4. Little Danny: Like Father, Like Son
After the demonic rages his father would fly into while under the influence and the terrible way his mother succumbed to smoking Danny vowed to never touch either. That was before he grew up and could not silence the images of the horrific dead people his ability to shine would show him. For Danny, alcohol became the only way to sleep. Now in his forties Dan is a drifting drunk who drowns his psychic abilities in whiskey. He wakes up in an apartment with a strange woman named Deenie and a massive hangover. Rising with a pounding headache he finds the woman's toddler son in a soaked diaper reaching for a pile of cocaine on the coffee table. Here King brings the alcoholic similarities between Jack and Danny to light as Dan pulls the kid away by the arm and sees bruises on his arm. He's not sure who has made the bruises, but doesn't stick around to find out. He ultimately leaves the kid by his mother, steals $70, and leaves to drift on to the next town. However, he can never get the image of the bruised kid reaching for the coke out of his mind. The sense of crushing guilt that he may have left that kid in an abusive environment like the one he grew up with weighs heavily upon him. As Halloran told him all those years ago as a kid the real ghosts are his memories that never go away.