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.”