Doctor Sleep, Page 31

  3

  As Dave was sitting down in his Richland Court living room with his puzzling daughter and his even more puzzling guests, the Winnebago containing the True raiding party was southeast of Toledo. Walnut was at the wheel. Andi Steiner and Barry were sleeping--Andi like the dead, Barry rolling from side to side and muttering. Crow was in the parlor area, paging through The New Yorker. The only things he really liked were the cartoons and the tiny ads for weird items like yak-fur sweaters, Vietnamese coolie hats, and faux Cuban cigars.

  Jimmy Numbers plunked down next to him with his laptop in hand. "I've been combing the 'net. Had to hack and back with a couple of sites, but . . . can I show you something?"

  "How can you surf the 'net from an interstate highway?"

  Jimmy gave him a patronizing smile. "4G connection, baby. This is the modern age."

  "If you say so." Crow put his magazine aside. "What've you got?"

  "School pictures from Anniston Middle School." Jimmy tapped the touchpad and a photo appeared. No grainy newsprint job, but a high-res school portrait of a girl in a red dress with puffed sleeves. Her braided hair was chestnut brown, her smile wide and confident.

  "Julianne Cross," Jimmy said. He tapped the touchpad again and a redhead with a mischievous grin popped up. "Emma Deane." Another tap, and an even prettier girl appeared. Blue eyes, blond hair framing her face and spilling over her shoulders. Serious expression, but dimples hinting at a smile. "This one's Abra Stone."

  "Abra?"

  "Yeah, they name em anything these days. Remember when Jane and Mabel used to be good enough for the rubes? I read somewhere that Sly Stallone named his kid Sage Moonblood, how fucked up is that?"

  "You think one of these three is Rose's girl."

  "If she's right about the girl being a young teenager, it just about has to be. Probably Deane or Stone, they're the two who actually live on the street where the little earthquake was, but you can't count the Cross girl out completely. She's just around the corner." Jimmy Numbers made a swirling gesture on the touchpad and the three pictures zipped into a row. Written below each in curly script was MY SCHOOL MEMORIES.

  Crow studied them. "Is anyone going to tip to the fact that you've been filching pictures of little girls off of Facebook, or something? Because that sets off all kinds of warning bells in Rubeland."

  Jimmy looked offended. "Facebook, my ass. These came from the Frazier Middle School files, pipelined direct from their computer to mine." He made an unlovely sucking sound. "And guess what, a guy with access to a whole bank of NSA computers couldn't follow my tracks on this one. Who rocks?"

  "You do," Crow said. "I guess."

  "Which one do you think it is?"

  "If I had to pick . . ." Crow tapped Abra's picture. "She's got a certain look in her eyes. A steamy look."

  Jimmy puzzled over this for a moment, decided it was dirty, and guffawed. "Does it help?"

  "Yes. Can you print these pictures and make sure the others have copies? Particularly Barry. He's Locator in Chief on this one."

  "I'll do it right now. I'm packing a Fujitsu ScanSnap. Great little on-the-go machine. I used to have the S1100, but I swapped it when I read in Computerworld--"

  "Just do it, okay?"

  "Sure."

  Crow picked up the magazine again and turned to the cartoon on the last page, the one where you were supposed to fill in the caption. This week's showed an elderly woman walking into a bar with a bear on a chain. She had her mouth open, so the caption had to be her dialogue. Crow considered carefully, then printed: "Okay, which one of you assholes called me a cunt?"

  Probably not a winner.

  The Winnebago rolled on through the deepening evening. In the cockpit, Nut turned on the headlights. In one of the bunks, Barry the Chink turned and scratched at his wrist in his sleep. A red spot had appeared there.

  4

  The three men sat in silence while Abra went upstairs to get something in her room. Dave thought of suggesting coffee--they looked tired, and both men needed a shave--but decided he wasn't going to offer either of them so much as a dry Saltine until he got an explanation. He and Lucy had discussed what they were going to do when Abra came home some day in the not-too-distant future and announced that a boy had asked her out, but these were men, men, and it seemed that the one he didn't know had been dating his daughter for quite some time. After a fashion, anyway . . . and wasn't that really the question: What sort of fashion?

