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“Does Abra know where the woman is?”
“All she knows is that when this contact—this mutual seeing—occurred, the woman was in a
Sam’s Supermarket. That puts it somewhere out West, but there are Sams in at least nine states.”
“Including Iowa?”
Dan shook his head.
“Then I don’t see what we can accomplish by going there.”
“We can get the glove,” Dan said. “Abra thinks if she has the glove, she can link to the man who
had it on his hand for a little while. She calls him Barry the Chunk.”
John sat with his head lowered, thinking. Dan let him do it.
“All right,” John said at last. “This is crazy, but I’ll buy it. Given what I know of Abra’s history
and given my own history with you, it’s actually kind of hard not to. But if this woman doesn’t know
where Abra is, might it not be wiser to leave things alone? Don’t kick a sleeping dog and all that?”
“I don’t think this dog’s asleep,” Dan said. “These
(empty devils)
freaks want her for the same reason they wanted the Trevor boy—I’m sure Billy’s right about that.
Also, they know she’s a danger to them. To put it in AA terms, she has the power to break their
anonymity. And they may have resources we can only guess at. Would you want a patient of yours to
live in fear, month after month and maybe year after year, always expecting some sort of paranormal
Manson Family to show up and snatch her off the street?”
“Of course not.”
“These assholes live on children like her. Children like I was. Kids with the shining.” He stared
grimly into John Dalton’s face. “If it’s true, they need to be stopped.”
Billy said, “If I’m not going to Iowa, what am I supposed to do?”
“Let’s put it this way,” Dan said. “You’re going to get very familiar with Anniston in the week
ahead. In fact, if Casey will give you time off, you’re going to stay at a motel there.”
5
Rose finally entered the meditative state she had been seeking. The hardest thing to let go of had been
her worries about Grampa Flick, but she finally got past them. Got above them. Now she cruised
within herself, repeating the old phrases—sabbatha hanti and lodsam hanti and cahanna risone hanti—
over and over again, her lips barely moving. It was too early to seek the troublesome girl, but now
that she’d been left alone and the world was quiet, both inside and out, she was in no hurry.
Meditation for its own sake was a fine thing. Rose went about gathering her tools and focusing her
concentration, working slowly and meticulously.
Sabbatha hanti, lodsam hanti, cahanna risone hanti: words that had been old when the True Knot
moved across Europe in wagons, selling peat turves and trinkets. They had probably been old when
Babylon was young. The girl was powerful, but the True was all-powerful, and Rose anticipated no
real problem. The girl would be asleep, and Rose would move with quiet stealth, picking up
information and planting suggestions like small explosives. Not just one worm, but a whole nest of
them. Some the girl might detect, and disable.
Others, not.
6
Abra spoke with her mother on the phone for almost forty-five minutes that night after she’d finished