“Who’s been in, then?” Thinking she might mean Gina Weems or Andrea Bottstein, the two nurses working the three-to-eleven in Riv One tonight. Or possibly Poul Larson, a slow-moving but decent orderly whom Dan thought of as the anti–Fred Carling, had stopped by for a natter.
“As I said, many. They are passing even now. An endless parade of them. They smile, they bow, a child wags his tongue like a dog’s tail. Some of them speak. Do you know the poet George Seferis?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t.” Were there others here? He had reason to believe it was possible, but he had no sense of them. Not that he always did.
“Mr. Seferis asks, ‘Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?’ The children are the saddest. There was a boy here who fell down a well.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, and a woman who committed suicide with a bedspring.”
He felt not even the slightest hint of a presence. Could his encounter with Abra Stone have sapped him? It was possible, and in any case, the shining came and went in tides he had never been able to chart. He didn’t think that was it, however. He thought Eleanor had probably lapsed into dementia. Or she might be having him on. It wasn’t impossible. Quite the wag was Eleanor Ooh-La-La. Someone—was it Oscar Wilde?—was reputed to have made a joke on his deathbed: Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.
“You are to wait,” Eleanor said. There was no humor in her voice now. “The lights will announce an arrival. There may be other disturbances. The door will open. Then your visitor will come.”
Dan looked doubtfully at the door to the hall, which was open already. He always left it open, so Azzie could leave if he wanted to. He usually did, once Dan showed up to take over.
“Eleanor, would you like some cold juice?”
“I would if there were ti—” she began, and then the life ran out of her face like water from a basin with a hole in it. Her eyes fixed at a point over his head and her mouth fell open. Her cheeks sagged and her chin dropped almost to her scrawny chest. The top plate of her dentures also dropped, slid over her lower lip, and hung in an unsettling open-air grin.
Fuck, that was quick.
Carefully, he hooked a finger beneath the denture plate and removed it. Her lip pulled out, then snapped back with a tiny plip sound. Dan put the plate on her night table, started to get up, then settled back. He waited for the red mist the old Tampa nurse had called the gasp . . . as though it were a pulling-in instead of a letting-out. It didn’t come.
You are to wait.
All right, he could do that, at least for awhile. He reached for Abra’s mind and found nothing. Maybe that was good. She might already be taking pains to guard her thoughts. Or maybe his own ability—his sensitivity—had departed. If so, it didn’t matter. It would be back. It always had been, at any rate.
He wondered (as he had before) why he had never seen flies on the face of any Rivington House guest. Maybe because he didn’t need to. He had Azzie, after all. Did Azzie see something with those wise green eyes of his? Maybe not flies, but something? He must.
Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?
It was so quiet on this floor tonight, and still so early! There was no sound of conversation from the common room at the end of the hall. No TV or radio played. He couldn’t hear the squeak of Poul’s sneakers or the low voices of Gina and Andrea down at the nurses’ station. No phone rang. As for his watch—
Dan raised it. No wonder he couldn’t hear its faint ticking. It had stopped.
The overhead fluorescent bar went off, leaving only Eleanor’s table lamp. The fluorescent came back on, and the lamp flickered out. It came on again and then it and the overhead went off together. On . . . off . . . on.
“Is someone here?”
The pitcher on the night table rattled, then stilled. The dentures he had removed gave a single unsettling clack. A queer ripple ran along the sheet of Eleanor’s bed, as if something beneath it had been startled into sudden motion. A puff of warm air pressed a quick kiss against Dan’s cheek, then was gone.
“Who is it?” His heartbeat remained regular, but he could feel it in his neck and wrists. The hair on the back of his neck felt thick and stiff. He suddenly knew what Eleanor had been seeing in her last moments: a parade of
( ghostie people)
the dead, passing into her room from one wall and passing out through the other. Passing out? No, passing on. He didn’t know Seferis, but he knew Auden: Death takes the rolling-in-money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. She had seen them all and they were here n—
But they weren’t. He knew they weren’t. The ghosts Eleanor had seen were gone and she had joined their parade. He had been told to wait. He was waiting.
The door to the hall swung slowly shut. Then the bathroom door opened.
From Eleanor Ouellette’s dead mouth came a single word: “Danny.”