Doctor Sleep, Page 21

  "He'll bounce back," Rose said. "You know Grampa."

  Barry grinned. "Tougher'n a boiled owl."

  Rose nodded and got her cart rolling again. "You bet he is."

  Just an ordinary weekday afternoon at the supermarket, and as she took her leave of Barry, she at first mistook what was happening to her for something mundane, maybe low sugar. She was prone to sugar crashes, and usually kept a candybar in her purse. Then she realized someone was inside her head. Someone was looking.

  Rose had not risen to her position as head of the True Knot by being indecisive. She halted with her cart pointed toward the meat counter (her planned next stop) and immediately leaped into the conduit some nosy and potentially dangerous person had established. Not a member of the True, she would have known any one of them immediately, but not an ordinary rube, either.

  No, this was far from ordinary.

  The market swung away and suddenly she was looking out at a mountain range. Not the Rockies, she would have recognized those. These were smaller. The Catskills? The Adirondacks? It could have been either, or some other. As for the looker . . . Rose thought it was a child. Almost certainly a girl, and one she had encountered before.

  I have to see what she looks like, then I can find her anytime I want to. I have to get her to look in a mir--

  But then a thought as loud as a shotgun blast in a closed room

  (NO! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!)

  wiped her mind clean and sent her staggering against shelves of canned soups and vegetables. They went cascading to the floor, rolling everywhere. For a moment or two Rose thought she was going to follow them, swooning like the dewy heroine of a romance novel. Then she was back. The girl had broken the connection, and in rather spectacular fashion.

  Was her nose bleeding? She wiped it with her fingers and checked. No. Good.

  One of the stockboys came rushing up. "Are you okay, ma'am?"

  "Fine. Just felt a little faint for a second or two. Probably from the tooth extraction I had yesterday. It's passed off now. I've made a mess, haven't I? Sorry. Good thing it was cans instead of bottles."

  "No problem, no problem at all. Would you like to come up front and sit down on the taxi bench?"

  "That won't be necessary," Rose said. And it wasn't, but she was done shopping for the day. She rolled her cart two aisles over and left it there.

  10

  She had brought her Tacoma (old but reliable) down from the high-country campground west of Sidewinder, and once she was in the cab, she pulled her phone out of her purse and hit speed dial. It rang at the other end just a single time.

  "What's up, Rosie-girl?" Crow Daddy.

  "We've got a problem."

  Of course it was also an opportunity. A kid with enough in her boiler to set off a blast like that--to not only detect Rose but send her reeling--wasn't just a steamhead but the find of the century. She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.

  "Talk to me." All business now.

  "A little over two years ago. The kid in Iowa. Remember him?"

  "Sure."

  "You also remember me telling you we had a looker?"

  "Yeah. East Coast. You thought it was probably a girl."

  "It was a girl, all right. She just found me again. I was in Sam's, minding my own business, and then all at once there she was."

  "Why, after all this time?"

  "I don't know and I don't care. But we have to have her, Crow. We have to have her."

  "Does she know who you are? Where we are?"

  Rose had thought about this while walking to the truck. The intruder hadn't seen her, of that much she was sure. The kid had been on the inside looking out. As to what she had seen? A supermarket aisle. How many of those were there in America? Probably a million.

  "I don't think so, but that's not the important part."

  "Then what is?"

  "Remember me telling you she was big steam? Huge steam? Well, she's even bigger than that. When I tried to turn it around on her, she blew me out of her head like I was a piece of milkweed fluff. Nothing like that's ever happened to me before. I would have said it was impossible."

  "Is she potential True or potential food?"

  "I don't know." But she did. They needed steam--stored steam--a lot more than they needed fresh recruits. Besides, Rose wanted no one in the True with that much power.

  "Okay, how do we find her? Any ideas?"

  Rose thought of what she'd seen through the girl's eyes before she had been so unceremoniously booted back to Sam's Supermarket in Sidewinder. Not much, but there had been a store . . .

  She said, "The kids call it the Lickety-Spliff."

  "Huh?"

