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  Then, all together: "We are the True Knot, and we . . ."

  But Andi lost track of it there. The silvery stuff settled over her face and it was cold, cold. When she inhaled, it came to some sort of tenebrous life and began screaming inside her. A child made of mist--whether boy or girl she didn't know--was struggling to get away but someone was cutting. Rose was cutting, while the others stood close around her (in a knot), shining down a dozen flashlights, illuminating a slow-motion murder.

  Andi tried to bolt up from the recliner, but she had no body to bolt with. Her body was gone. Where it had been was only pain in the shape of a human being. The pain of the child's dying, and of her own.

  Embrace it. The thought was like a cool cloth pressed on the burning wound that was her body. That's the only way through.

  I can't, I've been running from this pain my whole life.

  Perhaps so, but you're all out of running room. Embrace it. Swallow it. Take steam or die.

  8

  The True stood with hands upraised, chanting the old words: sabbatha hanti, lodsam hanti, cahanna risone hanti. They watched as Andi Steiner's blouse flattened where her breasts had been, as her skirt puffed shut like a closing mouth. They watched as her face turned to milk-glass. Her eyes remained, though, floating like tiny balloons on gauzy strings of nerve.

  But they're going to go, too, Walnut thought. She's not strong enough. I thought maybe she was, but I was wrong. She may come back a time or two, but then she'll cycle out. Nothing left but her clothes. He tried to recall his own Turning, and could only remember that the moon had been full and there had been a bonfire instead of headlights. A bonfire, the whicker of horses . . . and the pain. Could you actually remember pain? He didn't think so. You knew there was such a thing, and that you had suffered it, but that wasn't the same.

  Andi's face swam back into existence like the face of a ghost above a medium's table. The front of her blouse plumped up in curves; her skirt swelled as her hips and thighs returned to the world. She shrieked in agony.

  "We are the True Knot and we endure," they chanted in the crisscrossing beams of the RVs. "Sabbatha hanti. We are the chosen ones, lodsam hanti. We are the fortunate ones, cahanna risone hanti." They would go on until it was over. One way or the other, it wouldn't take long.

  Andi began to disappear again. Her flesh became cloudy glass through which the True could see her skeleton and the bone grin of her skull. A few silver fillings gleamed in that grin. Her disembodied eyes rolled wildly in sockets that were no longer there. She was still screaming, but now the sound was thin and echoing, as if it came from far down a distant hall.

  9

  Rose thought she'd give up, that was what they did when the pain became too much, but this was one tough babe. She came swirling back into existence, screaming all the way. Her newly arrived hands seized Rose's with mad strength and bore down. Rose leaned forward, hardly noticing the pain.

  "I know what you want, honeydoll. Come back and you can have it." She lowered her mouth to Andi's, caressing Andi's upper lip with her tongue until the lip turned to mist. But the eyes stayed, fixed on Rose's.

  "Sabbatha hanti," they chanted. "Lodsam hanti. Cahanna risone hanti."

  Andi came back, growing a face around her staring, pain-filled eyes. Her body followed. For a moment Rose could see the bones of her arms, the bones in the fingers clutching hers, then they were once more dressed in flesh.

  Rose kissed her again. Even in her pain Andi responded, and Rose breathed her own essence down the younger woman's throat.

  I want this one. And what I want, I get.

  Andi began to fade again, but Rose could feel her fighting it. Getting on top of it. Feeding herself with the screaming life-force she had breathed down her throat and into her lungs instead of trying to push it away.

  Taking steam for the first time.

  10

  The newest member of the True Knot spent that night in Rose O'Hara's bed, and for the first time in her life found something in sex besides horror and pain. Her throat was raw from the screaming she'd done on the lawn recliner, but she screamed again as this new sensation--pleasure to match the pain of her Turning--took her body and once more seemed to render it transparent.

  "Scream all you want," Rose said, looking up from between her thighs. "They've heard plenty of them. The good as well as the bad."

  "Is sex like this for everybody?" If so, what she had missed! What her bastard father had stolen from her! And people thought she was a thief ?

  "It's like this for us, when we've taken steam," Rose said. "That's all you need to know."

