Doctor Sleep

^{CHAPTER THIRTEEN} CLOUD GAP

EZ Mail Services was in a strip mall, between a Starbucks and O’Reilly Auto Parts. Crow entered just after 10 a.m., presented his Henry Rothman ID, signed for a package the size of a shoebox, and walked back out with it under his arm. In spite of the air-conditioning, the Winnebago was rank with the stench of Barry’s sickness, but they had grown used to it and hardly smelled it at all. The box bore the return address of a plumbing supply company in Flushing, New York. There actually was such a company, but it had had no hand in this particular delivery. Crow, Snake, and Jimmy Numbers watched as Nut sliced the tape with his Swiss Army Knife and lifted the flaps. He pulled out a wad of inflated plastic packing, then a double fold of cotton fluff. Beneath it, set in Styrofoam, was a large, unlabeled bottle of straw-colored fluid, eight syringes, eight darts, and a skeletal pistol.

“Holy shit, there’s enough stuff there to send her whole class to Middle Earth,” Jimmy said.

“Rose has a great deal of respect for this little chiquita,” Crow said. He took the tranquilizer gun out of its Styrofoam cradle, examined it, put it back. “We will, too.”

“Crow!” Barry’s voice was clotted and hoarse. “Come here!”

Crow left the contents of the box to Walnut and went to the man sweating on the bed. Barry was now covered with hundreds of bright red blemishes, his eyes swollen almost shut, his hair matted to his forehead. Crow could feel the fever baking off him, but the Chink was a hell of a lot stronger than Grampa Flick had been. He still wasn’t cycling.

“You guys okay?” Barry asked. “No fever? No spots?”

“We’re fine. Never mind us, you need to rest. Maybe get some sleep.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead, and I ain’t dead yet.” Barry’s red-streaked eyes gleamed. “I’m picking her up.”

Crow grabbed his hand without thinking about it, reminded himself to wash it with hot water and plenty of soap, then wondered what good that would do. They were all breathing his air, had all taken turns helping him to the jakes. Their hands had been all over him. “Do you know which one of the three girls she is? Have you got her name?”

“No.”

“Does she know we’re coming for her?”

“No. Stop asking questions and let me tell you what I do know. She’s thinking about Rose, that’s how I homed in, but she’s not thinking about her by name. ‘The woman in the hat with the one long tooth,’ that’s what she calls her. The kid’s…” Barry leaned to one side and coughed into a damp handkerchief. “The kid’s afraid of her.”

“She ought to be,” Crow said grimly. “Anything else?”

“Ham sandwiches. Deviled eggs.”

Crow waited.

“I’m not sure yet, but I think… she’s planning a picnic. Maybe with her parents. They’re going on a… toy train?” Barry frowned.

“What toy train? Where?”

“Don’t know. Get me closer and I will. I’m sure I will.” Barry’s hand turned in Crow’s, and suddenly bore down almost hard enough to hurt. “She might be able to help me, Daddy. If I can hold on and you can get her… hurt her enough to make her breathe out some steam… then maybe…”

“Maybe,” Crow said, but when he looked down he could see—just for a second—the bones inside Barry’s clutching fingers.

Abra was extraordinarily quiet at school that Friday. None of the faculty found this strange, although she was ordinarily vivacious and something of a chatterbox. Her father had called the school nurse that morning, and asked if she would tell Abra’s teachers to take it a bit easy on her. She wanted to go to school, but they had gotten some bad news about Abra’s great-grandmother the day before. “She’s still processing,” Dave said.

The nurse said she understood, and would pass on the message.

What Abra was actually doing that day was concentrating on being in two places at the same time. It was like simultaneously patting your head and rubbing your stomach: hard at first, but not too difficult once you got the hang of it.

Part of her had to stay with her physical body, answering the occasional question in class (a veteran hand-raiser since first grade, today she found it annoying to be called on when she was just sitting with them neatly folded on her desk), talking with her friends at lunch, and asking Coach Rennie if she could be excused from gym and go to the library instead. “I’ve got a stomachache,” she said, which was middle-school femcode for I’ve got my period.

She was equally quiet at Emma’s house after school, but that wasn’t a big problem. Emma came from a bookish family, and she was currently reading her way through the Hunger Games for the third time. Mr. Deane tried to chat Abra up when he came home from work, but quit and dove into the latest issue of The Economist when Abra answered in monosyllables and Mrs. Deane gave him a warning look.

Abra was vaguely aware of Emma putting her book aside and asking if she wanted to go out in the backyard for awhile, but most of her was with Dan: seeing through his eyes, feeling his hands and feet on the controls of The Helen Rivington’s little engine, tasting the ham sandwich he ate and the lemonade he chased it down with. When Dan spoke to her father, it was actually Abra speaking. As for Dr. John? He was riding at the very back of the train, and consequently there was no Dr. John. Just the two of them in the cab, a little father-and-daughter bonding in the wake of the bad news about Momo, cozy as could be.

Occasionally her thoughts turned to the woman in the hat, the one who had hurt the baseball boy until he died and then licked up his blood with her deformed and craving mouth. Abra couldn’t help it, but wasn’t sure it mattered. If she were being touched by Barry’s mind, her fear of Rose wouldn’t surprise him, would it?

She had an idea she couldn’t have fooled the True Knot’s locator if he had been healthy, but Barry was extremely sick. He didn’t know she knew Rose’s name. It hadn’t even occurred to him to wonder why a girl who wouldn’t be eligible for a driver’s license until 2015 was piloting the Teenytown train through the woods west of Frazier. If it had, he probably would have assumed the train didn’t really need a driver.

Because he thinks it’s a toy.

“—Scrabble?”

“Hmmm?” She looked around at Emma, at first not even sure where they were. Then she saw she was holding a basketball. Okay, the backyard. They were playing HORSE.

“I asked if you wanted to play Scrabble with me and my mom, because this is totally boring.”

“You’re winning, right?”

“Duh! All three games. Are you here at all?”

“Sorry, I’m just worried about my momo. Scrabble sounds good.” It sounded great, in fact. Emma and her mom were the slowest Scrabble players in the known universe, and would have shit large bricks if anyone had suggested playing with a timer. This would give Abra plenty of opportunity to continue minimizing her presence here. Barry was sick but he wasn’t dead, and if he got wise to the fact that Abra was performing a kind of telepathic ventriloquism, the results could be very bad. He might figure out where she really was.

Not much longer. Pretty soon they’ll all come together. God, please let it go okay.

While Emma cleared the crap off the table in the downstairs rec room and Mrs. Deane set up the board, Abra excused herself to use the toilet. She did need to go, but first she made a quick detour into the living room and peeked out the bow window. Billy’s truck was parked across the street. He saw the curtains twitch and flashed her a thumbs-up. Abra returned the gesture. Then the small part of her that was here went to the bathroom while the rest of her sat in the cab of The Helen Rivington.

We’ll eat our picnic, pick up our trash, watch the sunset, and then we’ll go back.

(eat our picnic, pick up our trash, watch the sunset, and then)

Something unpleasant and unexpected broke into her thoughts, and hard enough to snap her head back. A man and two women. The man had an eagle on his back, and both women had tramp stamps. Abra could see the tattoos because they were having naked sex beside a pool while stupid old disco music played. The women were letting out a lot of fake moans. What in hell had she stumbled across?

The shock of what those people were doing destroyed her delicate balancing act, and for a moment Abra was all in one place, all here. Cautiously, she looked again, and saw the people by the pool were all blurry. Not real. Almost ghostie people. And why? Because Barry was almost a ghostie person himself and had no interest in watching people have sex by the—

Those people aren’t by a pool, they’re on TV.

Did Barry the Chink know she was watching him watch some porno TV show? Him and the others? Abra wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think so. They had taken the possibility into account, though. Oh, yes. If she was there, they were trying to shock her into going away, or into revealing herself, or both.

“Abra?” Emma called. “We’re ready to play!”

We’re playing already, and it’s a much bigger game than Scrabble.

She had to get her balance back, and quickly. Never mind the porno TV with the crappy disco music. She was in the little train. She was driving the little train. It was her special treat. She was having fun.

We’re going to eat, we’re going to pick up our trash, we’re going to watch the sunset, and then we’re going to go back. I’m afraid of the woman in the hat but not too afraid, because I’m not home, I’m going to Cloud Gap with my dad.

“Abra! Did you fall in?”

“Coming!” she called. “Just want to wash my hands!”

I’m with my dad. I’m with my dad, and that’s all.

Looking at herself in the mirror, Abra whispered, “Hold that thought.”

Jimmy Numbers was behind the wheel when they pulled into the Bretton Woods rest stop, which was quite close to Anniston, the town where the troublesome girl lived. Only she wasn’t there. According to Barry, she was in a town called Frazier, a little further southeast. On a picnic with her dad. Making herself scarce. Much good it would do her.

Snake inserted the first video in the DVD player. It was called Kenny’s Poolside Adventure. “If the kid’s watching this, she’s gonna get an education,” she said, and pushed PLAY.

Nut was sitting beside Barry and feeding him more juice… when he could, that was. Barry had begun to cycle for real. He had little interest in juice and none at all in the poolside ménage à trois. He only looked at the screen because those were their orders. Each time he came back to his solid form, he groaned louder.

“Crow,” he said. “Get with me, Daddy.”

Crow was beside him in an instant, elbowing Walnut aside.

“Lean close,” Barry whispered, and—after one uneasy moment—Crow did as he was asked.

Barry opened his mouth, but the next cycle started before he could speak. His skin turned milky, then thinned to transparency. Crow could see his teeth locked together, the sockets that held his pain-filled eyes, and—worst of all—the shadowy crenellations of his brain. He waited, holding a hand that was no longer a hand but only a nestle of bones. Somewhere, at a great distance, that twanky disco music went on and on. Crow thought, They must be on drugs. You couldn’t fuck to music like that unless you were.

Slowly, slowly, Barry the Chink grew dense again. This time he screamed as he came back. Sweat stood out on his brow. So did the red spots, now so bright they looked like beads of blood.

He wet his lips and said, “Listen to me.”

Crow listened.

Dan did his best to empty his mind so Abra could fill it. He had driven the Riv out to Cloud Gap often enough for it to be almost automatic, and John was riding back by the caboose with the guns (two automatic pistols and Billy’s deer rifle). Out of sight, out of mind. Or almost. You couldn’t completely lose yourself even while you were asleep, but Abra’s presence was large enough to be a little scary. Dan thought if she stayed inside his head long enough, and kept broadcasting at her current power, he would soon be shopping for snappy sandals and matching accessories. Not to mention mooning over the groovy boys who made up the band ’Round Here.

It helped that she had insisted—at the last minute—that he take Hoppy, her old stuffed rabbit. “It will give me something to focus on,” she had said, all of them unaware that a not-quite-human gentleman whose rube name was Barry Smith would have understood perfectly. He had learned the trick from Grampa Flick, and used it many times.

It also helped that Dave Stone kept up a constant stream of family stories, many of which Abra had never heard before. And still, Dan wasn’t convinced any of this would have worked if the one in charge of finding her hadn’t been sick.

“Can’t the others do this location thing?” he had asked her.

“The lady in the hat could, even from halfway across the country, but she’s staying out of it.” That unsettling smile had once more curved Abra’s lips and exposed the tips of her teeth. It made her look far older than her years. “Rose is scared of me.”

Abra’s presence in Dan’s head wasn’t constant. Every now and then he would feel her leave as she went the other way, reaching out—oh so carefully—to the one who had been foolish enough to slip Bradley Trevor’s baseball glove on his hand. She said they had stopped in a town called Starbridge (Dan was pretty sure she meant Sturbridge) and left the turnpike there, moving along the secondary roads toward the bright blip of her consciousness. Later on they had stopped at a roadside café for lunch, not hurrying, making the final leg of the trip last. They knew where she was going now, and were perfectly willing to let her get there, because Cloud Gap was isolated. They thought she was making their job easier, and that was fine, but this was delicate work, a kind of telepathic laser surgery.

There had been one unsettling moment when a pornographic image filled Dan’s mind—some kind of group sex by a pool—but it had been gone almost at once. He supposed he had gotten a peek into her undermind, where—if you believed Dr. Freud—all sorts of primal images lurked. This was an assumption he would come to regret, although never to blame himself for; he had taught himself not to snoop into people’s most private things.

Dan held the Riv’s steering-yoke with one hand. The other was on the mangy stuffed bunny in his lap. Deep woods, now starting to flame with serious color, flowed by on both sides. In the right-hand seat—the so-called conductor’s seat—Dave rambled on, telling his daughter family stories and dancing at least one family skeleton out of the closet.

“When your mom called yesterday morning, she told me there’s a trunk stored in the basement of Momo’s building. It’s marked Alessandra. You know who that is, don’t you?”

“Gramma Sandy,” Dan said. Christ, even his voice sounded higher. Younger.

“Right you are. Now here’s something you might not know, and if that’s the case, you didn’t hear it from me. Right?”

“No, Daddy.” Dan felt his lips curve up as, some miles away, Abra smiled down at her current collection of Scrabble tiles: S P O N D L A.

“Your Gramma Sandy graduated from SUNY Albany—the State University of New York—and was doing her student teaching at a prep school, okay? Vermont, Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, I forget which. Halfway through her eight weeks, she up and quit. But she hung around for awhile, maybe picking up some part-time work, waitressing or something, for sure going to a lot of concerts and parties. She was…”

(a good-time girl)

That made Abra think of the three sex maniacs by the pool, smooching and gobbling to oldtime disco music. Uck. Some people had very strange ideas of what was a good time.

“Abra?” That was Mrs. Deane. “It’s your turn, honey.”

If she had to keep this up for long, she’d have a nervous breakdown. It would have been so much easier at home, by herself. She had even floated the idea to her father, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Not even with Mr. Freeman watching over her.

She used a U on the board to make POUND.

“Thanks, Abba-Doofus, I was going there,” Emma said. She turned the board and began to study it with beady-eyed final-exam concentration that would go on for another five minutes, at least. Maybe even ten. Then she would make something totally lame, like RAP or PAD.

Abra returned to the Riv. What her father was saying was sort of interesting, although she knew more about it than he thought she did.

(Abby? Are you)

“Abby? Are you listening?”

“Sure,” Dan said. I just had to take a little time-out to play a word. “This is interesting.”

“Anyway, Momo was living in Manhattan at that time, and when Alessandra came to see her that June, she was pregnant.”

“Pregnant with Mom?”

“That’s right, Abba-Doo.”

“So Mom was born out of wedlock?”

Total surprise, and maybe the tiniest bit overdone. Dan, in the peculiar position of both participating and eavesdropping on the discussion, now realized something he found touching and sweetly comic: Abra knew perfectly well that her mother was illegitimate. Lucy had told her the year before. What Abra was doing now, strange but true, was protecting her father’s innocence.

“That’s right, honey. But it’s no crime. Sometimes people get… I don’t know… confused. Family trees can grow strange branches, and there’s no reason for you not to know that.”

“Gramma Sandy died a couple of months after Mom was born, right? In a car wreck.”

“That’s right. Momo was babysitting Lucy for the afternoon, and ended up raising her. That’s the reason they’re so close, and why Momo getting old and sick has been so hard on your mom.”

“Who was the man who got Gramma Sandy pregnant? Did she ever say?”

“Tell you what,” Dave said, “that’s an interesting question. If Alessandra ever told, Momo kept it to herself.” He pointed ahead, at the lane cutting through the woods. “Look, honey, almost there!”

They were passing a sign reading CLOUD GAP PICNIC AREA, 2 MI.

Crow’s party made a brief stop in Anniston to gas up the Winnebago, but on lower Main Street, at least a mile from Richland Court. As they left town—Snake now at the wheel and an epic called Swinging Sorority Sisters on the DVD player—Barry called Jimmy Numbers to his bed.

“You guys got to step it up a notch,” Barry said. “They’re almost there. It’s a place called Cloud Gap. Did I tell you that?”

“Yeah, you did.” Jimmy almost patted Barry’s hand, then thought better of it.

“They’ll be spreading their picnic in no time. That’s when you should take them, while they’re sat down and eating.”

“We’ll get it done,” Jimmy promised. “And in time to twist enough steam out of her to help you. Rose can’t object to that.”

“She never would,” Barry agreed, “but it’s too late for me. Maybe not for you, though.”

“Huh?”

“Look at your arms.”

Jimmy did, and saw the first spots blooming on the soft white skin below his elbows. Red death. His mouth went dry at the sight of them.

“Oh Christ, here I go,” Barry moaned, and suddenly his clothes were collapsing in on a body that was no longer there. Jimmy saw him swallow… and then his throat was gone.

“Move,” Nut said. “Let me at him.”

“Yeah? What are you going to do? He’s cooked.”

Jimmy went up front and dropped into the passenger seat, which Crow had vacated. “Take Route 14-A around Frazier,” he said. “That’s quicker than going through the downtown. You’ll connect with the Saco River Road—”

Snake tapped the GPS. “I got all that programmed. You think I’m blind or just stupid?”

Jimmy barely heard her. All he knew was that he could not die. He was too young to die, especially with all the incredible computer developments just over the horizon. And the thought of cycling, the crushing pain every time he came back…

No. No. Absolutely not. Impossible.

Late-afternoon light slanted in through the ’Bago’s big front windows. Beautiful autumn sunlight. Fall was Jimmy’s favorite season, and he intended to still be alive and traveling with the True Knot when it came around again. And again. And again. Luckily, he was with the right bunch to get this done. Crow Daddy was brave, resourceful, and cunning. The True had been in tough spots before. He would bring them through this one.

“Watch for the sign pointing to the Cloud Gap picnic area. Don’t miss it. Barry says they’re almost there.”

“Jimmy, you’re giving me a headache,” Snake said. “Go sit down. We’ll be there in an hour, maybe less.”

“Goose it,” Jimmy Numbers said.

Snakebite Andi grinned and did so.

They were just turning onto the Saco River Road when Barry the Chink cycled out, leaving only his clothes. They were still warm from the fever that had baked him.

(Barry’s dead)

There was no horror in this thought when it reached Dan. Nor even an ounce of compassion. Only satisfaction. Abra Stone might look like an ordinary American girl, prettier than some and brighter than most, but when you got below the surface—and not that far below, either—there was a young Viking woman with a fierce and bloodthirsty soul. Dan thought it was a shame that she’d never had brothers and sisters. She would have protected them with her life.

Dan dropped the Riv into its lowest gear as the train came out of the deep woods and ran along a fenced drop. Below them, the Saco shone bright gold in the declining sun. The woods, sloping steeply down to the water on both sides, were a bonfire of orange, red, yellow, and purple. Above them, the puffy clouds drifting by seemed almost close enough to touch.

He pulled up to the sign reading CLOUD GAP STATION in a chuff of airbrakes, then turned the diesel off. For a moment he had no idea what to say, but Abra said it for him, using his mouth. “Thanks for letting me drive, Daddy. Now let’s have our plunder.” In the Deane rec room, Abra had just made this word. “Our picnic, I mean.”

“I can’t believe you’re hungry after all you ate on the train,” Dave teased.

“I am, though. Aren’t you glad I’m not anorexic?”

“Yes,” Dave said. “Actually, I am.”

Dan saw John Dalton from the corner of his eye, crossing the picnic area clearing, head down, feet noiseless on the thick pine duff. He was carrying a pistol in one hand and Billy Freeman’s rifle in the other. Trees bordered a parking lot for motor traffic; after a single look back, John disappeared into them. During summer, the little lot and all the picnic tables would have been full. On this weekday afternoon in late September, Cloud Gap was dead empty except for them.

Dave looked at Dan. Dan nodded. Abra’s father—an agnostic by inclination but a Catholic by association—made the sign of the cross in the air and then followed John into the woods.

“It’s so beautiful here, Daddy,” Dan said. His invisible passenger was now talking to Hoppy, because Hoppy was the only one left. Dan set the lumpy, balding, one-eyed rabbit on one of the picnic tables, then went back to the first passenger car for the wicker picnic basket. “That’s okay,” he said to the empty clearing, “I can get it, Dad.”

In the Deanes’ rec room, Abra pushed back her chair and stood up. “I have to go to the bathroom again. I feel sick to my stomach. And after that, I think I better go home.”

Emma rolled her eyes, but Mrs. Deane was all sympathy. “Oh, honey, is it your you-know?”

“Yes, and it’s pretty bad.”

“Do you have the things you need?”

“In my backpack. I’ll be fine. Excuse me.”

“That’s right,” Emma said, “quit while you’re winning.”

“Em-ma!” her mother cried.