  "Nothing, never mind. I need to think about it. But we're going to have her, Crow. We've got to have her."

  There was a pause. When he spoke again, Crow sounded cautious. "The way you're talking, there might be enough to fill a dozen canisters. If, that is, you really don't want to try Turning her."

  Rose gave a distracted, yapping laugh. "If I'm right, we don't have enough canisters to store the steam from this one. If she was a mountain, she'd be Everest." He made no reply. Rose didn't need to see him or poke into his mind to know he was flabbergasted. "Maybe we don't have to do either one."

  "I don't follow."

  Of course he didn't. Long-think had never been Crow's specialty. "Maybe we don't have to Turn her or kill her. Think cows."

  "Cows."

  "You can butcher one and get a couple of months' worth of steaks and hamburgers. But if you keep it alive and take care of it, it will give milk for six years. Maybe even eight."

  Silence. Long. She let it stretch. When he replied, he sounded more cautious than ever. "I've never heard of anything like that. We kill em once we've got the steam or if they've got something we need and they're strong enough to survive the Turn, we Turn em. The way we Turned Andi back in the eighties. Grampa Flick might say different, if you believe him he remembers all the way back to when Henry the Eighth was killing his wives, but I don't think the True has ever tried just holding onto a steamhead. If she's as strong as you say, it could be dangerous."

  Tell me something I don't know. If you'd felt what I did, you'd call me crazy to even think about it. And maybe I am. But . . .

  But she was tired of spending so much of her time--the whole family's time--scrambling for nourishment. Of living like tenth-century Gypsies when they should have been living like the kings and queens of creation. Which was what they were.

  "Talk to Grampa, if he's feeling better. And Heavy Mary, she's been around almost as long as Flick. Snakebite Andi. She's new, but she's got a good head on her shoulders. Anyone else you think might have valuable input."

  "Jesus, Rosie. I don't know--"

  "Neither do I, not yet. I'm still reeling. All I'm asking right now is for you to do some spadework. You are the advance man, after all."

  "Okay . . ."

  "Oh, and make sure you talk to Walnut. Ask him what drugs might keep a rube child nice and docile for a long period of time."

  "This girl doesn't sound like much of a rube to me."

  "Oh, she is. A big old fat rube milk-cow."

  Not exactly true. A great big white whale, that's what she is.

  Rose ended the call without waiting to see if Crow Daddy had anything else to say. She was the boss, and as far as she was concerned, the discussion was over.

  She's a white whale, and I want her.

  But Ahab hadn't wanted his whale just because Moby would provide tons of blubber and almost endless barrels of oil, and Rose didn't want the girl because she might--given the right drug cocktails and a lot of powerful psychic soothing--provide a nearly endless supply of steam. It was more personal than that. Turn her? Make her part of the True Knot? Never. The kid had kicked Rose the Hat out of her head as if she were some annoying religious goofball going door-to-door and handing out end-of-the-world tracts. No one had ever given her that kind of bum's rush
before. No matter how powerful she was, she had to be taught a lesson.

  And I'm just the woman for the job.

  Rose the Hat started her truck, pulled out of the supermarket parking lot, and headed for the family-owned Bluebell Campground. It was a really beautiful location, and why not? One of the world's great resort hotels had once stood there.

  But of course, the Overlook had burned to the ground long ago.

  11

  The Renfrews, Matt and Cassie, were the neighborhood's party people, and they decided on the spur of the moment to have an Earthquake Barbecue. They invited everyone on Richland Court, and almost everyone came. Matt got a case of soda, a few bottles of cheap wine, and a beer-ball from the Lickety-Split up the street. It was a lot of fun, and David Stone enjoyed himself tremendously. As far as he could tell, Abra did, too. She hung with her friends Julie and Emma, and he made sure that she ate a hamburger and some salad. Lucy had told him they had to be vigilant about their daughter's eating habits, because she'd reached the age when girls started to be very conscious about their weight and looks--the age at which anorexia or bulimia were apt to show their skinny, starveling faces.