  She lowered her head and it began again.

  11

  Not long before midnight, Token Charlie and Baba the Russian were sitting on the lower step of Token Charlie's Bounder, sharing a joint and looking up at the moon. From Rose's EarthCruiser came more screams.

  Charlie and Baba turned to each other and grinned.

  "Someone is likin it," Baba remarked.

  "What's not to like?" Charlie said.

  12

  Andi woke in the day's first early light with her head pillowed on Rose's breasts. She felt entirely different; she felt no different at all. She lifted her head and saw Rose looking at her with those remarkable gray eyes.

  "You saved me," Andi said. "You brought me back."

  "I couldn't have done it alone. You wanted to come." In more ways than one, honeydoll.

  "What we did after . . . we can't do it again, can we?"

  Rose shook her head, smiling. "No. And that's okay. Some experiences absolutely cannot be topped. Besides, my man will be back today."

  "What's his name?"

  "He answers to Henry Rothman, but that's just for the rubes. His True name is Crow Daddy."

  "Do you love him? You do, don't you?"

  Rose smiled, drew Andi closer, kissed her. But she did not answer.

  "Rose?"

  "Yes?"

  "Am I . . . am I still human?"

  To this Rose gave the same answer Dick Hallorann had once given young Danny Torrance, and in the same cold tone of voice: "Do you care?"

  Andi decided she didn't. She decided she was home.

  MAMA

  1

  There was a muddle of bad dreams--someone swinging a hammer and chasing him down endless halls, an elevator that ran by itself, hedges in the shapes of animals that came to life and closed in on him--and finally one clear thought: I wish I were dead.

  Dan Torrance opened his eyes. Sunlight shot through them and into his aching head, threatening to set his brains on fire. The hangover to end all hangovers. His face was throbbing. His nostrils were clogged shut except for a tiny pinhole in the left one that allowed in a thread of air. Left one? No, it was the right. He could breathe through his mouth, but it was foul with the taste of whiskey and cigarettes. His stomach was a ball of lead, full of all the wrong things. Morning-after junkbelly, some old drinking buddy or other had called that woeful sensation.

  Loud snoring from beside him. Dan turned his head that way, although his neck screamed in protest and another bolt of agony shot him through the temple. He opened his eyes again, but just a little; no more of that blazing sun, please. Not yet. He was lying on a bare mattress on a bare floor. A bare woman lay sprawled on her back beside him. Dan looked down and saw that he was also alfresco.

  Her name is . . . Dolores? No. Debbie? That's closer, but not quite--

  Deenie. Her name was Deenie. He had met her in a bar called the Milky Way, and it had all been quite hilarious until . . .

  He couldn't remember, and one look at his hands--both swollen, the knuckles of the right scuffed and scabbed--made him decide he didn't want to remember. And what did it matter? The basic scenario never changed. He got drunk, someone said the wrong thing, chaos and bar-carnage followed. There was a dangerous dog inside his head. Sober, he could keep it on a leash. When he drank, the leash disappeared. Sooner or later I'll kill someone. For all he knew, he had last ni
ght.

  Hey Deenie, squeeze my weenie.

  Had he actually said that? He was terribly afraid he had. Some of it was coming back to him now, and even some was too much. Playing eightball. Trying to put a little extra spin on the cue and scratching it right off the table, the little chalk-smudged sonofabitch bouncing and rolling all the way to the jukebox that was playing--what else?--country music. He seemed to remember Joe Diffie. Why had he scratched so outrageously? Because he was drunk, and because Deenie was standing behind him, Deenie had been squeezing his weenie just below the line of the table and he was showing off for her. All in good fun. But then the guy in the Case cap and the fancy silk cowboy shirt had laughed, and that was his mistake.

  Chaos and bar-carnage.

  Dan touched his mouth and felt plump sausages where normal lips had been when he left that check-cashing joint yesterday afternoon with a little over five hundred bucks in his front pants pocket.

  At least all my teeth seem to be--

  His stomach gave a liquid lurch. He burped up a mouthful of sour gunk that tasted of whiskey and swallowed it back. It burned going down. He rolled off the mattress onto his knees, staggered to his feet, then swayed as the room began to do a gentle tango. He was hungover, his head was bursting, his gut was filled with whatever cheap food he'd put in it last night to tamp down the booze . . . but he was also still drunk.

