Doctor Sleep, Page 46

  Abra walked to the desk and picked up one of the books. On the cover, a small child on a trike was being chased by a little dog. The title was Reading Fun with Dick and Jane.

  Dan joined her, wearing a bemused smile. "The little girl on the cover is Sally. Dick and Jane are her brother and sister. And the dog's name is Spot. For a little while they were my best friends. My only friends, I guess. Except for Tony, of course."

  She put the book down and turned to him. "What is this place, Dan?"

  "A memory. There used to be a hotel here, and this was my room. Now it's a place where we can be together. You know the wheel that turns when you go into someone else?"

  "Uh-huh . . ."

  "This is the middle. The hub."

  "I wish we could stay here. It feels . . . safe. Except for those." Abra pointed to the French doors with their long panes of glass. "They don't feel the same as the rest." She looked at him almost accusingly. "They weren't here, were they? When you were a kid."

  "No. There weren't any windows in my room, and the only door was the one that went into the rest of the caretaker's apartment. I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?"

  She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present."

  He smiled. "I couldn't have said it better myself."

  "You didn't have to say it. You thought it."

  He drew her toward those French doors that had never existed. Through the glass they could see the lawn, the tennis courts, the Overlook Lodge, and Roof O' the World.

  "I see her," Abra breathed. "She's up there, and she's not looking this way, is she?"

  "She better not be," Dan said. "How bad is the pain, honey?"

  "Bad," she said. "But I don't care. Because--"

  She didn't have to finish. He knew, and she smiled. This togetherness was what they had, and in spite of the pain that came with it--pain of all kinds--it was good. It was very good.

  "Dan?"

  "Yes, honey."

  "There are ghostie people out there. I can't see them, but I feel them. Do you?"

  "Yes." He had for years. Because the past defines the present. He put his arm around her shoulders, and her arm crept around his waist.

  "What do we do now?"

  "Wait for Billy. Hope he's on time. And then all of this is going to happen very fast."

  "Uncle Dan?"

  "What, Abra."

  "What's inside you? That isn't a ghost. It's like--" He felt her shiver. "It's like a monster."

  He said nothing.

  She straightened and stepped away from him. "Look! Over there!"

  An old Ford pickup was rolling into the visitor's parking lot.

  8

  Rose stood with her hands on the lookout platform's waist-high railing, peering at the truck pulling into the parking lot. The steam had sharpened her vision, but she still wished she had brought a pair of binoculars. Surely there were some in the supply room, for guests who wanted to go bird-watching, so why hadn't she?

  Because you had so many other things on your mind. The sickness . . . the rats jumping ship . . . losing Crow to the bitchgirl . . .

  Yes to all of that--yes, yes, yes--but she still should have remembered. For a moment she wondered what else she might have forgotten, but pushed the idea away. She was still in charge of this, loaded with steam and at the top of her game. Everything was going exactly as planned. Soon the little girl would come up here, because she was full of foolish teenage confidence and pride in her own abilities.

  But I have the high ground, dear, in all sorts of ways. If I can't take care of you alone, I'll draw from the rest of the True. They're all together in the main room, because you thought that was such a good idea. But there's something you didn't take into consideration. When we're together we're linked, we're a True Knot, and that makes us a giant battery. Power I can draw on if I need to.

  If all else failed, there was Silent Sarey. She would now have the sickle in her hand. She might not be a genius, but she was merciless, murderous, and--once she understood the job--completely obedient. Also, she had her own reasons for wanting the bitchgirl laid out dead on the ground at the foot of the lookout platform.

  (Charlie)

  Token Charlie hit her back at once, and although he was ordinarily a feeble sender, now--boosted by the others in the main room of the Lodge--he came in loud and clear and nearly mad with excitement.

  (I'm getting her steady and strong we all are she must be real close you must feel her)

  Rose did, even though she was still working hard to keep her mind closed off so the bitchgirl couldn't get in and mess with her.

  (never mind that just tell the others to be ready if I need help)

  Many voices came back, jumping all over each other. They were ready. Even those that were sick were ready to help all they could. She loved them for that.

  Rose stared at the blond girl in the truck. She was looking down. Reading something? Nerving herself up? Praying to the God of Rubes, perhaps? It didn't matter.

  Come to me, bitchgirl. Come to Auntie Rose.

  But it wasn't the girl who got out, it was the uncle. Just as the bitch had said he would. Checking. He walked around the hood of the truck, moving slowly, looking everywhere. He leaned in the passenger window, said something to the girl, then moved away from the truck a little. He looked toward the Lodge, then turned to the platform rearing against the sky . . . and waved. The insolent bugger actually waved at her.

  Rose didn't wave back. She was frowning. An uncle. Why had her parents sent an uncle instead of bringing their bitch daughter themselves? For that matter, why had they allowed her to come at all?

  She convinced them it was the only way. Told them that if she didn't come to me, I'd come to her. That's the reason, and it makes sense.

  It did, but she felt a growing unease all the same. She had allowed the bitchgirl to set the ground rules. To that extent, at least, Rose had been manipulated. She had allowed it because this was her home ground and because she had taken precautions, but mostly because she had been angry. So angry.

