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crazy feeling of someone INSIDE HER, and Abra suddenly understood that for once she wasn’t
alone on the turntable. She was looking toward a meat counter at the end of a supermarket aisle, and
the other person was looking out her window at Richland Court and the White Mountains beyond.
Panic exploded inside her; it was as if gasoline had been poured on a fire. Not a sound escaped her
lips, which were pressed together so tightly that her mouth was only a stitch, but inside her head she
produced a scream louder than anything of which she would ever have believed herself capable:
(NO! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!)
8
When David felt the house rumble and saw the overhead light fixture in his study swaying on its
chain, his first thought was
(Abra)
that his daughter had had one of her psychic outbursts, though there hadn’t been any of that
telekinetic crap in years, and never anything like this. As things settled back to normal, his second—
and, to his mind, far more reasonable—thought was that he had just experienced his first New
Hampshire earthquake. He knew they happened from time to time, but . . . wow!
He got up from his desk (not neglecting to hit SAVE before he did), and ran into the hall. From
the foot of the stairs he called, “Abra! Did you feel that?”
She came out of her room, looking pale and a little scared. “Yeah, sorta. I . . . I think I . . .”
“It was an earthquake!” David told her, beaming. “Your first earthquake! Isn’t that neat?”
“Yes,” Abra said, not sounding very thrilled. “Neat.”
He looked out the living room window and saw people standing on their stoops and lawns. His
good friend Matt Renfrew was among them. “I’m gonna go across the street and talk to Matt, hon.
You want to come with?”
“I guess I better finish my math.”
David started toward the front door, then turned to look up at her. “You’re not scared, are you?
You don’t have to be. It’s over.”
Abra only wished it was.
9
Rose the Hat was doing a double shop, because Grampa Flick was feeling poorly again. She saw a few
other members of the True in Sam’s, and nodded to them. She stopped awhile in canned goods to talk
to Barry the Chink, who had his wife’s list in one hand. Barry was concerned about Flick.
“He’ll bounce back,” Rose said. “You know Grampa.”
Barry grinned. “Tougher’n a boiled owl.”
Rose nodded and got her cart rolling again. “You bet he is.”
Just an ordinary weekday afternoon at the supermarket, and as she took her leave of Barry, she at
first mistook what was happening to her for something mundane, maybe low sugar. She was prone to
sugar crashes, and usually kept a candybar in her purse. Then she realized someone was inside her
head. Someone was looking.
Rose had not risen to her position as head of the True Knot by being indecisive. She halted with
her cart pointed toward the meat counter (her planned next stop) and immediately leaped into the
conduit some nosy and potentially dangerous person had established. Not a member of the True, she
would have known any one of them immediately, but not an ordinary rube, either.