Doctor Sleep, Page 24

1

  At a hundred and two, Eleanor Ouellette was the oldest resident of Rivington House in that fall of 2013, old enough so her last name had never been Americanized. She answered not to Wil-LET but to a much more elegant French pronunciation: Oooh-LAY. Dan sometimes called her Miss Oooh-La-La, which always made her smile. Ron Stimson, one of four docs who made regular day-rounds at the hospice, once told Dan that Eleanor was proof that living was sometimes stronger than dying. "Her liver function is nil, her lungs are shot from eighty years of smoking, she has colorectal cancer--moving at a snail's pace, but extremely malignant--and the walls of her heart are as thin as a cat's whisker. Yet she continues."

  If Azreel was right (and in Dan's experience, he was never wrong), Eleanor's long-term lease on life was about to expire, but she certainly didn't look like a woman on the threshold. She was sitting up in bed, stroking the cat, when Dan walked in. Her hair was beautifully permed--the hairdresser had been in just the day before--and her pink nightie was as immaculate as always, the top half giving a bit of color to her bloodless cheeks, the bottom half spread away from the sticks of her legs like a ballgown.

  Dan raised his hands to the sides of his face, the fingers spread and wiggling. "Ooh-la-la! Une belle femme! Je suis amoureux!"

  She rolled her eyes, then cocked her head and smiled at him. "Maurice Chevalier you ain't, but I like you, cher. You're cheery, which is important, you're cheeky, which is more important, and you've got a lovely bottom, which is all-important. The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and you have a good one. In my prime, I would have corked it with my thumb and then eaten you alive. Preferably by the pool of Le Meridien in Monte Carlo, with an admiring audience to applaud my frontside and backside efforts."

  Her voice, hoarse but cadenced, managed to render this image charming rather than vulgar. To Dan, Eleanor's cigarette rasp was the voice of a cabaret singer who had seen and done it all even before the German army goose-stepped down the Champs-Elysees in the spring of 1940. Washed up, maybe, but far from washed out. And while it was true she looked like the death of God in spite of the faint color reflected onto her face by her craftily chosen nightgown, she had looked like the death of God since 2009, the year she had moved into Room 15 of Rivington One. Only Azzie's attendance said that tonight was different.

  "I'm sure you would have been marvelous," he said.

  "Are you seeing any ladies, cher?"

  "Not currently, no." With one exception, and she was years too young for amour.

  "A shame. Because in later years, this"--she raised a bony forefinger, then let it dip--"becomes this. You'll see."

  He smiled and sat on her bed. As he had sat on so many. "How are you feeling, Eleanor?"

  "Not bad." She watched Azzie jump down and oil out the door, his work for the evening done. "I've had many visitors. They made your cat nervous, but he stuck it out until you came."

  "He's not my cat, Eleanor. He belongs to the house."

  "No," she said, as if the subject no longer interested her much, "he's yours."

  Dan doubted if Eleanor had had even one visitor--other than Azreel, that was. Not tonight, not in the last week or month, not in the last year. She was alone in the world. Even the dinosaur of an accountant who had overseen her money matters for so many years, lumbering in to visit her once every quarter and toting a briefcase the size of a Saab's trunk, had now gone to his reward. Miss Ooh-La-La claimed to have relatives in Montreal, "but I have not quite enough money left to make visiting me worthwhile, cher."

  "Who's been in, then?" Thinking she might mean Gina Weems or Andrea Bottstein, the two nurses working the three-to-eleven in Riv One tonight. Or possibly Poul Larson, a slow-moving but decent orderly whom Dan thought of as the anti-Fred Carling, had stopped by for a natter.

  "As I said, many. They are passing even now. An endless parade of them. They smile, they bow, a child wags his tongue like a dog's tail. Some of them speak. Do you know the poet George Seferis?"

  "No, ma'am, I don't." Were there others here? He had reason to believe it was possible, but he had no sense of them. Not that he always did.

  "Mr. Seferis asks, 'Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?' The children are the saddest. There was a boy here who fell down a well."

  "Is that so?"

  "Yes, and a woman who committed suicide with a bedspring."

