only I didn’t see the hat then, because I was inside her.”

Dan used one finger to describe a circle. “You went into her, she went into you.”

“Yes.” Abra shivered. “She was the one who cut Bradley Trevor until he was dead. When she smiles she has one big long tooth on top.”

Something about the hat struck a chord, something that made him think of Deenie from Wilmington. Because Deenie had worn a hat? Nope, at least not that he remembered; he’d been pretty blitzed. It probably meant nothing—sometimes the brain made phantom associations, that was all, especially when it was under stress, and the truth (little as he liked to admit it) was that Deenie was never far from his thoughts. Something as random as a display of cork-soled sandals in a store window could bring her to mind.

“Who’s Deenie?” Abra asked. Then she blinked rapidly and drew back a little, as if Dan had suddenly flapped a hand in front of her eyes. “Oops. Not supposed to go there, I guess. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Let’s go back to your hat woman. When you saw her later—in your window—that wasn’t the same?”

“No. I’m not even sure that was a shining. I think it was a remembering, from when I saw her hurting the boy.”

“So she didn’t see you then, either. She’s never seen you.” If the woman was as dangerous as Abra believed, this was important.

“No. I’m sure she hasn’t. But she wants to.” She looked at him, her eyes wide, her mouth trembling again. “When the turntable thing happened, she was thinking mirror. She wanted me to look at myself. She wanted to use my eyes to see me.”

“What did she see through your eyes? Could she find you that way?”

Abra thought it over carefully. At last she said, “I was looking out my window when it happened. All I can see from there is the street. And the mountains, of course, but there are lots of mountains in America, right?”

“Right.” Could the woman in the hat match the mountains she’d seen through Abra’s eyes to a photo, if she did an exhaustive computer search? Like so much else in this business, there was just no way to be sure.

“Why did they kill him, Dan? Why did they kill the baseball boy?”

He thought he knew, and he would have hidden it from her if he could, but even this short meeting was enough to tell him he would never have that sort of relationship with Abra Rafaella Stone. Recovering alcoholics strove for “complete honesty in all our affairs,” but rarely achieved it; he and Abra could not avoid it.

(food)

She stared at him, aghast. “They ate his shining?”

(I think so)

(they’re VAMPIRES?)

Then, aloud: “Like in Twilight?”

“Not like them,” Dan said. “And for God’s sake, Abra, I’m only guessing.” The library door opened. Dan looked around, afraid it might be the overly curious Yvonne Stroud, but it was a boy-girl couple that only had eyes for each other. He turned back to Abra. “We have to wrap this up.”

“I know.” She raised a hand, rubbed at her lips, realized what she was doing, and put it back in her lap. “But I have so many questions. There’s so much I want to know. It would take hours.”

“Which we don’t have. You’re sure it was a Sam’s?”

“Huh?”

“She was in a Sam’s Supermarket?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“I know the chain. I’ve even shopped in one or two, but not around here.”

She grinned. “Course not, Uncle Dan, there aren’t any. They’re all out west. I went on Google for that, too.” The grin faded. “There are hundreds of them, all the way from Nebraska to California.”

“I need to think about this some more, and so do you. You can stay in touch with me by email if it’s important, but it would be better if we just”—he tapped his forehead—“zip-zip. You know?”

“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “The only good part of this is having a friend who knows how to zip-zip. And what it’s like.”

“Can you use the blackboard?”

“Sure. It’s pretty easy.”

“You need to keep one thing in mind, one above all others. The hat woman probably doesn’t know how to find you, but she knows you’re out there someplace.”

She had grown very still. He reached for her thoughts, but Abra was guarding them.

“Can you set a burglar alarm in your mind? So that if she’s someplace near, either mentally or in person, you’ll know?”

“You think she’s going to come for me, don’t you?”

“She might try. Two reasons. First, just because you know she exists.”

“And her friends,” Abra whispered. “She has lots of friends.”

(with flashlights)

“What’s the other reason?” And before he could reply: “Because I’d be good to eat. Like the baseball boy was good to eat. Right?”

There was no point denying it; to Abra his forehead was a window. “Can you set an alarm? A proximity alarm? That’s—”

“I know what proximity means. I don’t know, but I’ll try.”

He knew what she was going to say next before she said it, and there was no mind-reading involved. She was only a child, after all. This time when she took his hand, he didn’t pull away. “Promise you won’t let her get me, Dan. Promise.”

He did, because she was a kid and needed comforting. But of course there was only one way to keep such a promise, and that was to make the threat go away.

He thought it again: Abra, the trouble you’re getting me into.

And she said it again, but this time not out loud:

(sorry)

“Not your fault, kid. You didn’t

(ask for this)

“any more than I did. Go on in with your books. I have to get back to Frazier. I’m on shift tonight.”

“Okay. But we’re friends, right?”

“Totally friends.”

“I’m glad.”

“And I bet you’ll like The Fixer. I think you’ll get it. Because you’ve fixed a few things in your time, haven’t you?”

Pretty dimples deepened the corners of her mouth. “You’d know.”

“Oh, believe me,” Dan said.

He watched her start up the steps, then pause and come back. “I don’t know who the woman in the hat is, but I know one of her friends. His name is Barry the Chunk, or something like that. I bet wherever she is, Barry the Chunk is someplace close. And I could find him, if I had the baseball boy’s glove.” She looked at him, a steady level glance from those beautiful blue eyes. “I’d know, because for a little while, Barry the Chunk was wearing it.”

Halfway back to Frazier, mulling over Abra’s hat woman, Dan remembered something that sent a jolt straight through him. He almost swerved over the double yellow line, and an oncoming truck westbound on Route 16 honked at him irritably.

Twelve years ago it had been, when Frazier was still new to him and his sobriety had been extremely shaky. He’d been walking back to Mrs. Robertson’s, where he had just that day secured a room. A storm was coming, so Billy Freeman had sent him off with a pair of boots. They don’t look like much, but at least they match. And as he turned the corner from Morehead onto Eliot, he’d seen—

Just ahead was a rest area. Dan pulled in and walked toward the sound of running water. It was the Saco, of course; it ran through two dozen little New Hampshire towns between North Conway and Crawford Notch, connecting them like beads on a string.

I saw a hat blowing up the gutter. A battered old tophat like a magician might wear. Or an actor in an old musical comedy. Only it wasn’t really there, because when I closed my eyes and counted to five, it was gone.

“Okay, it was a shining,” he told the running water. “But that doesn’t necessarily make it the hat Abra saw.”

Only he couldn’t believe that, because later that night he’d dreamed of Deenie. She had been dead, her face hanging off her skull like dough on a stick. Dead and wearing the blanket Dan had stolen from a bum’s shopping cart. Stay away from the woman in the hat, Honeybear. That was what she’d said. And something else… what?

She’s the Queen Bitch of Castle Hell.

“You don’t remember that,” he told the running water. “Nobody remembers dreams twelve years later.”

But he did. And now he remembered the rest of what the dead woman from Wilmington had said: If you mess with her, she’ll eat you alive.

He let himself into his turret room shortly after six, carrying a tray of food from the caf. He looked first at the blackboard, and smiled at what was printed there:

As if I had any choice, hon.

He erased Abra’s message, then sat down at his desk with his dinner. After leaving the rest area, his thoughts had turned back to Dick Hallorann. He supposed it was natural enough; when someone finally asked you to teach them, you went to your own teacher to find out how to do it. Dan had fallen out of touch with Dick during the drinking years (mostly out of shame), but he thought it might just be possible to find out what had happened to the old fellow. Possibly even to get in touch, if Dick was still alive. And hey, lots of people lived into their nineties, if they took care of themselves. Abra’s great-gramma, for instance—she had to be really getting up there.

I need some answers, Dick, and you’re the only person I know who might have a few. So do me a favor, my friend, and still be alive.

He fired up his computer and opened Firefox. He knew that Dick had spent his winters cooking at a series of Florida resort hotels, but he couldn’t remember the names or even which coast they had been on. Probably both—Naples one year, Palm Beach the next, Sarasota or Key West the year after that. There was always work for a man who could tickle palates, especially rich palates, and Dick had been able to tickle them like nobody’s business. Dan had an idea that his best shot might be the quirky spelling of Dick’s last name—not Halloran but Hallorann. He typed Richard Hallorann and Florida into the search box, then punched ENTER. He got back thousands of hits, but he was pretty sure the one he wanted was third from the top, and a soft sigh of disappointment escaped him. He clicked the link, and an article from The Miami Herald appeared. No question. When the age as well as the name appeared in the headline, you knew exactly what you were looking at.

There was a photo. It was small, but Dan would have recognized that cheerful, knowing face anywhere. Had he died alone? Dan doubted it. The man had been too gregarious… and too fond of women. His deathbed had probably been well attended, but the two people he’d saved that winter in Colorado hadn’t been there. Wendy Torrance had a valid excuse: she’d predeceased him. Her son, however…

Had he been in some dive, full of whiskey and playing truck-driving songs on the jukebox, when Dick passed on? Maybe in jail for the night on a drunk-and-disorderly?

Cause of death had been a heart attack. He scrolled back up and checked the date: January 19, 1999. The man who had saved Dan’s life and the life of his mother had been dead almost fifteen years. There would be no help from that quarter.

From behind him, he heard the soft squeak of chalk on slate. He sat where he was for a moment, with his cooling food and his laptop before him. Then, slowly, he turned around.

The chalk was still on the ledge at the bottom of the blackboard, but a picture was appearing, anyway. It was crude but recognizable. It was a baseball glove. When it was done, her chalk—invisible, but still making that low squeaking sound—drew a question mark in the glove’s pocket.

“I need to think about it,” he said, but before he could do so, the intercom buzzed, paging Doctor Sleep.

^{CHAPTER NINE} THE VOICES OF OUR DEAD FRIENDS

At a hundred and two, Eleanor Ouellette was the oldest resident of Rivington House in that fall of 2013, old enough so her last name had never been Americanized. She answered not to Wil-LET but to a much more elegant French pronunciation: Oooh-LAY. Dan sometimes called her Miss Oooh-La-La, which always made her smile. Ron Stimson, one of four docs who made regular day-rounds at the hospice, once told Dan that Eleanor was proof that living was sometimes stronger than dying. “Her liver function is nil, her lungs are shot from eighty years of smoking, she has colorectal cancer—moving at a snail’s pace, but extremely malignant—and the walls of her heart are as thin as a cat’s whisker. Yet she continues.”

If Azreel was right (and in Dan’s experience, he was never wrong), Eleanor’s long-term lease on life was about to expire, but she certainly didn’t look like a woman on the threshold. She was sitting up in bed, stroking the cat, when Dan walked in. Her hair was beautifully permed—the hairdresser had been in just the day before—and her pink nightie was as immaculate as always, the top half giving a bit of color to her bloodless cheeks, the bottom half spread away from the sticks of her legs like a ballgown.

Dan raised his hands to the sides of his face, the fingers spread and wiggling. “Ooh-la-la! Une belle femme! Je suis amoureux!”

She rolled her eyes, then cocked her head and smiled at him. “Maurice Chevalier you ain’t, but I like you, cher. You’re cheery, which is important, you’re cheeky, which is more important, and you’ve got a lovely bottom, which is all-important. The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and you have a good one. In my prime, I would have corked it with my thumb and then eaten you alive. Preferably by the pool of Le Meridien in Monte Carlo, with an admiring audience to applaud my frontside and backside efforts.”

Her voice, hoarse but cadenced, managed to render this image charming rather than vulgar. To Dan, Eleanor’s cigarette rasp was the voice of a cabaret singer who had seen and done it all even before the German army goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées in the spring of 1940. Washed up, maybe, but far from washed out. And while it was true she looked like the death of God in spite of the faint color reflected onto her face by her craftily chosen nightgown, she had looked like the death of God since 2009, the year she had moved into Room 15 of Rivington One. Only Azzie’s attendance said that tonight was different.

“I’m sure you would have been marvelous,” he said.

“Are you seeing any ladies, cher?”

“Not currently, no.” With one exception, and she was years too young for amour.

“A shame. Because in later years, this”—she raised a bony forefinger, then let it dip—“becomes this. You’ll see.”

He smiled and sat on her bed. As he had sat on so many. “How are you feeling, Eleanor?”

“Not bad.” She watched Azzie jump down and oil out the door, his work for the evening done. “I’ve had many visitors. They made your cat nervous, but he stuck it out until you came.”

“He’s not my cat, Eleanor. He belongs to the house.”

“No,” she said, as if the subject no longer interested her much, “he’s yours.”

Dan doubted if Eleanor had had even one visitor—other than Azreel, that was. Not tonight, not in the last week or month, not in the last year. She was alone in the world. Even the dinosaur of an accountant who had overseen her money matters for so many years, lumbering in to visit her once every quarter and toting a briefcase the size of a Saab’s trunk, had now gone to his reward. Miss Ooh-La-La claimed to have relatives in Montreal, “but I have not quite enough money left to make visiting me worthwhile, cher.”

“Who’s been in, then?” Thinking she might mean Gina Weems or Andrea Bottstein, the two nurses working the three-to-eleven in Riv One tonight. Or possibly Poul Larson, a slow-moving but decent orderly whom Dan thought of as the anti–Fred Carling, had stopped by for a natter.

“As I said, many. They are passing even now. An endless parade of them. They smile, they bow, a child wags his tongue like a dog’s tail. Some of them speak. Do you know the poet George Seferis?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t.” Were there others here? He had reason to believe it was possible, but he had no sense of them. Not that he always did.

“Mr. Seferis asks, ‘Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?’ The children are the saddest. There was a boy here who fell down a well.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, and a woman who committed suicide with a bedspring.”

He felt not even the slightest hint of a presence. Could his encounter with Abra Stone have sapped him? It was possible, and in any case, the shining came and went in tides he had never been able to chart. He didn’t think that was it, however. He thought Eleanor had probably lapsed into dementia. Or she might be having him on. It wasn’t impossible. Quite the wag was Eleanor Ooh-La-La. Someone—was it Oscar Wilde?—was reputed to have made a joke on his deathbed: Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.

“You are to wait,” Eleanor said. There was no humor in her voice now. “The lights will announce an arrival. There may be other disturbances. The door will open. Then your visitor will come.”

Dan looked doubtfully at the door to the hall, which was open already. He always left it open, so Azzie could leave if he wanted to. He usually did, once Dan showed up to take over.

“Eleanor, would you like some cold juice?”

“I would if there were ti—” she began, and then the life ran out of her face like water from a basin with a hole in it. Her eyes fixed at a point over his head and her mouth fell open. Her cheeks sagged and her chin dropped almost to her scrawny chest. The top plate of her dentures also dropped, slid over her lower lip, and hung in an unsettling open-air grin.

Fuck, that was quick.

Carefully, he hooked a finger beneath the denture plate and removed it. Her lip pulled out, then snapped back with a tiny plip sound. Dan put the plate on her night table, started to get up, then settled back. He waited for the red mist the old Tampa nurse had called the gasp… as though it were a pulling-in instead of a letting-out. It didn’t come.

You are to wait.

All right, he could do that, at least for awhile. He reached for Abra’s mind and found nothing. Maybe that was good. She might already be taking pains to guard her thoughts. Or maybe his own ability—his sensitivity—had departed. If so, it didn’t matter. It would be back. It always had been, at any rate.

He wondered (as he had before) why he had never seen flies on the face of any Rivington House guest. Maybe because he didn’t need to. He had Azzie, after all. Did Azzie see something with those wise green eyes of his? Maybe not flies, but something? He must.

Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?

It was so quiet on this floor tonight, and still so early! There was no sound of conversation from the common room at the end of the hall. No TV or radio played. He couldn’t hear the squeak of Poul’s sneakers or the low voices of Gina and Andrea down at the nurses’ station. No phone rang. As for his watch—

Dan raised it. No wonder he couldn’t hear its faint ticking. It had stopped.

The overhead fluorescent bar went off, leaving only Eleanor’s table lamp. The fluorescent came back on, and the lamp flickered out. It came on again and then it and the overhead went off together. On… off… on.

“Is someone here?”

The pitcher on the night table rattled, then stilled. The dentures he had removed gave a single unsettling clack. A queer ripple ran along the sheet of Eleanor’s bed, as if something beneath it had been startled into sudden motion. A puff of warm air pressed a quick kiss against Dan’s cheek, then was gone.

“Who is it?” His heartbeat remained regular, but he could feel it in his neck and wrists. The hair on the back of his neck felt thick and stiff. He suddenly knew what Eleanor had been seeing in her last moments: a parade of

(ghostie people)

the dead, passing into her room from one wall and passing out through the other. Passing out? No, passing on. He didn’t know Seferis, but he knew Auden: Death takes the rolling-in-money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. She had seen them all and they were here n—

But they weren’t. He knew they weren’t. The ghosts Eleanor had seen were gone and she had joined their parade. He had been told to wait. He was waiting.

The door to the hall swung slowly shut. Then the bathroom door opened.

From Eleanor Ouellette’s dead mouth came a single word: “Danny.”

When you enter the town of Sidewinder, you pass a sign reading WELCOME TO THE TOP OF AMERICA! It isn’t, but it’s close. Twenty miles from the place where the Eastern Slope becomes the Western, a dirt road splits off from the main highway, winding north. The burned-in-wood sign arched over this byway reads WELCOME TO THE BLUEBELL CAMPGROUND! STAY AWHILE, PARTNER!

That sounds like good old western hospitality, but locals know that more often than not the road is gated shut, and when it is, a less friendly sign hangs from it: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. How they do business is a mystery to the folks in Sidewinder, who’d like to see the Bluebell open every day the upcountry roads aren’t snowed in. They miss the commerce the Overlook used to bring in, and hoped the campground would at least partially make up for it (although they know that Camper People don’t have the kind of money the Hotel People used to pump into the local economy). That hasn’t been the case. The general consensus is that the campground is some rich corporation’s tax haven, a designated money-loser.

It’s a haven, all right, but the corporation it shelters is the True Knot, and when they are in residence, the only RVs in the big parking lot are their RVs, with Rose the Hat’s EarthCruiser standing tallest among them.

