The voice came floating up to her on the thin air. “Hey, you old bag! Watch this!”
She snapped her gaze back to the man in the parking lot and stared, close to flabbergasted, as he raised his hands over his head and then turned a big, unsteady cartwheel. She thought he was going to go on his ass, but the only thing that fell to the pavement was his hat. What it exposed was the fine white hair of a man in his seventies. Maybe even his eighties.
Rose looked back at the girl in the truck, who remained perfectly still with her head bent. She had absolutely no interest in the uncle’s antics. Suddenly it clicked and Rose understood what she would have seen right away, had the trick not been so outrageous: it was a mannequin.
But she’s here! Token Charlie feels her, all of them in the Lodge feel her, they’re all together and they know—
All together in the Lodge. All together in one place. And had that been Rose’s idea? No. That idea had come from the—
Rose broke for the stairs.
13
The remaining members of the True Knot were crowded together at the two windows looking down at the parking lot, watching as Billy Freeman turned a cartwheel for the first time in over forty years (and the last time he’d done this trick, he’d been drunk). Petty the Chink actually laughed. “What in God’s name—”
With their backs turned, they didn’t see Dan step into the room from the kitchen, or the girl flickering in and out of view at his side. Dan had time to register two bundles of clothes on the floor, and to understand that Bradley Trevor’s measles were still hard at work. Then he went back inside himself, went deep, and found the third lockbox—the leaky one. He flung it open.
(Dan what are you doing)
He leaned forward with his hands on his upper thighs, his stomach burning like hot metal, and exhaled the old poet’s last gasp, which she had given him freely, in a dying kiss. From his mouth there came a long plume of pink mist that deepened to red as it hit the air. At first he could focus on nothing but the blessed relief in the middle of his body as the poison remains of Concetta Reynolds left him.
“Momo!” Abra shrieked.
14
On the platform, Rose’s eyes widened. The bitchgirl was in the Lodge.
And someone was with her.
She leaped into this new mind without thinking about it. Searching. Ignoring the markers that meant big steam, only trying to stop him before he could do whatever it was he intended to do. Ignoring the terrible possibility that it was already too late.
15
The members of the True turned toward Abra’s cry. Someone—it was Long Paul—said: “What in the hell is that?”
The red mist coalesced into a shape of a woman. For a moment—surely no more than that—Dan looked into Concetta’s swirling eyes and saw they were young. Still weak and focused on this phantom, he had no sense of the intruder in his mind.
“Momo!” Abra cried again. She was holding out her arms.
The woman in the cloud might have looked at her. Might even have smiled. Then the shape of Concetta Reynolds was gone and the mist rolled at the clustered True Knot, many of them now clinging to one another in fright and bewilderment. To Dan, the red stuff looked like blood spreading in water.
“It’s steam,” Dan told them. “You bastards lived on it; now suck it in and die on it.”
He had known ever since the plan’s conception that if it didn’t happen fast, he would never live to see how well it succeeded, but he had never imagined it would occur as rapidly as it did. The measles that had already weakened them might have had something to do with it, because some lasted a little longer than others. Even so, it was over in a matter of seconds.
They howled in his head like dying wolves. The sound appalled Dan, but this was not true of his companion.
“Good!” Abra shouted. She shook her fists at them. “How does it taste? How does my momo taste? Is she good? Have as much as you want! HAVE ALL OF IT!”
They began to cycle. Through the red mist, Dan saw two of them embracing with their foreheads pressed together, and in spite of all they had done—all they were—the sight moved him. He saw the words I love you on Short Eddie’s lips; saw Big