“That’s okay, Mrs. Deane. She beat me at HORSE.” Abra went up the stairs, one hand pressed to her stomach in a way she hoped didn’t look too fakey. She glanced outside again, saw Mr. Freeman’s truck, but didn’t bother with the thumbs-up this time. Once in the bathroom, she locked the door and sat down on the closed toilet lid. It was such a relief to be done juggling so many different selves. Barry was dead; Emma and her mom were downstairs; now it was just the Abra in this bathroom and the Abra at Cloud Gap. She closed her eyes.

(Dan)

(I’m here)

(you don’t have to pretend to be me anymore)

She felt his relief, and smiled. Uncle Dan had tried hard, but he wasn’t cut out to be a chick.

A light, tentative knock at the door. “Girlfriend?” Emma. “You all right? I’m sorry if I was mean.”

“I’m okay, but I’m going to go home and take a Motrin and lie down.”

“I thought you were going to stay the night.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Isn’t your dad gone?”

“I’ll lock the doors until he gets back.”

“Well… want me to walk with you?”

“That’s okay.”

She wanted to be alone so she could cheer when Dan and her father and Dr. John took those things out. They would, too. Now that Barry was dead, the others were blind. Nothing could go wrong.

There was no breeze to rattle the brittle leaves, and with the Riv shut down, the picnic area at Cloud Gap was very quiet. There was only the muted conversation of the river below, the squall of a crow, and the sound of an approaching engine. Them. The ones the hat woman had sent. Rose. Dan flipped up one side of the wicker basket, reached in, and gripped the Glock .22 Billy had provided him with—from what source Dan didn’t know or care. What he cared about was that it could fire fifteen rounds without reloading, and if fifteen rounds weren’t enough, he was in a world of hurt. A ghost memory of his father came, Jack Torrance smiling his charming, crooked grin and saying, If that don’t work, I don’t know what to tellya. Dan looked at Abra’s old stuffed toy.

“Ready, Hoppy? I hope so. I hope we both are.”

Billy Freeman was slouched behind the wheel of his truck, but sat up in a hurry when Abra came out of the Deane house. Her friend—Emma—stood in the doorway. The two girls said goodbye, slapping palms first in an overhead high five, then down low. Abra started for her own house, across the street and four doors down. That wasn’t in the plan, and when she glanced at him, he raised both hands in a what gives gesture.

She smiled and shot him another quick thumbs-up. She thought everything was okay, he got that loud and clear, but seeing her outside and on her own made Billy uneasy, even if the freaks were twenty miles south of here. She was a powerhouse, and maybe she knew what she was doing, but she was also only thirteen.

As he watched her go up the walk to her house, pack on her back and rummaging in her pocket for her key, Billy leaned over and thumbed the button on his glove compartment. His own Glock .22 was inside. The pistols were rented firepower from a guy who was an emeritus member of the Road Saints, New Hampshire chapter. In his younger years, Billy had sometimes ridden with them but had never joined. On the whole he was glad, but he understood the pull. The camaraderie. He supposed it was the way Dan and John felt about the drinking.

Abra slipped into her house and closed the door. Billy didn’t take either the Glock or his cell phone out of the glove compartment—not yet—but he didn’t close the compartment, either. He didn’t know if it was what Dan called the shining, but he had a bad feeling about this. Abra should have stayed with her friend.

She should have stuck to the plan.

They ride in campers and Winnebagos, Abra had said, and it was a Winnebago that pulled into the parking lot where the Cloud Gap access road dead-ended. Dan sat watching with his hand in the picnic basket. Now that the time had come, he felt calm enough. He turned the basket so one end faced the newly arrived RV and flicked off the Glock’s safety with his thumb. The ’Bago’s door opened and Abra’s would-be kidnappers spilled out, one after the other.

She had also said they had funny names—pirate names—but these looked like ordinary people to Dan. The men were the going-on-elderly kind you always saw pooting around in campers and RVs; the woman was young and good-looking in an all-American way that made him think of cheerleaders who still had their figures ten years after high school, and maybe after a kid or two. She could have been the daughter of one of the men. He felt a moment’s doubt. This was, after all, a tourist spot, and it was the beginning of leaf-peeping season in New England. He hoped John and David would hold their fire; it would be horrible if they were just innocent by—

Then he saw the rattlesnake baring its fangs on the woman’s left arm, and the syringe in her right hand. The man crowding in close beside her had another syringe. And the man in the lead had what looked very much like a pistol in his belt. They stopped just inside the birch poles marking the entrance to the picnic area. The one in the lead disabused Dan of any lingering doubts he might have had by drawing the pistol. It didn’t look like a regular gun. It was too thin to be a regular gun.

“Where’s the girl?”

With the hand not in the picnic basket, Dan pointed to Hoppy the stuffed rabbit. “That’s as close to her as you’re ever going to get.”

The man with the funny gun was short, with a widow’s peak above a mild-mannered accountant’s face. A soft pod of well-fed stomach hung over his belt. He was wearing chinos and a t-shirt reading GOD DOES NOT DEDUCT FROM MAN’S ALLOTED SPAN THE HOURS SPENT FISHING.

“I have a question for you, honeybunch,” the woman said.

Dan raised his eyebrows. “Go ahead.”

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

He did. All at once his eyelids were as heavy as sashweights. The hand holding the gun began to relax. Two more seconds and he would have been crashed out and snoring with his head on the initial-carved surface of the picnic table. But that was when Abra screamed.

(WHERE’S THE CROW? I DON’T SEE THE CROW!)

Dan jerked as a man will when he is badly startled on the edge of sleep. The hand in the picnic basket spasmed, the Glock went off, and a cloud of wickerwork fragments flew. The bullet went wild but the people from the Winnebago jumped, and the sleepiness left Dan’s head like the illusion that it was. The woman with the snake tattoo and the man with the popcorny fringe of white hair flinched back, but the one with the odd-looking pistol charged forward, yelling “Get him! Get him!”

“Get this, you kidnapping fuckers!” Dave Stone shouted. He stepped out of the woods and began to spray bullets. Most of them went wild, but one hit Walnut in the neck and the True’s doctor went down on the pine duff, the hypo spilling from his fingers.

Leading the True had its responsibilities, but also its perks. Rose’s gigantic EarthCruiser, imported from Australia at paralyzing expense and then converted to left-hand drive, was one. Having the ladies’ shower room at the Bluebell Campground all to herself whenever she wanted it was another. After months on the road, there was nothing like a long hot shower in a big tiled room where you could hold your arms out or even dance around, if the spirit moved you. And where the hot water didn’t run out after four minutes.

Rose liked to turn off the lights and shower in darkness. She found she did her best thinking that way, and for just that reason she had headed to the shower immediately after the troubling cell phone call she’d gotten at 1 p.m., Mountain Time. She still believed everything was all right, but a few doubts had begun to sprout, like dandelions on a previously flawless lawn. If the girl was even smarter than they thought… or if she had enlisted help…

No. It couldn’t be. She was a steamhead for sure—the steamhead of all steamheads—but she was still only a child. A rube child. In any case, all Rose could do for the time being was wait on developments.

After fifteen refreshing minutes, she stepped out, dried off, wrapped herself in a fluffy bath sheet, and headed back to her RV, carrying her clothes. Short Eddie and Big Mo were cleaning up the open-air barbecue area following another excellent lunch. Not their fault that nobody felt much like eating, with two more of the True showing those goddamned red spots. They waved to her. Rose was raising her own hand in return when a bundle of dynamite went off in her head. She went sprawling, her pants and shirt spilling from her hand. Her bath sheet unraveled.

Rose barely noticed. Something had happened to the raiding party. Something bad. She was digging for her cell in the pocket of her crumpled jeans as soon as her head began to clear. Never in her life had she wished so strongly (and so bitterly) that Crow Daddy was capable of long-distance telepathy, but—with a few exceptions, like herself—that gift seemed reserved for rube steamheads like the girl in New Hampshire.

Eddie and Mo were running toward her. Behind them came Long Paul, Silent Sarey, Token Charlie, and Harpman Sam. Rose hit speed dial on her phone. A thousand miles away, Crow’s gave just half a ring.

“Hello, you’ve reached Henry Rothman. I can’t talk to you right now, but if you leave your number and a brief message—”

Fucking voice mail. Which meant his phone was either turned off or getting no service. Rose was betting the latter. Naked and on her knees in the dirt, her heels digging into the backs of her thighs, Rose smacked the center of her forehead with the hand not holding her cell.

Crow, where are you? What are you doing? What’s happening?

The man in the chinos and t-shirt fired his weird pistol at Dan. There was a chuff of compressed air, and suddenly a dart was sticking out of Hoppy’s back. Dan raised the Glock from the ruins of the picnic basket and fired again. Chinos Guy took it in the chest and went over backwards, grunting, as fine droplets of blood blew out through the back of his shirt.

Andi Steiner was the last one standing. She turned, saw Dave Stone frozen there, looking dazed, and charged at him with her hypodermic needle clutched in her fist like a dagger. Her ponytail swung like a pendulum. She was screaming. To Dan, everything seemed to have slowed down and gained clarity. He had time to see that the plastic protector-sleeve was still on the end of the needle and had time to think, What kind of clowns are these guys? The answer, of course, was that they weren’t clowns at all. They were hunters completely unused to resistance from their prey. But of course children were their usual targets, and unsuspecting ones, at that.

Dave only stared at the howling harpy coming toward him. Perhaps his gun was empty; more likely that one burst had been his limit. Dan raised his own gun but didn’t shoot. The chances of missing the tattooed lady and hitting Abra’s father were just too great.

That was when John ran out of the woods and slammed into Dave’s back, shoving him forward into the charging woman. Her screams (fury? dismay?) were driven out of her in a gust of violently expelled air. They both tumbled over. The needle flew. As Tattoo Woman went scrabbling for it on her hands and knees, John brought the stock of Billy’s deer rifle down on the side of her head. It was a full-force, adrenaline-fueled blow. There was a crunch as her jaw broke. Her features twisted to the left, one eye bulging from its socket in a startled glare. She sprawled and rolled over on her back. Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth. Her hands clenched and opened, clenched and opened.

John dropped the rifle and turned to Dan, stricken. “I didn’t mean to hit her that hard! Christ, I was just so scared!”

“Look at the one with the frizzy hair,” Dan said. He got up on legs that felt too long and not all there. “Look at him, John.”

John looked. Walnut lay in a pool of blood, one hand clutching his torn neck. He was cycling rapidly. His clothes fell in, then puffed out. The blood flowing through his fingers disappeared, then reappeared again. The fingers themselves were doing the same. The man had become an insane X-ray.

John stepped back with his hands plastered over his mouth and nose. Dan still had that sense of slowness and perfect clarity. There was time to see Tattoo Woman’s blood and a snarl of her blond hair on the stock of the Remington pump also appearing and disappearing. It made him think of how her ponytail had pendulumed back and forth when she

(Dan where’s the Crow WHERE’S THE CROW???)

ran at Abra’s father. She had told them that Barry was cycling. Now Dan understood what she meant.

“The one in the fishing shirt is doing it, too,” Dave Stone said. His voice was only slightly shaky, and Dan guessed he knew where some of his daughter’s steel had come from. But he didn’t have time to think about that now. Abra was telling him they hadn’t gotten the whole crew.

He sprinted to the Winnebago. The door was still open. He ran up the steps, threw himself on the carpeted floor, and managed to bang his head hard enough on the post under the eating table to send bright specks shooting across his field of vision. Never happens that way in the movies, he thought, and rolled over, expecting to be shot or stomped or injected by the one who had stayed behind to provide the rearguard. The one Abra called the crow. They weren’t totally stupid and complacent after all, it seemed.

The Winnebago was empty.

Appeared empty.

Dan got to his feet and hurried through the kitchenette. He passed a foldout bed, rumpled from frequent occupancy. Part of his mind registered the fact that the RV smelled like the wrath of God in spite of the air-conditioner that was still running. There was a closet, but the door stood open on its track and he saw nothing inside but clothes. He bent, looking for feet. No feet. He went on to the rear of the Winnebago and stood beside the bathroom door.

He thought more movie shit, and pulled it open, crouching as he did it. The Winnebago’s can was empty, and he wasn’t surprised. If anyone had tried hiding in there, he’d be dead by now. The smell alone would have killed him.

(maybe someone did die in here maybe this Crow)

Abra came back at once, full of panic, broadcasting so powerfully that she scattered his own thoughts.

(no Barry’s the one who died WHERE’S THE CROW FIND THE CROW)

Dan left the RV. Both of the men who had come after Abra were gone; only their clothes were left. The woman—the one who had tried to send him to sleep—was still there, but wouldn’t be for long. She had crawled to the picnic table with the ruined wicker basket on it and now lay propped against one of the bench seats, staring at Dan, John, and Dave from her newly crooked face. Blood ran from her nose and mouth, giving her a red goatee. The front of her blouse was soaked. As Dan approached, her skin melted from her face and her clothes fell inward against the strutwork of her skeleton. No longer held in place by her shoulders, the straps of her bra flopped in loops. Of her soft parts, only her eyes remained, watching Dan. Then her skin reknit itself and her clothes plumped up around her body. The fallen bra straps bit into her upper arms, the strap on the left gagging the rattlesnake so it couldn’t bite. The fingerbones clutching her shattered jaw grew a hand.

“You fucked us,” Snakebite Andi said. Her voice was slurred. “Fucked by a bunch of rubes. I don’t believe it.”

Dan pointed at Dave. “That rube there is the father of the girl you came to kidnap. Just in case you’re wondering.”

Snake managed a painful grin. Her teeth were rimmed with blood. “You think I give a tin shit? To me he’s just another swinging dick. Even the Pope of Rome’s got one, and not one of you care where you put it. Fucking men. Have to win, don’t you? Always have to w—”

“Where’s the other one? Where’s Crow?”

Andi coughed. Blood bubbled from the corners of her mouth. Once she had been lost, then she had been found. In a darkened movie theater she had been found, by a goddess with a thundercloud of dark hair. Now she was dying, and she wouldn’t have changed a thing. The years between the ex-actor president and the black president had been good; that one magic night with Rose had been even better. She grinned brightly up at the tall good-looking one. It hurt to grin, but she did it, anyway.

“Oh, him. He’s in Reno. Fucking rube showgirls.”

She began to disappear again. Dan heard John Dalton whisper, “Oh my God, look at that. Brain bleed. I can actually see it.”

Dan waited to see if Tat Woman would come back. Eventually she did, with a long groan from between her clenched and bloody teeth. The cycling seemed to hurt even more than the blow that had caused it, but Dan thought he could remedy that. He pulled Tat Woman’s hand away from her shattered jaw and dug in with his fingers. He could feel her entire skull shift as he did; it was like pushing the side of a badly cracked vase held together by a few strips of tape. This time Tat Woman did more than groan. She howled and pawed weakly at Dan, who paid no attention.

“Where’s Crow?”

“Anniston!” Snake screamed. “He got off in Anniston! Please don’t hurt me anymore, Daddy! Please don’t, I’ll do whatever you want!”

Dan thought of what Abra said these monsters had done to Brad Trevor in Iowa, how they had tortured him and God only knew how many others, and felt an almost ungovernable urge to tear the lower half of this murdering bitch’s face entirely off. To beat her bleeding, shattered skull with her own jawbone until both skull and bone disappeared.

Then—absurdly, given the circumstances—he thought of the kid in the Braves t-shirt reaching for the left-over coke piled on the shiny magazine cover. Canny, he’d said. This woman was nothing like that kid, nothing, but telling himself so did no good. His anger was suddenly gone, leaving him feeling sick and weak and empty.

Don’t hurt me anymore, Daddy.

He got up, wiping his hand on his shirt, and walked blindly toward the Riv.

(Abra are you there)

(yes)

Not so panicky now, and that was good.

(you need to have your friend’s mom call the police and tell them you’re in danger Crow’s in Anniston)

Bringing the police into a business that was, at bottom, supernatural was the last thing Dan wanted, but at this moment he saw no choice.

(I’m not)

Before she could finish, her thought was blotted out by a powerful shriek of female rage.

Suddenly the hat woman was in Dan’s head again, this time not as part of a dream but behind his waking eyes, her image burning: a creature of terrible beauty who was now naked, her wet hair lying on her shoulders in Medusa coils. Then her mouth yawned open and the beauty was torn away. There was only a dark hole with one jutting, discolored tooth. Almost a tusk.

Dan staggered and put a hand against the Riv’s lead passenger car to hold himself up. The world inside his head was revolving. The hat woman disappeared and suddenly a crowd of concerned faces was gathered around him. They were asking if he was all right.

He remembered Abra trying to explain how the world had revolved on the day she had discovered Brad Trevor’s picture in The Anniston Shopper; how all at once Abra had been looking out of the hat woman’s eyes and the hat woman had been looking out of hers. Now he understood. It was happening again, and this time he was along for the ride.

Rose was on the ground. He could see a broad swatch of evening sky overhead. The people crowding around her were no doubt her tribe of child-killers. This was what Abra was seeing.

The question was, what was Rose seeing?

Snake cycled, then came back. It burned. She looked at the man kneeling in front of her.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” John asked. “I’m a doctor.”

In spite of the pain, Snake laughed. This doctor, who belonged to the men who had just shot the True’s doctor to death, was now offering to help. What would Hippocrates make of that one? “Put a bullet in me, assface. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

The nerdy one, the bastard who’d actually pulled the trigger on Walnut, joined the one who said he was a doctor. “You’d deserve it,” Dave said. “Did you think I was just going to let you take my daughter? Torture and kill her like you did that poor little boy in Iowa?”

They knew about that? How could they? But it didn’t matter now, at least not to Andi. “Your people slaughter pigs and cows and sheep. Is what we do any different?”

“In my humble opinion, killing human beings is a lot different,” John said. “Call me silly and sentimental.”

Snake’s mouth was full of blood and some lumpy shit. Teeth, probably. That didn’t matter, either. In the end, this might be more merciful than what Barry had gone through. It would certainly be quicker. But one thing needed straightening out. Just so they’d know. “We’re the human beings. Your kind… just rubes.”

Dave smiled, but his eyes were hard. “And yet you’re the one lying on the ground with dirt in your hair and blood all down the front of your shirt. I hope hell’s hot enough for you.”

Snake could feel the next cycle coming on. With luck it would be the last one, but for now she held tight to her physical form. “You don’t understand how it was with me. Before. Or how is with us. We’re only a few, and we’re sick. We’ve got—”

“I know what you’ve got,” Dave said. “Fucking measles. I hope they rot your whole miserable Knot from the inside out.”

Snake said, “We didn’t choose to be what we are any more than you did. In our shoes, you’d do the same.”

John shook his head slowly from side to side. “Never. Never.”

Snake began to cycle out. She managed four more words, however. “Fucking men.” A final gasp as she stared up at them from her disappearing face. “Fucking rubes.”

Then she was gone.

Dan walked to John and Dave slowly and carefully, putting his hand on several of the picnic tables to keep his balance. He had picked up Abra’s stuffed rabbit without even realizing it. His head was clearing, but that was a decidedly mixed blessing.

“We have to go back to Anniston, and fast. I can’t touch Billy. I could before, but now he’s gone.”

“Abra?” Dave asked. “What about Abra?”

Dan didn’t want to look at him—Dave’s face was naked with fear—but he made himself do it. “She’s gone, too. So’s the woman in the hat. They’ve both dropped out of the mix.”

“Meaning what?” Dave grabbed Dan’s shirt in both hands. “Meaning what?”

“I don’t know.”

This was the truth, but he was afraid.

^{CHAPTER FOURTEEN} CROW

Get with me, Daddy, Barry the Chink had said. Lean close.

This was just after Snake had started the first of the porn DVDs. Crow got with Barry, even held his hand while the dying man struggled through his next cycle. And when he came back…

Listen to me. She’s been watching, all right. Only when that porno started up…

Explaining to someone who couldn’t do the locator thing was hard, especially when the one doing the talking was mortally ill, but Crow got the gist of it. The fucksome frolickers by the pool had shocked the girl, just as Rose had hoped they might, but they had done more than make her quit spying and pull back. For a moment or two, Barry’s sense of her location seemed to double. She was still on the midget train with her dad, riding to the place where they were going to have their picnic, but her shock had produced a ghost image that made no sense. In this she was in a bathroom, taking a leak.

“Maybe you were seeing a memory,” Crow said. “Could that be?”

“Yeah,” Barry said. “Rubes think all kinds of crazy shit. Most likely it’s nothing. But for a minute it was like she was twins, you know?”

Crow didn’t, exactly, but he nodded.

“Only if that’s not it, she might be running some kind of game. Gimme the map.”

Jimmy Numbers had all of New Hampshire on his laptop. Crow held it up in front of Barry.

“Here’s where she is,” Barry said, tapping the screen. “On her way to this Cloud Glen place with her dad.”

“Gap,” Crow said. “Cloud Gap.”