  Before any of them could risk starting a conversation that was bound to be awkward--and perhaps acrimonious--there came the muted thunder of Abra's sneakers on the stairs. She came into the room with a copy of The Anniston Shopper. "Look at the back page."

  Dave turned the newspaper over and grimaced. "What's this brown dreck?"

  "Dried coffee grounds. I threw the newspaper in the trash, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I fished it out again. I couldn't stop thinking about him." She pointed to the picture of Bradley Trevor in the bottom row. "And his parents. And his brothers and sisters, if he had them." Her eyes filled with tears. "He had freckles, Daddy. He hated them, but his mother said they were good luck."

  "You can't know that," Dave said with no conviction at all.

  "She knows," John said, "and so do you. Get with us on this, Dave. Please. It's important."

  "I want to know about you and my daughter," Dave said to Dan. "Tell me about that."

  Dan went through it again. Doodling Abra's name in his AA meeting book. The first chalked hello. His clear sense of Abra's presence on the night Charlie Hayes died. "I asked if she was the little girl who sometimes wrote on my blackboard. She didn't answer in words, but there was a little run of piano music. Some old Beatles tune, I think."

  Dave looked at John. "You told him about that!"

  John shook his head.

  Dan said, "Two years ago I got a blackboard message from her that said, 'They are killing the baseball boy.' I didn't know what it meant, and I'm not sure Abra did, either. That might have been the end of it, but then she saw that." He pointed to the back page of The Anniston Shopper with all those postage-stamp portraits.

  Abra told the rest.

  When she was done, Dave said: "So you flew to Iowa on a thirteen-year-old girl's sayso."

  "A very special thirteen-year-old girl," John said. "With some very special talents."

  "We thought all that was over." Dave shot Abra an accusing look. "Except for a few little premonitions, we thought she outgrew it."

  "I'm sorry, Daddy." Her voice was little more than a whisper.

  "Maybe she shouldn't have to be sorry," Dan said, hoping he didn't sound as angry as he felt. "She hid her ability because she knew you and your wife wanted it to be gone. She hid it because she loves you and wanted to be a good daughter."

  "She told you that, I suppose?"

  "We never even discussed it," Dan said. "But I had a mother I loved dearly, and because I did, I did the same thing."

  Abra shot him a look of naked gratitude. As she lowered her eyes again, she sent him a thought. Something she was embarrassed to say out loud.

  "She also didn't want her friends to know. She thought they wouldn't like her anymore. That they'd be scared of her. She was probably right about that, too."

  "Let's not lose sight of the major issue," John said. "We flew to Iowa, yes. We found the ethanol plant in the town of Freeman, just where Abra said it would be. We found the boy's body. And his glove. He wrote the name of his favorite baseball player in the pocket, but his name--Brad Trevor--is written on the strap."

  "He was murdered. That's what you're saying. By a bunch of wandering lunatics."

  "They ride in campers and Winnebagos," Abra said. Her voice was low and dreamy. She was looking at the towel-wrapped baseball glove as she spoke. She was afraid of it, and she wanted to put her hands on it. These conflicting emotions came through to Dan so clearly that they made him feel sick to his stomach. "They have funny names, like pirate names."

 
; Almost plaintively, Dave asked, "Are you sure the kid was murdered?"

  "The woman in the hat licked his blood off her hands," Abra said. She had been sitting on the stairs. Now she went to her father and put her face against his chest. "When she wants it, she has a special tooth. All of them do."

  "This kid was really like you?"

  "Yes." Abra's voice was muffled but understandable. "He could see through his hand."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Like when certain pitches would come, he could hit them because his hand saw them first. And when his mother lost something, he'd put his hand over his eyes and look through it to see where the thing was. I think. I don't know that part for sure, but sometimes I use my hand that way."

  "And that's why they killed him?"

  "I'm sure of it," Dan said.

  "For what? Some kind of ESP vitamin? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?"

  No one replied.

  "And they know Abra's on to them?"