On that September evening, nine members of the True were gathered in the high-ceilinged, pleasantly rustic building known as Overlook Lodge. When the campground was open to the public, the Lodge served as a restaurant that put on two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. The food was prepared by Short Eddie and Big Mo (rube names Ed and Maureen Higgins). Neither was up to Dick Hallorann’s culinary standards—few were!—but it’s hard to screw up too badly on the things Camper People like to eat: meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, pancakes drenched in Log Cabin syrup, meatloaf, chicken stew, meatloaf, Tuna Surprise, and meatloaf with mushroom gravy. After dinner, the tables were cleared for bingo or card parties. On weekends, there were dances. These festivities took place only when the campground was open. This evening—as, three time zones east, Dan Torrance sat beside a dead woman and waited for his visitor—there was business of a different sort to transact in Overlook Lodge.

Jimmy Numbers was at the head of a single table that had been set up in the middle of the polished bird’s-eye maple floor. His PowerBook was open, the desktop displaying a photograph of his hometown, which happened to be deep in the Carpathian Mountains. (Jimmy liked to joke that his grandfather had once entertained a young London solicitor named Jonathan Harker.)

Clustered around him, looking down at the screen, were Rose, Crow Daddy, Barry the Chink, Snakebite Andi, Token Charlie, Apron Annie, Diesel Doug, and Grampa Flick. None of them wanted to stand next to Grampa, who smelled as if he might have had a minor disaster in his pants and then forgotten to shower it off (a thing that happened more and more frequently these days), but this was important and they put up with him.

Jimmy Numbers was an unassuming guy with a receding hairline and a pleasant if vaguely simian face. He looked about fifty, which was one-third of his actual age. “I googled Lickety-Spliff and got nothing useful, which is what I expected. In case you care, lickety-spliff is teenage slang that means to do something really slow instead of really fast—”

“We don’t,” Diesel Doug said. “And by the way, you smell a trifle rank, Gramps. No offense, but when was the last time you wiped your ass?”

Grampa Flick bared his teeth—eroded and yellow, but all his own—at Doug. “Your wife wiped it for me just this morning, Deez. With her face, as it happens. Kinda nasty, but she seems to like that kind of thi—”

“Shut your heads, both of you,” Rose said. Her voice was toneless and unthreatening, but Doug and Grampa both shrank away from her, their faces those of chastened schoolboys. “Go on, Jimmy. But stay on point. I want to have a concrete plan, and soon.”

“The rest of them are going to be reluctant no matter how concrete the plan is,” Crow said. “They’re going to say it’s been a good year for steam. That movie theater thing, the church fire in Little Rock, and the terrorist thing in Austin. Not to mention Juárez. I was dubious about going south of the border, but it was good.”

Better than good, actually. Juárez had become known as the murder capital of the world, earning its sobriquet with over twenty-five hundred homicides a year. Many were torture-killings. The pervading atmosphere had been exceedingly rich. It wasn’t pure steam, and it made you feel a little whoopsy in the stomach, but it did the job.

“All those fucking beans gave me the runs,” Token Charlie said, “but I have to admit that the pickings were excellent.”

“It was a good year,” Rose agreed, “but we can’t make a business of Mexico—we’re too conspicuous. Down there, we’re rich americanos. Up here, we fade into the woodwork. And aren’t you tired of living from year to year? Always on the move and always counting canisters? This is different. This is the motherlode.”

None of them replied. She was their leader and in the end they would do what she said, but they didn’t understand about the girl. That was all right. When they encountered her for themselves, they would. And when they had her locked up and producing steam pretty much to order, they’d offer to get down on their knees and kiss Rose’s feet. She might even take them up on it.

“Go on, Jimmy, but get to the point.”

“I’m pretty sure what you picked up was a teen-slang version of Lickety-Split. It’s a chain of New England convenience stores. There are seventy-three in all, from Providence to Presque Isle. A grammar school kid with an iPad could have nailed that in about two minutes. I printed out the locations and used Whirl 360 to get pix. I found six that have mountain views. Two in Vermont, two in New Hampshire, and two in Maine.”

His laptop case was under his chair. He grabbed it, fumbled in the flap pocket, brought out a folder, and handed it to Rose. “These aren’t pictures of the stores, they’re pictures of various mountain views that can be seen from the neighborhoods the stores are in. Once more courtesy of Whirl 360, which is far better than Google Earth, and God bless its nosy little heart. Take a look and see if any ring a bell. If not, see if there are any you can definitely eliminate.”

Rose opened the folder and slowly went through the photographs. The two showing Vermont’s Green Mountains she put aside at once. One of the Maine locations was also wrong; it showed only one mountain, and she had seen a whole range of them. The other three she looked at longer. Finally she handed them back to Jimmy Numbers.

“One of these.”

He turned the pictures over. “Fryeburg, Maine… Madison, New Hampshire… Anniston, New Hampshire. Got a feel for which one of the three?”

Rose took them again, then held up the photos of the White Mountains as seen from Fryeburg and Anniston. “I think it’s one of these, but I’m going to make sure.”

“How are you going to do that?” Crow asked.

“I’m going to visit her.”

“If everything you say is true, that could be dangerous.”

“I’ll do it when she’s asleep. Young girls sleep deeply. She’ll never know I was there.”

“Are you sure you need to do that? These three places are pretty close together. We could check them all.”

“Yes!” Rose cried. “We’ll just cruise around and say, ‘We’re looking for a local girl, but we can’t seem to read her location the way we normally can, so give us a little help. Have you noticed any junior high girls around here with precognition or mind-reading talents?’”

Crow Daddy gave a sigh, stuck his big hands deep in his pockets, and looked at her.

“I’m sorry,” Rose said. “I’m a little on edge, all right? I want to do this and get it done. And you don’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

Dan sat looking at the late Eleanor Ouellette. The open eyes, now beginning to glaze. The tiny hands with their palms upturned. Most of all at the open mouth. Inside was all the clockless silence of death.

“Who are you?” Thinking: As if I didn’t know. Hadn’t he wished for answers?

“You grew up fine.” The lips didn’t move, and there seemed to be no emotion in the words. Perhaps death had robbed his old friend of his human feelings, and what a bitter shame that would be. Or perhaps it was someone else, masquerading as Dick. Something else.

“If you’re Dick, prove it. Tell me something only he and I could know.”

Silence. But the presence was still here. He felt it. Then:

“You asked me why Mrs. Brant wanted the car-park man’s pants.”

Dan at first had no idea what the voice was talking about. Then he did. The memory was on one of the high shelves where he kept all the bad Overlook memories. And his lockboxes, of course. Mrs. Brant had been a checkout on the day Danny arrived with his parents, and he had caught a random thought from her as the Overlook’s valet delivered her car: I’d sure like to get into his pants.

“You were just a little boy with a great big radio inside your head. I felt sorry for you. I was scared for you, too. And I was right to be scared, wasn’t I?”

In that there was a faint echo of his old friend’s kindness and humor. It was Dick, all right. Dan looked at the dead woman, dumbfounded. The lights in the room flickered on and off again. The water pitcher gave another brief jitter.

“I can’t stay long, son. It hurts to be here.”

“Dick, there’s a little girl—”

“Abra.” Almost a sigh. “She’s like you. It all comes around.”

“She thinks there’s a woman who may be after her. She wears a hat. It’s an old-fashioned tophat. Sometimes she only has one long tooth on top. When she’s hungry. This is what she told me, anyway.”

“Ask your question, son. I can’t stay. This world is a dream of a dream to me now.”

“There are others. The tophat woman’s friends. Abra saw them with flashlights. Who are they?”

Silence again. But Dick was still there. Changed, but there. Dan could feel him in his nerve endings, and as a kind of electricity skating on the damp surfaces of his eyes.

“They are the empty devils. They are sick and don’t know it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No. And that’s good. If you had ever met them—if they had ever gotten so much as a sniff of you—you’d be long dead, used and thrown away like an empty carton. That’s what happened to the one Abra calls the baseball boy. And many others. Children who shine are prey to them, but you already guessed that, didn’t you? The empty devils are on the land like a cancer on the skin. Once they rode camels in the desert; once they drove caravans across eastern Europe. They eat screams and drink pain. You had your horrors at the Overlook, Danny, but at least you were spared these folks. Now that the strange woman has her mind fixed on the girl, they won’t stop until they have her. They might kill her. They might Turn her. Or they might keep her and use her until she’s all used up, and that would be worst of all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Scoop her out. Make her empty like them.” From the dead mouth there came an autumnal sigh.

“Dick, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Get the girl what she asked for.”

“Where are they, these empty devils?”

“In your childhood, where every devil comes from. I’m not allowed to say more.”

“How do I stop them?”

“The only way is to kill them. Make them eat their own poison. Do that and they disappear.”

“The woman in the hat, the strange woman, what’s her name? Do you know?”

From down the hall came the clash of a mop-bucket squeegee, and Poul Larson began to whistle. The air in the room changed. Something that had been delicately balanced now began to swing out of true.

“Go to your friends. The ones who know what you are. It seems to me you grew up fine, son, but you still owe a debt.” There was a pause, and then the voice that both was and wasn’t Dick Hallorann’s spoke one final time, in a tone of flat command: “Pay it.”

Red mist rose from Eleanor’s eyes, nose, and open mouth. It hung over her for perhaps five seconds, then disappeared. The lights were steady. So was the water in the pitcher. Dick was gone. Dan was here with only a corpse.

Empty devils.

If he had ever heard a more terrible phrase, he couldn’t remember it. But it made sense… if you had seen the Overlook for what it really was. That place had been full of devils, but at least they had been dead devils. He didn’t think that was true of the woman in the tophat and her friends.

You still owe a debt. Pay it.

Yes. He had left the little boy in the sagging diaper and the Braves t-shirt to fend for himself. He would not do that with the girl.

Dan waited at the nurses’ station for the funeral hack from Geordie & Sons, and saw the covered gurney out the back door of Rivington One. Then he went to his room and sat looking down at Cranmore Avenue, now perfectly deserted. A night wind blew, stripping the early-turning leaves from the oaks and sending them dancing and pirouetting up the street. On the far side of the town common, Teenytown was equally deserted beneath a couple of orange hi-intensity security lights.

Go to your friends. The ones who know what you are.

Billy Freeman knew, had almost from the first, because Billy had some of what Dan had. And if Dan owed a debt, he supposed Billy did, too, because Dan’s larger and brighter shining had saved Billy’s life.

Not that I’d put it that way to him.

Not that he’d have to.

Then there was John Dalton, who had lost a watch and who just happened to be Abra’s pediatrician. What had Dick said through Eleanor Ooh-La-La’s dead mouth? It all comes around.

As for the thing Abra had asked for, that was even easier. Getting it, though… that might be a little complicated.

When Abra got up on Sunday morning, there was an email message from dtor36@nhmlx.com.

She was more convinced by the fact of his email than its content, because she knew he didn’t like communicating that way; he was afraid her parents would snoop in her mail and think she was exchanging notes with Chester the Molester.

If they only knew about the molesters she really had to worry about.

She was frightened, but also—now that it was bright daylight and there was no beautiful lunatic in a tophat peering in the window at her—rather excited. It was sort of like being in one of those love-and-horror supernatural novels, the kind Mrs. Robinson in the school library sniffily called “tweenager porn.” In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires—even zombies—but hardly ever became those things.

It was also nice to have a grown man stand up for her, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome, in a scruffy kind of way that reminded her a little of Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, a show she and Emma Deane secretly watched on Em’s computer.

She sent Uncle Dan’s email not just to her trash but to the permanent trash, which Emma called “the nuclear boyfriend file.” (As if you had any, Em, Abra thought snidely.) Then she turned off her computer and closed the lid. She didn’t email him back. She didn’t have to. She just had to close her eyes.

Zip-zip.

Message sent, Abra headed for the shower.

When Dan came back with his morning coffee, there was a new communiqué on his blackboard.

No. Not her parents. At least not yet. But Dan had no doubt they’d find out something was going on, and probably sooner rather than later. He would cross that bridge (or burn it) when he came to it. Right now he had a lot of other things to do, beginning with a call.

A child answered, and when he asked for Rebecca, the phone was dropped with a clunk and there was a distant, going-away cry of “Gramma! It’s for you!” A few seconds later, Rebecca Clausen was on the line.

“Hi, Becka, it’s Dan Torrance.”

“If it’s about Mrs. Ouellette, I had an email this morning from—”

“That’s not it. I need to ask for some time off.”

“Doctor Sleep wants time off? I don’t believe it. I had to practically kick you out the door last spring to take your vacation, and you were still in once or twice a day. Is it a family matter?”

Dan, with Abra’s theory of relativity in mind, said it was.

^{CHAPTER TEN} GLASS ORNAMENTS

Abra’s father was standing at the kitchen counter in his bathrobe and beating eggs in a bowl when the kitchen phone rang. Upstairs, the shower was pounding. If Abra followed her usual Sunday morning MO, it would continue to pound until the hot water gave out.

He checked the incoming call window. It was a 617 area code, but the number following wasn’t the one in Boston he knew, the one that rang the landline in his grandmother-in-law’s condo. “Hello?”

“Oh, David, I’m so glad I got you.” It was Lucy, and she sounded utterly exhausted.

“Where are you? Why aren’t you calling from your cell?”

“Mass General, on a pay phone. You can’t use cells in here, there are signs everywhere.”

“Is Momo all right? Are you?”

“I am. As for Momes, she’s stable… now… but for awhile it was pretty bad.” A gulp. “It still is.” That was when Lucy broke down. Not just crying, but sobbing her heart out.

David waited. He was glad Abra was in the shower, and hoped the hot water would hold out for a long time. This sounded bad.

At last Lucy was able to talk again. “This time she broke her arm.”

“Oh. Okay. Is that all?”

“No, it is not all!” Nearly shouting at him in that why-are-men-so-stupid voice that he absolutely loathed, the one he told himself was a part of her Italian heritage without ever considering that he might, on occasion, actually be quite stupid.

He took a steadying breath. “Tell me, honey.”

She did, although twice she broke into sobs again, and David had to wait her out. She was dead beat, but that was only part of the problem. Mostly, he realized, she was just accepting in her gut what her head had known for weeks: her momo was really going to die. Maybe not peacefully.

Concetta, who slept in only the thinnest of dozes now, had awakened after midnight and needed the toilet. Instead of buzzing for Lucy to bring the bedpan, she had tried to get up and go to the bathroom by herself. She had managed to swing her legs out onto the floor and sit up, but then dizziness had overcome her and she had tumbled off the bed, landing on her left arm. It hadn’t just broken, it had shattered. Lucy, tired out from weeks of night nursing that she had never been trained to do, awoke to the sound of her grandmother’s cries.

“She wasn’t just calling for help,” Lucy said, “and she wasn’t screaming, either. She was shrieking, like a fox that’s had a limb torn off in one of those terrible leghold traps.”

“Honey, that must have been awful.”

Standing in a first-floor alcove where there were snack machines and—mirabile dictu—a few working phones, her body aching and covered with drying sweat (she could smell herself, and it sure wasn’t Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue), her head pounding with the first migraine she’d had in four years, Lucia Stone knew she could never tell him how awful it had really been. What a stinking revelation it had been. You thought you understood the basic fact—woman grows old, woman grows feeble, woman dies—and then you discovered there was quite a lot more to it. You found that out when you found the woman who had written some of the greatest poetry of her generation lying in a puddle of her own piss, shrieking at her granddaughter to make the pain stop, make it stop, oh madre de Cristo, make it stop. When you saw the formerly smooth forearm twisted like a washrag and heard the poet call it a cunting thing and then wish herself dead so the hurting would stop.

Could you tell your husband how you were still half asleep, and frozen with the fear that anything you did would be the wrong thing? Could you tell him that she scratched your face when you tried to move her and howled like a dog that had been run over in the street? Could you explain what it was like to leave your beloved grandmother sprawled on the floor while you dialed 911, and then sat beside her waiting for the ambulance, making her drink Oxycodone dissolved in water through a bendy-straw? How the ambulance didn’t come and didn’t come and you thought of that Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the one that asks if anyone knows where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? The waves rolling over Momo were waves of pain, and she was foundering, and they just kept coming.

When she began to scream again, Lucy had gotten both arms under her and lifted her onto her bed in a clumsy clean-and-jerk that she knew she’d feel in her shoulders and lower back for days, if not weeks. Stopping her ears to Momo’s cries of put me down, you’re killing me. Then Lucy sat against the wall, gasping, her hair plastered to her cheeks in strings while Momo wept and cradled her hideously deformed arm and asked why Lucia would hurt her like that and why this was happening to her.

At last the ambulance had come, and a man—Lucy didn’t know his name but blessed him in her incoherent prayers—had given Momes a shot that put her out. Could you tell your husband you wished the shot had killed her?

“It was pretty awful,” was all she said. “I’m so glad Abra didn’t want to come down this weekend.”

“She did, but she had lots of homework, and said she had to go to the library yesterday. It must have been a big deal, because you know how she usually pesters me about going to the football game.” Babbling. Stupid. But what else was there? “Luce, I’m so goddamned sorry you had to go through that alone.”

“It’s just… if you could have heard her screaming. Then you might understand. I never want to hear anyone scream like that again. She’s always been so great at staying calm… keeping her head when all about her are losing theirs…”

“I know—”

“And then to be reduced to what she was last night. The only words she could remember were cunt and shit and piss and fuck and meretrice and—”

“Let it go, honey.” Upstairs, the shower had quit. It would only take Abra a few minutes to dry off and jump into her Sunday grubs; she’d be down soon enough, shirttail flying and sneaker laces flapping.

But Lucy wasn’t quite ready to let it go. “I remember a poem she wrote once. I can’t quote it word for word, but it started something like this: ‘God’s a connoisseur of fragile things, and decorates His cloudy outlook with ornaments of finest glass.’ I used to think that was a rather conventionally pretty idea for a Concetta Reynolds poem, almost twee.”

And here was his Abba-Doo—their Abba-Doo—with her skin flushed from the shower. “Everything all right, Daddy?”

David held up a hand: Wait a minute.

“Now I know what she really meant, and I’ll never be able to read that poem again.”

“Abby’s here, hon,” he said in a falsely jolly voice.

“Good. I’ll need to talk to her. I’m not going to bawl anymore, so don’t worry, but we can’t protect her from this.”

“Maybe from the worst of it?” he asked gently. Abra was standing by the table, her wet hair pulled into a couple of horsetails that made her look ten again. Her expression was grave.