“Whatever the fuck.” Barry moved his finger northeast. “And this is where the ghost-blip came from.”

Crow took the laptop and looked through the bead of no doubt infected sweat Barry had left on the screen. “Anniston? That’s her hometown, Bar. She’s probably left psychic traces of herself all over it. Like dead skin.”

“Sure. Memories. Daydreams. All kinds of crazy shit. What I said.”

“And it’s gone now.”

“Yeah, but…” Barry grasped Crow’s wrist. “If she’s as strong as Rose says, it’s just possible that she really is gaming us. Throwing her voice, like.”

“Have you ever run across a steamhead that could do that?”

“No, but there’s a first time for everything. I’m almost positive she’s with her father, but you’re the one who has to decide if almost positive is good enough for…”

That was when Barry began cycling again, and all meaningful communication ceased. Crow was left with a difficult decision. It was his mission, and he was confident he could handle it, but it was Rose’s plan and—more important—Rose’s obsession. If he screwed up, there would be hell to pay.

Crow glanced at his watch. Three p.m. here in New Hampshire, one o’clock in Sidewinder. At the Bluebell Campground, lunch would just be finishing up, and Rose would be available. That decided him. He made the call. He almost expected her to laugh and call him an old woman, but she didn’t.

“You know we can’t entirely trust Barry anymore,” she said, “but I trust you. What’s your gut feeling?”

His gut felt nothing one way or the other; that was why he had made the call. He told her so, and waited.

“I leave it with you,” she said. “Just don’t screw up.”

Thanks for nothing, Rosie darlin. He thought this… then hoped she hadn’t caught it.

He sat with the closed cell phone still in his hand, swaying from side to side with the motion of the RV, inhaling the smell of Barry’s sickness, wondering how long it would be before the first spots started showing up on his own arms and legs and chest. At last he went forward and put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.

“When you get to Anniston, stop.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m getting off.”

Crow Daddy watched them pull away from the Gas ’n Go on Anniston’s lower Main Street, resisting an urge to send a short-range thought (all the ESP of which he was capable) to Snake before they got out of range: Come back and pick me up, this is a mistake.

Only what if it wasn’t?

When they were gone, he looked briefly and longingly at the sad little line of used cars for sale at the car wash adjacent to the gas station. No matter what transpired in Anniston, he was going to need transpo out of town. He had more than enough cash in his wallet to buy something that would carry him to their agreed-on rendezvous point near Albany on I-87; the problem was time. It would take at least half an hour to transact a car deal, and that might be too long. Until he was sure this was a false alarm, he would just have to improvise and rely on his powers of persuasion. They had never let him down yet.

Crow did take time enough to step into the Gas ’n Go, where he bought a Red Sox hat. When in Bosox country, dress as the Bosox fans do. He debated adding a pair of sunglasses and decided against them. Thanks to TV, a fit middle-aged man in sunglasses always looked like a hit man to a certain part of the population. The hat would have to do.

He walked up Main Street to the library where Abra and Dan had once held a council of war. He had to go no farther than the lobby to find what he was looking for. There, under the heading of TAKE A LOOK AT OUR TOWN, was a map of Anniston with every street and lane carefully marked. He refreshed himself on the location of the girl’s street.

“Great game last night, wasn’t it?” a man asked. He was carrying an armload of books.

For a moment Crow had no idea what he was talking about, then remembered his new hat. “It sure was,” he agreed, still looking at the map.

He gave the Sox fan time to depart before leaving the lobby. The hat was fine, but he had no desire to discuss baseball. He thought it was a stupid game.

Richland Court was a short street of pleasant New England saltboxes and Cape Cods ending in a circular turnaround. Crow had grabbed a free newspaper called The Anniston Shopper on his walk from the library and now stood at the corner, leaning against a handy oak tree and pretending to study it. The oak shielded him from the street, and maybe that was a good thing, because there was a red truck with a guy sitting behind the wheel parked about halfway down. The truck was an oldie, with some hand-tools and what looked like a Rototiller in the bed, so the guy could be a groundskeeper—this was the kind of street where people could afford them—but if so, why was he just sitting there?

Babysitting, maybe?

Crow was suddenly glad he had taken Barry seriously enough to jump ship. The question was, what to do now? He could call Rose, but their last conversation hadn’t netted anything he couldn’t have gotten from a Magic 8 Ball.

He was still standing half-hidden behind the fine old oak and debating his next move when the providence that favored the True Knot above rubes stepped in. A door partway down the street opened, and two girls came out. Crow’s eyes were every bit as sharp as those of his namesake bird, and he ID’d them at once as two of the three girls in Billy’s computer pix. The one in the brown skirt was Emma Deane. The one in the black pants was Abra Stone.

He glanced back at the truck. The driver, also an oldie, had been slouched behind the wheel. Now he was sitting up. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. On the alert. So she had been gaming them. Crow still didn’t know for sure which of the two was the steamhead, but one thing he was sure of: the men in the Winnebago were on a wild goosechase.

Crow took out his cell but only held it in his hand for a moment, watching the girl in the black pants go down the walk to the street. The girl in the skirt watched her for a second, then went back inside. The girl in the pants—Abra—crossed Richland Court, and as she did, the man in the truck raised his hands in a what gives gesture. She responded with a thumbs-up: Don’t worry, everything’s okay. Crow felt a surge of triumph as hot as a knock of whiskey. Question answered. Abra Stone was the steamhead. No question about it. She was being guarded, and the guard was an old geezer with a perfectly good pickup truck. Crow felt confident it would take him and a certain young passenger as far as Albany.

He hit Snake on the speed dial, and wasn’t surprised or uneasy when he got a CALL FAILED message. Cloud Gap was a local beauty spot, and God forbid there should be any cell phone towers to clutter up the tourists’ snapshots. But that was okay. If he couldn’t take care of an old man and a young girl, it was time to turn in his badge. He considered his phone for a moment, then turned it off. For the next twenty minutes or so, there was no one he wanted to talk to, and that included Rose.

His mission, his responsibility.

He had four loaded syringes, two in the left pocket of his light jacket, two in the right. Putting his best Henry Rothman smile on his face—the one he wore when reserving campground space or four-walling motels for the True—Crow stepped from behind the tree and strolled down the street. In his left hand he still held his folded copy of The Anniston Shopper. His right hand was in his jacket pocket, easing the plastic cap off one of the needles.

“Pardon me, sir, I seem to be a little lost. I wonder if you could give me some directions.”

Billy Freeman was nervous, on edge, filled with something that was not quite foreboding… and still that cheerful voice and bright you-can-trust-me smile took him in. Only for two seconds, but that was enough. As he reached toward the open glove compartment, he felt a small sting on the side of his neck.

Bug bit me, he thought, and then slumped sideways, his eyes rolling up to the whites.

Crow opened the door and shoved the driver across the seat. The old guy’s head bonked the passenger-side window. Crow lifted limp legs over the transmission hump, batting the glove compartment closed to make a little more room, then slid behind the wheel and slammed the door. He took a deep breath and looked around, ready for anything, but there was nothing to be ready for. Richland Court was dozing the afternoon away, and that was lovely.

The key was in the ignition. Crow started the engine and the radio came on in a yahoo roar of Toby Keith: God bless America and pour the beer. As he reached to turn it off, a terrible white light momentarily washed out his vision. Crow had very little telepathic ability, but he was firmly linked to his tribe; in a way, the members were appendages of a single organism, and one of their number had just died. Cloud Gap hadn’t been just misdirection, it had been a fucking ambush.

Before he could decide what to do next, the white light came again, and, after a pause, yet again.

All of them?

Good Christ, all three? It wasn’t possible… was it?

He took a deep breath, then another. Forced himself to face the fact that yes, it could be. And if so, he knew who was to blame.

Fucking steamhead girl.

He looked at Abra’s house. All quiet there. Thank God for small favors. He had expected to drive the truck up the street and into her driveway, but all at once that seemed like a bad idea, at least for now. He got out, leaned back in, and grabbed the unconscious geezer by his shirt and belt. Crow yanked him back behind the wheel, pausing just long enough to give him a patdown. No gun. Too bad. He wouldn’t have minded having one, at least for awhile.

He fastened the geezer’s seatbelt so he couldn’t tilt forward and blare the horn. Then he walked down the street to the girl’s house, not hurrying. If he’d seen her face at one of the windows—or so much as a single twitch of a single curtain—he would have broken into a sprint, but nothing moved.

It was possible he could still make this work, but that consideration had been rendered strictly secondary by those terrible white flashes. What he mostly wanted was to get his hands on the miserable bitch that had caused them so much trouble and shake her until she rattled.

Abra sleepwalked down the front hall. The Stones had a family room in the basement, but the kitchen was their comfort place, and she headed there without thinking about it. She stood with her hands splayed out on the table where she and her parents had eaten thousands of meals, staring at the window over the kitchen sink with wide blank eyes. She wasn’t really here at all. She was in Cloud Gap, watching bad guys spill out of the Winnebago: the Snake and the Nut and Jimmy Numbers. She knew their names from Barry. But something was wrong. One of them was missing.

(WHERE’S THE CROW DAN I DON’T SEE THE CROW!)

No answer, because Dan and her father and Dr. John were busy. They took the bad guys down, one after the other: the Walnut first—that was her father’s work, and good for him—then Jimmy Numbers, then the Snake. She felt each mortal injury as a thudding deep in her head. Those thuds, like a heavy mallet repeatedly coming down on an oak plank, were terrible in their finality, but not entirely unpleasant. Because…

Because they deserve it, they kill kids, and nothing else would have stopped them. Only—

(Dan where’s the Crow? WHERE’S THE CROW???)

Now Dan heard her. Thank God. She saw the Winnebago. Dan thought the Crow was in there, and maybe he was right. Still—

She hurried back down the hall and peered out one of the windows beside the front door. The sidewalk was deserted, but Mr. Freeman’s truck was parked right where it belonged. She couldn’t see his face because of the way the sun was shining on the windshield, but she could see him behind the wheel, and that meant everything was still okay.

Probably okay.

(Abra are you there)

Dan. It was so great to hear him. She wished he was with her, but having him inside her head was almost as good.

(yes)

She took one more reassuring look at the empty sidewalk and Mr. Freeman’s truck, checked to make sure she had locked the door after coming in, and started back down to the kitchen.

(you need to have your friend’s mom call the police and tell them you’re in danger Crow’s in Anniston)

She stopped halfway down the hall. Her comfort-hand came up and began to rub her mouth. Dan didn’t know she had left the Deanes’ house. How could he? He’d been very busy.

(I’m not)

Before she could finish, Rose the Hat’s mental voice blasted through her head, wiping away all thought.

The familiar hallway between the front door and the kitchen began to sideslip. The last time this revolving thing happened, she’d been prepared. This time she wasn’t. Abra tried to stop it and couldn’t. Her house was gone. Anniston was gone. She was lying on the ground and looking up at the sky. Abra realized the loss of those three in Cloud Gap had literally knocked Rose off her feet, and she had a moment to be savagely glad. She struggled for something to defend herself with. There wasn’t much time.

Rose’s body lay sprawled halfway between the showers and the Overlook Lodge, but her mind was in New Hampshire, swarming through the girl’s head. There was no daydream horsewoman with a stallion and lance this time, oh no. This time it was just one surprised little chickadee and old Rosie, and Rosie wanted revenge. She would kill the girl only as a last resort, she was much too valuable for that, but Rose could give her a taste of what was coming. A taste of what Rose’s friends had already suffered. There were plenty of soft, vulnerable places in the minds of rubes, and she knew them all very w—

It was like having a flash-bang go off behind her eyes. Rose jerked and cried out. Big Mo, who had been reaching down to touch her, recoiled in surprise. Rose didn’t notice, didn’t even see her. She kept underestimating the girl’s power. She tried to keep her footing in the girl’s head, but the little bitch was actually pushing her out. It was incredible and infuriating and terrifying, but it was true. Worse, she could feel her physical hands rising toward her face. If Mo and Short Eddie hadn’t restrained her, the little girl might have made Rose claw her own eyes out.

For the time being, at least, she had to give up and leave. But before she did, she saw something through the girl’s eyes that flooded her with relief. It was Crow Daddy, and in one hand he was holding a needle.

Abra used all the psychic force she could muster, more than she had used on the day she had gone hunting for Brad Trevor, more than she had ever used in her life, and it was still barely enough. Just when she started to think she wouldn’t be able to get the hat woman out of her head, the world began to revolve again. She was making it revolve, but it was so hard—like pushing a great stone wheel. The sky and the faces staring down at her slid away. There was a moment of darkness when she was

(between)

nowhere, and then her own front hall slid back into view. But she was no longer alone. A man was standing in the kitchen doorway.

No, not a man. A Crow.

“Hello, Abra,” he said, smiling, and leaped at her. Still mentally reeling from her encounter with Rose, Abra made no attempt to push him away with her mind. She simply turned and ran.

In their moments of highest stress, Dan Torrance and Crow Daddy were very much alike, although neither would ever know it. The same clarity came over Crow’s vision, the same sense that all of this was happening in beautiful slow motion. He saw the pink rubber bracelet on Abra’s left wrist and had time to think breast cancer awareness. He saw the girl’s backpack slew to the left as she whirled to her right and knew it was full of books. He even had time to admire her hair as it flew out behind her in a bright sheaf.

He caught her at the door as she was trying to turn the thumb lock. When he put his left arm around her throat and yanked her back, he felt her first efforts—confused, weak—to push him away with her mind.

Not the whole hypo, it might kill her, she can’t weigh more than a hundred and fifteen pounds max.

Crow injected her just south of the collarbone as she twisted and struggled. He needn’t have worried about losing control and shooting the whole dose into her, because her left arm came up and thumped against his right hand, knocking the hypo free. It fell to the floor and rolled. But providence favors True above rubes, it had always been that way and was now. He got just enough into her. He felt her little handhold on his mind first slip, then fall away. Her hands did the same. She stared at him with shocked, floating eyes.

Crow patted her shoulder. “We’re going for a ride, Abra. You’re going to meet exciting new people.”

Incredibly, she managed a smile. A rather frightening one for a girl so young that with her hair piled up under a cap, she could still have passed for a boy. “Those monsters you call your friends are all dead. Theyyy…”

The last word was only an unwinding slur as her eyes rolled up and her knees came unhinged. Crow was tempted to let her drop—it would serve her too right—but restrained the impulse and caught her under the arms instead. She was valuable property, after all.

True property.

He had come in through the rear door, snapping back the next-to-useless spring lock with a single downward flick of Henry Rothman’s American Express Platinum Card, but he had no intention of leaving that way. There was nothing but a high fence at the foot of the sloping backyard, and beyond that a river. Also, his transportation was in the other direction. He carried Abra through the kitchen and into the empty garage. Both parents at work, maybe… unless they were out at Cloud Gap, gloating over Andi, Billy, and Nut. For now he didn’t give much of a shit about that end of things; whoever had been helping the girl could wait. Their time would come.

He slid her limp body under a table holding her father’s few tools. Then he thumbed the button that opened the garage door and stepped out, being sure to slap on that big old Henry Rothman smile before he did. The key to survival in the world of rubes was to look as if you belonged, as if you were always on the goodfoot, and no one was better at it than Crow. He walked briskly down to the truck and moved the geezer again, this time to the middle of the bench seat. As Crow turned in to the Stone driveway, Billy’s head lolled against his shoulder.

“Gettin a little chummy there, aren’t you, oldtimer?” Crow asked, and laughed as he drove the red truck into the garage. His friends were dead and this situation was horribly dangerous, but there was one big compensation: he felt totally alive and aware for the first time in a great many years, the world bursting with color and humming like a powerline. He had her, by God. In spite of all her weird strength and nasty tricks, he had her. Now he would bring her to Rose. A love offering.

“Jackpot,” he said, and gave the dashboard one hard, exultant hit.

He stripped off Abra’s backpack, left it under the worktable, and lifted her into the truck on the passenger side. He seatbelted both of his snoozing passengers. It had certainly occurred to him to snap the geezer’s neck and leave his body in the garage, but the geezer might come in handy. If the drug didn’t kill him, that was. Crow checked for a pulse on the side of the grizzled old neck and felt it, slow but strong. There was no question about the girl; she was leaning against the passenger window and he could see her breath fogging the glass. Excellent.

Crow took a second to inventory his stock. No gun—the True Knot never traveled with firearms—but he still had two full hypos of the noddy-time night-night stuff. He didn’t know how far two would get him, but the girl was his priority. Crow had an idea that the geezer’s period of usefulness might prove to be extremely limited. Oh, well. Rubes came and rubes went.

He took out his cell and this time it was Rose he hit on the speed dial. She answered just as he had resigned himself to leaving a message. Her voice was slow, her pronunciation slurry. It was a little like talking to a drunk.

“Rose? What’s up with you?”

“The girl messed with me a trifle more than I expected, but I’m all right. I don’t hear her anymore. Tell me you have her.”

“I do, and she’s having a nice nap, but she’s got friends. I don’t want to meet them. I’ll head west immediately, and I’ve got no time to be fucking with maps. I need secondary roads that’ll take me across Vermont and into New York.”

“I’ll put Toady Slim on it.”

“You need to send someone east to meet me immediately, Rosie, and with whatever you can lay your hands on that’ll keep Little Miss Nitro pacified, because I don’t have much left. Look in Nut’s supplies. He must have something—”

“Don’t tell me my business,” she snapped. “Toady will coordinate everything. You know enough to get started?”

“Yes. Rosie darlin, that picnic area was a trap. The little girl fucking deked us. What if her friends call the cops? I’m riding in an old F-150 with a couple of zombies next to me in the cab. I might as well have KIDNAPPER tattooed on my forehead.”

But he was grinning. Damned if he wasn’t grinning. There was a pause at the other end. Crow sat behind the wheel in the Stones’ garage, waiting.

At last Rose said, “If you see blue lights behind you or a roadblock ahead of you, strangle the girl and suck out as much of her steam as you can while she goes. Then surrender. We’ll take care of you eventually, you know that.”

It was Crow’s turn to pause. At last he said, “Are you sure that’s the right way to go, darlin?”

“I am.” Her voice was stony. “She’s responsible for the deaths of Jimmy, Nut, and Snakebite. I mourn them all, but it’s Andi I feel the worst about, because I Turned her myself and she only had a taste of the life. Then there’s Sarey…”

She trailed off with a sigh. Crow said nothing. There was really nothing to say. Andi Steiner had been with a lot of women during her early years with the True—not a surprise, steam always made newbies especially randy—but she and Sarah Carter had been a couple for the last ten years, and devoted to each other. In some ways, Andi had seemed more like Silent Sarey’s daughter than her lover.

“Sarey’s inconsolable,” Rose said, “and Black-Eyed Susie’s not much better about Nut. That little girl is going to answer for taking those three from us. One way or the other, her rube life is over. Any more questions?”

Crow had none.

No one paid any particular attention to Crow Daddy and his snoozing passengers as they left Anniston on the old Granite State Highway, headed west. With a few notable exceptions (sharp-eyed old ladies and little kids were the worst), Rube America was staggeringly unobservant even twelve years into the Dark Age of Terrorism. If you see something, say something was a hell of a slogan, but first you had to see something.

By the time they crossed into Vermont it was growing dark, and cars passing by in the other direction saw only Crow’s headlights, which he purposely left on hi-beam. Toady Slim had called three times already, feeding him route information. Most were byroads, many unmarked. Toady had also told Crow that Diesel Doug, Dirty Phil, and Apron Annie were on their way. They were riding in an ’06 Caprice that looked like a dog but had four hundred horses under the hood. Speeding would not be a problem; they were also carrying Homeland Security creds that would check out all the way up the line, thanks to the late Jimmy Numbers.

The Little twins, Pea and Pod, were using the True’s sophisticated satellite communications gear to monitor police chatter in the Northeast, and so far there had been nothing about the possible kidnapping of a young girl. This was good news, but not unexpected. Friends smart enough to set up an ambush were probably smart enough to know what could happen to their chickadee if they went public.

Another phone rang, this one muffled. Without taking his eyes off the road, Crow leaned across his sleeping passengers, reached into the glove compartment, and found a cell. The geezer’s, no doubt. He held it up to his eyes. There was no name, so the caller wasn’t in the phone’s memory, but the number had a New Hampshire area code. One of the ambushers, wanting to know if Billy and the girl were all right? Very likely. Crow considered answering it and decided not to. He would check later to see if the caller had left a message, though. Information was power.

When he leaned over again to return the cell to the glove compartment, his fingers touched metal. He stowed the phone and brought out an automatic pistol. A nice bonus, and a lucky find. If the geezer had awakened a little sooner than expected, he might have gotten to it before Crow could read his intentions. Crow slid the Glock under his seat, then flipped the glove compartment closed.

