Doctor Sleep (10 page)

The day was sunny, the air balmy. Dan, who was working in jeans and a Utica Blue Sox t-shirt, looked up at the nearly cloudless sky and then back at Casey Kingsley.

“Yeah, I know how it looks, but this is mountain country, pal. NOAA claims we're going to have a nor'easter, and it'll drop maybe a foot. Won't last long—poor man's fertilizer is what New Hampshire folks call April snow—but there's also gonna be gale-force winds. So they say. I hope you can use a snowblower as well as a leaf blower.” He paused. “I also hope your back's okay, because you and Billy'll be picking up plenty of dead limbs tomorrow. Might be cutting up some fallen trees, too. You okay with a chainsaw?”

“Yes, sir,” Dan said.

“Good.”

Dan and Mrs. Robertson came to amicable terms; she even offered him an egg salad sandwich and a cup of coffee in the communal kitchen. He took her up on it, expecting all the usual questions about what had brought him to Frazier and where he had been before. Refreshingly, there were none. Instead she asked him if he had time to help her close the shutters on the downstairs windows in case they really did get what she called “a cap o' wind.” Dan agreed. There weren't many mottoes he lived by, but one was always get in good with the landlady; you never know when you might have to ask her for a rent extension.

Back on the common, Billy was waiting with a list of chores.
The day before, the two of them had taken the tarps off all the kiddie rides. That afternoon they put them back on, and shuttered the various booths and concessions. The day's final job was backing the
Riv
into her shed. Then they sat in folding chairs beside the Teenytown station, smoking.

“Tell you what, Danno,” Billy said, “I'm one tired hired man.”

“You're not the only one.” But he felt okay, muscles limber and tingling. He'd forgotten how good outdoors work could be when you weren't also working off a hangover.

The sky had scummed over with clouds. Billy looked up at them and sighed. “I hope to God it don't snow n blow as hard as the radio says, but it probably will. I found you some boots. They don't look like much, but at least they match.”

Dan took the boots with him when he walked across town to his new accommodations. By then the wind was picking up and the day was growing dark. That morning, Frazier had felt on the edge of summer. This evening the air held the face-freezing dampness of coming snow. The side streets were deserted and the houses buttoned up.

Dan turned the corner from Morehead Street onto Eliot and paused. Blowing down the sidewalk, attended by a skeletal scutter of last year's autumn leaves, was a battered tophat, such as a magician might wear.
Or maybe an actor in an old musical comedy,
he thought. Looking at it made him feel cold in his bones, because it wasn't there. Not really.

He closed his eyes, slow-counted to five with the strengthening wind flapping the legs of his jeans around his shins, then opened them again. The leaves were still there, but the tophat was gone. It had just been the shining, producing one of its vivid, unsettling, and usually senseless visions. It was always stronger when he'd been sober for a little while, but never as strong as it had been since coming to Frazier. It was as if the air here were different, somehow. More conducive to those strange transmissions from Planet Elsewhere. Special.

The way the Overlook was special
.

“No,” he said. “No, I don't believe that.”

A few drinks and it all goes away, Danny. Do you believe
that
?

Unfortunately, he did.

Mrs. Robertson's was a rambling old Colonial, and Dan's third-floor room had a view of the mountains to the west. That was a panorama he could have done without. His recollections of the Overlook had faded to hazy gray over the years, but as he unpacked his few things, a memory surfaced . . . and it
was
a kind of surfacing, like some nasty organic artifact (the decayed body of a small animal, say) floating to the surface of a deep lake.

It was dusk when the first real snow came. We stood on the porch of that big old empty hotel, my dad in the middle, my mom on one side, me on the other. He had his arms around us. It was okay then. He wasn't drinking then. At first the snow fell in perfectly straight lines, but then the wind picked up and it started to blow sideways, drifting against the sides of the porch and coating those—

He tried to block it off, but it got through.

—those hedge animals. The ones that sometimes moved around when you weren't looking
.