“Maybe,” she agreed, “but I can’t do this anymore, Davey. Not even with day help. I thought I could, but I can’t. There’s a hospice in Frazier, just a little way down the road. The intake nurse told me about it. I think hospitals must keep a list for just this type of situation. Anyway, the place is called Helen Rivington House. I called them before I called you, and they have a vacancy as of today. I guess God pushed another of His ornaments off the mantelpiece last night.”

“Is Chetta awake? Have you discussed this—”

“She came around a couple of hours ago, but she was muddy. Had the past and present all mixed together in a kind of salad.”

While I was still fast asleep, David thought guiltily. Dreaming about my book, no doubt.

“When she clears up—I’m assuming she will—I’ll tell her, as gently as I can, that the decision isn’t hers to make. It’s time for hospice care.”

“All right.” When Lucy decided something—really decided—the best thing was to stand clear and let her work her will.

“Dad? Is Mom okay? Is Momo?”

Abra knew her mother was and her great-grandmother wasn’t. Most of what Lucy had told her husband had come to her while she was still in the shower, standing there with shampoo and tears running down her cheeks. But she had gotten good at putting on happy faces until someone told her out loud that it was time to put on a sad one. She wondered if her new friend Dan had learned about the happy-face thing as a kid. She bet he had.

“Chia, I think Abby wants to talk to you.”

Lucy sighed and said, “Put her on.”

David held out the phone to his daughter.

At 2 p.m. on that Sunday, Rose the Hat hung a sign reading DO NOT DISTURB ME UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY on the door of her plus-size RV. The coming hours had been carefully scheduled. She would eat no food today, and drink only water. Instead of mid-morning coffee, she had taken an emetic. When the time came to go after the girl’s mind, she would be as clear as an empty glass.

With no bodily functions to distract her, Rose would be able to find out everything she needed: the girl’s name, her exact location, how much she knew, and—this was very important—who she might have talked to. Rose would lie still on her double bed in the EarthCruiser from four in the afternoon until ten in the evening, looking up at the ceiling and meditating. When her mind was as clear as her body, she would take steam from one of the canisters in the hidden compartment—just a whiff would be enough—and once again turn the world until she was in the girl and the girl was in her. At one in the morning Eastern Time, her quarry would be dead asleep and Rose could pick through the contents of her mind at will. It might even be possible to plant a suggestion: Some men will come. They will help you. Go with them.

But as that old-school farmer-poet Bobbie Burns pointed out more than two hundred years before, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and she had barely begun to recite the beginning phrases of her relaxation mantra when an agley came hammering at her door.

“Go away!” she shouted. “Can’t you read the sign?”

“Rose, I’ve got Nut with me,” Crow called. “I think he’s got what you asked for, but he needs a go-ahead, and the timing on this thing is a bitch.”

She lay there for a moment, then blew out an angry breath and got up, snatching a Sidewinder t-shirt (KISS ME AT THE ROOF O’ THE WORLD!) and pulling it over her head. It dropped to the tops of her thighs. She opened the door. “This better be good.”

“We can come back,” Walnut said. He was a little man with a bald pate and Brillo pads of gray hair fluffing out above the tops of his ears. He held a sheet of paper in one hand.

“No, just make it quick.”

They sat at the table in the combined kitchen/living room. Rose snatched the paper from Nut’s hand and gave it a cursory glance. It was some sort of complicated chemical diagram filled with hexagons. It meant nothing to her. “What is it?”

“A powerful sedative,” Nut said. “It’s new, and it’s clean. Jimmy got this chem sheet from one of our assets in the NSA. It’ll put her out with no chance of ODing her.”

“It could be what we need, all right.” Rose knew she sounded grudging. “But couldn’t it have waited until tomorrow?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Nut said meekly.

“I’m not,” Crow said. “If you want to move fast on this girl and snatch her clean, I’ll not only have to make sure we can get some of this, I’ll have to arrange for it to be shipped to one of our mail drops.”

The True had hundreds of these across America, most of them at Mail Boxes Etc. and various UPS stores. Using them meant planning days ahead, because they always traveled in their RVs. Members of the True would no more get on public transport than they would slit their own throats. Private air travel was possible but unpleasant; they suffered extreme altitude sickness. Walnut believed it had something to do with their nervous systems, which differed radically from those of the rubes. Rose’s concern was with a certain taxpayer-funded nervous system. Very nervous. Homeland Security had been monitoring even private flights very closely since 9/11, and the True Knot’s first rule of survival was never attract attention.

Thanks to the interstate highway system, the RVs had always served their purposes, and would this time. A small raiding party, with new drivers taking the wheel every six hours, could get from Sidewinder to northern New England in less than thirty hours.

“All right,” she said, mollified. “What have we got along I-90 in upstate New York or Massachusetts?”

Crow didn’t hem and haw or tell her he’d have to get back to her on that. “EZ Mail Services, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.”

She flapped her fingers at the edge of the sheet of incomprehensible chemistry Nut was holding in his hand. “Have this stuff sent there. Use at least three cutouts so we have complete deniability if something goes wrong. Really bounce it around.”

“Do we have that much time?” Crow asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Rose said—a remark that would come back to haunt her. “Send it south, then into the Midwest, then into New England. Just get it to Sturbridge by Thursday. Use Express Mail, not FedEx or UPS.”

“I can do that,” Crow said. No hesitation.

Rose turned her attention to the True’s doctor. “You better be right, Walnut. If you do OD her instead of just putting her to sleep, I’ll see you’re the first True to be sent into exile since Little Big Horn.”

Walnut paled a little. Good. She had no intention of exiling anyone, but she still resented being interrupted.

“We’ll get the drug to Sturbridge, and Nut will know how to use it,” Crow said. “No problem.”

“There’s nothing simpler? Something we can get around here?”

Nut said, “Not if you want to be sure she doesn’t go Michael Jackson on us. This stuff is safe, and it hits fast. If she’s as powerful as you seem to think, fast is going to be impor—”

“Okay, okay, I get it. Are we done here?”

“There’s one more thing,” Walnut said. “I suppose it could wait, but…”

She looked out the window and, ye gods and little fishes, here came Jimmy Numbers, bustling across the parking lot adjacent to the Overlook Lodge with his own sheet of paper. Why had she hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her doorknob? Why not one that said Y’ALL COME?

Rose gathered all her bad temper, stuffed it in a sack, stored it at the back of her mind, and smiled gamely. “What is it?”

“Grampa Flick,” Crow said, “is no longer holding his fudge.”

“He hasn’t been able to hold it for the last twenty years,” Rose said. “He won’t wear diapers, and I can’t make him. No one can make him.”

“This is different,” Nut said. “He can barely get out of bed. Baba and Black-Eyed Susie are taking care of him as well as they can, but that camper of his smells like the wrath of God—”

“He’ll get better. We’ll feed him some steam.” But she didn’t like the look on Nut’s face. Tommy the Truck had passed two years ago, and by the way the True measured time, that might have been two weeks ago. Now Grampa Flick?

“His mind’s breaking down,” Crow said bluntly. “And…” He looked at Walnut.

“Petty was taking care of him this morning, and she says she thinks she saw him cycle.”

“Thinks,” Rose said. She didn’t want to believe it. “Has anyone else seen it happen? Baba? Sue?”

“No.”

She shrugged as if to say there you are. Jimmy knocked before they could discuss it farther, and this time she was glad for the interruption.

“Come in!”

Jimmy poked his head through. “Sure it’s okay?”

“Yes! Why don’t you bring the Rockettes and the UCLA marching band while you’re at it? Hell, I was only trying to get in a meditation groove after a few pleasant hours of spewing my guts.”

Crow was giving her a look of mild reproof, and maybe she deserved it—probably she deserved it, these people were only doing the True’s work as she had asked them to do it—but if Crow ever stepped up to the captain’s chair, he’d understand. Never a moment to yourself, unless you threatened them with pain of death. And in many cases, not even then.

“I got something you may want to see,” Jimmy said. “And since Crow and Nut were already here, I figured—”

“I know what you figured. What is it?”

“I went hunting around on the internet for news about those two towns you zeroed in on—Fryeburg and Anniston. Found this in the Union Leader. It’s from last Thursday’s paper. Maybe it’s nothing.”

She took the sheet. The main item was about some podunk school shutting down their football program because of budget cuts. Beneath it was a shorter item, which Jimmy had circled.

Rose read it twice, then looked up, eyes bright. “Good catch, Jimmy.”

He grinned. “Thanks. I’ll leave you guys to it, then.”

“Take Nut with you, he needs to check on Grampa. Crow, you stay a minute.”

When they were gone, he closed the door. “You think the girl caused that shake in New Hampshire?”

“I do. Not a hundred percent certain, but at least eighty. And having a place to focus on—not just a town but a street—will make things a hell of a lot easier for me tonight, when I go looking for her.”

“If you can stick a come-along worm in her head, Rosie, we may not even need to knock her out.”

She smiled, thinking again that Crow had no idea how special this one was. Later she would think, Neither did I. I only thought I did. “There’s no law against hoping, I suppose. But once we have her, we’ll need something a little more sophisticated than a Mickey Finn, even if it’s a high-tech one. We’ll need some wonder drug that’ll keep her nice and cooperative until she decides it’s in her best interest to cooperate on her own.”

“Will you be coming with us when we go to grab her?”

Rose had assumed so, but now she hesitated, thinking of Grampa Flick. “I’m not sure.”

He didn’t ask questions—which she appreciated—and turned to the door. “I’ll see that you’re not disturbed again.”

“Good. And you make sure Walnut gives Grampa a complete exam—I mean from asshole to appetite. If he really is cycling, I want to know tomorrow, when I come out of purdah.” She opened the compartment under the floor and brought out one of the canisters. “And give him what’s left in this.”

Crow was shocked. “All of it? Rose, if he’s cycling, there’s no point.”

“Give it to him. We’ve had a good year, as several of you have pointed out to me lately. We can afford a little extravagance. Besides, the True Knot only has one grampa. He remembers when the people of Europe worshipped trees instead of time-share condos. We’re not going to lose him if we can help it. We’re not savages.”

“The rubes might beg to differ.”

“That’s why they’re rubes. Now get out of here.”

After Labor Day, Teenytown closed at 3 p.m. on Sundays. This afternoon, at quarter to six, three giants sat on benches near the end of the mini–Cranmore Avenue, dwarfing Teenytown Drug and the Teenytown Music Box Theater (where, during tourist season, you could peek in the window and see teeny film clips playing on a teeny screen). John Dalton had come to the meeting wearing a Red Sox hat, which he placed on the head of the teeny Helen Rivington statue in the teeny courthouse square. “I’m sure she was a fan,” he said. “Everybody up this way is a fan. Nobody spares a little admiration for the Yankees except exiles like me. What can I do for you, Dan? I’m missing supper with the family for this. My wife’s an understanding woman, but her patience only stretches so far.”

“How would she feel about you spending a few days with me in Iowa?” Dan asked. “Strictly on my dime, you understand. I have to make a Twelfth Step call on an uncle who’s killing himself with booze and cocaine. My family’s begging me to step in, and I can’t do it alone.”

AA had no rules but many traditions (that were, in fact, rules). One of the most ironclad was that you never made a Twelfth Step call on an active alcoholic by yourself, unless the alkie in question was safely incarcerated in a hospital, detox, or the local bughouse. If you did, you were apt to end up matching him drink for drink and line for line. Addiction, Casey Kingsley liked to say, was the gift that kept on giving.

Dan looked at Billy Freeman and smiled. “Got something to say? Go ahead, feel free.”

“I don’t think you got an uncle. I’m not sure you’ve got any family left at all.”

“Is that it? You’re just not sure?”

“Well… you never talk about em.”

“Plenty of people have family and don’t talk about them. But you know I don’t have anyone, don’t you, Billy?”

Billy said nothing, but looked uneasy.

“Danny, I can’t go to Iowa,” John said. “I’m booked right into the weekend.”

Dan was still focused on Billy. Now he reached into his pocket, grabbed something, and held out his closed fist. “What have I got?”

Billy looked more uneasy than ever. He glanced at John, saw no help there, then back to Dan.

“John knows what I am,” Dan said. “I helped him once, and he knows I’ve helped a few others in the Program. You’re among friends here.”

Billy thought about it, then said: “Might be a coin, but I think it’s one of your AA medals. The kind they give you every time you get in another year sober.”

“What year’s this one?”

Billy hesitated, looking at Dan’s fisted hand.

“Let me help you out,” John said. “He’s been sober since the spring of 2001, so if he’s carrying a medallion around, it’s probably a Year Twelve.”

“Makes sense, but it ain’t.” Billy was concentrating now, two deep vertical lines grooving his forehead just about his eyes. “I think it might be… a seven?”

Dan opened his palm. The medallion had a big VI on it.

“Fuckaroo,” Billy said. “I’m usually good at guessing.”

“You were close enough,” Dan said. “And it’s not guessing, it’s shining.”

Billy took out his cigarettes, looked at the doctor sitting on the bench next to him, and put them back. “If you say so.”

“Let me tell you a little about yourself, Billy. When you were small, you were great at guessing things. You knew when your mother was in a good mood and you could hit her for an extra buck or two. You knew when your dad was in a bad one, and you steered clear of him.”

“I sure knew there were nights when bitchin about having to eat leftover pot roast would be a goddam bad idea,” Billy said.

“Did you gamble?”

“Hoss-races down Salem. Made a bundle. Then, when I was twenty-five or so, I kinda lost the knack of picking winners. I had a month when I had to beg an extension on the rent, and that cured me of railbirding.”

“Yes, the talent fades as people grow older, but you still have some.”

“You got more,” Billy said. No hesitation now.

“This is real, isn’t it?” John said. It really wasn’t a question; it was an observation.

“You’ve only got one appointment this coming week you really feel you can’t miss or hand off,” Dan said. “It’s a little girl with stomach cancer. Her name is Felicity—”

“Frederika,” John said. “Frederika Bimmel. She’s at Merrimack Valley Hospital. I’m supposed to have a consult with her oncologist and her parents.”

“Saturday morning.”

“Yeah. Saturday morning.” He gave Dan an amazed look. “Jesus. Jesus Christ. What you have… I had no idea there was so much of it.”

“I’ll have you back from Iowa by Thursday. Friday at the latest.”

Unless we get arrested, he thought. Then we might be there awhile longer. He looked to see if Billy had picked up that less-than-encouraging thought. There was no sign that he had.

“What’s this about?”

“Another patient of yours. Abra Stone. She’s like Billy and me, John, but I think you already know that. Only she’s much, much more powerful. I’ve got quite a lot more than Billy, and she makes me look like a fortune-teller at a county fair.”

“Oh my God, the spoons.”

It took Dan a second, then he remembered. “She hung them on the ceiling.”

John stared at him, wide-eyed. “You read that in my mind?”

“A little more mundane than that, I’m afraid. She told me.”

“When? When?”

“We’ll get there, but not yet. First, let’s try for some authentic mind-reading.” Dan took John’s hand. That helped; contact almost always did. “Her parents came to see you when she was just a toddler. Or maybe it was an aunt or her great-gram. They were concerned about her even before she decorated the kitchen with silverware, because there was all sorts of psychic phenomena going on in that house. There was something about the piano… Billy, help me out here.”

Billy grabbed John’s free hand. Dan took Billy’s, making a connected circle. A teeny séance in Teenytown.

“Beatles music,” Billy said. “On the piano instead of the guitar. It was… I dunno. It made em crazy for awhile.”

John stared at him.

“Listen,” Dan said, “you have her permission to talk. She wants you to. Trust me on this, John.”

John Dalton considered for almost a full minute. Then he told them everything, with one exception.

That stuff about The Simpsons being on all the TV channels was just too weird.

When he was finished, John asked the obvious question: How did Dan know Abra Stone?

From his back pocket Dan produced a small, battered notebook. On the cover was a photo of waves crashing against a headland and the motto NO GREAT THING IS CREATED SUDDENLY.

“You used to carry this, didn’t you?” John asked.

“Yes. You know Casey K.’s my sponsor, right?”

John rolled his eyes. “Who could forget, when every time you open your mouth in a meeting, you start with ‘My sponsor, Casey K., always says.’”

“John, nobody loves a smartass.”

“My wife does,” he said. “Because I’m a studly smartass.”

Dan sighed. “Look in the book.”

John paged through it. “These are meetings. From 2001.”

“Casey told me I had to do ninety-in-ninety, and keep track. Look at the eighth one.”

John found it. Frazier Methodist Church. A meeting he didn’t often go to, but one he knew. Printed below the notation, in elaborate capital letters, was the word ABRA.

John looked up at Dan not quite unbelievingly. “She got in touch with you when she was two months old?”

“You see my next meeting just below it,” Dan said, “so I couldn’t have added her name later just to impress you. Unless I faked the whole book, that is, and there are plenty of people in the Program who’ll remember seeing me with it.”

“Including me,” John said.

“Yeah, including you. In those days, I always had my meeting book in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. They were my security blankets. I didn’t know who she was then, and I didn’t much care. It was just one of those random touchings. The way a baby in a crib might reach out and brush your nose.

“Then, two or three years later, she wrote a word on a scheduling blackboard I keep in my room. The word was hello. She kept in contact after that, every once in awhile. Kind of touching base. I’m not even sure she was aware she was doing it. But I was there. When she needed help, I was the one she knew, and the one she reached out to.”

“What kind of help does she need? What kind of trouble is she in?” John turned to Billy. “Do you know?”

Billy shook his head. “I never heard of her, and I hardly ever go to Anniston.”

“Who said Abra lives in Anniston?”

Billy cocked a thumb at Dan. “He did. Didn’t he?”

John turned back to Dan. “All right. Say I’m convinced. Let’s have the whole thing.”

Dan told them about Abra’s nightmare of the baseball boy. The shapes holding flashlights on him. The woman with the knife, the one who had licked the boy’s blood off her palms. About how, much later, Abra had come across the boy’s picture in the Shopper.

“And she could do this why? Because the kid they killed was another one of these shiners?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s how the initial contact happened. He must have reached out while these people were torturing him—Abra has no doubt that’s what they did—and that created a link.”

“One that continued even after the boy, this Brad Trevor, was dead?”

“I think her later point of contact may have been something the Trevor kid owned—his baseball glove. And she was able to link to his killers because one of them put it on. She doesn’t know how she does it, and neither do I. All I know for sure is that she’s immensely powerful.”

“The way you are.”