Guns were also power.

It was full dark and they were deep into the Green Mountains on Highway 108 when Abra began to stir. Crow, still feeling brilliantly alive and aware, wasn’t sorry. For one thing, he was curious about her. For another, the old truck’s gas gauge was touching empty, and someone was going to have to fill the tank.

But it wouldn’t do to take chances.

With his right hand he removed one of the two remaining hypos from his pocket and held it on his thigh. He waited until the girl’s eyes—still soft and muzzy—opened. Then he said, “Good evening, little lady. I’m Henry Rothman. Do you understand me?”

“You’re…” Abra cleared her throat, wet her lips, tried again. “You’re not Henry anything. You’re the Crow.”

“So you do understand. That’s good. You feel woolly-headed just now, I imagine, and you’re going to stay that way, because that’s just how I like you. But there will be no need to knock you all the way out again as long as you mind your Ps and Qs. Have you got that?”

“Where are we going?”

“Hogwarts, to watch the International Quidditch Tourney. I’ll buy you a magic hotdog and a cone of magic cotton candy. Answer my question. Are you going to mind your Ps and Qs?”

“Yes.”

“Such instant agreement is pleasing to the ear, but you’ll have to pardon me if I don’t completely trust it. I need to give you some vital information before you try something foolish that you might regret. Do you see the needle I have?”

“Yes.” Abra’s head was still resting against the window, but she looked down at the hypo. Her eyes drifted shut then opened again, very slowly. “I’m thirsty.”

“From the drug, no doubt. I don’t have anything to drink with me, we left in a bit of a hurry—”

“I think there’s a juice box in my pack.” Husky. Low and slow. The eyes still opening with great effort after every blink.

“Afraid that’s back in your garage. You may get something to drink in the next town we come to—if you’re a good little Goldilocks. If you’re a bad little Goldilocks, you can spend the night swallowing your own spit. Clear?”

“Yes…”

“If I feel you fiddling around inside my head—yes, I know you can do it—or if you try attracting attention when we stop, I’ll inject this old gentleman. On top of what I already gave him, it will kill him as dead as Amy Winehouse. Are we clear on that, as well?”

“Yes.” She licked her lips again, then rubbed them with her hand. “Don’t hurt him.”

“That’s up to you.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Goldilocks? Dear?”

“What?” She blinked at him dazedly.

“Just shut up and enjoy the ride.”

“Hogwarts,” she said. “Cotton… candy.” This time when her eyes closed, the lids stayed down. She began to snore lightly. It was a breezy sound, sort of pleasant. Crow didn’t think she was shamming, but he continued to hold the hypo next to the geezer’s leg just to be sure. As Gollum had once said about Frodo Baggins, it was tricksy, precious. It was very tricksy.

Abra didn’t go under completely; she still heard the truck’s motor, but it was far away. It seemed to be above her. It made her remember when she and her parents went to Lake Winnipesaukee on hot summer afternoons, and how you could hear the distant drone of the motorboats if you ducked your head underwater. She knew she was being kidnapped, and she knew this should concern her, but she felt serene, content to float between sleep and waking. The dryness in her mouth and throat was horrible, though. Her tongue felt like a strip of dusty carpet.

I have to do something. He’s taking me to the hat woman and I have to do something. If I don’t, they’ll kill me like they killed the baseball boy. Or something even worse.

She would do something. After she got something to drink. And after she slept a little more…

The engine sound had faded from a drone to a distant hum when light penetrated her closed eyelids. Then the sound stopped completely and the Crow was poking her in the leg. Easy at first, then harder. Hard enough to hurt.

“Wake up, Goldilocks. You can go back to sleep later.”

She struggled her eyes open, wincing at the brightness. They were parked beside some gas pumps. There were fluorescents over them. She shielded her eyes from the glare. Now she had a headache to go with her thirst. It was like…

“What’s funny, Goldilocks?”

“Huh?”

“You’re smiling.”

“I just figured out what’s wrong with me. I’m hungover.”

Crow considered this, and grinned. “I suppose you are at that, and you didn’t even get to prance around with a lampshade on your head. Are you awake enough to understand me?”

“Yes.” At least she thought she was. Oh, but the thudding in her head. Awful.

“Take this.”

He was holding something in front of her face, reaching across his body with his left hand to do it. His right one still held the hypodermic, the needle resting next to Mr. Freeman’s leg.

She squinted. It was a credit card. She reached up with a hand that felt too heavy and took it. Her eyes started to close and he slapped her face. Her eyes flew open, wide and shocked. She had never been hit in her life, not by an adult, anyway. Of course she had never been kidnapped, either.

“Ow! Ow!”

“Get out of the truck. Follow the instructions on the pump—you’re a bright kid, I’m sure you can do that—and fill the tank. Then replace the nozzle and get back in. If you do all that like a good little Goldilocks, we’ll drive over to yonder Coke machine.” He pointed to the far corner of the store. “You can get a nice big twenty-ounce soda. Or a water, if that’s what you want; I spy with my little eye that they have Dasani. If you’re a bad little Goldilocks, I’ll kill the old man, then go into the store and kill the kid at the register. No problem there. Your friend had a gun, which is now in my possession. I’ll take you with me and you can watch the kid’s head go splat. It’s up to you, okay? You get it?”

“Yes,” Abra said. A little more awake now. “Can I have a Coke and a water?”

His grin this time was high, wide, and handsome. In spite of her situation, in spite of the headache, even in spite of the slap he’d administered, Abra found it charming. She guessed lots of people found it charming, especially women. “A little greedy, but that’s not always a bad thing. Let’s see how you mind those Ps and Qs.”

She unbuckled her belt—it took three tries, but she finally managed—and grabbed the doorhandle. Before she got out, she said: “Stop calling me Goldilocks. You know my name, and I know yours.”

She slammed the door and headed for the gas island (weaving a little) before he could reply. She had spunk as well as steam. He could almost admire her. But, given what had happened to Snake, Nut, and Jimmy, almost was as far as it went.

At first Abra couldn’t read the instructions because the words kept doubling and sliding around. She squinted and they came into focus. The Crow was watching her. She could feel his eyes like tiny warm weights on the back of her neck.

(Dan?)

Nothing, and she wasn’t surprised. How could she hope to reach Dan when she could barely figure out how to run this stupid pump? She had never felt less shiny in her life.

Eventually she managed to start the gas, although the first time she tried his credit card, she put it in upside-down and had to begin all over again. The pumping seemed to go on forever, but there was a rubber sleeve over the nozzle to keep the stench of the fumes down, and the night air was clearing her head a little. There were billions of stars. Usually they awed her with their beauty and profusion, but tonight looking at them only made her feel scared. They were far away. They didn’t see Abra Stone.

When the tank was full, she squinted at the new message in the pump’s window and turned to Crow. “Do you want a receipt?”

“I think we can crutch along without that, don’t you?” Again came his dazzling grin, the kind that made you happy if you were the one who caused it to break out. Abra bet he had lots of girlfriends.

No. He just has one. The hat woman is his girlfriend. Rose. If he had another one, Rose would kill her. Probably with her teeth and fingernails.

She trudged back to the truck and got in.

“That was very good,” Crow said. “You win the grand prize—a Coke and a water. So… what do you say to your Daddy?”

“Thank you,” Abra said listlessly. “But you’re not my daddy.”

“I could be, though. I can be a very good daddy to little girls who are good to me. The ones who mind their Ps and Qs.” He drove to the machine and gave her a five-dollar bill. “Get me a Fanta if they have it. A Coke if they don’t.”

“You drink sodas, like anyone else?”

He made a comical wounded face. “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?”

“Shakespeare, right?” She wiped her mouth again. “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Merchant of Venice, dummocks,” Crow said… but with a smile. “Don’t know the rest of it, I bet.”

She shook her head. A mistake. It refreshed the throbbing, which had begun to diminish.

“If you poison us, do we not die?” He tapped the needle against Mr. Freeman’s leg. “Meditate on that while you get our drinks.”

He watched closely as she operated the machine. This gas stop was on the wooded outskirts of some little town, and there was always a chance she might decide to hell with the geezer and run for the trees. He thought of the gun, but left it where it was. Chasing her down would be no great task, given her current soupy condition. But she didn’t even look in that direction. She slid the five-spot into the machine and got the drinks, one after the other, pausing only to drink deeply from the water. She came back and gave him his Fanta, but didn’t get in. Instead she pointed farther down the side of the building.

“I need to pee.”

Crow was flummoxed. This was something he hadn’t foreseen, although he should have. She had been drugged, and her body needed to purge itself of toxins. “Can’t you hold it awhile?” He was thinking that a few more miles down the road, he could find a turnout and pull in. Let her go behind a bush. As long as he could see the top of her head, they’d be fine.

But she shook her head. Of course she did.

He thought it over. “Okay, listen up. You can use the ladies’ toilet if the door’s unlocked. If it’s not, you’ll have to take your leak around back. There’s no way I’m letting you go inside and ask the counterboy for the key.”

“And if I have to go in back, you’ll watch me, I suppose. Pervo.”

“There’ll be a Dumpster or something you can squat behind. It would break my heart not to get a look at your precious little buns, but I’d try to survive. Now get in the truck.”

“But you said—”

“Get in, or I’ll start calling you Goldilocks again.”

She got in, and he pulled the truck up next to the bathroom doors, not quite blocking them. “Now hold out your hand.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

Very reluctantly, she held out her hand. He took it. When she saw the needle, she tried to pull back.

“Don’t worry, just a drop. We can’t have you thinking bad thoughts, now can we? Or broadcasting them. This is going to happen one way or the other, so why make a production of it?”

She stopped trying to pull away. It was easier just to let it happen. There was a brief sting on the back of her hand, then he released her. “Go on, now. Make wee-wee and make it quick. As the old song says, sand is a-runnin through the hourglass back home.”

“I don’t know any song like that.”

“Not surprised. You don’t even know The Merchant of Venice from Romeo and Juliet.”

“You’re mean.”

“I don’t have to be,” he said.

She got out and just stood beside the truck for a moment, taking deep breaths.

“Abra?”

She looked at him.

“Don’t try locking yourself in. You know who’d pay for that, don’t you?” He patted Billy Freeman’s leg.

She knew.

Her head, which had begun to clear, was fogging in again. Horrible man—horrible thing—behind that charming grin. And smart. He thought of everything. She tried the bathroom door and it opened. At least she wouldn’t have to whizz out back in the weeds, and that was something. She went inside, shut the door, and took care of her business. Then she simply sat there on the toilet with her swimming head hung down. She thought of being in the bathroom at Emma’s house, when she had foolishly believed everything was going to turn out all right. How long ago that seemed.

I have to do something.

But she was doped up, woozy.

(Dan)

She sent this with all the force she could muster… which wasn’t much. And how much time would the Crow give her? She felt despair wash over her, undermining what little will to resist was left. All she wanted to do was button her pants, get into the truck again, and go back to sleep. Yet she tried one more time.

(Dan! Dan, please!)

And waited for a miracle.

What she got instead was a single brief tap of the pickup truck’s horn. The message was clear: time’s up.

^{CHAPTER FIFTEEN} SWAPSIES

You will remember what was forgotten.

In the aftermath of the Pyrrhic victory at Cloud Gap, the phrase haunted Dan, like a snatch of irritating and nonsensical music that gets in your head and won’t let go, the kind you find yourself humming even as you stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night. This one was plenty irritating, but not quite nonsensical. For some reason he associated it with Tony.

You will remember what was forgotten.

There was no question of taking the True Knot’s Winnebago back to their cars, which were parked at Teenytown Station on the Frazier town common. Even if they hadn’t been afraid of being observed getting out of it or leaving forensic evidence inside it, they would have refused without needing to take a vote on the matter. It smelled of more than sickness and death; it smelled of evil. Dan had another reason. He didn’t know if members of the True Knot came back as ghostie people or not, but he didn’t want to find out.

So they threw the abandoned clothes and the drug paraphernalia into the Saco, where the stuff that didn’t sink would float downstream to Maine, and went back as they had come, in The Helen Rivington.

David Stone dropped into the conductor’s seat, saw that Dan was still holding Abra’s stuffed rabbit, and held out his hand for it. Dan passed it over willingly enough, taking note of what Abra’s father held in his other hand: his BlackBerry.

“What are you going to do with that?”

Dave looked at the woods flowing by on both sides of the narrow-gauge tracks, then back at Dan. “As soon as we get to where there’s cell coverage, I’m going to call the Deanes’ house. If there’s no answer, I’m going to call the police. If there is an answer, and either Emma or her mother tells me that Abra’s gone, I’m going to call the police. Assuming they haven’t already.” His gaze was cool and measuring and far from friendly, but at least he was keeping his fear for his daughter—his terror, more likely—at bay, and Dan respected him for that. Also, it would make him easier to reason with.

“I hold you responsible for this, Mr. Torrance. It was your plan. Your crazy plan.”

No use pointing out that they had all signed on to the crazy plan. Or that he and John were almost as sick about Abra’s continued silence as her father. Basically, the man was right.

You will remember what was forgotten.

Was that another Overlook memory? Dan thought it was. But why now? Why here?

“Dave, she’s almost certainly been taken.” That was John Dalton. He had moved up to the car just behind them. The last of the lowering sun came through the trees and flickered on his face. “If that’s the case and you tell the police, what do you think will happen to Abra?”

God bless you, Dan thought. If I’d been the one to say it, I doubt if he would have listened. Because, at bottom, I’m the stranger who was conspiring with his daughter. He’ll never be completely convinced that I’m not the one who got her into this mess.

“What else can we do?” Dave asked, and then his fragile calm broke. He began to weep, and held Abra’s stuffed rabbit to his face. “What am I going to tell my wife? That I was shooting people in Cloud Gap while some bogeyman was stealing our daughter?”

“First things first,” Dan said. He didn’t think AA slogans like Let go and let God or Take it easy would fly with Abra’s dad right now. “You should call the Deanes when you get cell coverage. I think you’ll reach them, and they’ll be fine.”

“You think this why?”

“In my last communication with Abra, I told her to have her friend’s mom call the police.”

Dave blinked. “You really did? Or are you just saying that now to cover your ass?”

“I really did. Abra started to answer. She said ‘I’m not,’ and then I lost her. I think she was going to tell me she wasn’t at the Deanes’ anymore.”

“Is she alive?” Dave grasped Dan’s elbow with a hand that was dead cold. “Is my daughter still alive?”

“I haven’t heard from her, but I’m sure she is.”

“Of course you’d say that,” Dave whispered. “CYA, right?”

Dan bit back a retort. If they started squabbling, any thin chance of getting Abra back would become no chance.

“It makes sense,” John said. Although he was still pale and his hands weren’t quite steady, he was using his calm bedside manner voice. “Dead, she’s no good to the one who’s left. The one who grabbed her. Alive, she’s a hostage. Also, they want her for… well…”

“They want her for her essence,” Dan said. “The steam.”

“Another thing,” John said. “What are you going to tell the cops about the men we killed? That they started cycling in and out of invisibility until they disappeared completely? And then we got rid of their… their leavings?”

“I can’t believe I let you get me into this.” Dave was twisting the rabbit from side to side. Soon the old toy would split open and spill its stuffing. Dan wasn’t sure he could bear to see that.

John said, “Listen, Dave. For your daughter’s sake, you have to clear your mind. She’s been in this ever since she saw that boy’s picture in the Shopper and tried to find out about him. As soon as the one Abra calls the hat woman was aware of her, she almost had to come after her. I don’t know about steam, and I know very little about what Dan calls the shining, but I know people like the ones we’re dealing with don’t leave witnesses. And when it comes to the Iowa boy, that’s what your daughter was.”

“Call the Deanes but keep it light,” Dan said.

“Light? Light?” He looked like a man trying out a word in Swedish.

“Say you want to ask Abra if there’s anything you should pick up at the store—bread or milk or something like that. If they say she went home, just say fine, you’ll reach her there.”

“Then what?”

Dan didn’t know. All he knew was that he needed to think. He needed to think about what was forgotten.

John did know. “Then you try to reach Billy Freeman.”

It was dusk, with the Riv’s headlight cutting a visible cone up the aisle of the tracks, before Dave got bars on his phone. He called the Deanes’, and although he was clutching the now-deformed Hoppy in a mighty grip and large beads of sweat were trickling down his face, Dan thought he did a pretty good job. Could Abby come to the phone for a minute and tell him if they needed anything at the Stop & Shop? Oh? She did? Then he’d try her at home. He listened a moment longer, said he’d be sure to do that, and ended the call. He looked at Dan, his eyes white-rimmed holes in his face.

“Mrs. Deane wanted me to find out how Abra’s feeling. Apparently she went home complaining of menstrual cramps.” He hung his head. “I didn’t even know she’d started having periods. Lucy never said.”

“There are things dads don’t need to know,” John said. “Now try Billy.”

“I don’t have his number.” He gave a single chop of a laugh—HA! “We’re one fucked-up posse.”

Dan recited it from memory. Up ahead the trees were thinning, and he could see the glow of the streetlights along Frazier’s main drag.

Dave punched in the number and listened. Listened some more, then killed the call. “Voice mail.”

The three men were silent as the Riv broke out of the trees and rolled the last two miles toward Teenytown. Dan tried again to reach Abra, throwing his mental voice with all the energy he could muster, and got nothing back. The one she called the Crow had probably knocked her out somehow. The tattoo woman had been carrying a needle. Probably the Crow had another one.

You will remember what was forgotten.

The origin of that thought arose from the very back of his mind, where he kept the lockboxes containing all the terrible memories of the Overlook Hotel and the ghosts who had infested it.

“It was the boiler.”

In the conductor’s seat, Dave glanced at him. “Huh?”

“Nothing.”

The Overlook’s heating system had been ancient. The steam pressure had to be dumped at regular intervals or it crept up and up to the point where the boiler could explode and send the whole hotel sky-high. In his steepening descent into dementia, Jack Torrance had forgotten this, but his young son had been warned. By Tony.

Was this another warning, or just a maddening mnemonic brought on by stress and guilt? Because he did feel guilty. John was right, Abra was going to be a True target no matter what, but feelings were invulnerable to rational thought. It had been his plan, the plan had gone wrong, and he was on the hook.

You will remember what was forgotten.

Was it the voice of his old friend, trying to tell him something about their current situation, or just the gramophone?

Dave and John went back to the Stone house together. Dan followed in his own car, delighted to be alone with his thoughts. Not that it seemed to help. He was almost positive there was something there, something real, but it wouldn’t come. He even tried to summon Tony, a thing he hadn’t attempted since his teenage years, and had no luck.

Billy’s truck was no longer parked on Richland Court. To Dan, that made sense. The True Knot raiding party had come in the Winnebago. If they dropped the Crow off in Anniston, he would have been on foot and in need of a vehicle.

The garage was open. Dave got out of John’s car before it pulled completely to a stop and ran inside, calling Abra’s name. Then, spotlighted in the headlights of John’s Suburban like an actor on a stage, he lifted something up and uttered a sound somewhere between a groan and a scream. As Dan pulled up next to the Suburban, he saw what it was: Abra’s backpack.

The urge to drink came on Dan then, even stronger than the night he’d called John from the parking lot of the cowboy-boogie bar, stronger than in all the years since he’d picked up a white chip at his first meeting. The urge to simply reverse down the driveway, ignoring their shouts, and drive back to Frazier. There was a bar there called the Bull Moose. He’d been past it many times, always with the recovered drunk’s reflexive speculations—what was it like inside? What was on draft? What kind of music was on the juke? What whiskey was on the shelf and what kind in the well? Were there any good-looking ladies? And what would that first drink taste like? Would it taste like home? Like finally coming home? He could answer at least some of those questions before Dave Stone called the cops and the cops took him in for questioning in the matter of a certain little girl’s disappearance.

A time will come, Casey had told him in those early white-knuckle days, when your mental defenses will fail and the only thing left standing between you and a drink will be your Higher Power.

Dan had no problem with the Higher Power thing, because he had a bit of inside information. God remained an unproven hypothesis, but he knew there really was another plane of existence. Like Abra, Dan had seen the ghostie people. So sure, God was possible. Given his glimpses of the world beyond the world, Dan thought it even likely… although what kind of God only sat by while shit like this played out?

As if you’re the first one to ask that question, he thought.

Casey Kingsley had told him to get down on his knees twice a day, asking for help in the morning and saying thanks at night. It’s the first three steps: I can’t, God can, I think I’ll let Him. Don’t think too much about it.

To newcomers reluctant to take this advice, Casey was wont to offer a story about the film director John Waters. In one of his early movies, Pink Flamingos, Waters’s drag-queen star, Divine, had eaten a bit of dog excrement off a suburban lawn. Years later, Waters was still being asked about that glorious moment of cinematic history. Finally he snapped. “It was just a little piece of dogshit,” he told a reporter, “and it made her a star.”