  What he didn't notice (although Lucy might have, had she been there) was that Abra wasn't joining in her friends' apparently nonstop gigglefest. And, after eating a bowl of ice cream (a small bowl), she asked her father if she could go back across the street and finish her homework.

  "Okay," David said, "but thank Mr. and Mrs. Renfrew first."

  This Abra would have done without having to be reminded, but she agreed without saying so.

  "You're very welcome, Abby," Mrs. Renfrew said. Her eyes were almost preternaturally bright from three glasses of white wine. "Isn't this cool? We should have earthquakes more often. Although I was talking to Vicky Fenton--you know the Fentons, on Pond Street? That's just a block over and she said they didn't feel anything. Isn't that weird?"

  "Sure is," Abra agreed, thinking that when it came to weird, Mrs. Renfrew didn't know the half of it.

  12

  She finished her homework and was downstairs watching TV with her dad when Mom called. Abra talked to her awhile, then turned the phone over to her father. Lucy said something, and Abra knew what it had been even before Dave glanced at her and said, "Yeah, she's fine, just blitzed from homework, I think. They give the kids so much now. Did she tell you we had a little earthquake?"

  "Going upstairs, Dad," Abra said, and he gave her an absent wave.

  She sat at her desk, turned on her computer, then turned it off again. She didn't want to play Fruit Ninja and she certainly didn't want to IM with anyone. She had to think about what to do, because she had to do something.

  She put her schoolbooks in her backpack, then looked up and the woman from the supermarket was staring in at her from the window. That was impossible because the window was on the second floor, but she was there. Her skin was unblemished and purest white, her cheekbones high, her dark eyes wide-set and slightly tilted at the corners. Abra thought she might be the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Also, she realized at once, and without a shadow of a doubt, she was insane. Masses of black hair framed her perfect, somehow arrogant face, and streamed down over her shoulders. Staying in place on this wealth of hair in spite of the crazy angle at which it was cocked, was a jaunty tophat of scuffed velvet.

  She's not really there, and she's not in my head, either. I don't know how I can be seeing her but I am and I don't think she kn--

  The madwoman in the darkening window grinned, and when her lips spread apart, Abra saw she only had one tooth on top, a monstrous discolored tusk. She understood it had been the last thing Bradley Trevor had ever seen, and she screamed, screamed as loudly as she could . . . but only inside, because her throat was locked and her vocal cords were frozen.

  Abra shut her eyes. When she opened them again, the grinning white-faced woman was gone.

  Not there. But she could come. She knows about me and she could come.

  In that moment, she realized what she should have known as soon as she saw the abandoned factory. There was really only one person she could call on. Only one who could help her. She closed her eyes again, this time not to hide from a horrible vision looking in at her from the window, but to summon help.

  (TONY, I NEED YOUR DAD! PLEASE, TONY, PLEASE!)

  Still with her eyes shut--but now feeling the warmth of tears on her lashes and cheeks--she whispered, "Help me, Tony. I'm scared."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ABRA'S THEORY OF RELATIVITY

  1

  The last run of the day on The Helen Rivington was called the Sunset Cruise, and many evenings when Dan wasn't on shift at the hospice, he took the controls. Billy Freeman, who had made the run roughly twenty-five thousand times during his years as a town employee, was delighted to turn them over.

  "You never get tired of it, do you?" he asked Dan once.

  "Put it down to a deprived childhood."

  It hadn't been, not really, but he and his mother had moved around a lot after the settlement money ran out, and she had worked a lot of jobs. With no college degree, most of them had been low-paying. She'd kept a roof over their heads and food on the table, but there had never been much extra.

  Once--he'd been in high school, the two of them living in Bradenton, not far from Tampa--he'd asked her why she never dated. By then he was old enough to know she was still a very good-looking woman. Wendy Torrance had given him a crooked smile and said, "One man was enough for me, Danny. Besides, now I've got you."

  "How much did she know about your drinking?" Casey K. had asked him during one of their meetings at the Sunspot. "You started pretty young, right?"

