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might tear him apart.
Had he been that strong? He thought he had been, or almost. On closing day at the Overlook,
Hallorann had told the troubled little boy sitting beside him to . . . what had he said?
He said to give him a blast.
Dan had arrived back at Rivington House and was standing outside the gate. The first leaves had
begun to fall, and an evening breeze whisked them around his feet.
And when I asked him what I should think about, he told me anything. “Just think it hard,” he said. So I
did, but at the last second I softened it, at least a little. If I hadn’t, I think I might have killed him. He jerked
back—no, he slammed back—and bit his lip. I remember the blood. He called me a pistol. And later, he asked
about Tony. My invisible friend. So I told him.
Tony was back, it seemed, but he was no longer Dan’s friend. Now he was the friend of a little girl
named Abra. She was in trouble just as Dan had been, but grown men who sought out little girls
attracted attention and suspicion. He had a good life here in Frazier, and he felt it was one he deserved
after all the lost years.
But . . .
But when he needed Dick—at the Overlook, and later, in Florida, when Mrs. Massey had come
back—Dick had come. In AA, people called that kind of thing a Twelfth Step call. Because when the
pupil was ready, the teacher would appear.
On several occasions, Dan had gone with Casey Kingsley and some other guys in the Program to
pay Twelfth Step calls on men who were over their heads in drugs or booze. Sometimes it was friends
or bosses who asked for this service; more often it was relatives who had exhausted every other
resource and were at their wits’ end. They’d had a few successes over the years, but most visits ended
with slammed doors or an invitation for Casey and his friends to stick their sanctimonious,
quasireligious bullshit up their asses. One fellow, a meth-addled veteran of George Bush’s splendid
Iraq adventure, had actually waved a pistol at them. Heading back from the Chocorua hole-in-thewall
shack where the vet was denned up with his terrified wife, Dan had said, “That was a waste of
time.”
“It would be if we did it for them,” Casey said, “but we don’t. We do it for us. You like the life
you’re living, Danny-boy?” It wasn’t the first time he had asked this question, and it wouldn’t be the
last.
“Yes.” No hesitation on that score. Maybe he wasn’t the president of General Motors or doing nude
love scenes with Kate Winslet, but in Dan’s mind, he had it all.
“Think you earned it?”
“No,” Dan said, smiling. “Not really. Can’t earn this.”
“So what was it that got you back to a place where you like getting up in the morning? Was it luck
or grace?”
He’d believed that Casey wanted him to say it was grace, but during the sober years he had learned
the sometimes uncomfortable habit of honesty. “I don’t know.”
“That’s okay, because when your back’s against the wall, there’s no difference.”
5
“Abra, Abra, Abra,” he said as he walked up the path to Rivington House. “What have you gotten
yourself into, girl? And what are you getting me into?”
He was thinking he’d have to try to get in touch with her by using the shining, which was never
completely reliable, but when he stepped into his turret room, he saw that wouldn’t be necessary.