  He hooked his underpants off the floor and left the bedroom with them clutched in his hand, not quite limping but definitely favoring his left leg. He had a vague memory--one he hoped would never sharpen--of the Case cowboy throwing a chair. That was when he and Deenie-squeeze-my-weenie had left, not quite running but laughing like loons.

  Another lurch from his unhappy gut. This time it was accompanied by a clench that felt like a hand in a slick rubber glove. That released all the puke triggers: the vinegar smell of hardcooked eggs in a big glass jar, the taste of barbecue-flavored pork rinds, the sight of french fries drowning in a ketchup nosebleed. All the crap he'd crammed into his mouth last night between shots. He was going to spew, but the images just kept on coming, revolving on some nightmare gameshow prize wheel.

  What have we got for our next contestant, Johnny? Well, Bob, it's a great big platter of GREASY SARDINES!

  The bathroom was directly across a short stub of hall. The door was open, the toilet seat up. Dan lunged, fell on his knees, and spewed a great flood of brownish-yellow stuff on top of a floating turd. He looked away, groped for the flush, found it, pushed it. Water cascaded, but there was no accompanying sound of draining water. He looked back and saw something alarming: the turd, probably his own, rising toward the pee-splashed rim of the toilet bowl on a sea of half-digested bar-snacks. Just before the toilet could overspill, making this morning's banal horrors complete, something cleared its throat in the pipe and the whole mess flushed away. Dan threw up again, then sat on his heels with his back against the bathroom wall and his throbbing head lowered, waiting for the tank to refill so he could flush a second time.

  No more. I swear it. No more booze, no more bars, no more fights. Promising himself this for the hundredth time. Or the thousandth.

  One thing was certain: he had to get out of this town or he might be in trouble. Serious trouble was not out of the question.

  Johnny, what have we got for today's grand prize winner? Bob, it's TWO YEARS IN STATE FOR ASSAULT AND BATTERY!

  And . . . the studio audience goes wild.

  The toilet tank had quieted its noisy refill. He reached for the handle to flush away The Morning After, Part Two, then paused, regarding the black hole of his short-term memory. Did he know his name? Yes! Daniel Anthony Torrance. Did he know the name of the chick snoring on the mattress in the other room? Yes! Deenie. He didn't recall her last name, but it was likely she had never told him. Did he know the current president's name?

  To Dan's horror, he didn't, not at first. The guy had a funky Elvis haircut and played the sax--quite badly. But the name . . . ?

  Do you even know where you are?

  Cleveland? Charleston? It was one or the other.

  As he flushed the toilet, the president's name arrived in his head with splendid clarity. And Dan wasn't in either Cleveland or Charleston. He was in Wilmington, North Carolina. He worked as an orderly at Grace of Mary Hospital. Or had. It was time to move on. If he got to some other place, some good place, he might be able to quit the drinking and start over.

  He got up and looked in the mirror. The damage wasn't as bad as he'd feared. Nose swelled but not actually broken--at least he didn't think so. Crusts of dried blood above his puffy upper lip. There was a bruise on his right cheekbone (the Case cowboy must have been a lefty) with the bloody imprint of a ring sitting in the middle of it. Another bruise, a big one, was spreading in the cup of his left shoulder. That, he seemed to remember, had been from a pool cue.

  He looked in the medicine cabinet. Amid tubes of makeup and cluttered bottles of over-the-counter medicine, he found three prescription bottles. The first was Diflucan, commonly prescribed for yeast infections. It made him glad he was circumcised. The second was Darvon Comp 65. He opened it, saw half a dozen capsules, and put three in his pocket for later reference. The last scrip was for Fioricet, and the bottle--thankfully--was almost full. He swallowed three with cold water. Bending over the basin made his headache worse than ever, but he thought he would soon get relief. Fioricet, intended for migraine and tension headaches, was a guaranteed hangover killer. Well . . . almost guaranteed.