So get down on your knees and ask for help even if you don’t like it, Casey always finished. After all, it’s just a little piece of dogshit.

Dan couldn’t very well get on his knees behind the steering wheel of his car, but he assumed the automatic default position of his morning and nightly prayers—eyes closed and one palm pressed against his lips, as if to keep out even a trickle of the seductive poison that had scarred twenty years of his life.

God, help me not to dri—

He got that far and the light broke.

It was what Dave had said on their way to Cloud Gap. It was Abra’s angry smile (Dan wondered if the Crow had seen that smile yet, and what he made of it, if so). Most of all, it was the feel of his own skin, pressing his lips back against his teeth.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. He got out of the car and his legs gave way. He fell on his knees after all, but got up and ran into the garage, where the two men were standing and looking at Abra’s abandoned pack.

He grabbed Dave Stone’s shoulder. “Call your wife. Tell her you’re coming to see her.”

“She’ll want to know what it’s about,” Dave said. It was clear from his quivering mouth and downcast eyes how little he wanted to have that conversation. “She’s staying at Chetta’s apartment. I’ll tell her… Christ, I don’t know what I’ll tell her.”

Dan gripped tighter, increasing the pressure until the lowered eyes came up and met his. “We’re all going to Boston, but John and I have other business to take care of there.”

“What other business? I don’t understand.”

Dan did. Not everything, but a lot.

They took John’s Suburban. Dave rode shotgun. Dan lay in the back with his head on an armrest and his feet on the floor.

“Lucy kept trying to get me to tell her what it was about,” Dave said. “She told me I was scaring her. And of course she thought it was Abra, because she’s got a little of what Abra’s got. I’ve always known it. I told her Abby was staying the night at Emma’s house. Do you know how many times I’ve lied to my wife in the years we’ve been married? I could count them on one hand, and three of them would be about how much I lost in the Thursday night poker games the head of my department runs. Nothing like this. And in just three hours, I’m going to have to eat it.”

Of course Dan and John knew what he’d said about Abra, and how upset Lucy had been at her husband’s continued insistence that the matter was too important and complex to go into on the telephone. They had both been in the kitchen when he made the call. But he needed to talk. To share, in AA-speak. John took care of any responses that needed to be made, saying uh-huh and I know and I understand.

At some point, Dave broke off and looked into the backseat. “Jesus God, are you sleeping?”

“No,” Dan said without opening his eyes. “I’m trying to get in touch with your daughter.”

That ended Dave’s monologue. Now there was only the hum of the tires as the Suburban ran south on Route 16 through a dozen little towns. Traffic was light and John kept the speedometer pegged at a steady sixty miles an hour once the two lanes broadened to four.

Dan made no effort to call Abra; he wasn’t sure that would work. Instead he tried to open his mind completely. To turn himself into a listening post. He had never attempted anything like this before, and the result was eerie. It was like wearing the world’s most powerful set of headphones. He seemed to hear a steady low rushing sound, and believed it was the hum of human thoughts. He held himself ready to hear her voice somewhere in that steady surf, not really expecting it, but what else could he do?

It was shortly after they went through the first tolls on the Spaulding Turnpike, now only sixty miles from Boston, that he finally picked her up.

(Dan)

Low. Barely there. At first he thought it was just imagination—wish fulfillment—but he turned in that direction anyway, trying to narrow his concentration down to a single searchlight beam. And it came again, a bit louder this time. It was real. It was her.

(Dan, please!)

She was drugged, all right, and he’d never tried anything remotely like what had to be done next… but Abra had. She would have to show him the way, doped up or not.

(Abra push you have to help me)

(help what help how)

(swapsies)

(???)

(help me turn the world)

Dave was in the passenger seat, going through the change in the cup holder for the next toll, when Dan spoke from behind him. Only it most certainly wasn’t Dan.

“Just give me another minute, I have to change my tampon!”

The Suburban swerved as John sat up straight and jerked the wheel. “What the hell?”

Dave unsnapped his seatbelt and got on his knees, twisting around to peer at the man lying on the backseat. Dan’s eyes were half-lidded, but when Dave spoke Abra’s name, they opened.

“No, Daddy, not now, I have to help… I have to try…” Dan’s body twisted. One hand came up, wiped his mouth in a gesture Dave had seen a thousand times, then fell away. “Tell him I said not to call me that. Tell him—”

Dan’s head cocked sideways until it was lying on his shoulder. He groaned. His hands twitched aimlessly.

“What’s going on?” John shouted. “What do I do?”

“I don’t know,” Dave said. He reached between the seats, took one of the twitching hands, and held it tight.

“Drive,” Dan said. “Just drive.”

Then the body on the backseat began to buck and twist. Abra began to scream with Dan’s voice.

He found the conduit between them by following the sluggish current of her thoughts. He saw the stone wheel because Abra was visualizing it, but she was far too weak and disoriented to turn it. She was using all the mental force she could muster just to keep her end of the link open. So he could enter her mind and she could enter his. But he was still mostly in the Suburban, with the lights of the cars headed in the other direction running across the padded roof. Light… dark… light… dark.

The wheel was so heavy.

There was a sudden hammering from somewhere, and a voice. “Come out, Abra. Time’s up. We have to roll.”

That frightened her, and she found a little extra strength. The wheel began to move, pulling him deeper into the umbilicus that connected them. It was the strangest sensation Dan had ever had in his life, exhilarating even in the horror of the situation.

Somewhere, distant, he heard Abra say, “Just give me another minute, I have to change my tampon!”

The roof of John’s Suburban was sliding away. Turning away. There was darkness, the sense of being in a tunnel, and he had time to think, If I get lost in here, I’ll never be able to get back. I’ll wind up in a mental hospital somewhere, labeled a hopeless catatonic.

But then the world was sliding back into place, only it wasn’t the same place. The Suburban was gone. He was in a smelly bathroom with dingy blue tiles on the floor and a sign beside the washbasin reading SORRY COLD WATER ONLY. He was sitting on the toilet.

Before he could even think about getting up, the door bammed open hard enough to crack some of the old tiles, and a man strode in. He looked about thirty-five, his hair dead black and combed away from his forehead, his face angular but handsome in a rough-hewn, bony way. In one hand he held a pistol.

“Change your tampon, sure,” he said. “Where’d you have it, Goldilocks, in your pants pocket? Must have been, because your backpack’s a long way from here.”

(tell him I said not to call me that)

Dan said, “I told you not to call me that.”

Crow paused, looking at the girl sitting on the toilet seat, swaying a little from side to side. Swaying because of the dope. Sure. But what about the way she sounded? Was that because of the dope?

“What happened to your voice? You don’t sound like yourself.”

Dan tried to shrug the girl’s shoulders and only succeeded in twitching one of them. Crow grabbed Abra’s arm and yanked Dan to Abra’s feet. It hurt, and he cried out.

Somewhere—miles from here—a faint voice shouted, What’s going on? What do I do?

“Drive,” he told John as Crow pulled him out the door. “Just drive.”

“Oh, I’ll drive, all right,” Crow said, and muscled Abra into the truck next to the snoring Billy Freeman. Then he grabbed a sheaf of her hair, wound it in his fist, and pulled. Dan screamed with Abra’s voice, knowing it wasn’t quite her voice. Almost, but not quite. Crow heard the difference, but didn’t know what it was. The hat woman would have; it was the hat woman who had unwittingly shown Abra this mindswap trick.

“But before we get rolling, we’re going to have an understanding. No more lies, that’s the understanding. The next time you lie to your Daddy, this old geezer snoring beside me is dead meat. I won’t use the dope, either. I’ll pull in at a camp road and put a bullet in his belly. That way it takes awhile. You’ll get to listen to him scream. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Dan whispered.

“Little girl, I fucking hope so, because I don’t chew my cabbage twice.”

Crow slammed the door and walked quickly around to the driver’s side. Dan closed Abra’s eyes. He was thinking about the spoons at the birthday party. About opening and shutting drawers—that, too. Abra was too physically weak to grapple with the man now getting behind the wheel and starting the engine, but part of her was strong. If he could find that part… the part that had moved the spoons and opened drawers and played air-music… the part that had written on his blackboard from miles away… if he could find it and then take control of it…

As Abra had visualized a female warrior’s lance and a stallion, Dan now visualized a bank of switches on a control room wall. Some worked her hands, some her legs, some the shrug of her shoulders. Others, though, were more important. He should be able to pull them; he had at least some of the same circuits.

The truck was moving, first reversing, then turning. A moment later they were back on the road.

“That’s right,” Crow said grimly. “Go to sleep. What the hell did you think you were going to do back there? Jump in the toilet and flush yourself away to…”

His words faded, because here were the switches Dan was looking for. The special switches, the ones with the red handles. He didn’t know if they were really there, and actually connected to Abra’s powers, or if this was just some mental game of solitaire he was playing. He only knew that he had to try.

Shine on, he thought, and pulled them all.

Billy Freeman’s pickup was six or eight miles west of the gas station and rolling through rural Vermont darkness on 108 when Crow first felt the pain. It was like a small silver band circling his left eye. It was cold, pressing. He reached up to touch it, but before he could, it slithered right, freezing the bridge of his nose like a shot of novocaine. Then it circled his other eye as well. It was like wearing metal binoculars.

Or eyecuffs.

Now his left ear began to ring, and suddenly his left cheek was numb. He turned his head and saw the little girl looking at him. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. They didn’t look doped in the slightest. For that matter, they didn’t look like her eyes. They looked older. Wiser. And as cold as his face now felt.

(stop the truck)

Crow had capped the hypo and put it away, but he was still holding the gun he’d taken from beneath the seat when he decided she was spending way too much time in the crapper. He raised it, meaning to threaten the geezer and make her stop whatever it was she was doing, but all at once his hand felt as if it had been plunged into freezing water. The gun put on weight: five pounds, ten pounds, what felt like twenty-five. Twenty-five at least. And while he was struggling to raise it, his right foot came off the F-150’s gas pedal and his left hand turned the wheel so that the truck veered off the road and rolled along the soft shoulder—gently, slowing—with the right-side wheels tilting toward the ditch.

“What are you doing to me?”

“What you deserve. Daddy.”

The truck bumped a downed birch tree, snapped it in two, and stopped. The girl and the geezer were seatbelted in, but Crow had forgotten his. He jolted forward into the steering wheel, honking the horn. When he looked down, he saw the geezer’s automatic turning in his fist. Very slowly turning toward him. This shouldn’t be happening. The dope was supposed to stop it. Hell, the dope had stopped it. But something had changed in that bathroom. Whoever was behind those eyes now was cold fucking sober.

And horribly strong.

Rose! Rose, I need you!

“I don’t think she can hear,” the voice that wasn’t Abra’s said. “You may have some talents, you son of a bitch, but I don’t think you have much in the way of telepathy. I think when you want to talk to your girlfriend, you use the phone.”

Exerting all his strength, Crow began to turn the Glock back toward the girl. Now it seemed to weigh fifty pounds. The tendons of his neck stood out like cables. Drops of perspiration beaded on his forehead. One ran into his eye, stinging, and Crow blinked it away.

“I’ll… shoot… your friend,” he said.

“No,” the person inside Abra said. “I won’t let you.”

But Crow could see she was straining now, and that gave him hope. He put everything he had into pointing the muzzle at Rip Van Winkle’s midsection, and had almost gotten there when the gun started to rotate back again. Now he could hear the little bitch panting. Hell, he was, too. They sounded like marathoners approaching the end of a race side by side.

A car went by, not slowing. Neither of them noticed. They were looking at each other.

Crow brought his left hand down to join his right on the gun. Now it turned a little more easily. He was beating her, by God. But his eyes! Jesus!

“Billy!” Abra shouted. “Billy, little help here!”

Billy snorted. His eyes opened. “Wha—”

For a moment Crow was distracted. The force he was exerting slackened, and the gun immediately began to turn back toward him. His hands were cold, cold. Those metal rings were pressing into his eyes, threatening to turn them to jelly.

The gun went off for the first time when it was between them, blowing a hole in the dashboard just above the radio. Billy jerked awake, arms flailing to either side like a man pulling himself out of a nightmare. One of them struck Abra’s temple, the other Crow’s chest. The cab of the truck was filled with blue haze and the smell of burnt gunpowder.

“What was that? What the hell was tha—”

Crow snarled, “No, you bitch! No!”

He swung the gun back toward Abra, and as he did it, he felt her control slip. It was the blow to the head. Crow could see dismay and terror in her eyes, and was savagely glad.

Have to kill her. Can’t give her another chance. But not a headshot. In the gut. Then I’ll suck the stea—

Billy slammed his shoulder into Crow’s side. The gun jerked up and went off again, this time putting a hole in the roof just above Abra’s head. Before Crow could bring it down again, huge hands laid themselves over his. He had time to realize that his adversary had only been tapping a fraction of the force at its command. Panic had unlocked a great, perhaps even unknowable, reserve. This time when the gun turned toward him, Crow’s wrists snapped like bundles of twigs. For a moment he saw a single black eye staring up at him, and there was time for half a thought:

(Rose I love y)

There was a brilliant flash of white, then darkness. Four seconds later, there was nothing left of Crow Daddy but his clothes.

Steamhead Steve, Baba the Red, Bent Dick, and Greedy G were playing a desultory game of canasta in the Bounder that Greedy and Dirty Phil shared when the shrieks began. All four of them had been on edge—the whole True was on edge—and they dropped their cards immediately and ran for the door.

Everyone was emerging from their campers and RVs to see what the matter was, but they stopped when they saw Rose the Hat standing in the brilliant yellow-white glare of the security lights surrounding the Overlook Lodge. Her eyes were wild. She was pulling at her hair like an Old Testament prophet in the throes of a violent vision.

“That fucking little bitch killed my Crow!” she shrieked. “I’ll kill her! I’LL KILL HER AND EAT HER HEART!”

At last she sank to her knees, sobbing into her hands.

The True Knot stood, stunned. No one knew what to say or do. At last Silent Sarey went to her. Rose shoved her violently away. Sarey landed on her back, got up, and returned to Rose without hesitation. This time Rose looked up and saw her would-be comforter, a woman who had also lost someone dear on this unbelievable night. She embraced Sarey, hugging so hard that the watching True heard bones crack. But Sarey didn’t struggle, and after a few moments, the two women helped each other to their feet. Rose looked from Silent Sarey to Big Mo, then to Heavy Mary and Token Charlie. It was as if she had never seen any of them.

“Come on, Rosie,” Mo said. “You’ve had a shock. You need to lie d—”

“NO!”

She stepped away from Silent Sarey and clapped her hands to the sides of her face in a huge double slap that knocked off her hat. She bent down to pick it up, and when she looked around at the gathered True again, some sanity had come back into her eyes. She was thinking of Diesel Doug and the crew she had sent to meet Daddy and the girl.

“I need to get hold of Deez. Tell him and Phil and Annie to turn around. We need to be together. We need to take steam. A lot of it. Once we’re loaded, we’re going to get that bitch.”

They only looked at her, their faces worried and unsure. The sight of those frightened eyes and stupid gaping mouths infuriated her.

“Do you doubt me?” Silent Sarey had crept back to her side. Rose pushed her away from her so hard Sarey almost fell down again. “Whoever doubts me, let him step forward.”

“No one doubts you, Rose,” Steamhead Steve said, “but maybe we ought to let her alone.” He spoke carefully, and couldn’t quite meet Rose’s eyes. “If Crow’s really gone, that’s five dead. We’ve never lost five in one day. We’ve never even lost t—”

Rose stepped forward and Steve immediately stepped back, hunching his shoulders up around his ears like a child expecting a blow. “You want to run away from one little steamhead girl? After all these years, you want to turn tail and run from a rube?”

No one answered her, least of all Steve, but Rose saw the truth in their eyes. They did. They actually did. They’d had a lot of good years. Fat years. Easy-hunting years. Now they had run across someone who not only had extraordinary steam but knew them for who they were and what they did. Instead of avenging Crow Daddy—who had, along with Rose, seen them through good times and bad—they wanted to put their tails between their legs and go yipping away. In that moment she wanted to kill them all. They felt it and shuffled further back, giving her room.

All but Silent Sarey, who was staring at Rose as if hypnotized, her mouth hung on a hinge. Rose seized her by her scrawny shoulders.

“No, Rosie!” Mo squealed. “Don’t hurt her!”

“What about you, Sarey? That little girl was responsible for murdering the woman you loved. Do you want to run away?”

“Nup,” Sarey said. Her eyes looked up into Rose’s. Even now, with everyone looking at her, Sarey seemed little more than a shadow.

“Do you want payback?”

“Lup,” Sarey said. Then: “Levenge.”

She had a low voice (almost a no-voice) and a speech impediment, but they all heard her, and they all knew what she was saying.

Rose looked around at the others. “For those of you who don’t want what Sarey wants, who just want to get down on your bellies and squirm away…”

She turned to Big Mo and seized the woman’s flabby arm. Mo screeched in fear and surprise and tried to draw away. Rose held her in place and lifted her arm so the others could see it. It was covered with red spots. “Can you squirm away from this?”

They muttered and took another step or two back.

Rose said, “It’s in us.”

“Most of us are fine!” Sweet Terri Pickford shouted. “I’m fine! Not a mark on me!” She held her smooth arms out for inspection.

Rose turned her burning, tear-filled eyes on Terri. “Now. But for how long?” Sweet Terri made no reply, but turned her face away.

Rose put her arm around Silent Sarey and surveyed the others. “Nut said that girl may be our only chance of getting rid of the sickness before it infects us all. Does anyone here know better? If you do, speak up.”

No one did.

“We’re going to wait until Deez, Annie, and Dirty Phil get back, then we’ll take steam. Biggest steam ever. We’re going to empty the canisters.”

Looks of surprise and more uneasy mutters greeted this. Did they think she was crazy? Let them. It wasn’t just measles eating into the True Knot; it was terror, and that was far worse.

“When we’re all together, we’re going to circle. We’re going to grow strong. Lodsam hanti, we are the chosen ones—have you forgotten that? Sabbatha hanti, we are the True Knot, and we endure. Say it with me.” Her eyes raked them. “Say it.”

They said it, joining hands, making a ring. We are the True Knot, and we endure. A little resolution came into their eyes. A little belief. Only half a dozen of them were showing the spots, after all; there was still time.

Rose and Silent Sarey stepped to the circle. Terri and Baba let go of each other to make a place for them, but Rose escorted Sarey to the center. Under the security lights, the bodies of the two women radiated multiple shadows, like the spokes of a wheel. “When we’re strong—when we’re one again—we’re going to find her and take her. I tell you that as your leader. And even if her steam doesn’t cure the sickness that’s eating us, it’ll be the end of the rotten—”

That was when the girl spoke inside her head. Rose could not see Abra Stone’s angry smile, but she could feel it.

(don’t bother coming to me, Rose)

In the back of John Dalton’s Suburban, Dan Torrance spoke four clear words in Abra’s voice.

“I’ll come to you.”

“Billy? Billy!”

Billy Freeman looked at the girl who didn’t exactly sound like a girl. She doubled, came together, and doubled again. He passed a hand over his face. His eyelids felt heavy and his thoughts seemed somehow glued together. He couldn’t make sense of this. It wasn’t daylight anymore, and they sure as hell weren’t on Abra’s street anymore. “Who’s shooting? And who took a shit in my mouth? Christ.”

“Billy, you have to wake up. You have to…”

You have to drive was what Dan meant to say, but Billy Freeman wasn’t going to be driving anywhere. Not for awhile. His eyes were drifting shut again, the lids out of sync. Dan threw one of Abra’s elbows into the old guy’s side and got his attention again. For the time being, at least.

Headlights flooded the cab of the truck as another car approached. Dan held Abra’s breath, but this one also went by without slowing. Maybe a woman on her own, maybe a salesman in a hurry to get home. A bad Samaritan, whoever it was, and bad was good for them, but they might not be lucky a third time. Rural people tended to be neighborly. Not to mention nosy.

“Stay awake,” he said.

“Who are you?” Billy tried to focus on the kid, but it was impossible. “Because you sure don’t sound like Abra.”

“It’s complicated. For now, just concentrate on staying awake.”

Dan got out and walked around to the driver’s side of the truck, stumbling several times. Her legs, which had seemed so long on the day he met her, were too damned short. He only hoped he wouldn’t have enough time to get used to them.

