Tan Tei Kurotabi

Dan’s Blackboard serves two very different purposes in Dan Torrance’s life at Rivington House: it is a working hospice register, and it becomes a surface on which he and Abra communicate across distance. The change is marked by what appears on it and by what disappears. Names and room numbers keep the living patients in order; erased names register those who have died. Later, Abra’s chalk messages interrupt that routine with evidence of a connection Dan cannot explain but gradually comes to recognize.

A Practical Register at Rivington House

The blackboard is a large, schoolroom-style board Dan finds leaning against a wall in the turret room. It had been hidden behind a collection of old, badly damaged wheelchairs for at least fifty years. Most of the stored items are junk, but Dan keeps this one because it is useful. He lists the hospice’s patients and their room numbers, removes the names of people who die, and adds those newly admitted. The board makes the work of care visible as a continually revised list rather than a fixed record.

In the spring of 2004, it holds thirty-two names. Ten patients are in Rivington One, twelve in Rivington Two, and the rest occupy the two floors beneath Dan’s cramped but serviceable apartment. Its everyday function is plain and administrative, yet the list also traces the movement of people through a place where death is expected. Erasing a name is not an abstract act: it follows a patient’s death, while each new name marks another admission into the hospice’s care.

Dan has come to regard that care as his calling, and Rivington House as home. The blackboard belongs to his practical life there, a tool used to keep track of those for whom he is responsible. Its transformation does not replace that purpose; the uncanny writing appears on the same surface, amid the same duties of remembering, updating, and erasing.

Abra’s First Messages

On the morning of Abra’s birthday party, Dan wakes to find that every patient’s name has been erased. In their place, in large, uneven letters, is the word “hEll”. He studies it, touches the chalk, and hopes to sense a psychic presence. He answers aloud and wonders whether the writer might be Abra. Nothing follows immediately. After showering, he begins to erase the word and restore the patient names and room numbers from the attendance memo. A thought comes to him—“daddy says we’ll have balloons”—and he pauses for more, but no further message arrives. He finishes the register. At noon, the board remains as he left it.

The board’s altered lettering turns an ordinary room into a point of contact, but the exchange is tentative: Dan can ask questions without receiving a reply. Later, he addresses the unseen writer more directly, asking whether she is the little girl who sometimes writes on his board and whether her name is Abra. He senses that someone is present even though the board gives him no answer. During another encounter, after the wind makes the turret groan, he feels a small, warm hand slip into his. He recognizes the girl as Abra and knows that people sometimes call her Abby. The contact lasts only seconds, but it comforts him enough to let him sleep.

Warnings and Replies

The board also conveys distress, not merely signs of friendship. After a conversation with Casey Kingsley, Dan returns to his room and finds the message “They are killing the baseball boy!” written on the board. He slowly erases it, then asks what baseball boy the message means. The warning supplies no explanation, but it changes the board’s role: its writing can direct Dan’s attention toward a danger beyond the hospice and beyond anything the patient register was designed to record.

Dan remains uncertain about how to reach the girl or how much he should involve himself in her life. He considers the difficulty of approaching her parents as a stranger who claims that their daughter visits his room psychically. Rather than seek them out, he leaves a message addressed to her, signing it as another friend alongside Tony: “Tony and I wish you a happy summer day, Abra! Your OTHER friend, Dan.” The message is a deliberate reply to a connection that had previously been made only through unexplained writing and impressions.

When Dan returns to the turret room after agreeing to be there, the board bears a new message: “I had a wonderful day!” The reply gives the exchange a reciprocal quality. Chalk marks that once disrupted the patient roster have become a way for Abra to report an experience to Dan, while his own words establish that he accepts the friendship. The board is still available for its hospice work, but it now also carries messages whose significance depends on recognizing a writer who is not physically in the room.

Erasure, Care, and Connection

The blackboard’s repeated erasures link its two functions without making them identical. In its register, erasure follows death and makes room for an updated list of patients. In the messages from Abra, Dan erases the uncanny writing so he can restore the names and room numbers, but the words have already made a connection—or delivered a warning. The same physical act therefore belongs both to routine administration and to the management of a communication that exceeds ordinary sight and hearing.

That overlap fits Dan’s life at the hospice. He uses the board to keep track of people near the end of life, while his encounters with Abra draw him toward a child whose danger he only begins to understand. The object does not explain their connection; it gives that connection a material, repeatable form: chalk appears, Dan reads or answers, and the surface can be cleared for another message or for the names of the patients in his care. Dan’s Blackboard matters because it holds these activities together without resolving the boundary between them. It remains a practical tool in a place organized around mortality, and becomes, at intervals, evidence that Dan is not alone in the room.