  He felt not even the slightest hint of a presence. Could his encounter with Abra Stone have sapped him? It was possible, and in any case, the shining came and went in tides he had never been able to chart. He didn't think that was it, however. He thought Eleanor had probably lapsed into dementia. Or she might be having him on. It wasn't impossible. Quite the wag was Eleanor Ooh-La-La. Someone--was it Oscar Wilde?--was reputed to have made a joke on his deathbed: Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.

  "You are to wait," Eleanor said. There was no humor in her voice now. "The lights will announce an arrival. There may be other disturbances. The door will open. Then your visitor will come."

  Dan looked doubtfully at the door to the hall, which was open already. He always left it open, so Azzie could leave if he wanted to. He usually did, once Dan showed up to take over.

  "Eleanor, would you like some cold juice?"

  "I would if there were ti--" she began, and then the life ran out of her face like water from a basin with a hole in it. Her eyes fixed at a point over his head and her mouth fell open. Her cheeks sagged and her chin dropped almost to her scrawny chest. The top plate of her dentures also dropped, slid over her lower lip, and hung in an unsettling open-air grin.

  Fuck, that was quick.

  Carefully, he hooked a finger beneath the denture plate and removed it. Her lip pulled out, then snapped back with a tiny plip sound. Dan put the plate on her night table, started to get up, then settled back. He waited for the red mist the old Tampa nurse had called the gasp . . . as though it were a pulling-in instead of a letting-out. It didn't come.

  You are to wait.

  All right, he could do that, at least for awhile. He reached for Abra's mind and found nothing. Maybe that was good. She might already be taking pains to guard her thoughts. Or maybe his own ability--his sensitivity--had departed. If so, it didn't matter. It would be back. It always had been, at any rate.

  He wondered (as he had before) why he had never seen flies on the face of any Rivington House guest. Maybe because he didn't need to. He had Azzie, after all. Did Azzie see something with those wise green eyes of his? Maybe not flies, but something? He must.

  Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?

  It was so quiet on this floor tonight, and still so early! There was no sound of conversation from the common room at the end of the hall. No TV or radio played. He couldn't hear the squeak of Poul's sneakers or the low voices of Gina and Andrea down at the nurses' station. No phone rang. As for his watch--

  Dan raised it. No wonder he couldn't hear its faint ticking. It had stopped.

  The overhead fluorescent bar went off, leaving only Eleanor's table lamp. The fluorescent came back on, and the lamp flickered out. It came on again and then it and the overhead went off together. On . . . off . . . on.

  "Is someone here?"

  The pitcher on the night table rattled, then stilled. The dentures he had removed gave a single unsettling clack. A queer ripple ran along the sheet of Eleanor's bed, as if something beneath it had been startled into sudden motion. A puff of warm air pressed a quick kiss against Dan's cheek, then was gone.

  "Who is it?" His heartbeat remained regular, but he could feel it in his neck and wrists. The hair on the back of his neck felt thick and stiff. He suddenly knew what Eleanor had been seeing in her last moments: a parade of

  ( ghostie people)

  the dead, passing into her room from one wall and passing out through the other. Passing out? No, passing on. He didn't know Seferis, but he knew Auden: Death takes the rolling-in-money, the screamingly funny, and those who ar
e very well hung. She had seen them all and they were here n--

  But they weren't. He knew they weren't. The ghosts Eleanor had seen were gone and she had joined their parade. He had been told to wait. He was waiting.

  The door to the hall swung slowly shut. Then the bathroom door opened.

  From Eleanor Ouellette's dead mouth came a single word: "Danny."

  2

  When you enter the town of Sidewinder, you pass a sign reading WELCOME TO THE TOP OF AMERICA! It isn't, but it's close. Twenty miles from the place where the Eastern Slope becomes the Western, a dirt road splits off from the main highway, winding north. The burned-in-wood sign arched over this byway reads WELCOME TO THE BLUEBELL CAMPGROUND! STAY AWHILE, PARTNER!