“Here’s the thing,” Dan said. “These people—if they are people—are led by the woman who did the actual killing. On the day Abra came across the picture of Brad Trevor on a missing-children page in the local rag, she got in this woman’s head. And the woman got in Abra’s. For a few seconds they looked through each other’s eyes.” He held up his hands, made fists, and rotated them. “Turn and turn about. Abra thinks they may come for her, and so do I. Because she could be a danger to them.”

“There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” Billy asked.

Dan looked at him, waiting.

“People who can do this shining thing have something, right? Something these people want. Something they can only get by killing.”

“Yes.”

John said, “Does this woman know where Abra is?”

“Abra doesn’t think so, but you have to remember she’s only thirteen. She could be wrong.”

“Does Abra know where the woman is?”

“All she knows is that when this contact—this mutual seeing—occurred, the woman was in a Sam’s Supermarket. That puts it somewhere out West, but there are Sams in at least nine states.”

“Including Iowa?”

Dan shook his head.

“Then I don’t see what we can accomplish by going there.”

“We can get the glove,” Dan said. “Abra thinks if she has the glove, she can link to the man who had it on his hand for a little while. She calls him Barry the Chunk.”

John sat with his head lowered, thinking. Dan let him do it.

“All right,” John said at last. “This is crazy, but I’ll buy it. Given what I know of Abra’s history and given my own history with you, it’s actually kind of hard not to. But if this woman doesn’t know where Abra is, might it not be wiser to leave things alone? Don’t kick a sleeping dog and all that?”

“I don’t think this dog’s asleep,” Dan said. “These

(empty devils)

freaks want her for the same reason they wanted the Trevor boy—I’m sure Billy’s right about that. Also, they know she’s a danger to them. To put it in AA terms, she has the power to break their anonymity. And they may have resources we can only guess at. Would you want a patient of yours to live in fear, month after month and maybe year after year, always expecting some sort of paranormal Manson Family to show up and snatch her off the street?”

“Of course not.”

“These assholes live on children like her. Children like I was. Kids with the shining.” He stared grimly into John Dalton’s face. “If it’s true, they need to be stopped.”

Billy said, “If I’m not going to Iowa, what am I supposed to do?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Dan said. “You’re going to get very familiar with Anniston in the week ahead. In fact, if Casey will give you time off, you’re going to stay at a motel there.”

Rose finally entered the meditative state she had been seeking. The hardest thing to let go of had been her worries about Grampa Flick, but she finally got past them. Got above them. Now she cruised within herself, repeating the old phrases—sabbatha hanti and lodsam hanti and cahanna risone hanti—over and over again, her lips barely moving. It was too early to seek the troublesome girl, but now that she’d been left alone and the world was quiet, both inside and out, she was in no hurry. Meditation for its own sake was a fine thing. Rose went about gathering her tools and focusing her concentration, working slowly and meticulously.

Sabbatha hanti, lodsam hanti, cahanna risone hanti: words that had been old when the True Knot moved across Europe in wagons, selling peat turves and trinkets. They had probably been old when Babylon was young. The girl was powerful, but the True was all-powerful, and Rose anticipated no real problem. The girl would be asleep, and Rose would move with quiet stealth, picking up information and planting suggestions like small explosives. Not just one worm, but a whole nest of them. Some the girl might detect, and disable.

Others, not.

Abra spoke with her mother on the phone for almost forty-five minutes that night after she’d finished her homework. The conversation had two levels. On the top one, they talked about Abra’s day, the school week ahead, and her costume for the upcoming Halloween Dance; they discussed the ongoing plans to have Momo moved north to the Frazier hospice (which Abra still thought of as the “hot spice”); Lucy brought Abra up-to-date on Momo’s condition, which she said was “actually pretty good, all things considered.”

On another level, Abra listened to Lucy’s nagging worry that she had somehow failed her grandmother, and to the truth of Momo’s condition: frightened, addled, racked with pain. Abra tried to send her mother soothing thoughts: it’s all right, Mom and we love you, Mom and you did the best you could, for as long as you were able. She liked to believe that some of these thoughts got through, but didn’t really believe it. She had many talents—the kind that were wonderful and scary at the same time—but changing another person’s emotional temperature had never been one of them.

Could Dan do that? She thought maybe he could. She thought he used that part of his shining to help people in the hot spice. If he could really do that, maybe he would help Momo when she got there. That would be good.

She came downstairs wearing the pink flannel pajamas Momo had given her last Christmas. Her father was watching the Red Sox and drinking a glass of beer. She put a big smackeroo on his nose (he always said he hated that, but she knew he sort of liked it) and told him she was off to bed.

“La homework est complète, mademoiselle?”

“Yes, Daddy, but the French word for homework is devoirs.”

“Good to know, good to know. How was your mother? I ask because I only had about ninety seconds with her before you snatched the phone.”

“She’s doing okay.” Abra knew this was the truth, but she also knew okay was a relative term. She started for the hall, then turned back. “She said Momo was like a glass ornament.” She hadn’t, not out loud, but she’d been thinking it. “She says we all are.”

Dave muted the TV. “Well, I guess that’s true, but some of us are made of surprisingly tough glass. Remember, your momo’s been up on the shelf, safe and sound, for many, many years. Now come over here, Abba-Doo, and give your Dad a hug. I don’t know if you need it, but I could use one.”

Twenty minutes later she was in bed with Mr. Pooh Bear Nightlight, a holdover from earliest childhood, glowing on the dresser. She reached for Dan and found him in an activities room where there were jigsaw puzzles, magazines, a Ping-Pong table, and a big TV on the wall. He was playing cards with a couple of hot spice residents.

(did you talk to Doctor John?)

(yes we’re going to Iowa day after tomorrow)

This thought was accompanied by a brief picture of an old biplane. Inside were two men wearing old-fashioned flying helmets, scarves, and goggles. It made Abra smile.

(if we bring you)

Picture of a catcher’s mitt. That wasn’t what the baseball boy’s glove really looked like, but Abra knew what Dan was trying to say.

(will you freak out)

(no)

She better not. Holding the dead boy’s glove would be terrible, but she would have to do it.

In the common room of Rivington One, Mr. Braddock was staring at Dan with that look of monumental but slightly puzzled irritation which only the very old and borderline senile can bring off successfully. “Are you gonna discard something, Danny, or just sit there starin into the corner until the icecaps melt?”

(goodnight Abra)

(goodnight Dan say goodnight to Tony for me)

“Danny?” Mr. Braddock knocked his swollen knuckles on the table. “Danny Torrance, come in, Danny Torrance, over?”

(don’t forget to set your alarm)

“Hoo-hoo, Danny,” Cora Willingham said.

Dan looked at them. “Did I discard, or is it still my turn?”

Mr. Braddock rolled his eyes at Cora; Cora rolled hers right back.

“And my daughters think I’m the one losing my marbles,” she said.

Abra had set the alarm on her iPad because tomorrow was not only a schoolday but one of her days to make breakfast—scrambled eggs with mushrooms, peppers, and Jack cheese was the plan. But that wasn’t the alarm Dan had been talking about. She closed her eyes and concentrated, her brow furrowing. One hand crept out from under the covers and began wiping at her lips. What she was doing was tricky, but maybe it would be worth it.

Alarms were all well and good, but if the woman in the hat came looking for her, a trap might be even better.

After five minutes or so, the lines on her forehead smoothed out and her hand fell away from her mouth. She rolled over on her side and pulled the duvet up to her chin. She was visualizing herself riding a white stallion in full warrior garb when she fell asleep. Mr. Pooh Bear Nightlight watched from his place on the dresser as he had since Abra was four, casting a dim radiance on her left cheek. That and her hair were the only parts of her that still showed.

In her dreams, she galloped over long fields under four billion stars.

Rose continued her meditations until one thirty that Monday morning. The rest of the True (with the exception of Apron Annie and Big Mo, currently watching over Grampa Flick) were sleeping deeply when she decided she was ready. In one hand she held a picture, printed off her computer, of Anniston, New Hampshire’s not-very-impressive downtown. In the other she held one of the canisters. Although there was nothing left inside but the faintest whiff of steam, she had no doubt it would be enough. She put her fingers on the valve, preparing to loosen it.

We are the True Knot, and we endure: Sabbatha hanti.

We are the chosen ones: Lodsam hanti.

We are the fortunate ones: Cahanna risone hanti.

“Take this and use it well, Rosie-girl,” she said. When she turned the valve, a short sigh of silver mist escaped. She inhaled, fell back on her pillow, and let the canister drop to the carpet with a soft thud. She lifted the picture of Anniston’s Main Street in front of her eyes. Her arm and hand were no longer precisely there, and so the picture seemed to float. Not far from that Main Street, a little girl lived down a lane that was probably called Richland Court. She would be fast asleep, but somewhere in her mind was Rose the Hat. She assumed the little girl didn’t know what Rose the Hat looked like (any more than Rose knew what the girl looked like… at least not yet), but she knew what Rose the Hat felt like. Also, she knew what Rose had been looking at in Sam’s yesterday. That was her marker, her way in.

Rose stared at the picture of Anniston with fixed and dreaming eyes, but what she was really looking for was Sam’s meat counter, where EVERY CUT IS A BLUE RIBBON COWBOY CUT. She was looking for herself. And, after a gratifyingly short search, found her. At first just an auditory trace: the sound of supermarket Muzak. Then a shopping cart. Beyond it, all was still dark. That was all right; the rest would come. Rose followed the Muzak, now echoing and distant.

It was dark, it was dark, it was dark, then a little light and a little more. Here was the supermarket aisle, then it became a hallway and she knew she was almost in. Her heartbeat kicked up a notch.

Lying on her bed, she closed her eyes so if the kid realized what was happening—unlikely but not impossible—she would see nothing. Rose took a few seconds to review her primary goals: name, exact location, extent of knowledge, anyone she might have told.

(turn, world)

She gathered her strength and pushed. This time the sensation of revolving wasn’t a surprise but something she had planned for and over which she had complete control. For a moment she was still in that hallway—the conduit between their two minds—and then she was in a large room where a little girl in pigtails was riding a bike and lilting a nonsense song. It was the little girl’s dream and Rose was watching it. But she had better things to do. The walls of the room weren’t real walls, but file drawers. She could open them at will now that she was inside. The little girl was safely dreaming in Rose’s head, dreaming she was five and riding her first bicycle. That was very fine. Dream on, little princess.

The child rode past her, singing la-la-la and seeing nothing. There were training wheels on her bike, but they flickered on and off. Rose guessed the princess was dreaming of the day when she had finally learned to ride without them. Always a very fine day in a child’s life.

Enjoy your bicycle, dear, while I find out all about you.

Moving with confidence, Rose opened one of the drawers.

The instant she reached inside, an earsplitting alarm began to bray and brilliant white spotlights blazed on all around the room, beating down on her with heat as well as light. For the first time in a great many years, Rose the Hat, once Rose O’Hara from County Antrim in Northern Ireland, was caught completely off-guard. Before she could pull her hand out of the drawer, it slammed shut. The pain was enormous. She screamed and jerked backward, but she was held fast.

Her shadow jumped high on the wall, but not just hers. She turned her head and saw the little girl bearing down on her. Only she wasn’t little anymore. Now she was a young woman wearing a leather jerkin with a dragon on her blooming chest and a blue band to hold back her hair. The bike had become a white stallion. Its eyes, like those of the warrior-woman, were blazing.

The warrior-woman had a lance.

(You came back Dan said you would and you did)

And then—unbelievable in a rube, even one loaded with big steam—pleasure.

(GOOD)

The child who was no longer a child had been lying in wait for her. She had laid a trap, she meant to kill Rose… and considering Rose’s state of mental vulnerability, she probably could.

Summoning every bit of her strength, Rose fought back, not with some comic-book lance, but with a blunt battering ram that had all her years and will behind it.

(GET AWAY FROM ME! GET THE FUCK BACK! NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU’RE JUST A LITTLE GIRL!)

The girl’s grown-up vision of herself—her avatar—kept coming, but she flinched as Rose’s thought hit her, and the lance crashed into the wall of file drawers to Rose’s immediate left instead of into her side, which was where it had been aimed.

The kid (that’s all she is, Rose kept telling herself) wheeled her horse away and Rose turned to the drawer that had caught her. She braced her free hand above it and pulled with all her might, ignoring the pain. At first the drawer held. Then it gave a little and she was able to pull out the heel of her hand. It was scraped and bleeding.

Something else was happening. There was a fluttering sensation in her head, as if a bird were flying around up there. What new shit was this?

Expecting that goddamned lance to drive into her back at any moment, Rose yanked with all her might. Her hand slipped all the way out and she curled her fingers into a fist just in time. If she’d waited even an instant, the drawer would have cut them off when it slammed shut. Her nails throbbed, and she knew when she had a chance to look at them, they would be plum-colored with trapped blood.

She turned. The girl was gone. The room was empty. But that fluttering sensation continued. If anything, it had intensified. Suddenly the pain in her hand and wrist was the last thing on Rose’s mind. She wasn’t the only one who had ridden the turntable, and it didn’t matter that her eyes were still shut back in the real world, where she lay on her double bed.

The fucking brat was in another room filled with file drawers.

Her room. Her head.

Instead of the burglar, Rose had become the burgled.

(GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT)

The fluttering didn’t stop; it sped up. Rose shoved away her panic, fought for clarity and focus, found some. Just enough to set the turntable in motion again, even though it had become weirdly heavy.

(turn, world)

As it did, she felt the maddening flutter in her head first diminish and then cease as the little girl was rotated back to wherever she came from.

Except that’s not right, and this is far too serious for you to indulge in the luxury of lying to yourself. You came to her. And walked right into a trap. Why? Because in spite of all you knew, you underestimated.

Rose opened her eyes, sat up, and swung her feet onto the carpet. One of them struck the empty canister and she kicked it away. The Sidewinder t-shirt she had pulled on before lying down was damp; she reeked of sweat. It was a piggy smell, entirely unattractive. She looked unbelievingly at her hand, which was scraped and bruised and swelling. Her fingernails were going from purple to black, and she guessed she might lose at least two of them.

“But I didn’t know,” she said. “There was no way I could.” She hated the whine she heard in her voice. It was the voice of a querulous old woman. “No way at all.”

She had to get out of this goddam camper. It might be the biggest, luxiest one in the world, but right now it felt the size of a coffin. She made her way to the door, holding onto things to keep her balance. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard before she went out. Ten to two. Everything had happened in just twenty minutes. Incredible.

How much did she find out before I got free of her? How much does she know?

No way of telling for sure, but even a little could be dangerous. The brat had to be taken care of, and soon.

Rose stepped out into the pale early moonlight and took half a dozen long, steadying breaths of fresh air. She began to feel a little better, a little more herself, but she couldn’t let go of that fluttering sensation. The feeling of having someone else inside her—a rube, no less—looking at her private things. The pain had been bad, and the surprise of being trapped that way was worse, but the worst thing of all was the humiliation and sense of violation. She had been stolen from.

You are going to pay for that, princess. You just messed in with the wrong bitch.

A shape was moving toward her. Rose had settled on the top step of her RV, but now she stood up, tense, ready for anything. Then the shape got closer and she saw it was Crow. He was dressed in pajama bottoms and slippers.

“Rose, I think you better—” He stopped. “What the hell happened to your hand?”

“Never mind my fucking hand,” she snapped. “What are you doing here at two in the morning? Especially when you knew I was apt to be busy?”

“It’s Grampa Flick,” Crow said. “Apron Annie says he’s dying.”

^{CHAPTER ELEVEN} THOME 25

Instead of pine-scented air freshener and Alcazar cigars, Grampa Flick’s Fleetwood this morning smelled of shit, disease, and death. It was also crowded. There were at least a dozen members of the True Knot present, some gathered around the old man’s bed, many more sitting or standing in the living room, drinking coffee. The rest were outside. Everyone looked stunned and uneasy. The True wasn’t used to death among their own.

“Clear out,” Rose said. “Crow and Nut—you stay.”

“Look at him,” Petty the Chink said in a trembling voice. “Them spots! And ’e’s cycling like crazy, Rose! Oh, this is ’orrible!”

“Go on,” Rose said. She spoke gently and gave Petty a comforting squeeze on the shoulder when what she felt like doing was kicking her fat Cockney ass right out the door. She was a lazy gossip, good for nothing but warming Barry’s bed, and probably not very good at that. Rose guessed that nagging was more Petty’s specialty. When she wasn’t scared out of her mind, that is.

“Come on, folks,” Crow said. “If he is going to die, he doesn’t need to do it with an audience.”

“He’ll pull through,” Harpman Sam said. “Tougher’n a boiled owl, that’s Grampa Flick.” But he put his arm around Baba the Russian, who looked devastated, and hugged her tight against him for a moment.

They got moving, some taking a last look back over their shoulders before going down the steps to join the others. When it was just the three of them, Rose approached the bed.

Grampa Flick stared up at her without seeing her. His lips had pulled back from his gums. Great patches of his fine white hair had fallen out on the pillowcase, giving him the look of a distempered dog. His eyes were huge and wet and filled with pain. He was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, and his scrawny body was stippled with red marks that looked like pimples or insect bites.

She turned to Walnut and said, “What in hell are those?”

“Koplik’s spots,” he said. “That’s what they look like to me, anyway. Although Koplik’s are usually just inside the mouth.”

“Talk English.”

Nut ran his hands through his thinning hair. “I think he’s got the measles.”

Rose gaped in shock, then barked laughter. She didn’t want to stand here listening to this shit; she wanted some aspirin for her hand, which sent out a pain-pulse with every beat of her heart. She kept thinking about how the hands of cartoon characters looked when they got whopped with a mallet. “We don’t catch rube diseases!”

“Well… we never used to.”

She stared at him furiously. She wanted her hat, she felt naked without it, but it was back in the EarthCruiser.

Nut said, “I can only tell you what I see, which is red measles, also known as rubeola.”

A rube disease called rubeola. How too fucking perfect.

“That is just… horseshit!”

He flinched, and why not? She sounded strident even to herself, but… ah, Jesus God, measles? The oldest member of the True Knot dying of a childhood disease even children didn’t catch anymore?

“That baseball-playing kid from Iowa had a few spots on him, but I never thought… because yeah, it’s like you say. We don’t catch their diseases.”

“He was years ago!”