Crow’s clothes were lying on the seat. His canvas shoes were on the dirty floormat with the socks trailing out of them. The blood and brains that had splattered his shirt and jacket had cycled out of existence, but they had left damp spots. Dan gathered everything up and, after a moment’s consideration, added the gun. He didn’t want to give it up, but if they were stopped…

He took the bundle to the front of the truck and buried it beneath a drift of old leaves. Then he grabbed a piece of the downed birch the F-150 had struck and dragged it over the burial site. It was hard work with Abra’s arms, but he managed.

He found he couldn’t just step into the cab; he had to pull himself up by the steering wheel. And once he was finally behind the wheel, her feet barely reached the pedals. Fuck.

Billy gave a galumphing snore, and Dan threw another elbow. Billy opened his eyes and looked around. “Where are we? Did that guy drug me?” Then: “I think I have to go back to sleep.”

At some point during the final life-or-death struggle for the gun, Crow’s unopened bottle of Fanta had fallen to the floor. Dan bent over, grabbed it, then paused with Abra’s hand on the cap, remembering what happens to soda when it takes a hard thump. From somewhere, Abra spoke to him

(oh dear)

and she was smiling, but it wasn’t the angry smile. Dan thought that was good.

You can’t let me go to sleep, the voice coming from Dan’s mouth said, so John took the Fox Run exit and parked in the lot farthest from Kohl’s. There he and Dave walked Dan’s body up and down, one on each side. He was like a drunk at the end of a hard night—every now and then his head sagged to his chest before snapping back up again. Both men took a turn at asking what had happened, what was happening now, and where it was happening, but Abra only shook Dan’s head. “The Crow shot me in my hand before he let me go in the bathroom. The rest is all fuzzy. Now shh, I have to concentrate.”

On the third wide circle of John’s Suburban, Dan’s mouth broke into a grin, and a very Abra-like giggle issued from him. Dave looked a question at John across the body of their shambling, stumbling charge. John shrugged and shook his head.

“Oh, dear,” Abra said. “Soda.”

Dan tilted the soda and removed the cap. A high-pressure spray of orange pop hit Billy full in the face. He coughed and spluttered, for the time being wide awake.

“Jesus, kid! Why’d you do that?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Dan handed him the still-fizzing soda. “Put the rest inside you. I’m sorry, but you can’t go back to sleep, no matter how much you want to.”

While Billy tilted the bottle and chugged soda, Dan leaned over and found the seat adjustment lever. He pulled it with one hand and yanked on the steering wheel with the other. The seat jolted forward. It caused Billy to spill Fanta down his chin (and to utter a phrase not generally used by adults around young girls from New Hampshire), but now Abra’s feet could reach the pedals. Barely. Dan put the truck in reverse and backed up slowly, angling toward the road as he went. When they were on the pavement, he breathed a sigh of relief. Getting stuck in a ditch beside a little-used Vermont highway would not have advanced their cause much.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Billy asked.

“Yes. Been doing it for years… although there was a little lag time when the state of Florida took away my license. I was in another state at the time, but there’s a little thing called reciprocity. The bane of traveling drunks all across this great country of ours.”

“You’re Dan.”

“Guilty as charged,” he said, peering over the top of the steering wheel. He wished he had a book to sit on, but since he didn’t, he would just have to do the best he could. He dropped the transmission into drive and got rolling.

“How’d you get inside her?”

“Don’t ask.”

The Crow had said something (or only thought it, Dan didn’t know which) about camp roads, and about four miles up Route 108, they came to a lane with a rustic wooden sign nailed to a pine tree: BOB AND DOT’S HAPPY PLACE. If that wasn’t a camp road, nothing was. Dan turned in, Abra’s arms glad for the power steering, and flicked on the high beams. A quarter of a mile up, the lane was barred by a heavy chain with another sign hanging from it, this one less rustic: NO TRESPASSING. The chain was good. It meant Bob and Dot hadn’t decided on a getaway weekend at their happy place, and a quarter of a mile from the highway was enough to assure them of some privacy. There was another bonus: a culvert with water trickling out of it.

He killed the lights and engine, then turned to Billy. “See that culvert? Go wash the soda off your face. Splash up good. You need to be as wide awake as you can get.”

“I’m awake,” Billy said.

“Not enough. Try to keep your shirt dry. And when you’re done, comb your hair. You’re going to have to meet the public.”

“Where are we?”

“Vermont.”

“Where’s the guy who hijacked me?”

“Dead.”

“Good goddam riddance!” Billy exclaimed. Then, after a moment’s thought: “How about the body? Where’s that?”

An excellent question, but not one Dan wanted to answer. What he wanted was for this to be over. It was exhausting, and disorienting in a thousand ways. “Gone. That’s really all you need to know.”

“But—”

“Not now. Wash your face, then walk up and down this road a few times. Swing your arms, take deep breaths, and get as clear as you can.”

“I’ve got one bitch of a headache.”

Dan wasn’t surprised. “When you come back, the girl is probably going to be the girl again, which means you’ll have to drive. If you feel sober enough to be plausible, go to the next town that has a motel and check in. You’re traveling with your granddaughter, got it?”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “My granddaughter. Abby Freeman.”

“Once you’re in, call me on my cell.”

“Because you’ll be wherever… wherever the rest of you is.”

“Right.”

“This is fucked to the sky, buddy.”

“Yes,” Dan said. “It certainly is. Our job now is to unfuck it.”

“Okay. What is the next town?”

“No idea. I don’t want you having an accident, Billy. If you can’t get clear enough to drive twenty or thirty miles and then check into a motel without having the guy on the counter call the cops, you and Abra will have to spend the night in the cab of this truck. It won’t be comfortable, but it should be safe.”

Billy opened the passenger-side door. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll be able to pass for sober. Done it before.” He gave the girl behind the steering wheel a wink. “I work for Casey Kingsley. Death on drinkin, remember?”

Dan watched him go to the culvert and kneel there, then closed Abra’s eyes.

In a parking lot outside the Fox Run Mall, Abra closed Dan’s.

(Abra)

(I’m here)

(are you awake)

(yes sort of)

(we need to turn the wheel again can you help me)

This time, she could.

“Let go of me, you guys,” Dan said. His voice was his own again. “I’m all right. I think.”

John and Dave let go, ready to grab him again if he staggered, but he didn’t. What he did was touch himself: hair, face, chest, legs. Then he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here.” He looked around. “Which is where?”

“Fox Run Mall,” John said. “Sixty miles or so from Boston.”

“Okay, let’s get back on the road.”

“Abra,” Dave said. “What about Abra?”

“Abra’s fine. Back where she belongs.”

“She belongs at home,” Dave said, and with more than a touch of resentment. “In her room. IM’ing with her friends or listening to those stupid ’Round Here kids on her iPod.”

She is at home, Dan thought. If a person’s body is their home, she’s there.

“She’s with Billy. Billy will take care of her.”

“What about the one who kidnapped her? This Crow?”

Dan paused beside the back door of John’s Suburban. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore. The one we have to worry about now is Rose.”

The Crown Motel was actually over the state line, in Crownville, New York. It was a rattletrap place with a flickering sign out front reading VAC NCY and M NY CAB E CHAN ELS! Only four cars were parked in the thirty or so slots. The man behind the counter was a descending mountain of fat, with a ponytail that trickled to a stop halfway down his back. He ran Billy’s Visa and gave him the keys to two rooms without taking his eyes from the TV, where two women on a red velvet sofa were engaged in strenuous osculation.

“Do they connect?” Billy asked. And, looking at the women: “The rooms, I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah, they all connect, just open the doors.”

“Thanks.”

He drove down the rank of units to twenty-three and twenty-four, and parked the truck. Abra was curled up on the seat with her head pillowed on one arm, fast asleep. Billy unlocked the rooms, turned on the lights, and opened the connecting doors. He judged the accommodations shabby but not quite desperate. All he wanted now was to get the two of them inside and go to sleep himself. Preferably for about ten hours. He rarely felt old, but tonight he felt ancient.

Abra woke up a little as he laid her on the bed. “Where are we?”

“Crownville, New York. We’re safe. I’ll be in the next room.”

“I want my dad. And I want Dan.”

“Soon.” Hoping he was right about that.

Her eyes closed, then slowly opened again. “I talked to that woman. That bitch.”

“Did you?” Billy had no idea what she meant.

“She knows what we did. She felt it. And it hurt.” A harsh light gleamed momentarily in Abra’s eyes. Billy thought it was like seeing a peek of sun at the end of a cold, overcast day in February. “I’m glad.”

“Go to sleep, hon.”

That cold winter light still shone out of the pale and tired face. “She knows I’m coming for her.”

Billy thought of brushing her hair out of her eyes, but what if she bit? Probably that was silly, but… the light in her eyes. His mother had looked like that sometimes, just before she lost her temper and whopped one of the kids. “You’ll feel better in the morning. I’d like it if we could go back tonight—I’m sure your dad feels that way, too—but I’m in no shape to drive. I was lucky to get this far without running off the road.”

“I wish I could talk to my mom and dad.”

Billy’s own mother and father—never candidates for Parents of the Year, even at their best—were long dead and he wished only for sleep. He looked longingly through the open door at the bed in the other room. Soon, but not quite yet. He took out his cell phone and flipped it open. It rang twice, and then he was talking to Dan. After a few moments, he handed the phone to Abra. “Your father. Knock yourself out.”

Abra seized the phone. “Dad? Dad?” Tears began to fill her eyes. “Yes, I’m… stop, Dad, I’m all right. Just so sleepy I can hardly—” Her eyes widened as a thought struck her. “Are you okay?”

She listened. Billy’s eyes drifted shut and he snapped them open with an effort. The girl was crying hard now, and he was sort of glad. The tears had doused that light in her eyes.

She handed the phone back. “It’s Dan. He wants to talk to you again.”

He took the phone and listened. Then he said, “Abra, Dan wants to know if you think there are any other bad guys. Ones close enough to get here tonight.”

“No. I think the Crow was going to meet some others, but they’re still a long way away. And they can’t figure out where we are”—she broke off for a huge yawn—“without him to tell them. Tell Dan we’re safe. And tell him to make sure my dad gets that.”

Billy relayed this message. When he ended the call, Abra was curled up on the bed, knees to chest, snoring softly. Billy covered her with a blanket from the closet, then went to the door and ran the chain. He considered, then propped the desk chair under the knob for good measure. Always safe, never sorry, his father had liked to say.

Rose opened the compartment under the floor and took out one of the canisters. Still on her knees between the EarthCruiser’s front seats, she cracked it and put her mouth over the hissing lid. Her jaw unhinged all the way to her chest, and the bottom of her head became a dark hole in which a single tooth jutted. Her eyes, ordinarily uptilted, bled downward and darkened. Her face became a doleful deathmask with the skull standing out clear beneath.

She took steam.

When she was done, she replaced the canister and sat behind the wheel of her RV, looking straight ahead. Don’t bother coming to me, Rose—I’ll come to you. That was what she had said. What she had dared to say to her, Rose O’Hara, Rose the Hat. Not just strong, then; strong and vengeful. Angry.

“Come ahead, darling,” she said. “And stay angry. The angrier you are, the more foolhardy you’ll be. Come and see your auntie Rose.”

There was a snap. She looked down and saw she had broken off the lower half of the EarthCruiser’s steering wheel. Steam conveyed strength. Her hands were bleeding. Rose threw the jagged arc of plastic aside, raised her palms to her face, and began to lick them.

^{CHAPTER SIXTEEN} THAT WHICH WAS FORGOTTEN

The moment Dan closed his phone, Dave said, “Let’s pick up Lucy and go get her.”

Dan shook his head. “She says they’re okay, and I believe her.”

“She’s been drugged, though,” John said. “Her judgment might not be the best right now.”

“She was clear enough to help me take care of the one she calls the Crow,” Dan said, “and I trust her on this. Let them sleep off whatever the bastard drugged them with. We have other things to do. Important things. You’ve got to trust me a little here. You’ll be with your daughter soon enough, David. For the moment, though, listen to me carefully. We’re going to drop you off at your grandmother-in-law’s place. You’re going to bring your wife to the hospital.”

“I don’t know if she’ll believe me when I tell her what happened today. I don’t know how convincing I can be when I hardly believe it myself.”

“Tell her the story has to wait until we’re all together. And that includes Abra’s momo.”

“I doubt if they’ll let you in to see her.” Dave glanced at his watch. “Visiting hours are long over, and she’s very ill.”

“Floor staff doesn’t pay much attention to the visiting rules when patients are near the end,” Dan said.

Dave looked at John, who shrugged. “The man works in a hospice. I think you can trust him on that.”

“She may not even be conscious,” Dave said.

“Let’s worry about one thing at a time.”

“What does Chetta have to do with this, anyway? She doesn’t know anything about it!”

Dan said, “I’m pretty sure she knows more than you think.”

They dropped Dave off at the condo on Marlborough Street and watched from the curb as he mounted the steps and rang one of the bells.

“He looks like a little kid who knows he’s going to the woodshed for a pants-down butt whippin,” John said. “This is going to strain the hell out of his marriage, no matter how it turns out.”

“When a natural disaster happens, no one’s to blame.”

“Try to make Lucy Stone see that. She’s going to think, ‘You left your daughter alone and a crazy guy snatched her.’ On some level, she’s always going to think it.”

“Abra might change her mind about that. As for today, we did what we could, and so far we’re not doing too badly.”

“But it’s not over.”

“Not by a long shot.”

Dave was ringing the bell again and peering into the little lobby when the elevator opened and Lucy Stone came rushing out. Her face was strained and pale. Dave started to talk as soon as she opened the door. So did she. Lucy pulled him in—yanked him in—by both arms.

“Ah, man,” John said softly. “That reminds me of too many nights when I rolled in drunk at three in the morning.”

“Either he’ll convince her or he won’t,” Dan said. “We’ve got other business.”

Dan Torrance and John Dalton arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital shortly after ten thirty. It was slack tide on the intensive care floor. A deflating helium balloon with FEEL BETTER SOON printed on it in particolored letters drifted halfheartedly along the hallway ceiling, casting a jellyfish shadow. Dan approached the nurses’ station, identified himself as a staffer at the hospice to which Ms. Reynolds was scheduled to be moved, showed his Helen Rivington House ID, and introduced John Dalton as the family doctor (a stretch, but not an actual lie).

“We need to assess her condition prior to the transfer,” Dan said, “and two family members have asked to be present. They are Ms. Reynolds’s granddaughter and her granddaughter’s husband. I’m sorry about the lateness of the hour, but it was unavoidable. They’ll be here shortly.”

“I’ve met the Stones,” the head nurse said. “They’re lovely people. Lucy in particular has been very attentive to her gran. Concetta’s special. I’ve been reading her poems, and they’re wonderful. But if you’re expecting any input from her, gentlemen, you’re going to be disappointed. She’s slipped into a coma.”

We’ll see about that, Dan thought.

“And…” The nurse looked at John doubtfully. “Well… it’s really not my place to say…”

“Go on,” John said. “I’ve never met a head nurse who didn’t know what the score was.”

She smiled at him, then turned her attention back to Dan. “I’ve heard wonderful things about the Rivington hospice, but I doubt very much if Concetta will be going there. Even if she lasts until Monday, I’m not sure there’s any point in moving her. It might be kinder to let her finish her journey here. If I’m stepping out of line, I’m sorry.”

“You’re not,” Dan said, “and we’ll take that into consideration. John, would you go down to the lobby and escort the Stones up when they arrive? I can start without you.”

“Are you sure—”

“Yes,” Dan said, holding his eyes. “I am.”

“She’s in Room Nine,” the head nurse said. “It’s the single at the end of the hall. If you need me, ring her call bell.”

Concetta’s name was on the Room 9 door, but the slot for medical orders was empty and the vitals monitor overhead showed nothing hopeful. Dan stepped into aromas he knew well: air freshener, antiseptic, and mortal illness. The last was a high smell that sang in his head like a violin that knows only one note. The walls were covered with photographs, many featuring Abra at various ages. One showed a gapemouthed cluster of little folks watching a magician pull a white rabbit from a hat. Dan was sure it had been taken at the famous birthday party, the Day of the Spoons.

Surrounded by these pictures, a skeleton woman slept with her mouth open and a pearl rosary twined in her fingers. Her remaining hair was so fine it almost disappeared against the pillow. Her skin, once olive-toned, was now yellow. The rise and fall of her thin bosom was hardly there. One look was enough to tell Dan that the head nurse had indeed known what the score was. If Azzie were here, he would have been curled up next to the woman in this room, waiting for Doctor Sleep to arrive so he could resume his late-night patrol of corridors empty save for the things only cats could see.

Dan sat down on the side of the bed, noting that the single IV going into her was a saline drip. There was only one medicine that could help her now, and the hospital pharmacy didn’t stock it. Her cannula had come askew. He straightened it. Then he took her hand and looked into the sleeping face.

(Concetta)

There was a slight hitch in her breathing.

(Concetta come back)

Beneath the thin, bruised lids, the eyes moved. She might have been listening; she might have been dreaming her last dreams. Of Italy, perhaps. Bending over the household well and hauling up a bucket of cool water. Bending over in the hot summer sun.

(Abra needs you to come back and so do I)

It was all he could do, and he wasn’t sure it would be enough until, slowly, her eyes opened. They were vacant at first, but they gained perception. Dan had seen this before. The miracle of returning consciousness. Not for the first time he wondered where it came from, and where it went when it departed. Death was no less a miracle than birth.

The hand he was holding tightened. The eyes remained on Dan’s, and Concetta smiled. It was a timid smile, but it was there.

“Oh mio caro! Sei tu? Sei tu? Come e possibile? Sei morto? Sono morta anch’io?… Siamo fantasmi?”

Dan didn’t speak Italian, and he didn’t have to. He heard what she was saying with perfect clarity in his head.

Oh my dear one, is it you? How can it be you? Are you dead? Am I?

Then, after a pause:

Are we ghosts?

Dan leaned toward her until his cheek lay against hers.

In her ear, he whispered.

In time, she whispered back.

Their conversation was short but illuminating. Concetta spoke mostly in Italian. At last she lifted a hand—it took great effort, but she managed—and caressed his stubbly cheek. She smiled.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Sì. Ready.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Sì, I know that. I’m so glad you come. Tell me again your name, signor.”

“Daniel Torrance.”

“Sì. You are a gift from God, Daniel Torrance. Sei un dono di Dio.”

Dan hoped it was true. “Will you give to me?”

“Sì, of course. What you need per Abra.”

“And I’ll give to you, Chetta. We’ll drink from the well together.”

She closed her eyes.

(I know)

“You’ll go to sleep, and when you wake up—”

(everything will be better)

The power was even stronger than it had been on the night Charlie Hayes passed; he could feel it between them as he gently clasped her hands in his and felt the smooth pebbles of her rosary against his palms. Somewhere, lights were being turned off, one by one. It was all right. In Italy a little girl in a brown dress and sandals was drawing water from the cool throat of a well. She looked like Abra, that little girl. The dog was barking. Il cane. Ginata. Il cane si rotolava sull’erba. Barking and rolling in the grass. Funny Ginata!

Concetta was sixteen and in love, or thirty and writing a poem at the kitchen table of a hot apartment in Queens while children shouted on the street below; she was sixty and standing in the rain and looking up at a hundred thousand lines of purest falling silver. She was her mother and her great-granddaughter and it was time for her great change, her great voyage. Ginata was rolling in the grass and the lights

(hurry up please)

were going out one by one. A door was opening

(hurry up please it’s time)

and beyond it they could both smell all the mysterious, fragrant respiration of the night. Above were all the stars that ever were.

He kissed her cool forehead. “Everything’s all right, cara. You only need to sleep. Sleep will make you better.”

Then he waited for her final breath.

It came.

He was still sitting there, holding her hands in his, when the door burst open and Lucy Stone came striding in. Her husband and her daughter’s pediatrician followed, but not too closely; it was as if they feared being burned by the fear, fury, and confused outrage that surrounded her in a crackling aura so strong it was almost visible.

She seized Dan by the shoulder, her fingernails digging like claws into the shoulder beneath his shirt. “Get away from her. You don’t know her. You have no more business with my grandmother than you do with my daugh—”

“Lower your voice,” Dan said without turning. “You’re in the presence of death.”

The rage that had stiffened her ran out all at once, loosening her joints. She sagged to the bed beside Dan and looked at the waxen cameo that was now her grandmother’s face. Then she looked at the haggard, beard-scruffy man who sat holding the dead hands, in which the rosary was still entwined. Unnoticed tears began rolling down Lucy’s cheeks in big clear drops.

“I can’t make out half of what they’ve been trying to tell me. Just that Abra was kidnapped, but now she’s all right—supposedly—and she’s in a motel with some man named Billy and they’re both sleeping.”

“All that’s true,” Dan said.