  She stared hard at the man in the parking lot. He was strolling around again, looking here and there, making sure she was alone. Perfectly reasonable, it was what she would have done, but she still had a gnawing intuition that what he was really doing was buying time, although why he would want to was beyond her.

  Rose stared harder, now focusing on the man's gait. She decided he wasn't as young as she had first believed. He walked, in fact, like a man who was far from young. As if he had more than a touch of arthritis. And why was the little girl so still?

  Rose felt the first pulse of real alarm.

  Something was wrong here.

  9

  "She's looking at Mr. Freeman," Abra said. "We should go."

  He opened the French doors, but hesitated. Something in her voice. "What's the trouble, Abra?"

  "I don't know. Maybe nothing, but I don't like it. She's looking at him really hard. We have to go right now."

  "I need to do something first. Try to be ready, and don't be scared."

  Dan closed his eyes and went to the storage room at the back of his mind. Real lockboxes would have been covered with dust after all these years, but the two he'd put here as a child were as fresh as ever. Why not? They were made of pure imagination. The third--the new one--had a faint aura hanging around it, and he thought: No wonder I'm sick.

  Never mind. That one had to stay for the time being. He opened the oldest of the other two, ready for anything, and found . . . nothing. Or almost. In the lockbox that had held Mrs. Massey for thirty-two years, there was a heap of dark gray ash. But in the other . . .

  He realized how foolish telling her not to be scared had been.

  Abra shrieked.

  10

  On the back stoop of the house in Anniston, Abra began to jerk. Her legs spasmed; her feet rattled a tattoo on the steps; one hand--flopping like a fish dra
gged to a riverbank and left to die there--sent the ill-used and bedraggled Hoppy flying.

  "What's wrong with her?" Lucy screamed.

  She rushed for the door. David stood frozen--transfixed by the sight of his seizing daughter--but John got his right arm around Lucy's waist and his left around her upper chest. She bucked against him. "Let me go! I have to go to her!"

  "No!" John shouted. "No, Lucy, you can't!"

  She would have broken free, but now David had her, too.

  She subsided, looking first at John. "If she dies out there, I'll see you go to jail for it." Next, her gaze--flat-eyed and hostile--went to her husband. "You I'll never forgive."

  "She's quieting," John said.

  On the stoop, Abra's tremors moderated, then stopped. But her cheeks were wet, and tears squeezed from beneath her closed lids. In the day's dying light, they clung to her lashes like jewels.

  11

  In Danny Torrance's childhood bedroom--a room now made only of memory--Abra clung to Dan with her face pressed against his chest. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. "The monster--is it gone?"

  "Yes," Dan said.

  "Swear on your mother's name?"

  "Yes."

  She raised her head, first looking at him to assure herself he was telling the truth, then daring to scan the room. "That smile." She shuddered.

  "Yes," Dan said. "I think . . . he's glad to be home. Abra, are you going to be all right? Because we have to do this right now. Time's up."

  "I'm all right. But what if . . . it . . . comes back?"

  Dan thought of the lockbox. It was open, but could be closed again easily enough. Especially with Abra to help him. "I don't think he . . . it . . . wants anything to do with us, honey. Come on. Just remember: if I tell you to go back to New Hampshire, you go."

  Once again she didn't reply, and there was no time to discuss it. Time was up. He stepped through the French doors. They gave on the end of the path. Abra walked beside him, but lost the solidity she'd had in the room of memory and began to flicker again.

  Out here she's almost a ghostie person herself, Dan thought. It brought home to him just how much she had put herself at risk. He didn't like to think about how tenuous her hold on her own body might now be.

  Moving rapidly--but not running; that would attract Rose's eye, and they had at least seventy yards to cover before the rear of the Overlook Lodge would block them from the lookout platform--Dan and his ghostie-girl companion crossed the lawn and took the flagstone walk that ran between the tennis courts.

  They reached the back of the kitchen, and at last the bulk of the Lodge hid them from the platform. Here was the steady rumble of an exhaust fan and the spoiled-meat smell of garbage cans. He tried the rear door and found it unlocked, but paused a moment before opening it.

  (are they all)

  (yes all but Rose she hurry up Dan you have to because)

  Abra's eyes, flickering like those of a child in an old black-and-white movie, were wide with dismay. "She knows something's wrong."

  12

  Rose turned her attention to the bitchgirl, still sitting in the passenger seat of the truck, head bowed, still as could be. Abra wasn't watching her uncle--if he was her uncle--and she was making no move to get out. The alarm meter in Rose's head went from Danger Yellow to Condition Red.

  "Hey!" The voice came floating up to her on the thin air. "Hey, you old bag! Watch this!"

  She snapped her gaze back to the man in the parking lot and stared, close to flabbergasted, as he raised his hands over his head and then turned a big, unsteady cartwheel. She thought he was going to go on his ass, but the only thing that fell to the pavement was his hat. What it exposed was the fine white hair of a man in his seventies. Maybe even his eighties.