“I know. All I can think is that it was in the steam, and it kind of hibernated. There are diseases that do that, you know. Lie passive, sometimes for years, then break out.”

“Maybe with rubes!” She kept coming back to that.

Walnut only shook his head.

“If Gramp’s got it, why don’t we all have it? Because those childhood diseases—chicken pox, measles, mumps—run through rube kids like shit through a goose. It doesn’t make sense.” Then she turned to Crow Daddy and promptly contradicted herself. “What the fuck were you thinking when you let a bunch of them in to stand around and breathe his air?”

Crow just shrugged, his eyes never leaving the shivering old man on the bed. Crow’s narrow, handsome face was pensive.

“Things change,” Nut said. “Just because we had immunity to rube diseases fifty or a hundred years ago doesn’t mean we have it now. For all we know, this could be part of a natural process.”

“Are you telling me there’s anything natural about that?” She pointed to Grampa Flick.

“A single case doesn’t make an epidemic,” Nut said, “and it could be something else. But if this happens again, we’ll have to put whoever it happens to in complete quarantine.”

“Would it help?”

He hesitated a long time. “I don’t know. Maybe we do have it, all of us. Maybe it’s like an alarm clock set to go off or dynamite on a timer. According to the latest scientific thinking, that’s sort of how rubes age. They go along and go along, pretty much the same, and then something turns off in their genes. The wrinkles start showing up and all at once they need canes to walk with.”

Crow had been watching Grampa. “There he goes. Fuck.”

Grampa Flick’s skin was turning milky. Then translucent. As it moved toward complete transparency, Rose could see his liver, the shriveled gray-black bags of his lungs, the pulsing red knot of his heart. She could see his veins and arteries like the highways and turnpikes on her in-dash GPS. She could see the optic nerves that connected his eyes to his brain. They looked like ghostly strings.

Then he came back. His eyes moved, caught Rosie’s, held them. He reached out and took her unhurt hand. Her first impulse was to pull away—if he had what Nut said he had, he was contagious—but what the hell. If Nut was right, they had all been exposed.

“Rose,” he whispered. “Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t.” She sat down beside him on the bed, her fingers entwined in his. “Crow?”

“Yes, Rose.”

“The package you had sent to Sturbridge—they’ll hold it, won’t they?”

“Sure.”

“All right, we’ll see this through. But we can’t afford to wait too long. The little girl is a lot more dangerous than I thought.” She sighed. “Why do problems always come in bunches?”

“Did she do that to your hand, somehow?”

That was a question she didn’t want to answer directly. “I won’t be able to go with you, because she knows me now.” Also, she thought but didn’t say, because if this is what Walnut thinks it is, the rest will need me here to play Mother Courage. “But we have to have her. It’s more important than ever.”

“Because?”

“If she’s had the measles, she’ll have the rube immunity to catching it again. That might make her steam useful in all sorts of ways.”

“The kids get vaccinated against all that crap now,” Crow said.

Rose nodded. “That could work, too.”

Grampa Flick once more began to cycle. It was hard to watch, but Rose made herself to do it. When she could no longer see the old fellow’s organs through his fragile skin, she looked at Crow and held up her bruised and scraped hand.

“Also… she needs to be taught a lesson.”

When Dan woke up in his turret room on Monday, the schedule had once more been wiped from his blackboard and replaced with a message from Abra. At the top was a smiley-face. All the teeth were showing, which gave it a gleeful look.

Dan lay back on his bed, covered his eyes, and went looking for her. He found her walking to school with three of her friends, which struck him as dangerous in itself. For the friends as well as for Abra. He hoped Billy was there and on the job. He also hoped Billy would be discreet and not get tagged by some zealous Neighborhood Watch type as a suspicious character.

(I can come John and I don’t leave until tomorrow but it has to be fast and we have to be careful)

(yes okay good)

Dan was once more seated on a bench outside the ivy-covered Anniston Library when Abra emerged, dressed for school in a red jumper and snazzy red sneakers. She held a knapsack by one strap. To Dan she looked as if she’d grown an inch since the last time he’d seen her.

She waved. “Hi, Uncle Dan!”

“Hello, Abra. How was school?”

“Great! I got an A on my biology report!”

“Sit down a minute and tell me about it.”

She crossed to the bench, so filled with grace and energy she almost seemed to dance. Eyes bright, color high: a healthy after-school teenager with all systems showing green. Everything about her said ready-steady-go. There was no reason for this to make Dan feel uneasy, but it did. One very good thing: a nondescript Ford pickup was parked half a block down, the old guy behind the wheel sipping a take-out coffee and reading a magazine. Appearing to read a magazine, at least.

(Billy?)

No answer, but he looked up from his magazine for a moment, and that was enough.

“Okay,” Dan said in a lower voice. “I want to hear exactly what happened.”

She told him about the trap she had set, and how well it had worked. Dan listened with amazement, admiration… and that growing sense of unease. Her confidence in her abilities worried him. It was a kid’s confidence, and the people they were dealing with weren’t kids.

“I just told you to set an alarm,” he said when she had finished.

“This was better. I don’t know if I could have gone at her that way if I wasn’t pretending to be Daenerys in the Game of Thrones books, but I think so. Because she killed the baseball boy and lots of others. Also because…” For the first time her smile faltered a little. As she was telling her story, Dan had seen what she would look like at eighteen. Now he saw what she had looked like at nine.

“Because what?”

“She’s not human. None of them are. Maybe they were once, but not anymore.” She straightened her shoulders and tossed her hair back. “But I’m stronger. She knew it, too.”

(I thought she pushed you away)

She frowned at him, annoyed, wiped at her mouth, then caught her hand doing it and returned it to her lap. Once it was there, the other one clasped it to keep it still. There was something familiar about this gesture, but why wouldn’t there be? He’d seen her do it before. Right now he had bigger things to worry about.

(next time I’ll be ready if there is a next time)

That might be true. But if there was a next time, the woman in the hat would be ready, too.

(I only want you to be careful)

“I will. For sure.” This, of course, was what all kids said in order to placate the adults in their lives, but it still made Dan feel better. A little, anyway. Besides, there was Billy in his F-150 with the faded red paint.

Her eyes were dancing again. “I found lots of stuff out. That’s why I needed to see you.”

“What stuff?”

“Not where she is, I didn’t get that far, but I did find… see, when she was in my head, I was in hers. Like swapsies, you know? It was full of drawers, like being in the world’s biggest library reference room, although maybe I only saw it that way because she did. If she had been looking at computer screens in my head, I might have seen computer screens.”

“How many of her drawers did you get into?”

“Three. Maybe four. They call themselves the True Knot. Most of them are old, and they really are like vampires. They look for kids like me. And like you were, I guess. Only they don’t drink blood, they breathe in the stuff that comes out when the special kids die.” She winced in disgust. “The more they hurt them before, the stronger that stuff is. They call it steam.”

“It’s red, right? Red or reddish-pink?”

He felt sure of this, but Abra frowned and shook her head. “No, white. A bright white cloud. Nothing red about it. And listen: they can store it! What they don’t use they put it in these thermos bottle thingies. But they never have enough. I saw this show once, about sharks? It said they’re always on the move, because they never have enough to eat. I think the True Knot is like that.” She grimaced. “They’re naughty, all right.”

White stuff. Not red but white. It still had to be what the old nurse had called the gasp, but a different kind. Because it came from healthy young people instead of old ones dying of almost every disease the flesh was heir to? Because they were what Abra called “the special kids?” Both?

She was nodding. “Both, probably.”

“Okay. But the thing that matters most is that they know about you. She knows.”

“They’re a little scared I might tell someone about them, but not too scared.”

“Because you’re just a kid, and no one believes kids.”

“Right.” She blew her bangs off her forehead. “Momo would believe me, but she’s going to die. She’s going to your hot spice, Dan. Hospice, I mean. You’ll help her, won’t you? If you’re not in Iowa?”

“All I can. Abra—are they coming for you?”

“Maybe, but if they do it won’t be because of what I know. It will be because of what I am.” Her happiness was gone now that she was facing this head-on. She rubbed at her mouth again, and when she dropped her hand, her lips were parted in an angry smile. This girl has a temper, Dan thought. He could relate to that. He had a temper himself. It had gotten him in trouble more than once.

“She won’t come, though. That bitch. She knows I know her now, and I’ll sense her if she gets close, because we’re sort of tied together. But there are others. If they come for me, they’ll hurt anyone who gets in their way.”

Abra took his hands in hers, squeezing hard. This worried Dan, but he didn’t make her let go. Right now she needed to touch someone she trusted.

“We have to stop them so they can’t hurt my daddy, or my mom, or any of my friends. And so they won’t kill any more kids.”

For a moment Dan caught a clear picture from her thoughts—not sent, just there in the foreground. It was a collage of photos. Children, dozens of them, under the heading HAVE YOU SEEN ME? She was wondering how many of them had been taken by the True Knot, murdered for their final psychic gasp—the obscene delicacy this bunch lived on—and left in unmarked graves.

“You have to get that baseball glove. If I have it, I’ll be able to find out where Barry the Chunk is. I know I will. And the rest of them will be where he is. If you can’t kill them, at least you can report them to the police. Get me that glove, Dan, please.”

“If it’s where you say it is, we’ll get it. But in the meantime, Abra, you have to watch yourself.”

“I will, but I don’t think she’ll try sneaking into my head again.” Abra’s smile reemerged. In it, Dan saw the take-no-prisoners warrior woman she sometimes pretended to be—Daenerys, or whoever. “If she does, she’ll be sorry.”

Dan decided to let this go. They had been together on this bench as long as he dared. Longer, really. “I’ve set up my own security system on your behalf. If you looked into me, I imagine you could find out what it is, but I don’t want you to do that. If someone else from this Knot tries to go prospecting in your head—not the woman in the hat, but someone else—they can’t find out what you don’t know.”

“Oh. Okay.” He could see her thinking that anyone else who tried that would be sorry, too, and this increased his sense of unease.

“Just… if you get in a tight place, yell Billy with all your might. Got that?”

(yes the way you once called for your friend Dick)

He jumped a little. Abra smiled. “I wasn’t peeking; I just—”

“I understand. Now tell me one thing before you go.”

“What?”

“Did you really get an A on your bio report?”

At quarter to eight on that Monday evening, Rose got a double break on her walkie. It was Crow. “Better get over here,” he said. “It’s happening.”

The True was standing around Grampa’s RV in a silent circle. Rose (now wearing her hat at its accustomed gravity-defying angle) cut through them, pausing to give Andi a hug, then went up the steps, rapped once, and let herself in. Nut was standing with Big Mo and Apron Annie, Grampa’s two reluctant nurses. Crow was sitting on the end of the bed. He stood up when Rose came in. He was showing his age this evening. Lines bracketed his mouth, and there were a few threads of white silk in his black hair.

We need to take steam, Rose thought. And when this is over, we will.

Grampa Flick was cycling rapidly now: first transparent, then solid again, then transparent. But each transparency was longer, and more of him disappeared. He knew what was happening, Rose saw. His eyes were wide and terrified; his body writhed with the pain of the changes it was going through. She had always allowed herself to believe, on some deep level of her mind, in the True Knot’s immortality. Yes, every fifty or a hundred years or so, someone died—like that big dumb Dutchman, Hands-Off Hans, who had been electrocuted by a falling powerline in an Arkansas windstorm not long after World War II ended, or Katie Patches, who had drowned, or Tommy the Truck—but those were exceptions. Usually the ones who fell were taken down by their own carelessness. So she had always believed. Now she saw she had been as foolish as rube children clinging to their belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

He cycled back to solidity, moaning and crying and shivering. “Make it stop, Rosie-girl, make it stop. It hurts—”

Before she could answer—and really, what could she have said?—he was fading again until there was nothing left of him but a sketch of bones and his staring, floating eyes. They were the worst.

Rose tried to contact him with her mind and comfort him that way, but there was nothing to hold onto. Where Grampa Flick had always been—often grumpy, sometimes sweet—there was now only a roaring windstorm of broken images. Rose withdrew from him, shaken. Again she thought, This can’t be happening.

“Maybe we should put him out of his miz’y,” Big Mo said. She was digging her fingernails into Annie’s forearm, but Annie didn’t seem to feel it. “Give him a shot, or something. You got something in your bag, don’t you, Nut? You must.”

“What good would it do?” Walnut’s voice was hoarse. “Maybe earlier, but it’s going too fast now. He’s got no system for any drug to circulate in. If I gave him a hypo in the arm, we’d see it soaking into the bed five seconds later. Best to just let it happen. It won’t be long.”

Nor was it. Rose counted four more full cycles. On the fifth, even his bones disappeared. For a moment the eyeballs remained, staring first at her and then rolling to look at Crow Daddy. They hung above the pillow, which was still indented by the weight of his head and stained with Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic, of which he seemed to have an endless supply. She thought she remembered Greedy G telling her once that he bought it on eBay. eBay, for fuck’s sweet sake!

Then, slowly, the eyes disappeared, too. Except of course they weren’t really gone; Rose knew she’d be seeing them in her dreams later tonight. So would the others in attendance at Grampa Flick’s deathbed. If they got any sleep at all.

They waited, none of them entirely convinced that the old man wouldn’t appear before them again like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or Jacob Marley or some other, but there was only the shape of his disappeared head, the stains left by his hair tonic, and the deflated pee- and shit-stained boxers he had been wearing.

Mo burst into wild sobs and buried her head in Apron Annie’s generous bosom. Those waiting outside heard, and one voice (Rose would never know whose) began to speak. Another joined in, then a third and a fourth. Soon they were all chanting under the stars, and Rose felt a wild chill go zigzagging up her back. She reached out, found Crow’s hand, and squeezed it.

Annie joined in. Mo next, her words muffled. Nut. Then Crow. Rose the Hat took a deep breath and added her voice to theirs.

Lodsam hanti, we are the chosen ones.

Cahanna risone hanti, we are the fortunate ones.

Sabbatha hanti, sabbatha hanti, sabbatha hanti.

We are the True Knot, and we endure.

Later, Crow joined her in her EarthCruiser. “You really won’t be going east, will you?”

“No. You’ll be in charge.”

“What do we do now?”

“Mourn him, of course. Unfortunately, we can only give him two days.”

The traditional period was seven: no fucking, no idle talk, no steam. Just meditation. Then a circle of farewell where everyone would step forward and say one memory of Grampa Jonas Flick and give up one object they had from him, or that they associated with him (Rose had already picked hers, a ring with a Celtic design Grampa had given her when this part of America had still been Indian country and she had been known as the Irish Rose). There was never a body when a member of the True died, so the objects of remembrance had to serve the purpose. Those things were wrapped in white linen and buried.

“So my group leaves when? Wednesday night or Thursday morning?”

“Wednesday night.” Rose wanted the girl as soon as possible. “Drive straight through. And you’re positive they’ll hold the knockout stuff at the mail drop in Sturbridge?”

“Yes. Set your mind at ease on that.”

My mind won’t be at ease until I can look at that little bitch lying in the room right across from mine, drugged to the gills, handcuffed, and full of tasty, suckable steam.

“Who are you taking? Name them off.”

“Me, Nut, Jimmy Numbers, if you can spare him—”

“I can spare him. Who else?”

“Snakebite Andi. If we need to put someone to sleep, she can get it done. And the Chink. Him for sure. He’s the best locator we’ve got now that Grampa’s gone. Other than you, that is.”

“By all means take him, but you won’t need a locator to find this one,” Rose said. “That’s not going to be the problem. And just one vehicle will be enough. Take Steamhead Steve’s Winnebago.”

“Already spoke to him about it.”

She nodded, pleased. “One other thing. There’s a little hole-in-the-wall store in Sidewinder called District X.”

Crow raised his eyebrows. “The porno palace with the inflatable nurse doll in the window?”

“You know it, I see.” Rose’s tone was dry. “Now listen to me, Daddy.”

Crow listened.

Dan and John Dalton flew out of Logan on Tuesday morning just as the sun was rising. They changed planes in Memphis and touched down in Des Moines at 11:15 CDT on a day that felt more like mid-July than late September.

Dan spent the first part of the Boston-to-Memphis leg pretending to sleep so he wouldn’t have to deal with the doubts and second thoughts he felt sprouting like weeds in John’s mind. Somewhere over upstate New York, pretending ceased and he fell asleep for real. It was John who slept between Memphis and Des Moines, so that was all right. And once they were actually in Iowa, rolling toward the town of Freeman in a totally unobtrusive Ford Focus from Hertz, Dan sensed that John had put his doubts to bed. For the time being, at least. What had replaced them was curiosity and uneasy excitement.

“Boys on a treasure hunt,” Dan said. He’d had the longer nap, and so he was behind the wheel. High corn, now more yellow than green, flowed past them on either side.

John jumped a little. “Huh?”

Dan smiled. “Isn’t that what you were thinking? That we’re like boys on a treasure hunt?”

“You’re pretty goddam spooky, Daniel.”

“I suppose. I’ve gotten used to it.” This was not precisely true.

“When did you find out you could read minds?”

“It isn’t just mind-reading. The shining’s a uniquely variable talent. If it is a talent. Sometimes—lots of times—it feels more like a disfiguring birthmark. I’m sure Abra would say the same. As for when I found out… I never did. I just always had it. It came with the original equipment.”

“And you drank to blot it out.”

A fat woodchuck trundled with leisurely fearlessness across Route 150. Dan swerved to avoid it and the chuck disappeared into the corn, still not hurrying. It was nice out here, the sky looking a thousand miles deep and nary a mountain in sight. New Hampshire was fine, and he’d come to think of it as home, but Dan thought he was always going to feel more comfortable in the flatlands. Safer.

“You know better than that, Johnny. Why does any alcoholic drink?”

“Because he’s an alcoholic?”

“Bingo. Simple as can be. Cut through the psychobabble and you’re left with the stark truth. We drank because we’re drunks.”

John laughed. “Casey K. has truly indoctrinated you.”

“Well, there’s also the heredity thing,” Dan said. “Casey always kicks that part to the curb, but it’s there. Did your father drink?”

“Him and mother dearest both. They could have kept the Nineteenth Hole at the country club in business all by themselves. I remember the day my mother took off her tennis dress and jumped into the pool with us kids. The men applauded. My dad thought it was a scream. Me, not so much. I was nine, and until I went to college I was the boy with the Striptease Mommy. Yours?”

