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“Not bad.” She watched Azzie jump down and oil out the door, his work for the evening done. “I’ve
had many visitors. They made your cat nervous, but he stuck it out until you came.”
“He’s not my cat, Eleanor. He belongs to the house.”
“No,” she said, as if the subject no longer interested her much, “he’s yours.”
Dan doubted if Eleanor had had even one visitor—other than Azreel, that was. Not tonight, not in
the last week or month, not in the last year. She was alone in the world. Even the dinosaur of an
accountant who had overseen her money matters for so many years, lumbering in to visit her once
every quarter and toting a briefcase the size of a Saab’s trunk, had now gone to his reward. Miss Ooh-
La-La claimed to have relatives in Montreal, “but I have not quite enough money left to make visiting
me worthwhile, cher.”
“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.