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“She’s looking at Mr. Freeman,” Abra said. “We should go.”
He opened the French doors, but hesitated. Something in her voice. “What’s the trouble, Abra?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but I don’t like it. She’s looking at him really hard. We have to go
right now.”
“I need to do something first. Try to be ready, and don’t be scared.”
Dan closed his eyes and went to the storage room at the back of his mind. Real lockboxes would
have been covered with dust after all these years, but the two he’d put here as a child were as fresh as
ever. Why not? They were made of pure imagination. The third—the new one—had a faint aura
hanging around it, and he thought: No wonder I’m sick.
Never mind. That one had to stay for the time being. He opened the oldest of the other two, ready
for anything, and found . . . nothing. Or almost. In the lockbox that had held Mrs. Massey for thirtytwo
years, there was a heap of dark gray ash. But in the other . . .
He realized how foolish telling her not to be scared had been.
Abra shrieked.
10
On the back stoop of the house in Anniston, Abra began to jerk. Her legs spasmed; her feet rattled a
tattoo on the steps; one hand—flopping like a fish dragged to a riverbank and left to die there—sent
the ill-used and bedraggled Hoppy flying.
“What’s wrong with her?” Lucy screamed.
She rushed for the door. David stood frozen—transfixed by the sight of his seizing daughter—but
John got his right arm around Lucy’s waist and his left around her upper chest. She bucked against
him. “Let me go! I have to go to her!”
“No!” John shouted. “No, Lucy, you can’t!”
She would have broken free, but now David had her, too.
She subsided, looking first at John. “If she dies out there, I’ll see you go to jail for it.” Next, her
gaze—flat-eyed and hostile—went to her husband. “You I’ll never forgive.”
“She’s quieting,” John said.
On the stoop, Abra’s tremors moderated, then stopped. But her cheeks were wet, and tears squeezed
from beneath her closed lids. In the day’s dying light, they clung to her lashes like jewels.
11
In Danny Torrance’s childhood bedroom—a room now made only of memory—Abra clung to Dan
with her face pressed against his chest. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “The monster—is it
gone?”
“Yes,” Dan said.
“Swear on your mother’s name?”
“Yes.”
She raised her head, first looking at him to assure herself he was telling the truth, then daring to
scan the room. “That smile.” She shuddered.
“Yes,” Dan said. “I think . . . he’s glad to be home. Abra, are you going to be all right? Because we
have to do this right now. Time’s up.”
“I’m all right. But what if . . . it . . . comes back?”
Dan thought of the lockbox. It was open, but could be closed again easily enough. Especially with