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a row? The Golden Sombrero? Dan’s father had had only one notable success: when the moment finally
came—the one the Overlook had been pushing him toward from their first day in the hotel—he had
refused to kill his little boy. If there was a fitting epitaph for him, it would be . . .
“Dan?”
“My father tried,” he said. “That’s the best I can say for him. The most malevolent spirits in his
life came in bottles. If he’d tried AA, things might have been a lot different. But he didn’t. I don’t
think my mother even knew there was such a thing, or she would have suggested he give it a shot. By
the time we went up to the Overlook Hotel, where a friend of his got him a job as the winter
caretaker, his picture could have been next to dry drunk in the dictionary.”
“That’s where the ghosts were?”
“Yes. I saw them. He didn’t, but he felt them. Maybe he had his own shining. Probably he did.
Lots of things are hereditary, after all, not just a tendency toward alcoholism. And they worked on
him. He thought they—the ghostie people—wanted him, but that was just another lie. What they
wanted was the little boy with the great big shine. The same way this True Knot bunch wants Abra.”
He stopped, remembering how Dick, speaking through Eleanor Ouellette’s dead mouth, had
answered when Dan had asked where the empty devils were. In your childhood, where every devil comes
from.
“Dan? Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “Anyway, I knew something was wrong in that goddam hotel even before I
stepped through the door. I knew when the three of us were still living pretty much hand-to-mouth
down in Boulder, on the Eastern Slope. But my father needed a job so he could finish a play he was
working on . . .”
7
By the time they reached Adair, he was telling John how the Overlook’s boiler had exploded, and how
the old hotel had burned to the ground in a driving blizzard. Adair was a two-stoplight town, but
there was a Holiday Inn Express, and Dan noted the location.
“That’s where we’ll be checking in a couple of hours from now,” he told John. “We can’t go digging
for treasure in broad daylight, and besides, I’m dead for sleep. Haven’t been getting much lately.”
“All that really happened to you?” John asked in a subdued voice.
“It really did.” Dan smiled. “Think you can believe it?”
“If we find the baseball glove where she says it is, I’ll have to believe a lot of things. Why did you
tell me?”
“Because part of you thinks we’re crazy to be here, in spite of what you know about Abra. Also
because you deserve to know that there are . . . forces. I’ve encountered them before; you haven’t. All
you’ve seen is a little girl who can do assorted psychic parlor tricks like hanging spoons on the ceiling.
This isn’t a boys’ treasure hunt game, John. If the True Knot finds out what we’re up to, we’ll be
pinned to the target right along with Abra Stone. If you decided to bail on this business, I’d make the
sign of the cross in front of you and say go with God.”
“And continue on by yourself.”
Dan tipped him a grin. “Well . . . there’s Billy.”
“Billy’s seventy-three if he’s a day.”
“He’d say that’s a plus. Billy likes to tell people that the good thing about being old is that you
don’t have to worry about dying young.”