11
The Renfrews, Matt and Cassie, were the neighborhood’s party people, and they decided on the spur of the moment to have an Earthquake Barbecue. They invited everyone on Richland Court, and almost everyone came. Matt got a case of soda, a few bottles of cheap wine, and a beer-ball from the Lickety-Split up the street. It was a lot of fun, and David Stone enjoyed himself tremendously. As far as he could tell, Abra did, too. She hung with her friends Julie and Emma, and he made sure that she ate a hamburger and some salad. Lucy had told him they had to be vigilant about their daughter’s eating habits, because she’d reached the age when girls started to be very conscious about their weight and looks—the age at which anorexia or bulimia were apt to show their skinny, starveling faces.
What he didn’t notice (although Lucy might have, had she been there) was that Abra wasn’t joining in her friends’ apparently nonstop gigglefest. And, after eating a bowl of ice cream (a small bowl), she asked her father if she could go back across the street and finish her homework.
“Okay,” David said, “but thank Mr. and Mrs. Renfrew first.”
This Abra would have done without having to be reminded, but she agreed without saying so.
“You’re very welcome, Abby,” Mrs. Renfrew said. Her eyes were almost preternaturally bright from three glasses of white wine. “Isn’t this cool? We should have earthquakes more often. Although I was talking to Vicky Fenton—you know the Fentons, on Pond Street? That’s just a block over and she said they didn’t feel anything. Isn’t that weird?”
“Sure is,” Abra agreed, thinking that when it came to weird, Mrs. Renfrew didn’t know the half of it.
12
She finished her homework and was downstairs watching TV with her dad when Mom called. Abra talked to her awhile, then turned the phone over to her father. Lucy said something, and Abra knew what it had been even before Dave glanced at her and said, “Yeah, she’s fine, just blitzed from homework, I think. They give the kids so much now. Did she tell you we had a little earthquake?”
“Going upstairs, Dad,” Abra said, and he gave her an absent wave.
She sat at her desk, turned on her computer, then turned it off again. She didn’t want to play Fruit Ninja and she certainly didn’t want to IM with anyone. She had to think about what to do, because she had to do something.
She put her schoolbooks in her backpack, then looked up and the woman from the supermarket was staring in at her from the window. That was impossible because the window was on the second floor, but she was there. Her skin was unblemished and purest white, her cheekbones high, her dark eyes wide-set and slightly tilted at the corners. Abra thought she might be the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Also, she realized at once, and without a shadow of a doubt, she was insane. Masses of black hair framed her perfect, somehow arrogant face, and streamed down over her shoulders. Staying in place on this wealth of hair in spite of the crazy angle at which it was cocked, was a jaunty tophat of scuffed velvet.
She’s not really there, and she’s not in my head, either. I don’t know how I can be seeing her but I am and I don’t think she kn—
The madwoman in the darkening window grinned, and when her lips spread apart, Abra saw she only had one tooth on top, a monstrous discolored tusk. She understood it had been the last thing Bradley Trevor had ever seen, and she screamed, screamed as loudly as she could . . . but only inside, because her throat was locked and her vocal cords were frozen.
Abra shut her eyes. When she opened them again, the grinning white-faced woman was gone.
Not there. But she could come. She knows about me and she could come.
In that moment, she realized what she should have known as soon as she saw the abandoned factory. There was really only one person she could call on. Only one who could help her. She closed her eyes again, this time not to hide from a horrible vision looking in at her from the window, but to summon help.
(TONY, I NEED YOUR DAD! PLEASE, TONY, PLEASE!)
Still with her eyes shut—but now feeling the warmth of tears on her lashes and cheeks—she whispered, “Help me, Tony. I’m scared.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
ABRA’S THEORY OF RELATIVITY
1
The last run of the day on The Helen Rivington was called the Sunset Cruise, and many evenings when Dan wasn’t on shift at the hospice, he took the controls. Billy Freeman, who had made the run roughly twenty-five thousand times during his years as a town employee, was delighted to turn them over.
“You never get tired of it, do you?” he asked Dan once.
“Put it down to a deprived childhood.”
It hadn’t been, not really, but he and his mother had moved around a lot after the settlement money ran out, and she had worked a lot of jobs. With no college degree, most of them had been low-paying. She’d kept a roof over their heads and food on the table, but there had never been much extra.
Once—he’d been in high school, the two of them living in Bradenton, not far from Tampa—he’d asked her why she never dated. By then he was old enough to know she was still a very good-looking woman. Wendy Torrance had given him a crooked smile and said, “One man was enough for me, Danny. Besides, now I’ve got you.”
“How much did she know about your drinking?” Casey K. had asked him during one of their meetings at the Sunspot. “You started pretty young, right?”
Dan had needed to give that one some thought. “Probably more than I knew at the time, but we never talked about it. I think she was afraid to bring it up. Besides, I never got in trouble with the law—not then, anyway—and I graduated high school with honors.” He had smiled grimly at Casey over his coffee cup. “And of course I never beat her up. I suppose that made a difference.”
Never got that train set, either, but the basic tenet AAs lived by was don’t drink and things will get better. They did, too. Now he had the biggest little choo-choo a boy could wish for, and Billy was right, it never got old. He supposed it might in another ten or twenty years, but even then Dan thought he’d probably still offer to drive the last circuit of the day, just to pilot the Riv at sunset, out to the turnaround at Cloud Gap. The view was spectacular, and when the Saco was calm (which it usually was once its spring convulsions had subsided), you could see all the colors twice, once above and once below. Everything was silence at the far end of the Riv’s run; it was as if God was holding His breath.
