“That kid,” Jack muttered. His jaws were clamped together, the muscles in the cheeks standing out. “We don't deserve him.”

“You have him, all the same,” Edmonds said dryly. “At any rate, he retires into a fantasy world from time to time. Nothing unusual about that; lots of kids do. As I recall, I had my own invisible friend when I was Danny's age, a talking rooster named Chug-Chug. Of course no one could see Chug-Chug but me. I had two older brothers who often left me behind, and in such a situation Chug-Chug came in mighty handy. And of course you two must understand why Danny's invisible friend is named Tony instead of Mike or Hal or Dutch.”

“Yes,” Wendy said.

“Have you ever pointed it out to him?”

“No,” Jack said. “Should we?”

“Why bother? Let him realize it in his own time, by his own logic. You see, Danny's fantasies were considerably deeper than those that grow around the ordinary invisible friend syndrome, but he felt he needed Tony that much more. Tony would come and show him pleasant things. Sometimes amazing things. Always good things. Once Tony showed him where Daddy's lost trunk was… under the stairs. Another time Tony showed him that Mommy and Daddy were going to take him to an amusement park for his birthday-”

“At Great Barrington!” Wendy cried. “But how could he know those things? It's eerie, the things he comes out with sometimes. Almost as if-”

“He had second sight?” Edmonds asked, smiling.

“He was born with a caul,” Wendy said weakly.

Edmonds's smile became a good, hearty laugh. Jack and Wendy exchanged a glance and then also smiled, both of them amazed at how easy it was. Danny's occasional “lucky guesses” about things was something else they had not discussed much.

“Next you'll be telling me he can levitate,” Edmonds said, still smiling. “No, no, no, I'm afraid not. It's not extrasensory but good old human perception, which in Danny's case is unusually keen. Mr. Torrance, he knew your trunk was under the stairs because you had looked everywhere else. Process of elimination, what? It's so simple Ellery Queen would laugh at it. Sooner or later you would have thought of it yourself.

“As for the amusement park at Great Barrington, whose idea was that originally? Yours or his?”

“His, of course,” Wendy said. “They advertised on all the morning children's programs. He was wild to go. But the thing is, Doctor, we couldn't afford to take him. And we had told him so.”

“Then a men's magazine I'd sold a story to back in 1971 sent a check for fifty dollars,” Jack said. “They were reprinting the story in an annual, or something. So we decided to spend it on Danny.”

Edmonds shrugged. “Wish fulfillment plus a lucky coincidence.”

“Goddammit, I bet that's just right,” Jack said.

Edmonds smiled a little. “And Danny himself told me that Tony often showed him things that never occurred. Visions based on faulty perception, that's all. Danny is doing subconsciously what these so-called mystics and mind readers do quite consciously and cynically. I admire him for it. If life doesn't cause him to retract his antennae, I think he'll be quite a man.”

Wendy nodded-of course she thought Danny would be quite a man-but the doctor's explanation struck her as glib. It tasted more like margarine than butter. Edmonds had not lived with them. He had not been there when Danny found lost buttons, told her that maybe the TV Guide was under the bed, that he thought he better wear his rubbers to nursery school even though the sun was out… and later that day they had walked home under her umbrella through the pouringrain. Edmonds couldn't know of the curious way Danny had of preguessing them both. She would decide to have an unusual evening cup of tea, go out in the kitchen and find her cup out with a tea bag in it. She would remember that the books were due at the library and find them all neatly piled up on the hall table, her library card on top. Or Jack would take it into his head to wax the Volkswagen and find Danny already out there, listening to tinny top-forty music on his crystal radio as he sat on the curb to watch.

Aloud she said, “Then why the nightmares now? Why did Tony tell him to lock the bathroom door?”

“I believe it's because Tony has outlived his usefulness,” Edmonds said. “He was born-Tony, not Danny-at a time when you and your husband were straining to keep your marriage together. Your husband was drinking too much. There was the incident of the broken arm. The ominous quiet between you.”

Ominous quiet, yes, that phrase was the real thing, anyway. The stiff, tense meals where the only conversation had been please pass the butter or Danny, eat the rest of your carrots or may I be excused, please. The nights when Jack was gone and she had lain down, dry-eyed, on the couch while Danny watched TV. The mornings when she and Jack had stalked around each other like two angry cats with a quivering, frightened mouse between them. It all rang true;

(dear God, do old scars ever stop hurting?)

horribly, horribly true.

Edmonds resumed, “But things have changed. You know, schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics. They have invisible friends. They may go and sit in the closet when they're depressed, withdrawing from the world. They attach talismanic importance to a special blanket, or a teddy bear, or a stuffed tiger. They suck their thumbs. When an adult sees things that aren't there, we consider him ready for the rubber room. When a child says he's seen a troll in his bedroom or a vampire outside the window, we simply smile indulgently. We have a one-sentence explanation that explains the whole range of such phenomena in children-”

“He'll grow out of it,” Jack said.

Edmonds blinked. “My very words,” he said. “Yes. Now I would guess that Danny was in a pretty good position to develop a full-fledged psychosis. Unhappy home life, a big imagination, the invisible friend who was so real to him that he nearly became real to you. Instead of `growing out of' is childhood schizophrenia, he might well have grown into it.”

“And become autistic?” Wendy asked. She had read about autism. The word itself frightened her; it sounded like dread and white silence.

“Possible but not necessarily. He might simply have entered Tony's world someday and never come back to what he calls `real things. ' “

“God,” Jack said.

“But now the basic situation has changed drastically. Mr. Torrance no longer drinks. You are in a new place where conditions have forced the three of you into a tighter family unit than ever before-certainly tighter than my own, where my wife and kids may see me for only two or three hours a day. To my mind, he is in the perfect healing situation. And I think the very fact that he is able to differentiate so sharply between Tony's world and `real things' says a lot about the fundamentally healthy state of his mind. He says that you two are no longer considering divorce. Is he as right as I think he is?”

“Yes,” Wendy said, and Jack squeezed her hand tightly, almost painfully. She squeezed back.

Edmonds nodded. “He really doesn't need Tony anymore. Danny is flushing him out of his system. Tony no longer brings pleasant visions but hostile nightmares that are too frightening for him to remember except fragmentarily. He internalized Tony during a difficult-desperate-life situation, and Tony is not leaving easily. But he is leaving. Your son is a little like a junkie kicking the habit.”

He stood up, and the Torrances stood also.

“As I said, I'm not a psychiatrist. If the nightmares are still continuing when your job at the Overlook ends next spring, Mr. Torrance, I would strongly urge you to take him to this man in Boulder.”

“I will.”

“Well, let's go out and tell him he can go home,” Edmonds said.