  That sounds like good old western hospitality, but locals know that more often than not the road is gated shut, and when it is, a less friendly sign hangs from it: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. How they do business is a mystery to the folks in Sidewinder, who'd like to see the Bluebell open every day the upcountry roads aren't snowed in. They miss the commerce the Overlook used to bring in, and hoped the campground would at least partially make up for it (although they know that Camper People don't have the kind of money the Hotel People used to pump into the local economy). That hasn't been the case. The general consensus is that the campground is some rich corporation's tax haven, a designated money-loser.

  It's a haven, all right, but the corporation it shelters is the True Knot, and when they are in residence, the only RVs in the big parking lot are their RVs, with Rose the Hat's EarthCruiser standing tallest among them.

  On that September evening, nine members of the True were gathered in the high-ceilinged, pleasantly rustic building known as Overlook Lodge. When the campground was open to the public, the Lodge served as a restaurant that put on two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. The food was prepared by Short Eddie and Big Mo (rube names Ed and Maureen Higgins). Neither was up to Dick Hallorann's culinary standards--few were!--but it's hard to screw up too badly on the things Camper People like to eat: meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, pancakes drenched in Log Cabin syrup, meatloaf, chicken stew, meatloaf, Tuna Surprise, and meatloaf with mushroom gravy. After dinner, the tables were cleared for bingo or card parties. On weekends, there were dances. These festivities took place only when the campground was open. This evening--as, three time zones east, Dan Torrance sat beside a dead woman and waited for his visitor--there was business of a different sort to transact in Overlook Lodge.

  Jimmy Numbers was at the head of a single table that had been set up in the middle of the polished bird's-eye maple floor. His PowerBook was open, the desktop displaying a photograph of his hometown, which happened to be deep in the Carpathian Mountains. ( Jimmy liked to joke that his grandfather had once entertained a young London solicitor named Jonathan Harker.)

  Clustered around him, looking down at the screen, were Rose, Crow Daddy, Barry the Chink, Snakebite Andi, Token Charlie, Apron Annie, Diesel Doug, and Grampa Flick. None of them wanted to stand next to Grampa, who smelled as if he might have had a minor disaster in his pants and then forgotten to shower it off (a thing that happened more and more frequently these days), but this was important and they put up with him.

  Jimmy Numbers was an unassuming guy with a receding hairline and a pleasant if vaguely simian face. He looked about fifty, which was one-third of his actual age. "I googled Lickety-Spliff and got nothing useful, which is what I expected. In case you care, lickety-spliff is teenage slang that means to do something really slow instead of really fast--"

  "We don't," Diesel Doug said. "And by the way, you smell a trifle rank, Gramps. No offense, but when was the last time you wiped your ass?"

  Grampa Flick bared his teeth--eroded and yellow, but all his own--at Doug. "Your wife wiped it for me just this morning, Deez. With her face, as it happens. Kinda nasty, but she seems to like that kind of thi--"

  "Shut your heads, both of you," Rose said. Her voice was toneless and unthreatening, but Doug and Grampa both shrank away from her, their faces those of chastened schoolboys. "Go on, Jimmy. But stay on point. I want to have a concrete plan, and soon."

  "The rest of them are going to be reluctant no matter how concrete the plan is," Crow said. "They're going to say it's been a good year for steam. That movie theater thing, the church fire in Little Rock, and the terrorist thing in Austin. Not to mention Juarez. I was dubious about going south of the border, but it was good."

  Better than good, actually. Juarez had become known as the murder capital of the world, earning its sobriquet with over twenty-five hundred homicides a year. Many were torture-killings. The pervading atmosphere had been exceedingly rich. It wasn't pure steam, and it made you feel a little whoopsy in the stomach, but it did the job.

  "All those fucking beans gave me the runs," Token Charlie said, "but I have to admit that the pickings were excellent."

  "It was a good year," Rose agreed, "but we can't make a business of Mexico--we're too conspicuous. Down there, we're rich americanos. Up here, we fade into the woodwork. And aren't you tired of living from year to year? Always on the move and always counting canisters? This is different. This is the motherlode."

  None of them replied. She was their leader and in the end they would do what she said, but they didn't understand about the girl. That was all right. When they encountered her for themselves, they would. And when they had her locked up and producing steam pretty much to order, they'd offer to get down on their knees and kiss Rose's feet. She might even take them up on it.

  "Go on, Jimmy, but get to the point."