  "They know." She raised her head. Her cheeks were flushed and wet with tears. "They don't know my name or where I live, but they know there is a me."

  "Then we need to go to the police," Dave said. "Or maybe . . . I guess we'd want the FBI in a case like this. They might have trouble believing it at first, but if the body's there--"

  Dan said, "I won't tell you that's a bad idea until we see what Abra can do with the baseball glove, but you need to think pretty carefully about the consequences. For me, for John, for you and your wife, and most of all for Abra."

  "I don't see what kind of trouble you and John could possibly--"

  John shifted impatiently in his chair. "Come on, David. Who found the body? Who dug it up and then buried it again, after taking a piece of evidence the forensics people would no doubt consider vital? Who brought that piece of evidence halfway across the country so an eighth-grader could use it like a Ouija board?"

  Although he hadn't meant to, Dan joined in. They were ganging up, and in other circumstances he might have felt bad about that, but not in these. "Your family's already in crisis, Mr. Stone. Your grandmother-in-law is dying, your wife's grieving and exhausted. This thing will hit the newspapers and the internet like a bomb. Wandering clan of murderers versus a supposedly psychic little girl. They'll want her on TV, you'll say no, and that will just make them hungrier. Your street will turn into an open-air studio, Nancy Grace will probably move in next door, and in a week or two the whole media mob will be yelling hoax at the top of its lungs. Remember Balloon Boy Dad? That's apt to be you. Meanwhile, these folks will still be out there."

  "So who's supposed to protect my little girl if they come after her? You two? A doctor and a hospice orderly? Or are you just a janitor?"

  You don't even know about the seventy-three-year-old groundskeeper standing watch down the street, Dan thought, and had to smile. "I'm a little of both. Look, Mr. Stone--"

  "Seeing as how you and my daughter are great pals, I guess you better call me Dave."

  "Okay, Dave it is. I guess what you do next depends on whether or not you're willing to gamble on law enforcement believing her. Especially when she tells them that the Winnebago People are life-sucking vampires."

  "Christ," Dave said. "I can't tell Lucy about this. She'll blow a fuse. All her fuses."

  "That would seem to answer the question about whether or not to call the police," John remarked.

  There was silence for a moment. Somewhere in the house a clock was ticking. Somewhere outside, a dog was barking.

  "The earthquake," Dave said suddenly. "That little earthquake. Was that you, Abby?"

  "I'm pretty sure," she whispered.

  Dave hugged her, then stood up and took the towel off the baseball glove. He held it, looking it over. "They buried him with it," he said. "They abducted him, tortured him, murdered him, and then buried him with his baseball glove."

  "Yes," Dan said.

  Dave turned to his daughter. "Do you really want to touch this thing, Abra?"

  She held out her hands and said, "No. But give it to me anyway."

  5

  David Stone hesitated, then handed it over. Abra took it in her hands and looked into the pocket. "Jim Thome," she said, and although Dan would have been willing to bet his savings (after twelve years of steady work and steady sobriety, he actually had some) that she had never encountered the name before, she said it correctly: Toe-me. "He's in the Six Hundred Club."

  "That's right," Dave said. "He--"

  "Hush," Dan said.

  They watched her. She raised the glove to her face and sniffed the pocket. (Dan, remembering the bugs, had to restrain a wince.) She said, "Not Barry the Chunk, Barry the Chink. Only he's not Chinese. They call him that because his eyes slant up at the corners. He's their . . . their . . . I don't know . . . wait . . ."

  She held the glove to her chest, like a baby. She began to breathe faster. Her mouth dropped open and she moaned. Dave, alarmed, put a hand on her shoulder. Abra shook him off. "No, Daddy, no!" She closed her eyes and hugged the glove. They waited.

  At last her eyes opened and she said, "They're coming for me."

  Dan got up, knelt beside her, and put one hand over both of hers.

  (how many is it some or is it all of them)

  "Just some. Barry's with them. That's why I can see. There are three others. Maybe four. One is a lady with a snake tattoo. They call us rubes. We're rubes to them."

  (is the woman with the hat)

  (no)

  "When will they get here?" John asked. "Do you know?"