He turned away from the window, his arms rashed out in gooseflesh. He'd gotten a sandwich from the Red Apple store and had planned to eat it while he started the John Sandford paperback he'd also picked up at the Red Apple, but after a few bites he rewrapped the sandwich and put it on the windowsill, where it would stay cold. He might eat the rest later, although he didn't think he'd be staying up much past nine tonight; if he got a hundred pages into the book, he'd be doing well.

Outside, the wind continued to rise. Every now and then it gave a bloodcurdling scream around the eaves that made him look up from his book. Around eight thirty, the snow began. It was heavy and wet, quickly coating his window and blocking his view of the
mountains. In a way, that was worse. The snow had blocked the windows in the Overlook, too. First just on the first floor . . . then on the second . . . and finally on the third.

Then they had been entombed with the lively dead.

My father thought they'd make him the manager. All he had to do was show his loyalty. By giving them his son
.

“His only begotten son,” Dan muttered, then looked around as if someone else had spoken . . . and indeed, he did not feel alone. Not quite alone. The wind shrieked down the side of the building again, and he shuddered.

Not too late to go back down to the Red Apple. Grab a bottle of something. Put all these unpleasant thoughts to bed
.

No. He was going to read his book. Lucas Davenport was on the case, and he was going to read his book.

He closed it at quarter past nine and got into another rooming-house bed.
I won't sleep,
he thought.
Not with the wind screaming like that
.

But he did.

He was sitting at the mouth of the stormdrain, looking down a scrubgrass slope at the Cape Fear River and the bridge that spanned it. The night was clear and the moon was full. There was no wind, no snow. And the Overlook was gone. Even if it hadn't burned to the ground during the tenure of the Peanut Farmer President, it would have been over a thousand miles from here. So why was he so frightened?

Because he wasn't alone, that was why. There was someone behind him.

“Want some advice, Honeybear?”

The voice was liquid, wavering. Dan felt a chill go rushing down his back. His legs were colder still, prickled out in starpoints of gooseflesh. He could see those white bumps because he was wearing
shorts. Of course he was wearing shorts. His brain might be that of a grown man, but it was currently sitting on top of a five-year-old's body.

Honeybear. Who—?

But he knew. He had told Deenie his name, but she didn't use it, just called him Honeybear instead.

You don't remember that, and besides, this is just a dream
.

Of course it was. He was in Frazier, New Hampshire, sleeping while a spring snowstorm howled outside Mrs. Robertson's rooming house. Still, it seemed wiser not to turn around. And safer—that, too.

“No advice,” he said, looking out at the river and the full moon. “I've been advised by experts. The bars and barbershops are full of them.”

“Stay away from the woman in the hat, Honeybear.”

What hat?
he could have asked, but really, why bother? He knew the hat she was talking about, because he had seen it blowing down the sidewalk. Black as sin on the outside, lined with white silk on the inside.

“She's the Queen Bitch of Castle Hell. If you mess with her, she'll eat you alive.”

He turned his head. He couldn't help it. Deenie was sitting behind him in the stormdrain with the bum's blanket wrapped around her naked shoulders. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks. Her face was bloated and dripping. Her eyes were cloudy. She was dead, probably years in her grave.

You're not real,
Dan tried to say, but no words came out. He was five again, Danny was five, the Overlook was ashes and bones, but here was a dead woman, one he had stolen from.

“It's all right,” she said. Bubbling voice coming from a swollen throat. “I sold the coke. Stepped on it first with a little sugar and got two hundred.” She grinned, and water spilled through her teeth. “I liked you, Honeybear. That's why I came to warn you.
Stay away from the woman in the hat
.”

“False face,” Dan said . . . but it was Danny's voice, the high, frail, chanting voice of a child. “False face, not there, not real.”

He closed his eyes as he had often closed them when he had seen terrible things in the Overlook. The woman began to scream, but he wouldn't open his eyes. The screaming went on, rising and falling, and he realized it was the scream of the wind. He wasn't in Colorado and he wasn't in North Carolina. He was in New Hampshire. He'd had a bad dream, but the dream was over.