“Then spare me your holier-than-thou pronouncements, if you please. I’ll mourn my momo after I see Abra. When I’ve got my arms around her. For now, I want to know… I want…” She trailed off, looking from Dan to her dead grandmother and back to Dan again. Her husband stood behind her. John had closed the door of Room 9 and was leaning against it. “Your name is Torrance? Daniel Torrance?”

“Yes.”

Again that slow look from her grandmother’s still profile to the man who had been present when she died. “Who are you, Mr. Torrance?”

Dan let go of Chetta’s hands and took Lucy’s. “Walk with me. Not far. Just across the room.”

She stood up without protest, still looking into his face. He led her to the bathroom door, which was standing open. He turned on the light and pointed to the mirror above the washbasin, where they were framed as if in a photograph. Seen that way, there could be little doubt. None, really.

He said, “My father was your father, Lucy. I’m your half brother.”

After notifying the head nurse that there had been a death on the floor, they went to the hospital’s small nondenominational chapel. Lucy knew the way; although not much of a believer, she had spent a good many hours there, thinking and remembering. It was a comforting place to do those things, which are necessary when a loved one nears the end. At this hour, they had it all to themselves.

“First things first,” Dan said. “I have to ask if you believe me. We can do the DNA test when there’s time, but… do we need to?”

Lucy shook her head dazedly, never taking her eyes from his face. She seemed to be trying to memorize it. “Dear Jesus. I can hardly get my breath.”

“I thought you looked familiar the first time I saw you,” Dave said to Dan. “Now I know why. I would have gotten it sooner, I think, if it hadn’t been… you know…”

“So right in front of you,” John said. “Dan, does Abra know?”

“Sure.” Dan smiled, remembering Abra’s theory of relativity.

“She got it from your mind?” Lucy asked. “Using her telepathy thing?”

“No, because I didn’t know. Even someone as talented as Abra can’t read something that isn’t there. But on a deeper level, we both knew. Hell, we even said it out loud. If anyone asked what we were doing together, we were going to say I was her uncle. Which I am. I should have realized consciously sooner than I did.”

“This is coincidence beyond coincidence,” Dave said, shaking his head.

“It’s not. It’s the farthest thing in the world from coincidence. Lucy, I understand that you’re confused and angry. I’ll tell you everything I know, but it will take some time. Thanks to John and your husband and Abra—her most of all—we’ve got some.”

“On the way,” Lucy said. “You can tell me on the way to Abra.”

“All right,” Dan said, “on the way. But three hours’ sleep first.”

She was shaking her head before he finished. “No, now. I have to see her as soon as I possibly can. Don’t you understand? She’s my daughter, she’s been kidnapped, and I have to see her!”

“She’s been kidnapped, but now she’s safe,” Dan said.

“You say that, of course you do, but you don’t know.”

“Abra says it,” he replied. “And she does know. Listen, Mrs. Stone—Lucy—she’s asleep right now, and she needs her sleep.” I do, too. I’ve got a long trip ahead of me, and I think it’s going to be a hard one. Very hard.

Lucy was looking at him closely. “Are you all right?”

“Just tired.”

“We all are,” John said. “It’s been… a stressful day.” He uttered a brief yap of laughter, then pressed both hands over his mouth like a child who’s said a naughty word.

“I can’t even call her and hear her voice,” Lucy said. She spoke slowly, as if trying to articulate a difficult precept. “Because they’re sleeping off the drugs this man… the one you say she calls the Crow… put into her.”

“Soon,” Dave said. “You’ll see her soon.” He put his hand over hers. For a moment Lucy looked as if she would shake it off. She clasped it instead.

“I can start on the way back to your grandmother’s,” Dan said. He got up. It was an effort. “Come on.”

He had time to tell her how a lost man had ridden a northbound bus out of Massachusetts, and how—just over the New Hampshire state line—he’d tossed what would turn out to be his last bottle of booze into a trash can with IF YOU NO LONGER NEED IT, LEAVE IT HERE stenciled on the side. He told them how his childhood friend Tony had spoken up for the first time in years when the bus had rolled into Frazier. This is the place, Tony had said.

From there he doubled back to a time when he had been Danny instead of Dan (and sometimes doc, as in what’s up, doc), and his invisible friend Tony had been an absolute necessity. The shining was only one of the burdens that Tony helped him bear, and not the major one. The major one was his alcoholic father, a troubled and ultimately dangerous man whom both Danny and his mother had loved deeply—perhaps as much because of his flaws as in spite of them.

“He had a terrible temper, and you didn’t have to be a telepath to know when it was getting the best of him. For one thing, he was usually drunk when it happened. I know he was loaded on the night he caught me in his study, messing with his papers. He broke my arm.”

“How old were you?” Dave asked. He was riding in the backseat with his wife.

“Four, I think. Maybe even younger. When he was on the warpath, he had this habit of rubbing his mouth.” Danny demonstrated. “Do you know anyone else who does that when she’s upset?”

“Abra,” Lucy said. “I thought she got it from me.” She raised her right hand toward her mouth, then captured it with her left and returned it to her lap. Dan had seen Abra do exactly the same thing on the bench outside the Anniston Public Library, on the day they’d met in person for the first time. “I thought she got her temper from me, too. I can be… pretty ragged sometimes.”

“I thought of my father the first time I saw her do the mouth-rubbing thing,” Dan said, “but I had other things on my mind. So I forgot.” This made him think of Watson, the caretaker at the Overlook, who had first shown the hotel’s untrustworthy furnace boiler to his father. You have to watch it, Watson had said. Because she creeps. But in the end, Jack Torrance had forgotten. It was the reason Dan was still alive.

“Are you telling me you figured out this family relationship from one little habit? That’s quite a deductive leap, especially when it’s you and I who look alike, not you and Abra—she gets most of her looks from her father.” Lucy paused, thinking. “But of course you share another family trait—Dave says you call it the shining. That’s how you knew, isn’t it?”

Dan shook his head. “I made a friend the year my father died. His name was Dick Hallorann, and he was the cook at the Overlook Hotel. He also had the shining, and he told me lots of people had a little bit of it. He was right. I’ve met plenty of people along the way who shine to a greater or lesser degree. Billy Freeman, for one. Which is why he’s with Abra right now.”

John swung the Suburban into the little parking area behind Concetta’s condo, but for the time being, none of them got out. In spite of her worry about her daughter, Lucy was fascinated by this history lesson. Dan didn’t have to look at her to know it.

“If it wasn’t the shining, what was it?”

“When we were going out to Cloud Gap on the Riv, Dave mentioned that you found a trunk in storage at Concetta’s building.”

“Yes. My mother’s. I had no idea Momo had saved some of her things.”

“Dave told John and me that she was quite the party girl, back in the day.” It was actually Abra that Dave had been talking to, via telepathic link, but this was something Dan felt it might be better for his newly discovered half sister not to know, at least for the time being.

Lucy flashed Dave the reproachful look reserved for spouses who have been telling tales out of school, but said nothing.

“He also said that when Alessandra dropped out of SUNY Albany, she was doing her student teaching at a prep school in Vermont or Massachusetts. My father taught English—until he lost his job for hurting a student, that is—in Vermont. At a school called Stovington Prep. And according to my mother, he was quite the party boy in those days. Once I knew that Abra and Billy were safe, I ran some numbers in my head. They seemed to add up, but I felt if anyone knew for sure, it would be Alessandra Anderson’s mother.”

“Did she?” Lucy asked. She was leaning forward now, her hands on the console between the front seats.

“Not everything, and we didn’t have long together, but she knew enough. She didn’t remember the name of the school where your mother student-taught, but she knew it was in Vermont. And that she’d had a brief affair with her supervising teacher. Who was, she said, a published writer.” Dan paused. “My father was a published writer. Only a few stories, but some of them were in very good magazines, like the Atlantic Monthly. Concetta never asked her for the man’s name, and Alessandra never volunteered it, but if her college transcript is in that trunk, I’m pretty sure you’ll find that her supervisor was John Edward Torrance.” He yawned and looked at his watch. “That’s all I can do right now. Let’s go upstairs. Three hours’ sleep for all of us, then on to upstate New York. The roads will be empty, and we should be able to make great time.”

“Do you swear she’s safe?” Lucy asked.

Dan nodded.

“All right, I’ll wait. But only for three hours. As for sleeping…” She laughed. The sound had no humor in it.

When they entered Concetta’s condo, Lucy strode directly to the microwave in the kitchen, set the timer, and showed it to Dan. He nodded, then yawned again. “Three thirty a.m., we’re out of here.”

She studied him gravely. “I’d like to go without you, you know. Right this minute.”

He smiled a little. “I think you better hear the rest of the story first.”

She nodded grimly.

“That and the fact that my daughter needs to sleep off whatever is in her system are the only things holding me here. Now go lie down before you fall down.”

Dan and John took the guest room. The wallpaper and furnishings made it clear that it had been mostly kept for one special little girl, but Chetta must have had other guests from time to time, because there were twin beds.

As they lay in the dark, John said: “It’s not a coincidence that this hotel you stayed in as a child is also in Colorado, is it?”

“No.”

“This True Knot is in the same town?”

“They are.”

“And the hotel was haunted?”

The ghostie people, Dan thought. “Yes.”

Then John said something that surprised Dan and temporarily brought him back from the edge of sleep. Dave had been right—the easiest things to miss were the ones right in front of you. “It makes sense, I suppose… once you accept the idea there could be supernatural beings among us and feeding on us. An evil place would call evil creatures. They’d feel right at home there. Do you suppose this Knot has other places like that, in other parts of the country? Other… I don’t know… cold spots?”

“I’m sure they do.” Dan put an arm over his eyes. His body ached and his head was pounding. “Johnny, I’d love to do the boys-having-a-sleepover thing with you, but I have to get some shuteye.”

“Okay, but…” John got up on one elbow. “All things being equal, you would have gone right from the hospital, like Lucy wanted. Because you care almost as much about Abra as they do. You think she’s safe, but you could be wrong.”

“I’m not.” Hoping that was the truth. He had to hope so, because the simple fact was that he couldn’t go, not now. If it had only been to New York, maybe. But it wasn’t, and he had to sleep. His whole body cried for it.

“What’s wrong with you, Dan? Because you look terrible.”

“Nothing. Just tired.”

Then he was gone, first into darkness and then into a confused nightmare of running down endless halls while some Shape followed him, swinging a mallet from side to side, splitting wallpaper and driving up puffs of plaster dust. Come out, you little shit! the Shape yelled. Come out, you worthless pup, and take your medicine!

Then Abra was with him. They were sitting on the bench in front of the Anniston Public Library, in the late-summer sun. She was holding his hand. It’s all right, Uncle Dan. It’s all right. Before he died, your father turned that Shape out. You don’t have to—

The library door banged open and a woman stepped into the sunlight. Great clouds of dark hair billowed around her head, yet her jauntily cocked tophat stayed on. It stayed on like magic.

“Oh, look,” she said. “It’s Dan Torrance, the man who stole a woman’s money while she was sleeping one off and then left her kid to be beaten to death.”

She smiled at Abra, revealing a single tooth. It looked as long and sharp as a bayonet.

“What will he do to you, little sweetie? What will he do to you?”

Lucy woke him promptly at three thirty, but shook her head when Dan moved to wake John. “Let him sleep a bit longer. And my husband is snoring on the couch.” She actually smiled. “It makes me think of the Garden of Gethsemane, you know. Jesus reproaching Peter, saying, ‘So you could not watch with me even one hour?’ Or something like that. But I have no reason to reproach David, I guess—he saw it, too. Come on. I’ve made scrambled eggs. You look like you could use some. You’re skinny as a rail.” She paused and added: “Brother.”

Dan wasn’t particularly hungry, but he followed her into the kitchen. “Saw what, too?”

“I was going through Momo’s papers—anything to keep my hands busy and pass the time—and I heard a clunk from the kitchen.”

She took his hand and led him to the counter between the stove and the fridge. There was a row of old-fashioned apothecary jars here, and the one containing sugar had been overturned. A message had been written in the spill.

In spite of how he felt, Dan thought of his blackboard and had to smile. It was so perfectly Abra.

“She must have woken up just enough to do that,” Lucy said.

“Don’t think so,” Dan said.

She looked at him from the stove, where she was dishing up scrambled eggs.

“You woke her up. She heard your worry.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Sit down.” She paused. “Sit down, Dan. I guess I better get used to calling you that. Sit down and eat.”

Dan wasn’t hungry, but he needed the fuel. He did as she said.

She sat across from him, sipping a glass of juice from the last carafe Concetta Reynolds would ever have delivered from Dean & DeLuca. “Older man with booze issues, starstruck younger woman. That’s the picture I’m getting.”

“It’s the one I got, too.” Dan shoveled the eggs in steadily and methodically, not tasting them.

“Coffee, Mr.… Dan?”

“Please.”

She went past the spilled sugar to the Bunn. “He’s married, but his job takes him to a lot of faculty parties where there are a lot of pretty young gals. Not to mention a fair amount of blooming libido when the hour gets late and the music gets loud.”

“Sounds about right,” Dan said. “Maybe my mom used to go along to those parties, but then there was a kid to take care of at home and no money for babysitters.” She passed him a cup of coffee. He sipped it black before she could ask what he took in it. “Thanks. Anyway, they had a thing. Probably at one of the local motels. It sure wasn’t in the back of his car—we had a VW Bug. Even a couple of horny acrobats couldn’t have managed that.”

“Blackout screwing,” John said, coming into the room. His hair was standing up in sleep-quills at the back of his head. “That’s what the oldtimers call it. Are there any more of those eggs?”

“Plenty,” Lucy said. “Abra left a message on the counter.”

“Really?” John went to look at it. “That was her?”

“Yes. I’d know her printing anywhere.”

“Holy shit, this could put Verizon out of business.”

She didn’t smile. “Sit down and eat, John. You’ve got ten minutes, then I’m going to wake up Sleeping Beauty in there on the couch.” She sat down. “Go on, Dan.”

“I don’t know if she thought my dad would leave my mom for her or not, and I doubt if you’ll find the answer to that one in her trunk. Unless maybe she left a diary. All I know—based on what Dave said and what Concetta told me later—is that she hung around for awhile. Maybe hoping, maybe just partying, maybe both. But by the time she found out she was pregnant, she must have given up. For all I know, we might have been in Colorado by then.”

“Do you suppose your mother ever found out?”

“I don’t know, but she must have wondered how faithful he was, especially on the nights when he came in late and shitfaced. I’m sure she knew that drunks don’t limit their bad behavior to betting the ponies or tucking five-spots into the cleavages of the waitresses down at the Twist and Shout.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Are you all right? You look exhausted.”

“I’m okay. But you’re not the only one who’s trying to process all this.”

“She died in a car accident,” Lucy said. She had turned from Dan and was looking fixedly at the bulletin board on the fridge. In the middle was a photograph of Concetta and Abra, who looked about four, walking hand in hand through a field of daisies. “The man with her was a lot older. And drunk. They were going fast. Momo didn’t want to tell me, but around the time I turned eighteen, I got curious and nagged her into giving me at least some of the details. When I asked if my mother was drunk, too, Chetta said she didn’t know. She said the police have no reason to test passengers who are killed in fatal accidents, only the driver.” She sighed. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll leave the family stories for another day. Tell me what’s happened to my daughter.”

He did. At some point, he turned around and saw Dave Stone standing in the doorway, tucking his shirt into his pants and watching him.

Dan started with how Abra had gotten in touch with him, first using Tony as a kind of intermediary. Then how Abra had come in contact with the True Knot: a nightmare vision of the one she called “the baseball boy.”

“I remember that nightmare,” Lucy said. “She woke me up, screaming. It had happened before, but it was the first time in two or three years.”

Dave frowned. “I don’t remember that at all.”

“You were in Boston, at a conference.” She turned to Dan. “Let me see if I’ve got this. These people aren’t people, they’re… what? Some kind of vampires?”

“In a way, I suppose. They don’t sleep in coffins during the day or turn into bats by moonlight, and I doubt if crosses and garlic bother them, but they’re parasites, and they’re certainly not human.”

“Human beings don’t disappear when they die,” John said flatly.

“You really saw that happen?”

“We did. All three of us.”

“In any case,” Dan said, “the True Knot isn’t interested in ordinary children, only those who have the shining.”

“Children like Abra,” Lucy said.

“Yes. They torture them before killing them—to purify the steam, Abra says. I keep picturing moonshiners making white lightning.”

“They want to… inhale her,” Lucy said. Still trying to get it straight in her head. “Because she has the shining.”

“Not just the shining, but a great shining. I’m a flashlight. She’s a lighthouse. And she knows about them. She knows what they are.”

“There’s more,” John said. “What we did to those men at Cloud Gap… as far as this Rose is concerned, that’s down to Abra, no matter who actually did the killing.”

“What else could she expect?” Lucy asked indignantly. “Don’t they understand self-defense? Survival?”

“What Rose understands,” Dan said, “is that there’s a little girl who has challenged her.”

“Challenged—?”

“Abra got in touch telepathically. She told Rose that she was coming after her.”

“She what?”

“That temper of hers,” Dave said quietly. “I’ve told her a hundred times it would get her in trouble.”

“She’s not going anywhere near that woman, or her child-killing friends,” Lucy said.

Dan thought: Yes… and no. He took Lucy’s hand. She started to pull away, then didn’t.

“The thing you have to understand is really quite simple,” he said. “They will never stop.”

“But—”

“No buts, Lucy. Under other circumstances, Rose still might have decided to disengage—this is one crafty old she-wolf—but there’s one other factor.”

“Which is?”

“They’re sick,” John said. “Abra says it’s the measles. They might even have caught it from the Trevor boy. I don’t know if you’d call that divine retribution or just irony.”

“Measles?”

“I know it doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, it is. You know how, in the old days, measles could run through a whole family of kids? If that’s happening to this True Knot, it could wipe them out.”

“Good!” Lucy cried. The angry smile on her face was one Dan knew well.

“Not if they think Abra’s supersteam will cure them,” Dave said. “That’s what you need to understand, hon. This isn’t just a skirmish. To this bitch it’s a fight to the death.” He struggled and then brought out the rest of it. Because it had to be said. “If Rose gets the chance, she’ll eat our daughter alive.”

Lucy asked, “Where are they? This True Knot, where are they?”

“Colorado,” Dan said. “At a place called the Bluebell Campground in the town of Sidewinder.” That the site of the campground was the very place where he had once almost died at his father’s hands was a thing he didn’t want to say, because it would lead to more questions and more cries of coincidence. The one thing of which Dan was sure was that there were no coincidences.

“This Sidewinder must have a police department,” Lucy said. “We’ll call them and get them on this.”

“By telling them what?” John’s tone was gentle, nonargumentative.

“Well… that…”

“If you actually got the cops to go up there to the campground,” Dan said, “they’d find nothing but a bunch of middle-aged-going-on-older Americans. Harmless RV folks, the kind who always want to show you pictures of their grandkids. Their papers would all be in apple-pie order, from dog licenses to land deeds. The police wouldn’t find guns if they managed to get a search warrant—which they wouldn’t, no probable cause—because the True Knot doesn’t need guns. Their weapons are up here.” Dan tapped his forehead. “You’d be the crazy lady from New Hampshire, Abra would be your crazy daughter who ran away from home, and we’d be your crazy friends.”

Lucy pressed her palms to her temples. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“If you did a search of records, I think you’d find that the True Knot—under whatever name they might be incorporated—has been very generous to that particular Colorado town. You don’t shit in your nest, you feather it. Then, if bad times come, you have lots of friends.”

“These bastards have been around a long time,” John said. “Haven’t they? Because the main thing they take from this steam is longevity.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s right,” Dan said. “And as good Americans, I’m sure they’ve been busy making money the whole time. Enough to grease wheels a lot bigger than the ones that turn in Sidewinder. State wheels. Federal wheels.”

“And this Rose… she’ll never stop.”

“No.” Dan was thinking of the precognitive vision he’d had of her. The cocked hat. The yawning mouth. The single tooth. “Her heart is set on your daughter.”

“A woman who stays alive by killing children has no heart,” Dave said.

“Oh, she has one,” Dan said. “But it’s black.”

Lucy stood up. “No more talking. I want to go to her now. Everybody use the bathroom, because once we leave, we’re not stopping until we get to that motel.”

Dan said, “Does Concetta have a computer? If she does, I need to take a quick peek at something before we go.”

Lucy sighed. “It’s in her study, and I think you can guess the password. But if you take more than five minutes, we’re going without you.”

Rose lay awake in her bed, stiff as a poker, trembling with steam and fury.

When an engine started up at quarter past two, she heard it. Steamhead Steve and Baba the Russian. When another started at twenty till four, she heard that one, too. This time it was the Little twins, Pea and Pod. Sweet Terri Pickford was with them, no doubt looking nervously through the back window for any sign of Rose. Big Mo had asked to go along—begged to go along—but they had turned her down because Mo was carrying the disease.