  "I'm pretty sure what you picked up was a teen-slang version of Lickety-Split. It's a chain of New England convenience stores. There are seventy-three in all, from Providence to Presque Isle. A grammar school kid with an iPad could have nailed that in about two minutes. I printed out the locations and used Whirl 360 to get pix. I found six that have mountain views. Two in Vermont, two in New Hampshire, and two in Maine."

  His laptop case was under his chair. He grabbed it, fumbled in the flap pocket, brought out a folder, and handed it to Rose. "These aren't pictures of the stores, they're pictures of various mountain views that can be seen from the neighborhoods the stores are in. Once more courtesy of Whirl 360, which is far better than Google Earth, and God bless its nosy little heart. Take a look and see if any ring a bell. If not, see if there are any you can definitely eliminate."

  Rose opened the folder and slowly went through the photographs. The two showing Vermont's Green Mountains she put aside at once. One of the Maine locations was also wrong; it showed only one mountain, and she had seen a whole range of them. The other three she looked at longer. Finally she handed them back to Jimmy Numbers.

  "One of these."

  He turned the pictures over. "Fryeburg, Maine . . . Madison, New Hampshire . . . Anniston, New Hampshire. Got a feel for which one of the three?"

  Rose took them again, then held up the photos of the White Mountains as seen from Fryeburg and Anniston. "I think it's one of these, but I'm going to make sure."

  "How are you going to do that?" Crow asked.

  "I'm going to visit her."

  "If everything you say is true, that could be dangerous."

  "I'll do it when she's asleep. Young girls sleep deeply. She'll never know I was there."

  "Are you sure you need to do that? These three places are pretty close together. We could check them all."

  "Yes!" Rose cried. "We'll just cruise around and say, 'We're looking for a local girl, but we can't seem to read her location the way we normally can, so give us a little help. Have you noticed any junior high girls around here with precognition or mind-reading talents?' "

  Crow Daddy gave a sigh, stuck his big hands deep in his pockets, and looked at her.

  "I'm sorry," Rose said. "I'm a little on edge, all right? I want to do this and get it done. And you don't have to worry about me. I can take care of myself."

  3

  Dan sat looking
at the late Eleanor Ouellette. The open eyes, now beginning to glaze. The tiny hands with their palms upturned. Most of all at the open mouth. Inside was all the clockless silence of death.

  "Who are you?" Thinking: As if I didn't know. Hadn't he wished for answers?

  "You grew up fine." The lips didn't move, and there seemed to be no emotion in the words. Perhaps death had robbed his old friend of his human feelings, and what a bitter shame that would be. Or perhaps it was someone else, masquerading as Dick. Something else.

  "If you're Dick, prove it. Tell me something only he and I could know."

  Silence. But the presence was still here. He felt it. Then:

  "You asked me why Mrs. Brant wanted the car-park man's pants."

  Dan at first had no idea what the voice was talking about. Then he did. The memory was on one of the high shelves where he kept all the bad Overlook memories. And his lockboxes, of course. Mrs. Brant had been a checkout on the day Danny arrived with his parents, and he had caught a random thought from her as the Overlook's valet delivered her car: I'd sure like to get into his pants.

  "You were just a little boy with a great big radio inside your head. I felt sorry for you. I was scared for you, too. And I was right to be scared, wasn't I?"

  In that there was a faint echo of his old friend's kindness and humor. It was Dick, all right. Dan looked at the dead woman, dumbfounded. The lights in the room flickered on and off again. The water pitcher gave another brief jitter.

  "I can't stay long, son. It hurts to be here."

  "Dick, there's a little girl--"

  "Abra." Almost a sigh. "She's like you. It all comes around."

  "She thinks there's a woman who may be after her. She wears a hat. It's an old-fashioned tophat. Sometimes she only has one long tooth on top. When she's hungry. This is what she told me, anyway."

  "Ask your question, son. I can't stay. This world is a dream of a dream to me now."

  "There are others. The tophat woman's friends. Abra saw them with flashlights. Who are they?"

  Silence again. But Dick was still there. Changed, but there. Dan could feel him in his nerve endings, and as a kind of electricity skating on the damp surfaces of his eyes.