“My mother could take it or leave it alone. Sometimes she used to call herself Two Beers Wendy. My dad, however… one glass of wine or can of Bud and he was off to the races.” Dan glanced at the odometer and saw they still had forty miles to go. “You want to hear a story? One I’ve never told anybody? I should warn you, it’s a weird one. If you think the shining begins and ends with paltry shit like telepathy, you’re way short.” He paused. “There are other worlds than these.”

“You’ve… um… seen these other worlds?” Dan had lost track of John’s mind, but DJ suddenly looked a little nervous. As if he thought the guy sitting next to him might suddenly stick his hand in his shirt and declare himself the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte.

“No, just some of the people who live there. Abra calls them the ghostie people. Do you want to hear, or not?”

“I’m not sure I do, but maybe I better.”

Dan didn’t know how much this New England pediatrician would believe about the winter the Torrance family had spent at the Overlook Hotel, but found he didn’t particularly care. Telling it in this nondescript car, under this bright Midwestern sky, would be good enough. There was one person who would have believed it all, but Abra was too young, and the story was too scary. John Dalton would have to do. But how to begin? With Jack Torrance, he supposed. A deeply unhappy man who had failed at teaching, writing, and husbanding. What did the baseball players call three strikeouts in a row? The Golden Sombrero? Dan’s father had had only one notable success: when the moment finally came—the one the Overlook had been pushing him toward from their first day in the hotel—he had refused to kill his little boy. If there was a fitting epitaph for him, it would be…

“Dan?”

“My father tried,” he said. “That’s the best I can say for him. The most malevolent spirits in his life came in bottles. If he’d tried AA, things might have been a lot different. But he didn’t. I don’t think my mother even knew there was such a thing, or she would have suggested he give it a shot. By the time we went up to the Overlook Hotel, where a friend of his got him a job as the winter caretaker, his picture could have been next to dry drunk in the dictionary.”

“That’s where the ghosts were?”

“Yes. I saw them. He didn’t, but he felt them. Maybe he had his own shining. Probably he did. Lots of things are hereditary, after all, not just a tendency toward alcoholism. And they worked on him. He thought they—the ghostie people—wanted him, but that was just another lie. What they wanted was the little boy with the great big shine. The same way this True Knot bunch wants Abra.”

He stopped, remembering how Dick, speaking through Eleanor Ouellette’s dead mouth, had answered when Dan had asked where the empty devils were. In your childhood, where every devil comes from.

“Dan? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Dan said. “Anyway, I knew something was wrong in that goddam hotel even before I stepped through the door. I knew when the three of us were still living pretty much hand-to-mouth down in Boulder, on the Eastern Slope. But my father needed a job so he could finish a play he was working on…”

By the time they reached Adair, he was telling John how the Overlook’s boiler had exploded, and how the old hotel had burned to the ground in a driving blizzard. Adair was a two-stoplight town, but there was a Holiday Inn Express, and Dan noted the location.

“That’s where we’ll be checking in a couple of hours from now,” he told John. “We can’t go digging for treasure in broad daylight, and besides, I’m dead for sleep. Haven’t been getting much lately.”

“All that really happened to you?” John asked in a subdued voice.

“It really did.” Dan smiled. “Think you can believe it?”

“If we find the baseball glove where she says it is, I’ll have to believe a lot of things. Why did you tell me?”

“Because part of you thinks we’re crazy to be here, in spite of what you know about Abra. Also because you deserve to know that there are… forces. I’ve encountered them before; you haven’t. All you’ve seen is a little girl who can do assorted psychic parlor tricks like hanging spoons on the ceiling. This isn’t a boys’ treasure hunt game, John. If the True Knot finds out what we’re up to, we’ll be pinned to the target right along with Abra Stone. If you decided to bail on this business, I’d make the sign of the cross in front of you and say go with God.”

“And continue on by yourself.”

Dan tipped him a grin. “Well… there’s Billy.”

“Billy’s seventy-three if he’s a day.”

“He’d say that’s a plus. Billy likes to tell people that the good thing about being old is that you don’t have to worry about dying young.”

John pointed. “Freeman town line.” He gave Dan a small, tight smile. “I can’t completely believe I’m doing this. What are you going to think if that ethanol plant is gone? If it’s been torn down since Google Earth snapped its picture, and planted over with corn?”

“It’ll still be there,” Dan said.

And so it was: a series of soot-gray concrete blocks roofed in rusty corrugated metal. One smokestack still stood; two others had fallen and lay on the ground like broken snakes. The windows had been smashed and the walls were covered in blotchy spray-paint graffiti that would have been laughed at by the pro taggers in any big city. A potholed service road split off from the two-lane, ending in a parking lot that had sprouted with errant seed corn. The water tower Abra had seen stood nearby, rearing against the horizon like an H. G. Wells Martian war machine. FREEMAN, IOWA was printed on the side. The shed with the broken roof was also present and accounted for.

“Satisfied?” Dan asked. They had slowed to a crawl. “Factory, water tower, shed, No Trespassing sign. All just like she said it would be.”

John pointed to the rusty gate at the end of the service road. “What if that’s locked? I haven’t climbed a chainlink fence since I was in junior high.”

“It wasn’t locked when killers brought that kid here, or Abra would have said.”

“Are you sure of that?”

A farm truck was coming the other way. Dan sped up a little and lifted a hand as they passed. The guy behind the wheel—green John Deere cap, sunglasses, bib overalls—raised his in return but hardly glanced at them. That was a good thing.

“I asked if—”

“I know what you asked,” Dan said. “If it’s locked, we’ll deal with it. Somehow. Now let’s go back to that motel and check in. I’m whipped.”

While John got adjoining rooms at the Holiday Inn—paying cash—Dan sought out the Adair True Value Hardware. He bought a spade, a rake, two hoes, a garden trowel, two pairs of gloves, and a duffel to hold his new purchases. The only tool he actually wanted was the spade, but it seemed best to buy in bulk.

“What brings you to Adair, may I ask?” the clerk asked as he rang up Dan’s stuff.

“Just passing through. My sister’s in Des Moines, and she’s got quite the garden patch. She probably owns most of this stuff, but presents always seem to improve her hospitality.”

“I hear that, brother. And she’ll thank you for this short-handle hoe. No tool comes in handier, and most amateur gardeners never think to get one. We take MasterCard, Visa—”

“I think I’ll give the plastic a rest,” Dan said, taking out his wallet. “Just give me a receipt for Uncle Sugar.”

“You bet. And if you give me your name and address—or your sister’s—we’ll send our catalogue.”

“You know what, I’m going to pass on that today,” Dan said, and put a little fan of twenties on the counter.

At eleven o’clock that night, there came a soft rap on Dan’s door. He opened it and let John inside. Abra’s pediatrician was pale and keyed-up. “Did you sleep?”

“Some,” Dan said. “You?”

“In and out. Mostly out. I’m nervous as a goddam cat. If a cop stops us, what are we going to say?”

“That we heard there was a juke joint in Freeman and decided to go looking for it.”

“There’s nothing in Freeman but corn. About nine billion acres of it.”

“We don’t know that,” Dan said mildly. “We’re just passing through. Besides, no cop’s going to stop us, John. Nobody’s even going to notice us. But if you want to stay here—”

“I didn’t come halfway across the country to sit in a motel watching Jay Leno. Just let me use the toilet. I used mine before I left the room, but now I need to go again. Christ, am I nervous.”

The drive to Freeman seemed very long to Dan, but once they left Adair behind, they didn’t meet a single car. Farmers went to bed early, and they were off the trucking routes.

When they reached the ethanol plant, Dan doused the rental car’s lights, turned in to the service road, and rolled slowly up to the closed gate. The two men got out. John cursed when the Ford’s dome light came on. “I should have turned that thing off before we left the motel. Or smashed the bulb, if it doesn’t have a switch.”

“Relax,” Dan said. “There’s no one out here but us chickens.” Still, his heart was beating hard in his chest as they walked to the gate. If Abra was right, a little boy had been murdered and buried out here after being miserably tortured. If ever a place should be haunted—

John tried the gate, and when pushing didn’t work, he tried pulling. “Nothing. What now? Climb, I guess. I’m willing to try, but I’ll probably break my fucking—”

“Wait.” Dan took a penlight from his jacket pocket and shone it on the gate, first noting the broken padlock, then the heavy twists of wire above and below it. He went back to the car, and it was his turn to wince when the trunk light came on. Well, shit. You couldn’t think of everything. He yanked out the new duffel, and slammed the trunk lid down. Dark returned.

“Here,” he told John, holding out a pair of gloves. “Put these on.” Dan put on his own, untwisted the wire, and hung both pieces in one of the chainlink diamonds for later reference. “Okay, let’s go.”

“I have to pee again.”

“Oh, man. Hold it.”

Dan drove the Hertz Ford slowly and carefully around to the loading dock. There were plenty of potholes, some deep, all hard to see with the headlights off. The last thing in the world he wanted was to drop the Focus into one and smash an axle. Behind the plant, the surface was a mixture of bare earth and crumbling asphalt. Fifty feet away was another chainlink fence, and beyond that, endless leagues of corn. The dock area wasn’t as big as the parking lot, but it was plenty big.

“Dan? How will we know where—”

“Be quiet.” Dan bent his head until his brow touched the steering wheel and closed his eyes.

(Abra)

Nothing. She was asleep, of course. Back in Anniston it was already Wednesday morning. John sat beside him, chewing his lips.

(Abra)

A faint stirring. It could have been his imagination. Dan hoped it was more.

(ABRA!)

Eyes opened in his head. There was a moment of disorientation, a kind of double vision, and then Abra was looking with him. The loading dock and the crumbled remains of the smokestacks were suddenly clearer, even though there was only starlight to see by.

Her vision’s a hell of a lot better than mine.

Dan got out of the car. So did John, but Dan barely noticed. He had ceded control to the girl who was now lying awake in her bed eleven hundred miles away. He felt like a human metal detector. Only it wasn’t metal that he—they—were looking for.

(walk over to that concrete thing)

Dan walked to the loading dock and stood with his back to it.

(now start going back and forth)

A pause as she hunted for a way to clarify what she wanted.

(like on CSI)

He coursed fifty feet or so to the left, then turned right, moving out from the dock on opposing diagonals. John had gotten the spade out of the duffel bag and stood by the rental car, watching.

(here is where they parked their RVs)

Dan cut back left again, walking slowly, occasionally kicking a loose brick or chunk of concrete out of his way.

(you’re close)

Dan stopped. He smelled something unpleasant. A gassy whiff of decay.

(Abra? do you)

(yes oh God Dan)

(take it easy hon)

(you went too far turn around go slow)

Dan turned on one heel, like a soldier doing a sloppy about-face. He started back toward the loading dock.

(left a little to your left slower)

He went that way, now pausing after each small step. Here was that smell again, a little stronger. Suddenly the preternaturally sharp nighttime world began to blur as his eyes filled with Abra’s tears.

(there the baseball boy you’re standing right on top of him)

Dan took a deep breath and wiped at his cheeks. He was shivering. Not because he was cold, but because she was. Sitting up in her bed, clutching her lumpy stuffed rabbit, and shaking like an old leaf on a dead tree.

(get out of here Abra)

(Dan are you)

(yes fine but you don’t need to see this)

Suddenly that absolute clarity of vision was gone. Abra had broken the connection, and that was good.

“Dan?” John called, low. “All right?”

“Yes.” His voice was still clogged with Abra’s tears. “Bring that spade.”

It took them twenty minutes. Dan dug for the first ten, then passed the spade to John, who actually found Brad Trevor. He turned away from the hole, covering his mouth and nose. His words were muffled but understandable. “Okay, there’s a body. Jesus!”

“You didn’t smell it before?”

“Buried that deep, and after two years? Are you saying that you did?”

Dan didn’t reply, so John addressed the hole again, but without conviction this time. He stood for a few seconds with his back bent as if he still meant to use the spade, then straightened and drew back when Dan shone the penlight into the little excavation they had made. “I can’t,” he said. “I thought I could, but I can’t. Not with… that. My arms feel like rubber.”

Dan handed him the light. John shone it into the hole, centering the beam on what had freaked him out: a dirt-clotted sneaker. Working slowly, not wanting to disturb the earthly remains of Abra’s baseball boy any more than necessary, Dan scraped dirt away from the sides of the body. Little by little, an earth-covered shape emerged. It reminded him of the carvings on sarcophagi he had seen in National Geographic.

The smell of decay was now very strong.

Dan stepped away and hyperventilated, ending with the deepest breath he could manage. Then he dropped into the end of the shallow grave, where both of Brad Trevor’s sneakers now protruded in a V. He knee-walked up to about where he thought the boy’s waist must be, then held up a hand for the penlight. John handed it over and turned away. He was sobbing audibly.

Dan clamped the slim flashlight between his lips and began brushing away more dirt. A child’s t-shirt came into view, clinging to a sunken chest. Then hands. The fingers, now little more than bones wrapped in yellow skin, were clasped over something. Dan’s chest was starting to pound for air now, but he pried the Trevor boy’s fingers apart as gently as he could. Still, one of them snapped with a dry crunching sound.

They had buried him holding his baseball glove to his chest. Its lovingly oiled pocket was full of squirming bugs.

The air escaped Dan’s lungs in a shocked whoosh, and the breath he inhaled to replace it was rich with rot. He lunged out of the grave to his right, managing to vomit on the dirt they’d taken out of the hole instead of on the wasted remains of Bradley Trevor, whose only crime had been to be born with something a tribe of monsters wanted. And had stolen from him on the very wind of his dying shrieks.

They reburied the body, John doing most of the work this time, and covered the spot with a makeshift crypt of broken asphalt chunks. Neither of them wanted to think of foxes or stray dogs feasting on what scant meat was left.

When they were done, they got back into the car and sat without speaking. At last John said, “What are we going to do about him, Danno? We can’t just leave him. He’s got parents. Grandparents. Probably brothers and sisters. All of them still wondering.”

“He has to stay awhile. Long enough so nobody’s going to say, ‘Gee, that anonymous call came in just after some stranger bought a spade in the Adair hardware store.’ That probably wouldn’t happen, but we can’t take the chance.”

“How long’s awhile?”

“Maybe a month.”

John considered this, then sighed. “Maybe even two. Give his folks that long to go on thinking he might just have run off. Give them that long before we break their hearts.” He shook his head. “If I’d had to look at his face, I don’t think I ever could have slept again.”

“You’d be surprised what a person can live with,” Dan said. He was thinking of Mrs. Massey, now safely stored away in the back of his head, her haunting days over. He started the car, powered down his window, and beat the baseball glove several times against the door to dislodge the dirt. Then he put it on, sliding his fingers into the places where the child’s had been on so many sunlit afternoons. He closed his eyes. After thirty seconds or so, he opened them again.

“Anything?”

“‘You’re Barry. You’re one of the good guys.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, except I’m betting he’s the one Abra calls Barry the Chunk.”

“Nothing else?”

“Abra will be able to get more.”

“Are you sure of that?”

Dan thought of the way his vision had sharpened when Abra opened her eyes inside his head. “I am. Shine your light on the pocket of the glove for a sec, will you? There’s something written there.”

John did it, revealing a child’s careful printing: THOME 25.

“What does that mean?” John asked. “I thought his name was Trevor.”

“Jim Thome’s a baseball player. His number is twenty-five.” He stared into the pocket of the glove for a moment, then laid it gently on the seat between them. “He was that kid’s favorite Major Leaguer. He named his glove after him. I’m going to get these fuckers. I swear before God Almighty, I’m going to get them and make them sorry.”

Rose the Hat shone—the entire True shone—but not in the way Dan or Billy did. Neither Rose nor Crow had any sense, as they said their goodbyes, that the child they had taken years ago in Iowa was at that moment being uncovered by two men who knew far too much about them already. Rose could have caught the communications flying between Dan and Abra if she had been in a state of deep meditation, but of course then the little girl would have noticed her presence immediately. Besides, the goodbyes going on in Rose’s EarthCruiser that night were of an especially intimate sort.

She lay with her fingers laced together behind her head and watched Crow dress. “You visited that store, right? District X?”

“Not me personally, I have a reputation to protect. I sent Jimmy Numbers.” Crow grinned as he buckled his belt. “He could’ve gotten what we needed in fifteen minutes, but he was gone for two hours. I think Jimmy’s found a new home.”

“Well, that’s good. I hope you boys enjoy yourselves.” Trying to keep it light, but after two days of mourning Grampa Flick, climaxed by the circle of farewell, keeping anything light was an effort.

“He didn’t get anything that compares to you.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Had a preview, did you, Henry?”

“Didn’t need one.” He eyed her as she lay naked with her hair spread out in a dark fan. She was tall, even lying down. He had ever liked tall women. “You’re the feature attraction in my home theater and always will be.”

Overblown—just a bit of Crow’s patented razzle-dazzle—but it pleased her just the same. She got up and pressed against him, her hands in his hair. “Be careful. Bring everyone back. And bring her.”

“We will.”

“Then you better get a wiggle on.”

“Relax. We’ll be in Sturbridge when EZ Mail Services opens on Friday morning. In New Hampshire by noon. By then, Barry will have located her.”

“As long as she doesn’t locate him.”

“I’m not worried about that.”

Fine, Rose thought. I’ll worry for both of us. I’ll worry until I’m looking at her wearing cuffs on her wrists and clamps on her ankles.

“The beauty of it,” Crow said, “is that if she does sense us and tries to put up an interference wall, Barry will key on that.”

“If she’s scared enough, she might go to the police.”

He flashed a grin. “You think? ‘Yes, little girl,’ they’d say, ‘we’re sure these awful people are after you. So tell us if they’re from outer space or just your ordinary garden variety zombies. That way we’ll know what to look for.’”

“Don’t joke, and don’t take this lightly. Get in clean and get out the same way, that’s how it has to be. No outsiders involved. No innocent bystanders. Kill the parents if you need to, kill anyone who tries to interfere, but keep it quiet.”

Crow snapped off a comic salute. “Yes, my captain.”

“Get out of here, idiot. But give me another kiss first. Maybe a little of that educated tongue, for good measure.”

He gave her what she asked for. Rose held him tight, and for a long time.

Dan and John rode in silence most of the way back to the motel in Adair. The spade was in the trunk. The baseball glove was in the backseat, wrapped in a Holiday Inn towel. At last John said, “We’ve got to bring Abra’s folks into this now. She’s going to hate it and Lucy and David won’t want to believe it, but it has to be done.”