  He started to close the cabinet, then took another look. He moved some of the crap around. No birth control ring. Maybe it was in her purse. He hoped so, because he hadn't been carrying a rubber. If he'd fucked her--and although he couldn't remember for sure, he probably had--he'd ridden in bareback.

  He put on his underwear and shuffled back to the bedroom, standing in the doorway for a moment and looking at the woman who had brought him home last night. Arms and legs splayed, everything showing. Last night she had looked like the goddess of the Western world in her thigh-high leather skirt and cork sandals, her cropped top and hoop earrings. This morning he saw the sagging white dough of a growing boozegut, and the second chin starting to appear under the first.

  He saw something worse: she wasn't a woman, after all. Probably not jailbait (please God not jailbait), but surely no more than twenty and maybe still in her late teens. On one wall, chillingly childish, was a poster of KISS with Gene Simmons spewing fire. On another was a cute kitten with startled eyes, dangling from a tree branch. HANG IN THERE, BABY, this poster advised.

  He needed to get out of here.

  Their clothes were tangled together at the foot of the mattress. He separated his t-shirt from her panties, yanked it over his head, then stepped into his jeans. He froze with the zipper halfway up, realizing that his left front pocket was much flatter than it had been when he left the check-cashing joint the previous afternoon.

  No. It can't be.

  His head, which had begun to feel the teeniest bit better, started to throb again as his heartbeat picked up speed, and when he shoved his hand into the pocket, it brought up nothing but a ten-dollar bill and two toothpicks, one of which poked under his index fingernail and into the sensitive meat beneath. He hardly noticed.

  We didn't drink up five hundred dollars. No way we did. We'd be dead if we drank up that much.

  His wallet was still at home in his hip pocket. He pulled it out, hoping against hope, but no joy. He must have transferred the ten he usually kept there to his front pocket at some point. The front pocket made it tougher for barroom dips, which now seemed like quite the joke.

  He looked at the snoring, splayed girl-woman on the mattress and started for her, meaning to shake her awake and ask her what she'd done with his fucking money. Choke her awake, if that was what it took. But if she'd stolen from him, why had she brought him home? And hadn't there been something else? Some other adventure after they left the Milky Way? Now that his head was clearing,
he had a memory--hazy, but probably valid--of them taking a cab to the train station.

  I know a guy who hangs out there, honey.

  Had she really said that, or was it only his imagination?

  She said it, all right. I'm in Wilmington, Bill Clinton's the president, and we went to the train station. Where there was indeed a guy. The kind who likes to do his deals in the men's room, especially when the customer has a slightly rearranged face. When he asked who teed off on me, I told him--

  "I told him he should mind his beeswax," Dan muttered.

  When the two of them went in, Dan had been meaning to buy a gram to keep his date happy, no more than that, and only if it wasn't half Manitol. Coke might be Deenie's thing but it wasn't his. Rich man's Anacin, he'd heard it called, and he was far from rich. But then someone had come out of one of the stalls. A business type with a briefcase banging his knee. And when Mr. Businessman went to wash his hands at one of the basins, Dan had seen flies crawling all over his face.

  Deathflies. Mr. Businessman was a dead man walking and didn't know it.

  So instead of going small, he was pretty sure he'd gone big. Maybe he'd changed his mind at the last moment, though. It was possible; he could remember so little.

  I remember the flies, though.

  Yes. He remembered those. Booze tamped down the shining, knocked it unconscious, but he wasn't sure the flies were even a part of the shining. They came when they would, drunk or sober.

  He thought again: I need to get out of here.

  He thought again: I wish I were dead.

  2

  Deenie made a soft snorting sound and turned away from the merciless morning light. Except for the mattress on the floor, the room was devoid of furniture; there wasn't even a thrift-shop bureau. The closet stood open, and Dan could see the majority of Deenie's meager wardrobe heaped in two plastic laundry baskets. The few items on hangers looked like barhopping clothes. He could see a red t-shirt with SEXY GIRL printed in spangles on the front, and a denim skirt with a fashionably frayed hem. There were two pairs of sneakers, two pairs of flats, and one pair of strappy high-heel fuck-me shoes. No cork sandals, though. No sign of his own beat-up Reeboks, for that matter.