3
Dan sat looking at the late Eleanor Ouellette. The open eyes, now beginning to glaze. The tiny hands with their palms upturned. Most of all at the open mouth. Inside was all the clockless silence of death.
“Who are you?” Thinking: As if I didn’t know. Hadn’t he wished for answers?
“You grew up fine.” The lips didn’t move, and there seemed to be no emotion in the words. Perhaps death had robbed his old friend of his human feelings, and what a bitter shame that would be. Or perhaps it was someone else, masquerading as Dick. Something else.
“If you’re Dick, prove it. Tell me something only he and I could know.”
Silence. But the presence was still here. He felt it. Then:
“You asked me why Mrs. Brant wanted the car-park man’s pants.”
Dan at first had no idea what the voice was talking about. Then he did. The memory was on one of the high shelves where he kept all the bad Overlook memories. And his lockboxes, of course. Mrs. Brant had been a checkout on the day Danny arrived with his parents, and he had caught a random thought from her as the Overlook’s valet delivered her car: I’d sure like to get into his pants.
“You were just a little boy with a great big radio inside your head. I felt sorry for you. I was scared for you, too. And I was right to be scared, wasn’t I?”
In that there was a faint echo of his old friend’s kindness and humor. It was Dick, all right. Dan looked at the dead woman, dumbfounded. The lights in the room flickered on and off again. The water pitcher gave another brief jitter.
“I can’t stay long, son. It hurts to be here.”
“Dick, there’s a little girl—”
“Abra.” Almost a sigh. “She’s like you. It all comes around.”
“She thinks there’s a woman who may be after her. She wears a hat. It’s an old-fashioned tophat. Sometimes she only has one long tooth on top. When she’s hungry. This is what she told me, anyway.”
“Ask your question, son. I can’t stay. This world is a dream of a dream to me now.”
“There are others. The tophat woman’s friends. Abra saw them with flashlights. Who are they?”
Silence again. But Dick was still there. Changed, but there. Dan could feel him in his nerve endings, and as a kind of electricity skating on the damp surfaces of his eyes.
“They are the empty devils. They are sick and don’t know it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No. And that’s good. If you had ever met them—if they had ever gotten so much as a sniff of you—you’d be long dead, used and thrown away like an empty carton. That’s what happened to the one Abra calls the baseball boy. And many others. Children who shine are prey to them, but you already guessed that, didn’t you? The empty devils are on the land like a cancer on the skin. Once they rode camels in the desert; once they drove caravans across eastern Europe. They eat screams and drink pain. You had your horrors at the Overlook, Danny, but at least you were spared these folks. Now that the strange woman has her mind fixed on the girl, they won’t stop until they have her. They might kill her. They might Turn her. Or they might keep her and use her until she’s all used up, and that would be worst of all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Scoop her out. Make her empty like them.” From the dead mouth there came an autumnal sigh.
“Dick, what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Get the girl what she asked for.”
“Where are they, these empty devils?”
“In your childhood, where every devil comes from. I’m not allowed to say more.”
“How do I stop them?”
“The only way is to kill them. Make them eat their own poison. Do that and they disappear.”
“The woman in the hat, the strange woman, what’s her name? Do you know?”
From down the hall came the clash of a mop-bucket squeegee, and Poul Larson began to whistle. The air in the room changed. Something that had been delicately balanced now began to swing out of true.
“Go to your friends. The ones who know what you are. It seems to me you grew up fine, son, but you still owe a debt.” There was a pause, and then the voice that both was and wasn’t Dick Hallorann’s spoke one final time, in a tone of flat command: “Pay it.”
Red mist rose from Eleanor’s eyes, nose, and open mouth. It hung over her for perhaps five seconds, then disappeared. The lights were steady. So was the water in the pitcher. Dick was gone. Dan was here with only a corpse.
Empty devils.
If he had ever heard a more terrible phrase, he couldn’t remember it. But it made sense . . . if you had seen the Overlook for what it really was. That place had been full of devils, but at least they had been dead devils. He didn’t think that was true of the woman in the tophat and her friends.
You still owe a debt. Pay it.
Yes. He had left the little boy in the sagging diaper and the Braves t-shirt to fend for himself. He would not do that with the girl.
4
Dan waited at the nurses’ station for the funeral hack from Geordie & Sons, and saw the covered gurney out the back door of Rivington One. Then he went to his room and sat looking down at Cranmore Avenue, now perfectly deserted. A night wind blew, stripping the early-turning leaves from the oaks and sending them dancing and pirouetting up the street. On the far side of the town common, Teenytown was equally deserted beneath a couple of orange hi-intensity security lights.
Go to your friends. The ones who know what you are.
Billy Freeman knew, had almost from the first, because Billy had some of what Dan had. And if Dan owed a debt, he supposed Billy did, too, because Dan’s larger and brighter shining had saved Billy’s life.
Not that I’d put it that way to him.
Not that he’d have to.
Then there was John Dalton, who had lost a watch and who just happened to be Abra’s pediatrician. What had Dick said through Eleanor Ooh-La-La’s dead mouth? It all comes around.
As for the thing Abra had asked for, that was even easier. Getting it, though . . . that might be a little complicated.
5
When Abra got up on Sunday morning, there was an email message from [email protected].
Abra: I have spoken to a friend using the talent we share, and am convinced that you are in danger. I want to speak about your situation to another friend, one we have in common: John Dalton. I will not do so unless I have your permission. I believe John and I can retrieve the object you drew on my blackboard.
Have you set your burglar alarm? Certain people may be looking for you, and it’s very important they not find you. You must be careful. Good wishes and STAY SAFE. Delete this email.
Uncle D.
She was more convinced by the fact of his email than its content, because she knew he didn’t like communicating that way; he was afraid her parents would snoop in her mail and think she was exchanging notes with Chester the Molester.
If they only knew about the molesters she really had to worry about.
She was frightened, but also—now that it was bright daylight and there was no beautiful lunatic in a tophat peering in the window at her—rather excited. It was sort of like being in one of those love-and-horror supernatural novels, the kind Mrs. Robinson in the school library sniffily called “tweenager porn.” In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires—even zombies—but hardly ever became those things.
It was also nice to have a grown man stand up for her, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome, in a scruffy kind of way that reminded her a little of Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, a show she and Emma Deane secretly watched on Em’s computer.
She sent Uncle Dan’s email not just to her trash but to the permanent trash, which Emma called “the nuclear boyfriend file.” (As if you had any, Em, Abra thought snidely.) Then she turned off her computer and closed the lid. She didn’t email him back. She didn’t have to. She just had to close her eyes.
Zip-zip.
Message sent, Abra headed for the shower.
6
When Dan came back with his morning coffee, there was a new communiqué on his blackboard.
You can tell Dr. John but NOT MY PARENTS.
No. Not her parents. At least not yet. But Dan had no doubt they’d find out something was going on, and probably sooner rather than later. He would cross that bridge (or burn it) when he came to it. Right now he had a lot of other things to do, beginning with a call.
A child answered, and when he asked for Rebecca, the phone was dropped with a clunk and there was a distant, going-away cry of “Gramma! It’s for you!” A few seconds later, Rebecca Clausen was on the line.
“Hi, Becka, it’s Dan Torrance.”
“If it’s about Mrs. Ouellette, I had an email this morning from—”
“That’s not it. I need to ask for some time off.”
“Doctor Sleep wants time off? I don’t believe it. I had to practically kick you out the door last spring to take your vacation, and you were still in once or twice a day. Is it a family matter?”
Dan, with Abra’s theory of relativity in mind, said it was.