  Rose looked back at the girl in the truck, who remained perfectly still with her head bent. She had absolutely no interest in the uncle's antics. Suddenly it clicked and Rose understood what she would have seen right away, had the trick not been so outrageous: it was a mannequin.

  But she's here! Token Charlie feels her, all of them in the Lodge feel her, they're all together and they know--

  All together in the Lodge. All together in one place. And had that been Rose's idea? No. That idea had come from the--

  Rose broke for the stairs.

  13

  The remaining members of the True Knot were crowded together at the two windows looking down at the parking lot, watching as Billy Freeman turned a cartwheel for the first time in over forty years (and the last time he'd done this trick, he'd been drunk). Petty the Chink actually laughed. "What in God's name--"

  With their backs turned, they didn't see Dan step into the room from the kitchen, or the girl flickering in and out of view at his side. Dan had time to register two bundles of clothes on the floor, and to understand that Bradley Trevor's measles were still hard at work. Then he went back inside himself, went deep, and found the third lockbox--the leaky one. He flung it open.

  (Dan what are you doing)

  He leaned forward with his hands on his upper thighs, his stomach burning like hot metal, and exhaled the old poet's last gasp, which she had given him freely, in a dying kiss. From his mouth there came a long plume of pink mist that deepened to red as it hit the air. At first he could focus on nothing but the blessed relief in the middle of his body as the poison remains of Concetta Reynolds left him.

  "Momo!" Abra shrieked.

  14

  On the platform, Rose's eyes widened. The bitchgirl was in the Lodge.

  And someone was with her.

  She leaped into this new mind without thinking about it. Searching. Ignoring the markers that meant big steam, only trying to stop him before he could do whatever it was he intended to do. Ignoring the terrible possibility that it was already too late.

  15

  The members of the True turned toward Abra's cry. Someone--it was Long Paul--said: "What in the hell is that?"

  The red mist coalesced into a shape of a woman. For a moment--surely no more than that--Dan looked into Concetta's swirling eyes and saw they were young. Still weak and focused on this phantom, he had no sense of the intruder in his mind.

  "Momo!" Abra cried again. She was holding out her arms.

  The woman in the cloud might have looked at her. Might even have smiled. Then the shape of Concetta Reynolds was gone and the mist rolled at the clustered True Knot, many of them now clinging to one another in fright and bewilderment. To Dan, the red stuff looked like blood spreading in water.

  "It's steam," Dan told them. "You bastards lived on it; now suck it in and die on it."

  He had known ever since the plan's conception that if it didn't happen fast, he would never live to see how well it succeeded, but he had never imagined it would occur as rapidly as it did. The measles that had already weakened them might have had something to do with it, because some lasted a little longer than others. Even so, it was over in a matter of seconds.

  They howled in his head like dying wolves. The sound appalled Dan, but this was not true of his companion.

  "Good!" Abra shouted. She shook her fists at them. "How does it taste? How does my momo taste? Is she good? Have as much as you want! HAVE ALL OF IT!"

  They began to cycle. Through the red mist, Dan saw two of them embracing with their foreheads pressed together, and in spite of all they had done--all they were--the sight moved him. He saw the words I love you on Short Eddie's lips; saw Big Mo begin to reply; then they were gone, their clothes floating to the floor. It was that quick.

  He turned to Abra, meaning to tell her they had to finish it at once, but then Rose the Hat began to shriek, and for a few moments--until Abra could block her--those cries of rage and maddened grief blotted out everything else, even the blessed relief of being pain-free. And, he devoutly hoped, cancer-free. About that he wouldn't know for sure until he could see his face in a mirror.

  16

  Rose was at the head of the steps leading down from the platform whe
n the killing mist rolled over the True Knot, the remains of Abra's momo doing its quick and lethal work.

  A white sheet of agony filled her. Screams shot through her head like shrapnel. The cries of the dying True made those of the Cloud Gap raiding party in New Hampshire and Crow in New York seem puny by comparison. Rose staggered back as if she had been hit with a club. She struck the railing, rebounded, and fell down on the boards. Somewhere in the distance, a woman--an old one, by the wavering sound of her voice--was chanting no, no, no, no, no.

  That's me. It has to be, because I'm the only one left.

  It wasn't the girl who had fallen into the trap of overconfidence, but Rose herself. She thought of something

  (hoisted on your own petard)

  the bitchgirl had said. It scalded her with rage and dismay. Her old friends and longtime traveling companions were dead. Poisoned. Except for the cowards who had run, Rose the Hat was the last of the True Knot.

  But no, that wasn't true. There was Sarey.

  Sprawled on the platform and shivering under the late-afternoon sky, Rose reached out to her.

  (are you)

  The thought that came back was full of confusion and horror.

  (yes but Rose are they can they be)

  (never mind them just remember Sarey do you remember)

  ("don't make me punish you")

  (good Sarey good)

  If the girl didn't run . . . if she made the mistake of trying to finish her murderous day's work . . .

  She would. Rose was sure of it, and she had seen enough in the mind of the bitchgirl's companion to know two things: how they had accomplished this slaughter, and how their very connection could be turned against them.

  Rage was powerful.

  So were childhood memories.