According to his Timex, it was two in the morning. The room was cold, but his arms and chest were slimy with sweat.

Want some advice, Honeybear?

“No,” he said. “Not from you.”

She's dead
.

There was no way he could know that, but he did. Deenie—who had looked like the goddess of the Western world in her thigh-high leather skirt and cork sandals—was dead. He even knew how she had done it. Took pills, pinned up her hair, climbed into a bathtub filled with warm water, went to sleep, slid under, drowned.

The roar of the wind was dreadfully familiar, loaded with hollow threat. Winds blew everywhere, but it only sounded like this in the high country. It was as if some angry god were pounding the world with an air mallet.

I used to call his booze the Bad Stuff,
Dan thought.
Only sometimes it's the Good Stuff. When you wake up from a nightmare that you know is at least fifty percent shining, it's the Very Good Stuff
.

One drink would send him back to sleep. Three would guarantee not just sleep but dreamless sleep. Sleep was nature's doctor, and right now Dan Torrance felt sick and in need of strong medicine.

Nothing's open. You lucked out there
.

Well. Maybe.

He turned on his side, and something rolled against his back when he did. No, not something. Some
one
. Someone had gotten
into bed with him.
Deenie
had gotten into bed with him. Only it felt too small to be Deenie. It felt more like a—

He scrambled out of bed, landed awkwardly on the floor, and looked over his shoulder. It was Deenie's little boy, Tommy. The right side of his skull was caved in. Bone splinters protruded through bloodstained fair hair. Gray scaly muck—brains—was drying on one cheek. He couldn't be alive with such a hellacious wound, but he was. He reached out to Dan with one starfish hand.

“Canny,” he said.

The screaming began again, only this time it wasn't Deenie and it wasn't the wind.

This time it was him.

When he woke for the second time—real waking, this time—he wasn't screaming at all, only making a kind of low growling deep in his chest. He sat up, gasping, the bedclothes puddled around his waist. There was no one else in his bed, but the dream hadn't yet dissolved, and looking wasn't enough. He threw back the bedclothes, and that still wasn't enough. He ran his hands down the bottom sheet, feeling for fugitive warmth, or a dent that might have been made by small hips and buttocks. Nothing. Of course not. So then he looked under the bed and saw only his borrowed boots.

The wind was blowing less strongly now. The storm wasn't over, but it was winding down.

He went to the bathroom, then whirled and looked back, as if expecting to surprise someone. There was just the bed, with the covers now lying on the floor at the foot. He turned on the light over the sink, splashed his face with cold water, and sat down on the closed lid of the commode, taking long breaths, one after the other. He thought about getting up and grabbing a cigarette from
the pack lying beside his book on the room's one small table, but his legs felt rubbery and he wasn't sure they'd hold him. Not yet, anyway. So he sat. He could see the bed and the bed was empty. The whole room was empty. No problem there.

Only . . . it didn't
feel
empty. Not yet. When it did, he supposed he would go back to bed. But not to sleep. For this night, sleep was done.

Seven years before, working as an orderly in a Tulsa hospice, Dan had made friends with an elderly psychiatrist who was suffering from terminal liver cancer. One day, when Emil Kemmer had been reminiscing (not very discreetly) about a few of his more interesting cases, Dan had confessed that ever since childhood, he had suffered from what he called double dreaming. Was Kemmer familiar with the phenomenon? Was there a name for it?

Kemmer had been a large man in his prime—the old black-and-white wedding photo he kept on his bedside table attested to that—but cancer is the ultimate diet program, and on the day of this conversation, his weight had been approximately the same as his age, which was ninety-one. His mind had still been sharp, however, and now, sitting on the closed toilet and listening to the dying storm outside, Dan remembered the old man's sly smile.

“Usually,” he had said in his heavy German accent, “I am paid for my diagnoses, Daniel.”