4
At quarter to eight on that Monday evening, Rose got a double break on her walkie. It was Crow. “Better get over here,” he said. “It’s happening.”
The True was standing around Grampa’s RV in a silent circle. Rose (now wearing her hat at its accustomed gravity-defying angle) cut through them, pausing to give Andi a hug, then went up the steps, rapped once, and let herself in. Nut was standing with Big Mo and Apron Annie, Grampa’s two reluctant nurses. Crow was sitting on the end of the bed. He stood up when Rose came in. He was showing his age this evening. Lines bracketed his mouth, and there were a few threads of white silk in his black hair.
We need to take steam, Rose thought. And when this is over, we will.
Grampa Flick was cycling rapidly now: first transparent, then solid again, then transparent. But each transparency was longer, and more of him disappeared. He knew what was happening, Rose saw. His eyes were wide and terrified; his body writhed with the pain of the changes it was going through. She had always allowed herself to believe, on some deep level of her mind, in the True Knot’s immortality. Yes, every fifty or a hundred years or so, someone died—like that big dumb Dutchman, Hands-Off Hans, who had been electrocuted by a falling powerline in an Arkansas windstorm not long after World War II ended, or Katie Patches, who had drowned, or Tommy the Truck—but those were exceptions. Usually the ones who fell were taken down by their own carelessness. So she had always believed. Now she saw she had been as foolish as rube children clinging to their belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
He cycled back to solidity, moaning and crying and shivering. “Make it stop, Rosie-girl, make it stop. It hurts—”
Before she could answer—and really, what could she have said?—he was fading again until there was nothing left of him but a sketch of bones and his staring, floating eyes. They were the worst.
Rose tried to contact him with her mind and comfort him that way, but there was nothing to hold onto. Where Grampa Flick had always been—often grumpy, sometimes sweet—there was now only a roaring windstorm of broken images. Rose withdrew from him, shaken. Again she thought, This can’t be happening.
“Maybe we should put him out of his miz’y,” Big Mo said. She was digging her fingernails into Annie’s forearm, but Annie didn’t seem to feel it. “Give him a shot, or something. You got something in your bag, don’t you, Nut? You must.”
“What good would it do?” Walnut’s voice was hoarse. “Maybe earlier, but it’s going too fast now. He’s got no system for any drug to circulate in. If I gave him a hypo in the arm, we’d see it soaking into the bed five seconds later. Best to just let it happen. It won’t be long.”
Nor was it. Rose counted four more full cycles. On the fifth, even his bones disappeared. For a moment the eyeballs remained, staring first at her and then rolling to look at Crow Daddy. They hung above the pillow, which was still indented by the weight of his head and stained with Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic, of which he seemed to have an endless supply. She thought she remembered Greedy G telling her once that he bought it on eBay. eBay, for fuck’s sweet sake!
Then, slowly, the eyes disappeared, too. Except of course they weren’t really gone; Rose knew she’d be seeing them in her dreams later tonight. So would the others in attendance at Grampa Flick’s deathbed. If they got any sleep at all.
They waited, none of them entirely convinced that the old man wouldn’t appear before them again like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or Jacob Marley or some other, but there was only the shape of his disappeared head, the stains left by his hair tonic, and the deflated pee- and shit-stained boxers he had been wearing.
Mo burst into wild sobs and buried her head in Apron Annie’s generous bosom. Those waiting outside heard, and one voice (Rose would never know whose) began to speak. Another joined in, then a third and a fourth. Soon they were all chanting under the stars, and Rose felt a wild chill go zigzagging up her back. She reached out, found Crow’s hand, and squeezed it.
Annie joined in. Mo next, her words muffled. Nut. Then Crow. Rose the Hat took a deep breath and added her voice to theirs.
Lodsam hanti, we are the chosen ones.
Cahanna risone hanti, we are the fortunate ones.
Sabbatha hanti, sabbatha hanti, sabbatha hanti.
We are the True Knot, and we endure.
5
Later, Crow joined her in her EarthCruiser. “You really won’t be going east, will you?”
“No. You’ll be in charge.”
“What do we do now?”
“Mourn him, of course. Unfortunately, we can only give him two days.”
The traditional period was seven: no fucking, no idle talk, no steam. Just meditation. Then a circle of farewell where everyone would step forward and say one memory of Grampa Jonas Flick and give up one object they had from him, or that they associated with him (Rose had already picked hers, a ring with a Celtic design Grampa had given her when this part of America had still been Indian country and she had been known as the Irish Rose). There was never a body when a member of the True died, so the objects of remembrance had to serve the purpose. Those things were wrapped in white linen and buried.
“So my group leaves when? Wednesday night or Thursday morning?”