  "Tomorrow. They have to stop first and get . . ." She paused. Her eyes searched the room, not seeing it. One hand slipped out from beneath Dan's and began to rub her mouth. The other clasped the glove. "They have to . . . I don't know . . ." Tears began to ooze from the corners of her eyes, not of sadness but of effort. "Is it medicine? Is it . . . wait, wait, let go of me, Dan, I have to . . . you have to let me . . ."

  He took his hand away. There was a brisk snap and a blue flick of static electricity. The piano played a discordant run of notes. On an occasional table by the door to the hall, a number of ceramic Hummel figures were jittering and rapping. Abra slipped the glove on her hand. Her eyes flew wide open.

  "One is a crow! One is a doctor and that's lucky for them because Barry is sick! He's sick!" She stared around at them wildly, then laughed. The sound of it made Dan's neck hairs stiffen. He thought it was the way lunatics must laugh when their medication is late. It was all he could do not to snatch the glove off her hand.

  "He's got the measles! He's caught the measles from Grampa Flick and he'll start to cycle soon! It was that fucking kid! He must never have gotten the shot! We have to tell Rose! We have to--"

  That was enough for Dan. He pulled the glove from her hand and threw it across the room. The piano ceased. The Hummels gave one final clatter and grew still, one of them on the verge of tumbling from the table. Dave was staring at his daughter with his mouth open. John had risen to his feet, but seemed incapable of moving any further.

  Dan took Abra by the shoulders and gave her a hard shake. "Abra, snap out of it."

  She stared at him with huge, floating eyes.

  (come back Abra it's okay)

  Her shoulders, which had been almost up to her ears, gradually relaxed. Her eyes were seeing him again. She let out a long breath and fell back against her father's encircling arm. The collar of her t-shirt was dark with sweat.

  "Abby?" Dave asked. "Abba-Doo? Are you all right?"

  "Yes, but don't call me that." She drew in air and let it out in another long sigh. "God, that was intense." She looked at her father. "I didn't drop the f-bomb, Daddy, that was one of them. I think it was the crow. He's the leader of the ones who are coming."

  Dan sat down beside Abra on the couch. "Sure you're okay?"

  "Yes. Now. But I never want to touch that glove again. They're not like us. They look like people and I think they used to be people, but now they have lizardy thoughts."


  "You said Barry has measles. Do you remember that?"

  "Barry, yes. The one they call the Chink. I remember everything. I'm so thirsty."

  "I'll get you water," John said.

  "No, something with sugar in it. Please."

  "There are Cokes in the fridge," Dave said. He stroked Abra's hair, then the side of her face, then the back of her neck. As if to reassure himself that she was still there.

  They waited until John came back with a can of Coke. Abra seized it, drank greedily, then belched. "Sorry," she said, and giggled.

  Dan had never been so happy to hear a giggle in his life. "John. Measles are more serious in adults, yes?"

  "You bet. It can lead to pneumonia, even blindness, due to corneal scarring."

  "Death?"

  "Sure, but it's rare."

  "It's different for them," Abra said, "because I don't think they usually get sick. Only Barry is. They're going to stop and get a package. It must be medicine for him. The kind you give in shots."

  "What did you mean about cycling?" Dave asked.

  "I don't know."

  "If Barry's sick, will that stop them?" John asked. "Will they maybe turn around and go back to wherever they came from?"

  "I don't think so. They might already be sick from Barry, and they know it. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain, that's what Crow says." She drank more Coke, holding the can in both hands, then looked around at each of the three men in turn, ending with her father. "They know my street. And they might know my name, after all. They might even have a picture. I'm not sure. Barry's mind is all messed up. But they think . . . they think if I can't catch the measles . . ."

  "Then your essence might be able to cure them," Dan said. "Or at least inoculate the others."

  "They don't call it essence," Abra said. "They call it steam."

  Dave clapped his hands once, briskly. "That's it. I'm calling the police. We'll have these people arrested."

  "You can't." Abra spoke in the dull voice of a depressed fifty-year-old woman. Do what you want, that voice said. I'm only telling you.