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Dan looked at her closely.
(do you know something Abra)
The reply was quick.
(no feel something)
That was good enough for Dan. He held out his arms and Abra hugged him hard, the side of her
face pressed against his chest. Dan could have held her like that for a long time, but he let her go and
stepped back.
(let me know when you get close Uncle Dan I’ll come)
(just little touches remember)
She sent an image instead of a thought in words: a smoke detector beeping the way they did when
they wanted a battery change. She remembered perfectly.
As she went to the car, Abra said to her father, “We need to stop on the way back for a get-well
card. Julie Cross broke her wrist yesterday in soccer practice.”
He frowned at her. “How do you know that?”
“I know,” she said.
He gently pulled one of her pigtails. “You really could do it all along, couldn’t you? I don’t
understand why you didn’t just tell us, Abba-Doo.”
Dan, who had grown up with the shining, could have answered that question.
Sometimes parents needed to be protected.
4
So they parted. John’s SUV went east and Billy’s pickup truck went west, with Billy behind the wheel.
Dan said, “Are you really okay to drive, Billy?”
“After all the sleep I got last night? Sweetheart, I could drive to California.”
“Do you know where we’re going?”
“I bought a road atlas in town while I was waitin for the pizza.”
“So you’d made up your mind even then. And you knew what Abra and I were planning.”
“Well . . . sorta.”
“When you need me to take over, just yell,” Dan said, and promptly fell asleep with his head
against the passenger window. He descended through a deepening depth of unpleasant images. First
the hedge animals at the Overlook, the ones that moved when you weren’t looking. This was followed
by Mrs. Massey from Room 217, who now wore a cocked tophat. Still descending, he revisited the
battle at Cloud Gap. Only this time when he burst into the Winnebago, he found Abra lying on the
floor with her throat cut and Rose standing over her with a dripping straight razor. Rose saw Dan and
the bottom half of her face dropped away in an obscene grin where one long tooth gleamed. I told her it
would end this way but she wouldn’t listen, she said. Children so rarely do.
Below this there was only darkness.
When he woke it was to twilight with a broken white line running down the middle of it. They
were on an interstate highway.
“How long did I sleep?”
Billy glanced at his watch. “A good long while. Feel better?”
“Yes.” He did and didn’t. His head was clear, but his stomach hurt like hell. Considering what he
had seen that morning in the mirror, he wasn’t surprised. “Where are we?”
“Hunnert-n-fifty miles east of Cincinnati, give or take. You slept through two gas stops. And you
snore.”