“Wednesday night.” Rose wanted the girl as soon as possible. “Drive straight through. And you’re positive they’ll hold the knockout stuff at the mail drop in Sturbridge?”
“Yes. Set your mind at ease on that.”
My mind won’t be at ease until I can look at that little bitch lying in the room right across from mine, drugged to the gills, handcuffed, and full of tasty, suckable steam.
“Who are you taking? Name them off.”
“Me, Nut, Jimmy Numbers, if you can spare him—”
“I can spare him. Who else?”
“Snakebite Andi. If we need to put someone to sleep, she can get it done. And the Chink. Him for sure. He’s the best locator we’ve got now that Grampa’s gone. Other than you, that is.”
“By all means take him, but you won’t need a locator to find this one,” Rose said. “That’s not going to be the problem. And just one vehicle will be enough. Take Steamhead Steve’s Winnebago.”
“Already spoke to him about it.”
She nodded, pleased. “One other thing. There’s a little hole-in-the-wall store in Sidewinder called District X.”
Crow raised his eyebrows. “The porno palace with the inflatable nurse doll in the window?”
“You know it, I see.” Rose’s tone was dry. “Now listen to me, Daddy.”
Crow listened.
6
Dan and John Dalton flew out of Logan on Tuesday morning just as the sun was rising. They changed planes in Memphis and touched down in Des Moines at 11:15 CDT on a day that felt more like mid-July than late September.
Dan spent the first part of the Boston-to-Memphis leg pretending to sleep so he wouldn’t have to deal with the doubts and second thoughts he felt sprouting like weeds in John’s mind. Somewhere over upstate New York, pretending ceased and he fell asleep for real. It was John who slept between Memphis and Des Moines, so that was all right. And once they were actually in Iowa, rolling toward the town of Freeman in a totally unobtrusive Ford Focus from Hertz, Dan sensed that John had put his doubts to bed. For the time being, at least. What had replaced them was curiosity and uneasy excitement.
“Boys on a treasure hunt,” Dan said. He’d had the longer nap, and so he was behind the wheel. High corn, now more yellow than green, flowed past them on either side.
John jumped a little. “Huh?”
Dan smiled. “Isn’t that what you were thinking? That we’re like boys on a treasure hunt?”
“You’re pretty goddam spooky, Daniel.”
“I suppose. I’ve gotten used to it.” This was not precisely true.
“When did you find out you could read minds?”
“It isn’t just mind-reading. The shining’s a uniquely variable talent. If it is a talent. Sometimes—lots of times—it feels more like a disfiguring birthmark. I’m sure Abra would say the same. As for when I found out . . . I never did. I just always had it. It came with the original equipment.”
“And you drank to blot it out.”
A fat woodchuck trundled with leisurely fearlessness across Route 150. Dan swerved to avoid it and the chuck disappeared into the corn, still not hurrying. It was nice out here, the sky looking a thousand miles deep and nary a mountain in sight. New Hampshire was fine, and he’d come to think of it as home, but Dan thought he was always going to feel more comfortable in the flatlands. Safer.
“You know better than that, Johnny. Why does any alcoholic drink?”
“Because he’s an alcoholic?”
“Bingo. Simple as can be. Cut through the psychobabble and you’re left with the stark truth. We drank because we’re drunks.”
John laughed. “Casey K. has truly indoctrinated you.”
“Well, there’s also the heredity thing,” Dan said. “Casey always kicks that part to the curb, but it’s there. Did your father drink?”
“Him and mother dearest both. They could have kept the Nineteenth Hole at the country club in business all by themselves. I remember the day my mother took off her tennis dress and jumped into the pool with us kids. The men applauded. My dad thought it was a scream. Me, not so much. I was nine, and until I went to college I was the boy with the Striptease Mommy. Yours?”
“My mother could take it or leave it alone. Sometimes she used to call herself Two Beers Wendy. My dad, however . . . one glass of wine or can of Bud and he was off to the races.” Dan glanced at the odometer and saw they still had forty miles to go. “You want to hear a story? One I’ve never told anybody? I should warn you, it’s a weird one. If you think the shining begins and ends with paltry shit like telepathy, you’re way short.” He paused. “There are other worlds than these.”
“You’ve . . . um . . . seen these other worlds?” Dan had lost track of John’s mind, but DJ suddenly looked a little nervous. As if he thought the guy sitting next to him might suddenly stick his hand in his shirt and declare himself the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte.
“No, just some of the people who live there. Abra calls them the ghostie people. Do you want to hear, or not?”
“I’m not sure I do, but maybe I better.”