The trips between Labor Day and Columbus Day, when the Riv shut down for the winter, were the best of all. The tourists were gone, and the few riders were locals, many of whom Dan could now call by name. On weeknights like tonight, there were less than a dozen paying customers. Which was fine by him.
It was fully dark when he eased the Riv back into its dock at Teenytown Station. He leaned against the side of the first passenger car with his cap (ENGINEER DAN stitched in red above the bill) tipped back on his head, wishing his handful of riders a very good night. Billy was sitting on a bench, the glowing tip of his cigarette intermittently lighting his face. He had to be nearly seventy, but he looked good, had made a complete recovery from his abdominal surgery two years before, and said he had no plans to retire.
“What would I do?” he’d asked on the single occasion Dan had brought the subject up. “Retire to that deathfarm where you work? Wait for your pet cat to pay me a visit? Thanks but no thanks.”
When the last two or three riders had ambled on their way, probably in search of dinner, Billy butted his cigarette and joined him. “I’ll put er in the barn. Unless you want to do that, too.”
“No, go right ahead. You’ve been sitting on your ass long enough. When are you going to give up the smokes, Billy? You know the doctor said they contributed to your little gut problem.”
“I’ve cut down to almost nothing,” Billy said, but with a telltale downward shift in his gaze. Dan could have found out just how much Billy had cut down—he probably wouldn’t even need to touch the guy in order to get that much info—but he didn’t. One day in the summer just past, he’d seen a kid wearing a t-shirt with an octagonal road sign printed on it. Instead of STOP, the sign said TMI. When Danny asked him what it meant, the kid had given him a sympathetic smile he probably reserved strictly for gentlemen of a fortyish persuasion. “Too much information,” he’d said. Dan thanked him, thinking: Story of my life, young fellow.
Everyone had secrets. This he had known from earliest childhood. Decent people deserved to keep theirs, and Billy Freeman was decency personified.
“Want to go for a coffee, Danno? You got time? Won’t take me ten minutes to put this bitch to bed.”
Dan touched the side of the engine lovingly. “Sure, but watch your mouth. This is no bitch, this is a la—”
That was when his head exploded.
2
When he came back to himself, he was sprawled on the bench where Billy had been smoking. Billy was sitting beside him, looking worried. Hell, looking scared half to death. He had his phone in one hand, with his finger poised over the buttons.
“Put it away,” Dan said. The words came out in a dusty croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m okay.”
“You sure? Jesus Christ, I thought you was havin a stroke. I thought it for sure.”
That’s what it felt like.
For the first time in years Dan thought of Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel’s chef extraordinaire back in the day. Dick had known almost at once that Jack Torrance’s little boy shared his own talent. Dan wondered now if Dick might still be alive. Almost certainly not; he’d been pushing sixty back then.
“Who’s Tony?” Billy asked.
“Huh?”
“You said ‘Please, Tony, please.’ Who’s Tony?”
“A guy I used to know back in my drinking days.” As an improvisation it wasn’t much, but it was the first thing to come into his still-dazed mind. “A good friend.”
Billy looked at the lighted rectangle of his cell a few seconds longer, then slowly folded the phone and put it away. “You know, I don’t believe that for a minute. I think you had one of your flashes. Like on the day you found out about my . . .” He tapped his stomach.
“Well . . .”
Billy raised a hand. “Say nummore. As long as you’re okay, that is. And as long as it isn’t somethin bad about me. Because I’d want to know if it was. I don’t s’pose that’s true of everyone, but it is with me.”
“Nothing about you.” Dan stood up and was pleased to discover his legs held him just fine. “But I’m going to take a raincheck on that coffee, if you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit. You need to go back to your place and lie down. You’re still pale. Whatever it was, it hit you hard.” Billy glanced at the Riv. “Glad it didn’t happen while you were up there in the peak-seat, rolling along at forty.”
“Tell me about it,” Dan said.
3
He crossed Cranmore Avenue to the Rivington House side, meaning to take Billy’s advice and lie down, but instead of turning in at the gate giving on the big old Victorian’s flower-bordered walk, he decided to stroll a little while. He was getting his wind back now—getting himself back—and the night air was sweet. Besides, he needed to consider what had just happened, and very carefully.
Whatever it was, it hit you hard.
That made him think again of Dick Hallorann, and of all the things he had never told Casey Kingsley. Nor would he. The harm he had done to Deenie—and to her son, he supposed, simply by doing nothing—was lodged deep inside, like an impacted wisdom tooth, and there it would stay. But at five, Danny Torrance had been the one harmed—along with his mother, of course—and his father had not been the only culprit. About that Dick had done something. If not, Dan and his mother would have died in the Overlook. Those old things were still painful to think about, still bright with the childish primary colors of fear and horror. He would have preferred never to think of them again, but now he had to. Because . . . well . . .
Because everything that goes around comes around. Maybe it’s luck or maybe it’s fate, but either way, it comes back around. What was it Dick said that day he gave me the lockbox? When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. Not that I’m equipped to teach anyone anything, except maybe that if you don’t take a drink, you won’t get drunk.
He’d reached the end of the block; now he turned around and headed back. He had the sidewalk entirely to himself. It was eerie how fast Frazier emptied out once the summer was over, and that made him think of the way the Overlook had emptied out. How quickly the little Torrance family had had the place entirely to themselves.
Except for the ghosts, of course. They never left.