  Dan had needed to give that one some thought. "Probably more than I knew at the time, but we never talked about it. I think she was afraid to bring it up. Besides, I never got in trouble with the law--not then, anyway--and I graduated high school with honors." He had smiled grimly at Casey over his coffee cup. "And of course I never beat her up. I suppose that made a difference."

  Never got that train set, either, but the basic tenet AAs lived by was don't drink and things will get better. They did, too. Now he had the biggest little choo-choo a boy could wish for, and Billy was right, it never got old. He supposed it might in another ten or twenty years, but even then Dan thought he'd probably still offer to drive the last circuit of the day, just to pilot the Riv at sunset, out to the turnaround at Cloud Gap. The view was spectacular, and when the Saco was calm (which it usually was once its spring convulsions had subsided), you could see all the colors twice, once above and once below. Everything was silence at the far end of the Riv's run; it was as if God was holding His breath.

  The trips between Labor Day and Columbus Day, when the Riv shut down for the winter, were the best of all. The tourists were gone, and the few riders were locals, many of whom Dan could now call by name. On weeknights like tonight, there were less than a dozen paying customers. Which was fine by him.

  It was fully dark when he eased the Riv back into its dock at Teenytown Station. He leaned against the side of the first passenger car with his cap (ENGINEER DAN stitched in red above the bill) tipped back on his head, wishing his handful of riders a very good night. Billy was sitting on a bench, the glowing tip of his cigarette intermittently lighting his face. He had to be nearly seventy, but he looked good, had made a complete recovery from his abdominal surgery two years before, and said he had no plans to retire.

  "What would I do?" he'd asked on the single occasion Dan had brought the subject up. "Retire to that deathfarm where you work? Wait for your pet cat to pay me a visit? Thanks but no thanks."

  When the last two or three riders had ambled on their way, probably in search of dinner, Billy butted his cigarette and joined him. "I'll put er in the barn. Unless you want to do that, too."

  "No, go right ahead. You've been sitting on your ass long enough. When are you going to give up the smokes, Billy? You know the doctor said they contributed to y
our little gut problem."

  "I've cut down to almost nothing," Billy said, but with a telltale downward shift in his gaze. Dan could have found out just how much Billy had cut down--he probably wouldn't even need to touch the guy in order to get that much info--but he didn't. One day in the summer just past, he'd seen a kid wearing a t-shirt with an octagonal road sign printed on it. Instead of STOP, the sign said TMI. When Danny asked him what it meant, the kid had given him a sympathetic smile he probably reserved strictly for gentlemen of a fortyish persuasion. "Too much information," he'd said. Dan thanked him, thinking: Story of my life, young fellow.

  Everyone had secrets. This he had known from earliest childhood. Decent people deserved to keep theirs, and Billy Freeman was decency personified.

  "Want to go for a coffee, Danno? You got time? Won't take me ten minutes to put this bitch to bed."

  Dan touched the side of the engine lovingly. "Sure, but watch your mouth. This is no bitch, this is a la--"

  That was when his head exploded.

  2

  When he came back to himself, he was sprawled on the bench where Billy had been smoking. Billy was sitting beside him, looking worried. Hell, looking scared half to death. He had his phone in one hand, with his finger poised over the buttons.

  "Put it away," Dan said. The words came out in a dusty croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. "I'm okay."

  "You sure? Jesus Christ, I thought you was havin a stroke. I thought it for sure."

  That's what it felt like.

  For the first time in years Dan thought of Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel's chef extraordinaire back in the day. Dick had known almost at once that Jack Torrance's little boy shared his own talent. Dan wondered now if Dick might still be alive. Almost certainly not; he'd been pushing sixty back then.

  "Who's Tony?" Billy asked.

  "Huh?"

  "You said 'Please, Tony, please.' Who's Tony?"

  "A guy I used to know back in my drinking days." As an improvisation it wasn't much, but it was the first thing to come into his still-dazed mind. "A good friend."

  Billy looked at the lighted rectangle of his cell a few seconds longer, then slowly folded the phone and put it away. "You know, I don't believe that for a minute. I think you had one of your flashes. Like on the day you found out about my . . ." He tapped his stomach.