Dan didn’t know how much this New England pediatrician would believe about the winter the Torrance family had spent at the Overlook Hotel, but found he didn’t particularly care. Telling it in this nondescript car, under this bright Midwestern sky, would be good enough. There was one person who would have believed it all, but Abra was too young, and the story was too scary. John Dalton would have to do. But how to begin? With Jack Torrance, he supposed. A deeply unhappy man who had failed at teaching, writing, and husbanding. What did the baseball players call three strikeouts in a row? The Golden Sombrero? Dan’s father had had only one notable success: when the moment finally came—the one the Overlook had been pushing him toward from their first day in the hotel—he had refused to kill his little boy. If there was a fitting epitaph for him, it would be . . .
“Dan?”
“My father tried,” he said. “That’s the best I can say for him. The most malevolent spirits in his life came in bottles. If he’d tried AA, things might have been a lot different. But he didn’t. I don’t think my mother even knew there was such a thing, or she would have suggested he give it a shot. By the time we went up to the Overlook Hotel, where a friend of his got him a job as the winter caretaker, his picture could have been next to dry drunk in the dictionary.”
“That’s where the ghosts were?”
“Yes. I saw them. He didn’t, but he felt them. Maybe he had his own shining. Probably he did. Lots of things are hereditary, after all, not just a tendency toward alcoholism. And they worked on him. He thought they—the ghostie people—wanted him, but that was just another lie. What they wanted was the little boy with the great big shine. The same way this True Knot bunch wants Abra.”
He stopped, remembering how Dick, speaking through Eleanor Ouellette’s dead mouth, had answered when Dan had asked where the empty devils were. In your childhood, where every devil comes from.
“Dan? Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “Anyway, I knew something was wrong in that goddam hotel even before I stepped through the door. I knew when the three of us were still living pretty much hand-to-mouth down in Boulder, on the Eastern Slope. But my father needed a job so he could finish a play he was working on . . .”
7
By the time they reached Adair, he was telling John how the Overlook’s boiler had exploded, and how the old hotel had burned to the ground in a driving blizzard. Adair was a two-stoplight town, but there was a Holiday Inn Express, and Dan noted the location.
“That’s where we’ll be checking in a couple of hours from now,” he told John. “We can’t go digging for treasure in broad daylight, and besides, I’m dead for sleep. Haven’t been getting much lately.”
“All that really happened to you?” John asked in a subdued voice.
“It really did.” Dan smiled. “Think you can believe it?”
“If we find the baseball glove where she says it is, I’ll have to believe a lot of things. Why did you tell me?”
“Because part of you thinks we’re crazy to be here, in spite of what you know about Abra. Also because you deserve to know that there are . . . forces. I’ve encountered them before; you haven’t. All you’ve seen is a little girl who can do assorted psychic parlor tricks like hanging spoons on the ceiling. This isn’t a boys’ treasure hunt game, John. If the True Knot finds out what we’re up to, we’ll be pinned to the target right along with Abra Stone. If you decided to bail on this business, I’d make the sign of the cross in front of you and say go with God.”
“And continue on by yourself.”
Dan tipped him a grin. “Well . . . there’s Billy.”
“Billy’s seventy-three if he’s a day.”
“He’d say that’s a plus. Billy likes to tell people that the good thing about being old is that you don’t have to worry about dying young.”
John pointed. “Freeman town line.” He gave Dan a small, tight smile. “I can’t completely believe I’m doing this. What are you going to think if that ethanol plant is gone? If it’s been torn down since Google Earth snapped its picture, and planted over with corn?”
“It’ll still be there,” Dan said.
8
And so it was: a series of soot-gray concrete blocks roofed in rusty corrugated metal. One smokestack still stood; two others had fallen and lay on the ground like broken snakes. The windows had been smashed and the walls were covered in blotchy spray-paint graffiti that would have been laughed at by the pro taggers in any big city. A potholed service road split off from the two-lane, ending in a parking lot that had sprouted with errant seed corn. The water tower Abra had seen stood nearby, rearing against the horizon like an H. G. Wells Martian war machine. FREEMAN, IOWA was printed on the side. The shed with the broken roof was also present and accounted for.
“Satisfied?” Dan asked. They had slowed to a crawl. “Factory, water tower, shed, No Trespassing sign. All just like she said it would be.”
John pointed to the rusty gate at the end of the service road. “What if that’s locked? I haven’t climbed a chainlink fence since I was in junior high.”
“It wasn’t locked when killers brought that kid here, or Abra would have said.”
“Are you sure of that?”
A farm truck was coming the other way. Dan sped up a little and lifted a hand as they passed. The guy behind the wheel—green John Deere cap, sunglasses, bib overalls—raised his in return but hardly glanced at them. That was a good thing.
“I asked if—”
“I know what you asked,” Dan said. “If it’s locked, we’ll deal with it. Somehow. Now let’s go back to that motel and check in. I’m whipped.”