Rose could have stopped them, but why bother? Let them discover what life was like in America on their own, with no True Knot to protect them in camp or watch their backs while they were on the road. Especially when I tell Toady Slim to kill their credit cards and empty their rich bank accounts, she thought.

Toady was no Jimmy Numbers, but he could still take care of it, and at the touch of a button. And he’d be there to do it. Toady would stick. So would all the good ones… or almost all the good ones. Dirty Phil, Apron Annie, and Diesel Doug were no longer on their way back. They had taken a vote and decided to head south instead. Deez had told them Rose was no longer to be trusted, and besides, it was long past time to cut the Knot.

Good luck with that, darling boy, she thought, clenching and unclenching her fists.

Splitting the True was a terrible idea, but thinning the herd was a good one. So let the weaklings run and the sicklings die. When the bitchgirl was also dead and they had swallowed her steam (Rose had no more illusions of keeping her prisoner), the twenty-five or so who were left would be stronger than ever. She mourned Crow, and knew she had no one who could step into his shoes, but Token Charlie would do the best he could. So would Harpman Sam… Bent Dick… Fat Fannie and Long Paul… Greedy G, not the brightest bulb, but loyal and unquestioning.

Besides, with the others gone, the steam she still had in storage would go farther and make them stronger. They would need to be strong.

Come to me, little bitchgirl, Rose thought. See how strong you are when there are two dozen against you. See how you like it when it’s just you against the True. We’ll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we’ll drink your screams.

Rose stared up into the darkness, hearing the fading voices of the runners, the faithless ones.

At the door came a soft, timid knock. Rose lay silent for a moment or two, considering, then swung her legs out of bed.

“Come.”

She was naked but made no attempt to cover herself when Silent Sarey crept in, shapeless inside one of her flannel nightgowns, her mouse-colored bangs covering her brows and almost hanging in her eyes. As always, Sarey seemed hardly there even when she was.

“I’m sad, Loze.”

“I know you are. I’m sad, too.”

She wasn’t—she was furious—but it sounded good.

“I miss Andi.”

Andi, yes—rube name Andrea Steiner, whose father had fucked the humanity out of her long before the True Knot had found her. Rose remembered watching her that day in the movie theater, and how, later, she had fought her way through the Turning with sheer guts and willpower. Snakebite Andi would have stuck. Snake would have walked through fire, if Rose said the True Knot needed her to.

She held out her arms. Sarey scurried to her and laid her head against Rose’s breast.

“Wivvout her I lunt to die.”

“No, honey, I don’t think so.” Rose pulled the little thing into bed and hugged her tight. She was nothing but a rack of bones held together by scant meat. “Tell me what you really want.”

Beneath the shaggy bangs, two eyes gleamed, feral. “Levenge.”

Rose kissed one cheek, then the other, then the thin dry lips. She drew back a little and said, “Yes. And you’ll have it. Open your mouth, Sarey.”

Sarey obediently did so. Their lips came together again. Rose the Hat, still full of steam, breathed down Silent Sarey’s throat.

The walls of Concetta’s study were papered with memos, fragments of poems, and correspondence that would never be answered. Dan typed in the four-letter password, launched Firefox, and googled the Bluebell Campground. They had a website that wasn’t terribly informative, probably because the owners didn’t care that much about attracting visitors; the place was your basic front. But there were photos of the property, and these Dan studied with the fascination people reserve for recently discovered old family albums.

The Overlook was long gone, but he recognized the terrain. Once, just before the first of the snowstorms that closed them in for the winter, he and his mother and father had stood together on the hotel’s broad front porch (seeming even broader with the lawn gliders and wicker furniture in storage), looking down the long, smooth slope of the front lawn. At the bottom, where the deer and the antelope often came out to play, there was now a long rustic building called the Overlook Lodge. Here, the caption said, visitors could dine, play bingo, and dance to live music on Friday and Saturday nights. On Sundays there were church services, overseen by a rotating cadre of Sidewinder’s men and women of the cloth.

Until the snow came, my father mowed that lawn and trimmed the topiary that used to be there. He said he’d trimmed lots of ladies’ topiaries in his time. I didn’t get the joke, but it used to make Mom laugh.

“Some joke,” he said, low.

He saw rows of sparkling RV hookups, lux mod cons that supplied LP gas as well as electricity. There were men’s and women’s shower buildings big enough to service mega-truckstops like Little America or Pedro’s South of the Border. There was a playground for the wee folks. (Dan wondered if the kiddies who played there ever saw or sensed unsettling things, as Danny “Doc” Torrance once had in the Overlook’s playground.) There was a softball field, a shuffleboard area, a couple of tennis courts, even bocce.

No roque, though—not that. Not anymore.

Halfway up the slope—where the Overlook’s hedge animals had once congregated—there was a row of clean white satellite dishes. At the crest of the hill, where the hotel itself had stood, was a wooden platform with a long flight of steps leading up to it. This site, now owned and administered by the State of Colorado, was identified as Roof O’ the World. Visitors to the Bluebell Campground were welcome to use it, or to hike the trails beyond, free of charge. The trails are recommended only for the more experienced hiker, the caption read, but Roof O’ the World is for everyone. The views are spectacular!

Dan was sure they were. Certainly they had been spectacular from the dining room and ballroom of the Overlook… at least until the steadily mounting snow blocked off the windows. To the west were the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains, sawing at the sky like spears. To the east, you could see all the way to Boulder. Hell, all the way to Denver and Arvada on rare days when the pollution wasn’t too bad.

The state had taken that particular piece of land, and Dan wasn’t surprised. Who would have wanted to build there? The ground was rotten, and he doubted if you had to be telepathic to sense it. But the True had gotten as close as it could, and Dan had an idea that their wandering guests—the normal ones—rarely came back for a second visit, or recommended the Bluebell to their friends. An evil place would call evil creatures, John had said. If so, the converse would also be true: it would tend to repel good ones.

“Dan?” Dave called. “Bus is leaving.”

“I need another minute!”

He closed his eyes and propped the heel of his palm against his forehead.

(Abra)

His voice awoke her at once.

^{CHAPTER SEVENTEEN} BITCHGIRL

It was dark outside the Crown Motel, dawn still an hour or more away, when the door of unit 24 opened and a girl stepped out. Heavy fog had moved in, and the world was hardly there at all. The girl was wearing black pants and a white shirt. She had put her hair up in pigtails, and the face they framed looked very young. She breathed deeply, the coolness and the hanging moisture in the air doing wonders for her lingering headache but not much for her unhappy heart. Momo was dead.

Yet, if Uncle Dan was right, not really dead; just somewhere else. Perhaps a ghostie person; perhaps not. In any case, it wasn’t a thing she could spend time thinking about. Later, perhaps, she would meditate on these matters.

Dan had asked if Billy was asleep. Yes, she had told him, still fast asleep. Through the open door she could see Mr. Freeman’s feet and legs under the blankets and hear his steady snoring. He sounded like an idling motorboat.

Dan had asked if Rose or any of the others had tried to touch her mind. No. She would have known. Her traps were set. Rose would guess that. She wasn’t stupid.

He had asked if there was a telephone in her room. Yes, there was a phone. Uncle Dan told her what he wanted her to do. It was pretty simple. The scary part was what she had to say to the strange woman in Colorado. And yet she wanted to. Part of her had wanted that ever since she’d heard the baseball boy’s dying screams.

(you understand the word you have to keep saying?)

Yes, of course.

(because you have to goad her do you know what that)

(yes I know what it means)

Make her mad. Infuriate her.

Abra stood breathing into the fog. The road they’d driven in on was nothing but a scratch, the trees on the other side completely gone. So was the motel office. Sometimes she wished she was like that, all white on the inside. But only sometimes. In her deepest heart, she had never regretted what she was.

When she felt ready—as ready as she could be—Abra went back into her room and closed the door on her side so she wouldn’t disturb Mr. Freeman if she had to talk loud. She examined the instructions on the phone, pushed 9 to get an outside line, then dialed directory assistance and asked for the number of the Overlook Lodge at the Bluebell Campground, in Sidewinder, Colorado. I could give you the main number, Dan had said, but you’d only get an answering machine.

In the place where the guests ate meals and played games, the telephone rang for a long time. Dan said it probably would, and that she should just wait it out. It was, after all, two hours earlier there.

At last a grumpy voice said, “Hello? If you want the office, you called the wrong num—”

“I don’t want the office,” Abra said. She hoped the rapid heavy beating of her heart wasn’t audible in her voice. “I want Rose. Rose the Hat.”

A pause. Then: “Who is this?”

“Abra Stone. You know my name, don’t you? I’m the girl she’s looking for. Tell her I’ll call back in five minutes. If she’s there, we’ll talk. If she’s not, tell her she can go fuck herself. I won’t call back again.”

Abra hung up, then lowered her head, cupped her burning face in her palms, and took long deep breaths.

Rose was drinking coffee behind the wheel of her EarthCruiser, her feet on the secret compartment with the stored canisters of steam inside, when the knock came at her door. A knock this early could only mean more trouble.

“Yes,” she said. “Come in.”

It was Long Paul, wearing a robe over childish pajamas with racing cars on them. “The pay phone in the Lodge started ringing. At first I let it go, thought it was a wrong number, and besides, I was making coffee in the kitchen. But it kept on, so I answered. It was that girl. She wanted to talk to you. She said she’d call back in five minutes.”

Silent Sarey sat up in bed, blinking through her bangs, the covers clutched around her shoulders like a shawl.

“Go,” Rose told her.

Sarey did so, without a word. Rose watched through the EarthCruiser’s wide windshield as Sarey trudged barefooted back to the Bounder she had shared with Snake.

That girl.

Instead of running and hiding, the bitchgirl was making telephone calls. Talk about brassbound nerve. Her own idea? That was a little hard to believe, wasn’t it?

“What were you doing up and bustling in the kitchen so early?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

She turned toward him. Just a tall, elderly fellow with thinning hair and bifocals sitting at the end of his nose. A rube could pass him on the street every day for a year without seeing him, but he wasn’t without certain abilities. Paul didn’t have Snake’s sleeper talent, or the late Grampa Flick’s locator talent, but he was a decent persuader. If he happened to suggest that a rube slap his wife’s face—or a stranger’s, for that matter—that face would be slapped, and briskly. Everyone in the True had their little skills; it was how they got along.

“Let me see your arms, Paulie.”

He sighed and brushed the sleeves of his robe and pajamas up to his wrinkly elbows. The red spots were there.

“When did they break?”

“Saw the first couple yesterday afternoon.”

“Fever?”

“Yuh. Some.”

She gazed into his honest, trusting eyes and felt like hugging him. Some had run, but Long Paul was still here. So were most of the others. Surely enough to take care of the bitchgirl if she were really foolish enough to show her face. And she might be. What girl of thirteen wasn’t foolish?

“You’re going to be all right,” she said.

He sighed again. “Hope so. If not, it’s been a damn good run.”

“None of that talk. Everyone who sticks is going to be all right. It’s my promise, and I keep my promises. Now let’s see what our little friend from New Hampshire has to say for herself.”

Less than a minute after Rose settled into a chair next to the big plastic bingo drum (with her cooling mug of coffee beside it), the Lodge’s pay telephone exploded with a twentieth-century clatter that made her jump. She let it ring twice before lifting the receiver from the cradle and speaking in her most modulated voice. “Hello, dear. You could have reached out to my mind, you know. It would have saved you long-distance charges.”

A thing the bitchgirl would have been very unwise to try. Abra Stone wasn’t the only one who could lay traps.

“I’m coming for you,” the girl said. The voice was so young, so fresh! Rose thought of all the useful steam that would come with that freshness and felt greed rise in her like an unslaked thirst.

“So you’ve said. Are you sure you really want to do that, dear?”

“Will you be there if I do? Or only your trained rats?”

Rose felt a trill of anger. Not helpful, but of course she had never been much of a morning person.

“Why would I not be, dear?” She kept her voice calm and slightly indulgent—the voice of a mother (or so she imagined; she had never been one) speaking to a tantrum-prone toddler.

“Because you’re a coward.”

“I’m curious to know what you base that assumption on,” Rose said. Her tone was the same—indulgent, slightly amused—but her hand had tightened on the phone, and pressed it harder against her ear. “Never having met me.”

“Sure I have. Inside my head, and I sent you running with your tail between your legs. And you kill kids. Only cowards kill kids.”

You don’t need to justify yourself to a child, she told herself. Especially not a rube. But she heard herself saying, “You know nothing about us. What we are, or what we have to do in order to survive.”

“A tribe of cowards is what you are,” the bitchgirl said. “You think you’re so talented and so strong, but the only thing you’re really good at is eating and living long lives. You’re like hyenas. You kill the weak and then run away. Cowards.”

The contempt in her voice was like acid in Rose’s ear. “That’s not true!”

“And you’re the chief coward. You wouldn’t come after me, would you? No, not you. You sent those others instead.”

“Are we going to have a reasonable conversation, or—”

“What’s reasonable about killing kids so you can steal the stuff in their minds? What’s reasonable about that, you cowardly old whore? You sent your friends to do your work, you hid behind them, and I guess that was smart, because now they’re all dead.”

“You stupid little bitch, you don’t know anything!” Rose leaped to her feet. Her thighs bumped the table and her coffee spilled, running beneath the bingo drum. Long Paul peeked through the kitchen doorway, took one look at her face, and pulled back. “Who’s the coward? Who’s the real coward? You can say such things over the phone, but you could never say them looking into my face!”

“How many will you have to have with you when I come?” Abra taunted. “How many, you yellow bitch?”

Rose said nothing. She had to get herself under control, she knew it, but to be talked to this way by a rube girl with a mouthful of filthy schoolyard language… and she knew too much. Much too much.

“Would you even dare to face me alone?” the bitchgirl asked.

“Try me,” Rose spat.

There was a pause on the other end, and when the bitchgirl next spoke, she sounded thoughtful. “One-on-one? No, you wouldn’t dare. A coward like you would never dare. Not even against a kid. You’re a cheater and a liar. You look pretty sometimes, but I’ve seen your real face. You’re nothing but an old chickenshit whore.”

“You… you…” But she could say no more. Her rage was so great it felt like it was strangling her. Some of it was shock at finding herself—Rose the Hat—dressed down by a kid whose idea of transportation was a bicycle and whose major concern before these last weeks had probably been when she might get breasts bigger than mosquito bumps.

“But maybe I’ll give you a chance,” the bitchgirl said. Her confidence and breezy temerity were unbelievable. “Of course, if you take me up on it, I’ll wipe the floor with you. I won’t bother with the others, they’re dying already.” She actually laughed. “Choking on the baseball boy, and good for him.”

“If you come, I’ll kill you,” Rose said. One hand found her throat, closed on it, and began to squeeze rhythmically. Later there would be bruises. “If you run, I’ll find you. And when I do, you’ll scream for hours before you die.”

“I won’t run,” the girl said. “And we’ll see who does the screaming.”

“How many will you have to back you up? Dear?”

“I’ll be alone.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Read my mind,” the girl said. “Or are you afraid to do that, too?”

Rose said nothing.

“Sure you are. You remember what happened last time you tried it. I gave you a taste of your own medicine, and you didn’t like it, did you? Hyena. Child-killer. Coward.”

“Stop… calling… me that.”

“There’s a place up the hill from where you are. A lookout. It’s called Roof O’ the World. I found it on the internet. Be there at five o’clock Monday afternoon. Be there alone. If you’re not, if the rest of your pack of hyenas doesn’t stay in that meeting-hall place while we do our business, I’ll know. And I’ll go away.”

“I’d find you,” Rose repeated.

“You think?” Actually jeering at her.

Rose shut her eyes and saw the girl. She saw her writhing on the ground, her mouth stuffed with stinging hornets and hot sticks jutting out of her eyes. No one talks to me like this. Not ever.

“I suppose you might find me. But by the time you did, how many of your stinking True Knot would be left to back you up? A dozen? Ten? Maybe only three or four?”

This idea had already occurred to Rose. For a child she’d never even seen face-to-face to reach the same conclusion was, in many ways, the most infuriating thing of all.

“The Crow knew Shakespeare,” the bitchgirl said. “He quoted some to me not too long before I killed him. I know a little, too, because we had a Shakespeare unit in school. We only read one play, Romeo and Juliet, but Ms. Franklin gave us a printout with a whole list of famous lines from his other plays. Things like ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘It was Greek to me.’ Did you know those were from Shakespeare? I didn’t. Don’t you think it’s interesting?”

Rose said nothing.

“You’re not thinking about Shakespeare at all,” the bitchgirl said. “You’re thinking about how much you’d like to kill me. I don’t have to read your mind to know that.”

“If I were you, I’d run,” Rose said thoughtfully. “As fast and as far as your baby legs can carry you. It wouldn’t do you any good, but you’d live a little longer.”

The bitchgirl was not to be turned. “There was another saying. I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something like ‘Hoisted on your own petard.’ Ms. Franklin said a petard was a bomb on a stick. I think that’s sort of what’s happening to your tribe of cowards. You sucked the wrong kind of steam, and got stuck on a petard, and now the bomb is going off.” She paused. “Are you still there, Rose? Or did you run away?”

“Come to me, dear,” Rose said. She had regained her calm. “If you want to meet me on the lookout, that’s where I’ll be. We’ll take in the view together, shall we? And see who’s the stronger.”

She hung up before the bitchgirl could say anything else. She’d lost the temper she had vowed to keep, but she had at least gotten the last word.

Or maybe not, because the one the bitchgirl kept using played over and over in her head, like a gramophone record stuck in a bad groove.

Coward. Coward. Coward.

Abra replaced the telephone receiver carefully in its cradle. She looked at it; she even stroked its plastic surface, which was hot from her hand and wet with her sweat. Then, before she realized it was going to happen, she burst into loud, braying sobs. They stormed through her, cramping her stomach and shaking her body. She rushed to the bathroom, still crying, knelt in front of the toilet, and threw up.

When she came out, Mr. Freeman was standing in the connecting doorway with his shirttail hanging down and his gray hair in corkscrews. “What’s wrong? Are you sick from the dope he gave you?”

“It wasn’t that.”

He went to the window and peered out into the pressing fog. “Is it them? Are they coming for us?”

Temporarily incapable of speech, she could only shake her head so vehemently her pigtails flew. It was she who was coming for them, and that was what terrified her.

And not just for herself.

Rose sat still, taking long steadying breaths. When she had herself under control again, she called for Long Paul. After a moment or two, he poked his head cautiously through the swing door that gave on the kitchen. The look on his face brought a ghost of a smile to her lips. “It’s safe. You can come in. I won’t bite you.”

He stepped in and saw the spilled coffee. “I’ll clean that up.”

“Leave it. Who’s the best locator we’ve got left?”

“You, Rose.” No hesitation.

Rose had no intention of approaching the bitchgirl mentally, not even in a touch-and-go. “Aside from me.”

“Well… with Grampa Flick gone… and Barry…” He considered. “Sue’s got a touch of locator, and so does Greedy G. But I think Token Charlie’s got a bit more.”

“Is he sick?”

“He wasn’t yesterday.”

“Send him to me. I’ll wipe up the coffee while I’m waiting. Because—this is important, Paulie—the person who makes the mess is the one who should have to clean it up.”

After he left, Rose sat where she was for awhile, fingers steepled under her chin. Clear thinking had returned, and with it the ability to plan. They wouldn’t be taking steam today after all, it seemed. That could wait until Monday morning.

At last she went into the galley for a wad of paper towels. And cleaned up her mess.

“Dan!” This time it was John. “Gotta go!”

“Right there,” he said. “I just want to splash some cold water on my face.”

He went down the hall listening to Abra, nodding his head slightly as if she were there.

(Mr. Freeman wants to know why I was crying why I threw up what should I tell him)

(for now just that when we get there I’ll want to borrow his truck)

(because we’re going on going west)

(…well…)

It was complicated, but she understood. The understanding wasn’t in words and didn’t need to be.

Beside the bathroom washbasin was a rack holding several wrapped toothbrushes. The smallest—not wrapped—had ABRA printed on the handle in rainbow letters. On one wall was a small plaque reading A LIFE WITHOUT LOVE IS LIKE A TREE WITHOUT FRUIT. He looked at it for a few seconds, wondering if there was anything in the AA program to that effect. The only thing he could think of was If you can’t love anybody today, at least try not to hurt anybody. Didn’t really compare.

He turned on the cold water and splashed his face several times, hard. Then he grabbed a towel and raised his head. No Lucy in the portrait with him this time; just Dan Torrance, son of Jack and Wendy, who had always believed himself to be an only child.

His face was covered with flies.