Dan looked at him, straight-faced, and said: “What are you, a mind-reader?”

John wasn’t, but Abra was, and her sudden loud voice in Dan’s head made him glad that this time John was driving. If he had been behind the wheel, they very likely would have ended up in some farmer’s cornpatch.

(NOOOOO!)

“Abra.” He spoke aloud so that John could hear at least his half of the conversation. “Abra, listen to me.”

(NO, DAN! THEY THINK I’M ALL RIGHT! THEY THINK I’M ALMOST NORMAL NOW!)

“Honey, if these people had to kill your mom and dad to get to you, do you think they’d hesitate? I sure don’t. Not after what we found back there.”

There was no counterargument she could make to this, and Abra didn’t try… but suddenly Dan’s head was filled with her sorrow and her fear. His eyes welled up again and spilled tears down his cheeks.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

Early Thursday morning.

Steamhead Steve’s Winnebago, with Snakebite Andi currently behind the wheel, was cruising eastbound on I-80 in western Nebraska at a perfectly legal sixty-five miles an hour. The first streaks of dawn had just begun to show on the horizon. In Anniston it was two hours later. Dave Stone was in his bathrobe making coffee when the phone rang. It was Lucy, calling from Concetta’s Marlborough Street condo. She sounded like a woman who had nearly reached the end of her resources.

“If nothing changes for the worse—although I guess that’s the only way things can change now—they’ll be releasing Momo from the hospital first thing next week. I talked with the two doctors on her case last night.”

“Why didn’t you call me, sweetheart?”

“Too tired. And too depressed. I thought I’d feel better after a night’s sleep, but I didn’t get much. Honey, this place is just so full of her. Not just her work, her vitality…”

Her voice wavered. David waited. They had been together for over fifteen years, and he knew that when Lucy was upset, waiting was sometimes better than talking.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with it all. Just looking at the books makes me tired. There are thousands on the shelves and stacked in her study, and the super says there are thousands more in storage.”

“We don’t have to decide right now.”

“He says there’s also a trunk marked Alessandra. That was my mother’s real name, you know, although I guess she always called herself Sandra or Sandy. I never knew Momo had her stuff.”

“For someone who let it all hang out in her poetry, Chetta could be one closemouthed lady when she wanted to.”

Lucy seemed not to hear him, only continued in the same dull, slightly nagging, tired-to-death tone. “Everything’s arranged, although I’ll have to reschedule the private ambulance if they decide to let her go Sunday. They said they might. Thank God she’s got good insurance. That goes back to her teaching days at Tufts, you know. She never made a dime from poetry. Who in this fucked-up country would pay a dime to read it anymore?”

“Lucy—”

“She’s got a good place in the main building at Rivington House—a little suite. I took the online tour. Not that she’ll be using it long. I made friends with the head nurse on her floor here, and she says Momo’s just about at the end of her—”

“Chia, I love you, honey.”

That—Concetta’s old nickname for her—finally stopped her.

“With all my admittedly non-Italian heart and soul.”

“I know, and thank God you do. This has been so hard, but it’s almost over. I’ll be there Monday at the very latest.”

“We can’t wait to see you.”

“How are you? How’s Abra?”

“We’re both fine.” David would be allowed to go on believing this for another sixty seconds or so.

He heard Lucy yawn. “I might go back to bed for an hour or two. I think I can sleep now.”

“You do that. I’ve got to get Abs up for school.”

They said their goodbyes, and when Dave turned away from the kitchen wall phone, he saw that Abra was already up. She was still in her pajamas. Her hair was every whichway, her eyes were red, and her face was pale. She was clutching Hoppy, her old stuffed rabbit.

“Abba-Doo? Honey? Are you sick?”

Yes. No. I don’t know. But you will be, when you hear what I’m going to tell you.

“I need to talk to you, Daddy. And I don’t want to go to school today. Tomorrow, either. Maybe not for awhile.” She hesitated. “I’m in trouble.”

The first thing that phrase brought to mind was so awful that he pushed it away at once, but not before Abra caught it.

She smiled wanly. “No, I’m not pregnant.”

He stopped on his way to her, halfway across the kitchen, his mouth falling open. “You… did you just—”

“Yes,” she said. “I just read your mind. Although anyone could have guessed what you were thinking that time, Daddy—it was all over your face. And it’s called shining, not mind-reading. I can still do most of the things that used to scare you when I was little. Not all, but most.”

He spoke very slowly. “I know you still sometimes have premonitions. Your mom and I both know.”

“It’s a lot more than that. I have a friend. His name is Dan. He and Dr. John have been in Iowa—”

“John Dalton?”

“Yes—”

“Who’s this Dan? Is he a kid Dr. John treats?”

“No, he’s a grown-up.” She took his hand and led him to the kitchen table. There they sat down, Abra still holding Hoppy. “But when he was a kid, he was like me.”

“Abs, I’m not understanding any of this.”

“There are bad people, Daddy.” She knew she couldn’t tell him they were more than people, worse than people, until Dan and John were here to help her explain. “They might want to hurt me.”

“Why would anyone want to hurt you? You’re not making sense. As for all those things you used to do, if you could still do them, we’d kn—”

The drawer below the hanging pots flew open, then shut, then opened again. She could no longer lift the spoons, but the drawer was enough to get his attention.

“Once I understood how much it worried you guys—how much it scared you—I hid it. But I can’t hide it anymore. Dan says I have to tell.”

She pressed her face against Hoppy’s threadbare fur and began to cry.

^{CHAPTER TWELVE} THEY CALL IT STEAM

John turned on his cell as soon as he and Dan emerged from the jetway at Logan Airport late Thursday afternoon. He had no more than registered the fact that he had well over a dozen missed calls when the phone rang in his hand. He glanced down at the window.

“Stone?” Dan asked.

“I’ve got a lot of missed calls from the same number, so I’d say it has to be.”

“Don’t answer. Call him back when we’re on the expressway north and tell him we’ll be there by—” Dan glanced at his watch, which he had never changed from Eastern Time. “By six. When we get there, we’ll tell him everything.”

John reluctantly pocketed his cell. “I spent the flight back hoping I’m not going to lose my license to practice over this. Now I’m just hoping the cops don’t grab us as soon as we park in front of Dave Stone’s house.”

Dan, who had consulted several times with Abra on their way back across the country, shook his head. “She’s convinced him to wait, but there’s a lot going on in that family just now, and Mr. Stone is one confused American.”

To this, John offered a smile of singular bleakness. “He’s not the only one.”

Abra was sitting on the front step with her father when Dan swung into the Stones’ driveway. They had made good time; it was only five thirty.

Abra was up before Dave could grab her and came running down the walk with her hair flying out behind her. Dan saw she was heading for him, and handed the towel-wrapped fielder’s mitt to John. She threw herself into his arms. She was trembling all over.

(you found him you found him and you found the glove give it to me)

“Not yet,” Dan said, setting her down. “We need to thrash this out with your dad first.”

“Thrash what out?” Dave asked. He took Abra by the wrist and pulled her away from Dan. “Who are these bad people she’s talking about? And who the hell are you?” His gaze shifted to John, and there was nothing friendly in his eyes. “What in the name of sweet Jesus is going on here?”

“This is Dan, Daddy. He’s like me. I told you.”

John said, “Where’s Lucy? Does she know about this?”

“I’m not telling you anything until I find out what’s going on.”

Abra said, “She’s still in Boston, with Momo. Daddy wanted to call her, but I persuaded him to wait until you got here.” Her eyes remained pinned on the towel-wrapped glove.

“Dan Torrance,” Dave said. “That your name?”

“Yes.”

“You work at the hospice in Frazier?”

“That’s right.”

“How long have you been meeting my daughter?” His hands were clenching and unclenching. “Did you meet her on the internet? I’m betting that’s it.” He switched his gaze to John. “If you hadn’t been Abra’s pediatrician from the day she was born, I would have called the police six hours ago, when you didn’t answer your phone.”

“I was in an airplane,” John said. “I couldn’t.”

“Mr. Stone,” Dan said. “I haven’t known your daughter as long as John has, but almost. The first time I met her, she was just a baby. And it was she who reached out to me.”

Dave shook his head. He looked perplexed, angry, and little inclined to believe anything Dan told him.

“Let’s go in the house,” John said. “I think we can explain everything—almost everything—and if that’s the case, you’ll be very happy that we’re here, and that we went to Iowa to do what we did.”

“I damn well hope so, John, but I’ve got my doubts.”

They went inside, Dave with his arm around Abra’s shoulders—at that moment they looked more like jailer and prisoner than father and daughter—John Dalton next, Dan last. He looked across the street at the rusty red pickup parked there. Billy gave him a quick thumbs-up… then crossed his fingers. Dan returned the gesture, and followed the others through the front door.

As Dave was sitting down in his Richland Court living room with his puzzling daughter and his even more puzzling guests, the Winnebago containing the True raiding party was southeast of Toledo. Walnut was at the wheel. Andi Steiner and Barry were sleeping—Andi like the dead, Barry rolling from side to side and muttering. Crow was in the parlor area, paging through The New Yorker. The only things he really liked were the cartoons and the tiny ads for weird items like yak-fur sweaters, Vietnamese coolie hats, and faux Cuban cigars.

Jimmy Numbers plunked down next to him with his laptop in hand. “I’ve been combing the ’net. Had to hack and back with a couple of sites, but… can I show you something?”

“How can you surf the ’net from an interstate highway?”

Jimmy gave him a patronizing smile. “4G connection, baby. This is the modern age.”

“If you say so.” Crow put his magazine aside. “What’ve you got?”

“School pictures from Anniston Middle School.” Jimmy tapped the touchpad and a photo appeared. No grainy newsprint job, but a high-res school portrait of a girl in a red dress with puffed sleeves. Her braided hair was chestnut brown, her smile wide and confident.

“Julianne Cross,” Jimmy said. He tapped the touchpad again and a redhead with a mischievous grin popped up. “Emma Deane.” Another tap, and an even prettier girl appeared. Blue eyes, blond hair framing her face and spilling over her shoulders. Serious expression, but dimples hinting at a smile. “This one’s Abra Stone.”

“Abra?”

“Yeah, they name em anything these days. Remember when Jane and Mabel used to be good enough for the rubes? I read somewhere that Sly Stallone named his kid Sage Moonblood, how fucked up is that?”

“You think one of these three is Rose’s girl.”

“If she’s right about the girl being a young teenager, it just about has to be. Probably Deane or Stone, they’re the two who actually live on the street where the little earthquake was, but you can’t count the Cross girl out completely. She’s just around the corner.” Jimmy Numbers made a swirling gesture on the touchpad and the three pictures zipped into a row. Written below each in curly script was MY SCHOOL MEMORIES.

Crow studied them. “Is anyone going to tip to the fact that you’ve been filching pictures of little girls off of Facebook, or something? Because that sets off all kinds of warning bells in Rubeland.”

Jimmy looked offended. “Facebook, my ass. These came from the Frazier Middle School files, pipelined direct from their computer to mine.” He made an unlovely sucking sound. “And guess what, a guy with access to a whole bank of NSA computers couldn’t follow my tracks on this one. Who rocks?”

“You do,” Crow said. “I guess.”

“Which one do you think it is?”

“If I had to pick…” Crow tapped Abra’s picture. “She’s got a certain look in her eyes. A steamy look.”

Jimmy puzzled over this for a moment, decided it was dirty, and guffawed. “Does it help?”

“Yes. Can you print these pictures and make sure the others have copies? Particularly Barry. He’s Locator in Chief on this one.”

“I’ll do it right now. I’m packing a Fujitsu ScanSnap. Great little on-the-go machine. I used to have the S1100, but I swapped it when I read in Computerworld—”

“Just do it, okay?”

“Sure.”

Crow picked up the magazine again and turned to the cartoon on the last page, the one where you were supposed to fill in the caption. This week’s showed an elderly woman walking into a bar with a bear on a chain. She had her mouth open, so the caption had to be her dialogue. Crow considered carefully, then printed: “Okay, which one of you assholes called me a cunt?”

Probably not a winner.

The Winnebago rolled on through the deepening evening. In the cockpit, Nut turned on the headlights. In one of the bunks, Barry the Chink turned and scratched at his wrist in his sleep. A red spot had appeared there.

The three men sat in silence while Abra went upstairs to get something in her room. Dave thought of suggesting coffee—they looked tired, and both men needed a shave—but decided he wasn’t going to offer either of them so much as a dry Saltine until he got an explanation. He and Lucy had discussed what they were going to do when Abra came home some day in the not-too-distant future and announced that a boy had asked her out, but these were men, men, and it seemed that the one he didn’t know had been dating his daughter for quite some time. After a fashion, anyway… and wasn’t that really the question: What sort of fashion?

Before any of them could risk starting a conversation that was bound to be awkward—and perhaps acrimonious—there came the muted thunder of Abra’s sneakers on the stairs. She came into the room with a copy of The Anniston Shopper. “Look at the back page.”

Dave turned the newspaper over and grimaced. “What’s this brown dreck?”

“Dried coffee grounds. I threw the newspaper in the trash, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I fished it out again. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.” She pointed to the picture of Bradley Trevor in the bottom row. “And his parents. And his brothers and sisters, if he had them.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He had freckles, Daddy. He hated them, but his mother said they were good luck.”

“You can’t know that,” Dave said with no conviction at all.

“She knows,” John said, “and so do you. Get with us on this, Dave. Please. It’s important.”

“I want to know about you and my daughter,” Dave said to Dan. “Tell me about that.”

Dan went through it again. Doodling Abra’s name in his AA meeting book. The first chalked hello. His clear sense of Abra’s presence on the night Charlie Hayes died. “I asked if she was the little girl who sometimes wrote on my blackboard. She didn’t answer in words, but there was a little run of piano music. Some old Beatles tune, I think.”

Dave looked at John. “You told him about that!”

John shook his head.

Dan said, “Two years ago I got a blackboard message from her that said, ‘They are killing the baseball boy.’ I didn’t know what it meant, and I’m not sure Abra did, either. That might have been the end of it, but then she saw that.” He pointed to the back page of The Anniston Shopper with all those postage-stamp portraits.

Abra told the rest.

When she was done, Dave said: “So you flew to Iowa on a thirteen-year-old girl’s sayso.”

“A very special thirteen-year-old girl,” John said. “With some very special talents.”

“We thought all that was over.” Dave shot Abra an accusing look. “Except for a few little premonitions, we thought she outgrew it.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

“Maybe she shouldn’t have to be sorry,” Dan said, hoping he didn’t sound as angry as he felt. “She hid her ability because she knew you and your wife wanted it to be gone. She hid it because she loves you and wanted to be a good daughter.”

“She told you that, I suppose?”

“We never even discussed it,” Dan said. “But I had a mother I loved dearly, and because I did, I did the same thing.”

Abra shot him a look of naked gratitude. As she lowered her eyes again, she sent him a thought. Something she was embarrassed to say out loud.

“She also didn’t want her friends to know. She thought they wouldn’t like her anymore. That they’d be scared of her. She was probably right about that, too.”

“Let’s not lose sight of the major issue,” John said. “We flew to Iowa, yes. We found the ethanol plant in the town of Freeman, just where Abra said it would be. We found the boy’s body. And his glove. He wrote the name of his favorite baseball player in the pocket, but his name—Brad Trevor—is written on the strap.”

“He was murdered. That’s what you’re saying. By a bunch of wandering lunatics.”

“They ride in campers and Winnebagos,” Abra said. Her voice was low and dreamy. She was looking at the towel-wrapped baseball glove as she spoke. She was afraid of it, and she wanted to put her hands on it. These conflicting emotions came through to Dan so clearly that they made him feel sick to his stomach. “They have funny names, like pirate names.”

Almost plaintively, Dave asked, “Are you sure the kid was murdered?”

“The woman in the hat licked his blood off her hands,” Abra said. She had been sitting on the stairs. Now she went to her father and put her face against his chest. “When she wants it, she has a special tooth. All of them do.”

“This kid was really like you?”

“Yes.” Abra’s voice was muffled but understandable. “He could see through his hand.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like when certain pitches would come, he could hit them because his hand saw them first. And when his mother lost something, he’d put his hand over his eyes and look through it to see where the thing was. I think. I don’t know that part for sure, but sometimes I use my hand that way.”

“And that’s why they killed him?”

“I’m sure of it,” Dan said.

“For what? Some kind of ESP vitamin? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

No one replied.

“And they know Abra’s on to them?”

“They know.” She raised her head. Her cheeks were flushed and wet with tears. “They don’t know my name or where I live, but they know there is a me.”

“Then we need to go to the police,” Dave said. “Or maybe… I guess we’d want the FBI in a case like this. They might have trouble believing it at first, but if the body’s there—”

Dan said, “I won’t tell you that’s a bad idea until we see what Abra can do with the baseball glove, but you need to think pretty carefully about the consequences. For me, for John, for you and your wife, and most of all for Abra.”

“I don’t see what kind of trouble you and John could possibly—”

John shifted impatiently in his chair. “Come on, David. Who found the body? Who dug it up and then buried it again, after taking a piece of evidence the forensics people would no doubt consider vital? Who brought that piece of evidence halfway across the country so an eighth-grader could use it like a Ouija board?”

Although he hadn’t meant to, Dan joined in. They were ganging up, and in other circumstances he might have felt bad about that, but not in these. “Your family’s already in crisis, Mr. Stone. Your grandmother-in-law is dying, your wife’s grieving and exhausted. This thing will hit the newspapers and the internet like a bomb. Wandering clan of murderers versus a supposedly psychic little girl. They’ll want her on TV, you’ll say no, and that will just make them hungrier. Your street will turn into an open-air studio, Nancy Grace will probably move in next door, and in a week or two the whole media mob will be yelling hoax at the top of its lungs. Remember Balloon Boy Dad? That’s apt to be you. Meanwhile, these folks will still be out there.”

“So who’s supposed to protect my little girl if they come after her? You two? A doctor and a hospice orderly? Or are you just a janitor?”

You don’t even know about the seventy-three-year-old groundskeeper standing watch down the street, Dan thought, and had to smile. “I’m a little of both. Look, Mr. Stone—”

“Seeing as how you and my daughter are great pals, I guess you better call me Dave.”

