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standing tallest among them.
On that September evening, nine members of the True were gathered in the high-ceilinged,
pleasantly rustic building known as Overlook Lodge. When the campground was open to the public,
the Lodge served as a restaurant that put on two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. The food was
prepared by Short Eddie and Big Mo (rube names Ed and Maureen Higgins). Neither was up to Dick
Hallorann’s culinary standards—few were!—but it’s hard to screw up too badly on the things Camper
People like to eat: meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, pancakes drenched in Log Cabin syrup,
meatloaf, chicken stew, meatloaf, Tuna Surprise, and meatloaf with mushroom gravy. After dinner,
the tables were cleared for bingo or card parties. On weekends, there were dances. These festivities
took place only when the campground was open. This evening—as, three time zones east, Dan
Torrance sat beside a dead woman and waited for his visitor—there was business of a different sort to
transact in Overlook Lodge.
Jimmy Numbers was at the head of a single table that had been set up in the middle of the
polished bird’s-eye maple floor. His PowerBook was open, the desktop displaying a photograph of his
hometown, which happened to be deep in the Carpathian Mountains. ( Jimmy liked to joke that his
grandfather had once entertained a young London solicitor named Jonathan Harker.)
Clustered around him, looking down at the screen, were Rose, Crow Daddy, Barry the Chink,
Snakebite Andi, Token Charlie, Apron Annie, Diesel Doug, and Grampa Flick. None of them wanted
to stand next to Grampa, who smelled as if he might have had a minor disaster in his pants and then
forgotten to shower it off (a thing that happened more and more frequently these days), but this was
important and they put up with him.
Jimmy Numbers was an unassuming guy with a receding hairline and a pleasant if vaguely simian
face. He looked about fifty, which was one-third of his actual age. “I googled Lickety-Spliff and got
nothing useful, which is what I expected. In case you care, lickety-spliff is teenage slang that means to
do something really slow instead of really fast—”
“We don’t,” Diesel Doug said. “And by the way, you smell a trifle rank, Gramps. No offense, but
when was the last time you wiped your ass?”
Grampa Flick bared his teeth—eroded and yellow, but all his own—at Doug. “Your wife wiped it
for me just this morning, Deez. With her face, as it happens. Kinda nasty, but she seems to like that
kind of thi—”
“Shut your heads, both of you,” Rose said. Her voice was toneless and unthreatening, but Doug and
Grampa both shrank away from her, their faces those of chastened schoolboys. “Go on, Jimmy. But
stay on point. I want to have a concrete plan, and soon.”
“The rest of them are going to be reluctant no matter how concrete the plan is,” Crow said.
“They’re going to say it’s been a good year for steam. That movie theater thing, the church fire in
Little Rock, and the terrorist thing in Austin. Not to mention Juárez. I was dubious about going
south of the border, but it was good.”
Better than good, actually. Juárez had become known as the murder capital of the world, earning
its sobriquet with over twenty-five hundred homicides a year. Many were torture-killings. The
pervading atmosphere had been exceedingly rich. It wasn’t pure steam, and it made you feel a little
whoopsy in the stomach, but it did the job.
“All those fucking beans gave me the runs,” Token Charlie said, “but I have to admit that the
pickings were excellent.”
“It was a good year,” Rose agreed, “but we can’t make a business of Mexico—we’re too conspicuous.
Down there, we’re rich americanos. Up here, we fade into the woodwork. And aren’t you tired of living
from year to year? Always on the move and always counting canisters? This is different. This is the
motherlode.”