“Okay, Dave it is. I guess what you do next depends on whether or not you’re willing to gamble on law enforcement believing her. Especially when she tells them that the Winnebago People are life-sucking vampires.”

“Christ,” Dave said. “I can’t tell Lucy about this. She’ll blow a fuse. All her fuses.”

“That would seem to answer the question about whether or not to call the police,” John remarked.

There was silence for a moment. Somewhere in the house a clock was ticking. Somewhere outside, a dog was barking.

“The earthquake,” Dave said suddenly. “That little earthquake. Was that you, Abby?”

“I’m pretty sure,” she whispered.

Dave hugged her, then stood up and took the towel off the baseball glove. He held it, looking it over. “They buried him with it,” he said. “They abducted him, tortured him, murdered him, and then buried him with his baseball glove.”

“Yes,” Dan said.

Dave turned to his daughter. “Do you really want to touch this thing, Abra?”

She held out her hands and said, “No. But give it to me anyway.”

David Stone hesitated, then handed it over. Abra took it in her hands and looked into the pocket. “Jim Thome,” she said, and although Dan would have been willing to bet his savings (after twelve years of steady work and steady sobriety, he actually had some) that she had never encountered the name before, she said it correctly: Toe-me. “He’s in the Six Hundred Club.”

“That’s right,” Dave said. “He—”

“Hush,” Dan said.

They watched her. She raised the glove to her face and sniffed the pocket. (Dan, remembering the bugs, had to restrain a wince.) She said, “Not Barry the Chunk, Barry the Chink. Only he’s not Chinese. They call him that because his eyes slant up at the corners. He’s their… their… I don’t know… wait…”

She held the glove to her chest, like a baby. She began to breathe faster. Her mouth dropped open and she moaned. Dave, alarmed, put a hand on her shoulder. Abra shook him off. “No, Daddy, no!” She closed her eyes and hugged the glove. They waited.

At last her eyes opened and she said, “They’re coming for me.”

Dan got up, knelt beside her, and put one hand over both of hers.

(how many is it some or is it all of them)

“Just some. Barry’s with them. That’s why I can see. There are three others. Maybe four. One is a lady with a snake tattoo. They call us rubes. We’re rubes to them.”

(is the woman with the hat)

(no)

“When will they get here?” John asked. “Do you know?”

“Tomorrow. They have to stop first and get…” She paused. Her eyes searched the room, not seeing it. One hand slipped out from beneath Dan’s and began to rub her mouth. The other clasped the glove. “They have to… I don’t know…” Tears began to ooze from the corners of her eyes, not of sadness but of effort. “Is it medicine? Is it… wait, wait, let go of me, Dan, I have to… you have to let me…”

He took his hand away. There was a brisk snap and a blue flick of static electricity. The piano played a discordant run of notes. On an occasional table by the door to the hall, a number of ceramic Hummel figures were jittering and rapping. Abra slipped the glove on her hand. Her eyes flew wide open.

“One is a crow! One is a doctor and that’s lucky for them because Barry is sick! He’s sick!” She stared around at them wildly, then laughed. The sound of it made Dan’s neck hairs stiffen. He thought it was the way lunatics must laugh when their medication is late. It was all he could do not to snatch the glove off her hand.

“He’s got the measles! He’s caught the measles from Grampa Flick and he’ll start to cycle soon! It was that fucking kid! He must never have gotten the shot! We have to tell Rose! We have to—”

That was enough for Dan. He pulled the glove from her hand and threw it across the room. The piano ceased. The Hummels gave one final clatter and grew still, one of them on the verge of tumbling from the table. Dave was staring at his daughter with his mouth open. John had risen to his feet, but seemed incapable of moving any further.

Dan took Abra by the shoulders and gave her a hard shake. “Abra, snap out of it.”

She stared at him with huge, floating eyes.

(come back Abra it’s okay)

Her shoulders, which had been almost up to her ears, gradually relaxed. Her eyes were seeing him again. She let out a long breath and fell back against her father’s encircling arm. The collar of her t-shirt was dark with sweat.

“Abby?” Dave asked. “Abba-Doo? Are you all right?”

“Yes, but don’t call me that.” She drew in air and let it out in another long sigh. “God, that was intense.” She looked at her father. “I didn’t drop the f-bomb, Daddy, that was one of them. I think it was the crow. He’s the leader of the ones who are coming.”

Dan sat down beside Abra on the couch. “Sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. Now. But I never want to touch that glove again. They’re not like us. They look like people and I think they used to be people, but now they have lizardy thoughts.”

“You said Barry has measles. Do you remember that?”

“Barry, yes. The one they call the Chink. I remember everything. I’m so thirsty.”

“I’ll get you water,” John said.

“No, something with sugar in it. Please.”

“There are Cokes in the fridge,” Dave said. He stroked Abra’s hair, then the side of her face, then the back of her neck. As if to reassure himself that she was still there.

They waited until John came back with a can of Coke. Abra seized it, drank greedily, then belched. “Sorry,” she said, and giggled.

Dan had never been so happy to hear a giggle in his life. “John. Measles are more serious in adults, yes?”

“You bet. It can lead to pneumonia, even blindness, due to corneal scarring.”

“Death?”

“Sure, but it’s rare.”

“It’s different for them,” Abra said, “because I don’t think they usually get sick. Only Barry is. They’re going to stop and get a package. It must be medicine for him. The kind you give in shots.”

“What did you mean about cycling?” Dave asked.

“I don’t know.”

“If Barry’s sick, will that stop them?” John asked. “Will they maybe turn around and go back to wherever they came from?”

“I don’t think so. They might already be sick from Barry, and they know it. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain, that’s what Crow says.” She drank more Coke, holding the can in both hands, then looked around at each of the three men in turn, ending with her father. “They know my street. And they might know my name, after all. They might even have a picture. I’m not sure. Barry’s mind is all messed up. But they think… they think if I can’t catch the measles…”

“Then your essence might be able to cure them,” Dan said. “Or at least inoculate the others.”

“They don’t call it essence,” Abra said. “They call it steam.”

Dave clapped his hands once, briskly. “That’s it. I’m calling the police. We’ll have these people arrested.”

“You can’t.” Abra spoke in the dull voice of a depressed fifty-year-old woman. Do what you want, that voice said. I’m only telling you.

He had taken his cell out of his pocket, but instead of opening it, he held it. “Why not?”

“They’ll have a good story for why they’re traveling to New Hampshire and lots of good identity things. Also, they’re rich. Really rich, the way banks and oil companies and Walmart are rich. They might go away, but they’ll come back. They always come back for what they want. They kill people who get in their way, and people who try to tell on them, and if they need to buy their way out of trouble, that’s what they do.” She put her Coke down on the coffee table and put her arms around her father. “Please, Daddy, don’t tell anybody. I’d rather go with them than have them hurt Mom or you.”

Dan said, “But right now there are only four or five of them.”

“Yes.”

“Where are the rest? Do you know that now?”

“At a place called the Bluebird Campground. Or maybe it’s Bluebell. They own it. There’s a town nearby. That’s where the supermarket is, the Sam’s. The town is called Sidewinder. Rose is there, and the True. That’s what they call themselves, the… Dan? What’s wrong?”

Dan made no reply. For the moment, at least, he was incapable of speech. He was remembering Dick Hallorann’s voice coming from Eleanor Ouellette’s dead mouth. He had asked Dick where the empty devils were, and now the answer made sense.

In your childhood.

“Dan?” That was John. He sounded far away. “You’re as white as a sheet.”

It all made a weird kind of sense. He had known from the first—even before he actually saw it—that the Overlook Hotel was an evil place. It was gone now, burned flat, but who was to say the evil had also been burned away? Certainly not him. As a child, he had been visited by revenants who had escaped.

This campground they own—it stands where the hotel stood. I know it. And sooner or later, I’ll have to go back there. I know that, too. Probably sooner. But first—

“I’m all right,” he said.

“Want a Coke?” Abra asked. “Sugar solves lots of problems, that’s what I think.”

“Later. I have an idea. It’s sketchy, but maybe the four of us working together can turn it into a plan.”

Snakebite Andi parked in the truckers’ lot of a turnpike rest area near Westfield, New York. Nut went into the service plaza to get juice for Barry, who was now running a fever and had a painfully sore throat. While they waited for him to come back, Crow put through a call to Rose. She answered on the first ring. He filled her in as quickly as he could, then waited.

“What’s that I hear in the background?” she asked.

Crow sighed and rubbed one hand up a stubbled cheek. “That’s Jimmy Numbers. He’s crying.”

“Tell him to shut up. Tell him there’s no crying in baseball.”

Crow conveyed this, omitting Rose’s peculiar sense of humor. Jimmy, at the moment wiping Barry’s face with a damp cloth, managed to muffle his loud and (Crow had to admit it) annoying sobs.

“That’s better,” Rose said.

“What do you want us to do?”

“Give me a second, I’m trying to think.”

Crow found the idea of Rose having to try to think almost as disturbing as the red spots that had now broken out all over Barry’s face and body, but he did as he was told, holding the iPhone to his ear but saying nothing. He was sweating. Fever, or just hot in here? Crow scanned his arms for red blemishes and saw none. Yet.

“Are you on schedule?” Rose asked.

“So far, yes. A little ahead, even.”

There was a brisk double rap at the door. Andi looked out, then opened it.

“Crow? Still there?”

“Yes. Nut just came back with some juice for Barry. He’s got a bad sore throat.”

“Try this,” Walnut said to Barry, unscrewing the cap. “It’s apple. Still cold from the cooler. It’ll soothe your gullet something grand.”

Barry got up on his elbows and gulped when Nut tipped the small glass bottle to his lips. Crow found it hard to look at. He’d seen baby lambs drink from nursing bottles in that same weak, I-can’t-do-it-myself way.

“Can he talk, Crow? If he can, give him the phone.”

Crow elbowed Jimmy aside and sat down beside Barry. “Rose. She wants to talk to you.”

He attempted to hold the phone next to Barry’s ear, but the Chink took it from him. Either the juice or the aspirin Nut had made him swallow seemed to have given him some strength.

“Rose,” he croaked. “Sorry about this, darlin.” He listened, nodding. “I know. I get that. I…” He listened some more. “No, not yet, but… yeah. I can. I will. Yeah. I love you, too. Here he is.” He handed the phone to Crow, then collapsed back onto the stacked pillows, his temporary burst of strength exhausted.

“I’m here,” Crow said.

“Has he started cycling yet?”

Crow glanced at Barry. “No.”

“Thank God for small favors. He says he can still locate her. I hope he’s right. If he can’t, you’ll have to find her yourselves. We have to have that girl.”

Crow knew she wanted the kid—maybe Julianne, maybe Emma, probably Abra—for her own reasons, and for him that was enough, but there was more at stake. Maybe the True’s continued survival. In a whispered consultation at the back of the Winnebago, Nut had told Crow that the girl had probably never had the measles, but her steam might still serve to protect them, because of the inoculations she would have been given as a baby. It wasn’t a sure bet, but a hell of a lot better than no bet at all.

“Crow? Talk to me, honey.”

“We’ll find her.” He shot the True’s computer maven a look. “Jimmy’s got it narrowed down to three possibles, all in a one-block radius. We’ve got pictures.”

“That’s excellent.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was lower, warmer, and perhaps the slightest bit shaky. Crow hated the idea of Rose being afraid, but he thought she was. Not for herself, but for the True Knot it was her duty to protect. “You know I’d never send you on with Barry sick if I didn’t think it was absolutely vital.”

“Yeah.”

“Get her, knock her the fuck out, bring her back. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“If the rest of you get sick, if you feel you have to charter a jet and fly her back—”

“We’ll do that, too.” But Crow dreaded the prospect. Any of them not sick when they got on the plane would be when they got off—equilibrium shot, hearing screwed blue for a month or more, palsy, vomiting. And of course flying left a paper trail. Not good for passengers escorting a drugged and kidnapped little girl. Still: needs must when the devil drives.

“Time you got back on the road,” Rose said. “You take care of my Barry, big man. The rest of them, too.”

“Is everyone okay at your end?”

“Sure,” Rose said, and hung up before he could ask her anything else. That was okay. Sometimes you didn’t need telepathy to tell when someone was lying. Even the rubes knew that.

He tossed the phone on the table and clapped his hands briskly. “Okay, let’s gas and go. Next stop, Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Nut, you stick with Barry. I’ll drive the next six hours, then you’re up, Jimmy.”

“I want to go home,” Jimmy Numbers said morosely. He was about to say more, but a hot hand grabbed his wrist before he could.

“We got no choice about this,” Barry said. His eyes were glittering with fever, but they were sane and aware. In that moment, Crow was very proud of him. “No choice at all, Computer Boy, so man up. True comes first. Always.”

Crow sat down behind the wheel and turned the key. “Jimmy,” he said. “Sit with me a minute. Want to have a little gab.”

Jimmy Numbers sat down in the passenger seat.

“These three girls, how old are they? Do you know?”

“That and a lot of other stuff. I hacked their school records when I got the pictures. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? Deane and Cross are fourteen. The Stone girl is a year younger. She skipped a grade in elementary school.”

“I find that suggestive of steam,” Crow said.

“Yeah.”

“And they all live in the same neighborhood.”

“Right.”

“I find that suggestive of chumminess.”

Jimmy’s eyes were still swollen with tears, but he laughed. “Yeah. Girls, y’know. All three of them probably wear the same lipstick and moan over the same bands. What’s your point?”

“No point,” Crow said. “Just information. Information is power, or so they say.”

Two minutes later, Steamhead Steve’s ’Bago was merging back onto Interstate 90. When the speedometer was pegged at sixty-five, Crow put on the cruise control and let it ride.

Dan outlined what he had in mind, then waited for Dave Stone to respond. For a long time he only sat beside Abra with his head lowered and his hands clasped between his knees.

“Daddy?” Abra asked. “Please say something.”

Dave looked up and said, “Who wants a beer?”

Dan and John exchanged a brief bemused glance and declined.

“Well, I do. What I really want is a double shot of Jack, but I’m willing to stipulate with no input from you gentlemen that sippin whiskey might not be such a good idea tonight.”

“I’ll get it, Dad.”

Abra bounced into the kitchen. They heard the snap of the flip-top and the hiss of the carbonation—sounds that brought back memories for Dan, many of them treacherously happy. She returned with a can of Coors and a pilsner glass.

“Can I pour it?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Dan and John watched with silent fascination as Abra tilted the glass and slid the beer down the side to minimize the foam, operating with the casual expertise of a good bartender. She handed the glass to her father and set the can on a coaster beside him. Dave took a deep swallow, sighed, closed his eyes, then opened them again.

“That’s good,” he said.

I bet it is, Dan thought, and saw Abra watching him. Her face, usually so open, was inscrutable, and for the moment he could not read the thoughts behind it.

Dave said, “What you’re proposing is crazy, but it has its attractions. Chief among them would be a chance to see these… creatures… with my own eyes. I think I need to, because—in spite of everything you’ve told me—I find it impossible to believe in them. Even with the glove, and the body you say you found.”

Abra opened her mouth to speak. Her father stayed her with a raised hand.

“I believe that you believe,” he went on. “All three of you. And I believe that some group of dangerously deranged individuals might—I say might—be after my daughter. I’d certainly go along with your idea, Mr. Torrance, if it didn’t mean bringing Abra. I won’t use my kid as bait.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” Dan said. He was remembering how Abra’s presence in the loading dock area behind the ethanol plant had turned him into a kind of human cadaver dog, and the way his vision had sharpened when Abra opened her eyes inside his head. He had even cried her tears, although a DNA test might not have shown it.

“What do you mean?”

“Your daughter doesn’t have to be with us to be with us. She’s unique that way. Abra, do you have a friend you could visit tomorrow after school? Maybe even stay with overnight?”

“Sure, Emma Deane.” He could see by the excited sparkle in her eyes that she already understood what he had in mind.

“Bad idea,” Dave said. “I won’t leave her unguarded.”

“Abra was being guarded all the time we were in Iowa,” John said.

Abra’s eyebrows shot up and her mouth dropped open a little. Dan was glad to see this. He was sure she could have picked his brain any old time she wanted to, but she had done as he asked.

Dan took out his cell and speed-dialed. “Billy? Why don’t you come on in here and join the party.”

Three minutes later, Billy Freeman stepped into the Stone house. He was wearing jeans, a red flannel shirt with tails hanging almost to his knees, and a Teenytown Railroad cap, which he doffed before shaking hands with Dave and Abra.

“You helped him with his stomach,” Abra said, turning to Dan. “I remember that.”

“You’ve been picking my brains after all,” Dan said.

She flushed. “Not on purpose. Never. Sometimes it just happens.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“All respect to you, Mr. Freeman,” Dave said, “but you’re a little old for bodyguard duty, and this is my daughter we’re talking about.”

Billy raised his shirttails and revealed an automatic pistol in a battered black holster. “One-nine-one-one Colt,” he said. “Full auto. World War II vintage. This is old, too, but it’ll do the job.”

“Abra?” John asked. “Do you think bullets can kill these things, or is it only childhood diseases?”

Abra was looking at the gun. “Oh yes,” she said. “Bullets would work. They’re not ghostie people. They’re as real as we are.”

John looked at Dan and said, “I don’t suppose you have a gun?”

Dan shook his head and looked at Billy. “I’ve got a deer rifle I could loan you,” Billy said.

“That… might not be good enough,” Dan said.

Billy considered. “Okay, I know a guy down in Madison. He buys and sells bigger stuff. Some of it much bigger.”

“Oh Jesus,” Dave said. “This just gets worse.” But he didn’t say anything else.

Dan said, “Billy, could we reserve the train tomorrow, if we wanted to have a sunset picnic at Cloud Gap?”

“Sure. People do it all the time, ’specially after Labor Day, when the rates go down.”

Abra smiled. It was one Dan had seen before. It was her angry smile. He wondered if the True Knot might have had second thoughts if they knew their target had a smile like that in her repertoire.

“Good,” she said. “Good.”

“Abra?” Dave looked bewildered and a little frightened. “What?”

Abra ignored him for the moment. It was Dan she spoke to. “They deserve it for what they did to the baseball boy.” She wiped at her mouth with her cupped hand, as if to erase that smile, but when she pulled the hand away the smile was still there, her thinned lips showing the tips of her teeth. She clenched the hand into a fist.

“They deserve it.”