Doctor Sleep (3 page)

“For a long time I believed the old bastard. I didn't even tell my White Gramma, the one with the shining, because I was afraid she'd think it was my fault. If I'd been older I would've known better, but I was just a kid.” He paused. “There was something else, too. Do you know what it was, Danny?”

Danny looked into Dick's face for a long time, probing the thoughts and images behind his forehead. At last he said, “You wanted your father to get the money. But he never did.”

“No. Black Grampa left it all to a home for Negro orphans in Alabama, and I bet I know why, too. But that's neither here nor there.”

“And your good gramma never knew? She never guessed?”

“She knew there was
something,
but I kep it blocked away, and she left me alone about it. Just told me that when I was ready to talk, she was ready to listen. Danny, when Andy Hallorann died—it was a stroke—I was the happiest boy on earth. My ma said I didn't have to go to the funeral, that I could stay with Gramma Rose—my White Gramma—if I wanted to, but I wanted to go. You bet I did. I wanted to make sure old Black Grampa was really dead.

“It rained that day. Everybody stood around the grave under black umbrellas. I watched his coffin—the biggest and best one in his shop, I have no doubt—go into the ground, and I thought about all the times he'd twisted my balls and all the cigarette butts in my cake and the one he put out on my foot and how he ruled the dinner table like the crazy old king in that Shakespeare play. But most of all I thought about Charlie Manx—who Grampa had no doubt made up out of whole cloth—and how Black Grampa could never call Charlie Manx on the long-distance to come in the night and take me away in his fancy car to live with the other stolen boys and girls.

“I peeped over the edge of the grave—‘Let the boy see,' my pa
said when my ma tried to pull me back—and I scoped the coffin down in that wet hole and I thought, ‘Down there you're six feet closer to hell, Black Grampa, and pretty soon you'll be all the way, and I hope the devil gives you a thousand with a hand that's on fire.' ”

Dick reached into his pants pocket and brought out a pack of Marlboros with a book of matches tucked under the cellophane. He put a cigarette in his mouth and then had to chase it with the match because his hand was trembling and his lips were trembling, too. Danny was astounded to see tears standing in Dick's eyes.

Now knowing where this story was headed, Danny asked: “When did he come back?”

Dick dragged deep on his cigarette and exhaled smoke through a smile. “You didn't need to peek inside my head to get that, did you?”

“Nope.”

“Six months later. I came home from school one day and he was laying naked on my bed with his half-rotted prick all rared up. He said, ‘You come on and sit on this, Dickie-Bird. You give me a thousand and I'll give you
two
thousand.' I screamed but there was no one there to hear it. My ma and pa, they was both working, my ma in a restaurant and my dad at a printing press. I ran out and slammed the door. And I heard Black Grampa get up . . .
thump
 . . . and cross the room . . .
thump-thump-thump
 . . . and what I heard next . . .”

“Fingernails,” Danny said in a voice that was hardly there. “Scratching on the door.”

“That's right. I didn't go in again until that night, when my ma and pa were both home. He was gone, but there were . . . leavings.”

“Sure. Like in our bathroom. Because he was going bad.”

“That's right. I changed the bed myself, which I could do because my ma showed me how two years before. She said I was too old to need a housekeeper anymore, that housekeepers were for little white boys and girls like the ones she took care of before she got her hostessing job at Berkin's Steak House. About a week later, I see ole Black Grampa in the park, a-settin in a swing. He had his suit on,
but it was all covered with gray stuff—the mold that was growing on it down in his coffin, I think.”

“Yeah,” Danny said. He spoke in a glassy whisper. It was all he could manage.

“His fly was open, though, with his works stickin out. I'm sorry to tell you all this, Danny, you're too young to hear about such things, but you need to know.”

“Did you go to the White Gramma then?”

“Had to. Because I knew what you know: he'd just keep comin back. Not like . . . Danny, have you ever seen dead people?
Regular
dead people, I mean.” He laughed because that sounded funny. It did to Danny, too. “Ghosts.”

“A few times. Once there were three of them standing around a railroad crossing. Two boys and a girl. Teenagers. I think . . . maybe they got killed there.”

Dick nodded. “Mostly they stick close to where they crossed over until they finally get used to bein dead and move on. Some of the folks you saw in the Overlook were like that.”

“I know.” The relief in being able to talk about these things—to someone who
knew
—was indescribable. “And this one time there was a woman at a restaurant. The kind, you know, where they have tables outside?”

Dick nodded again.

“I couldn't see through that one, but no one else saw her, and when a waitress pushed in the chair she was sitting in, the ghost lady disappeared. Do you see them sometimes?”

“Not for years, but you're stronger in the shining than I was. It goes back some as you get older—”

“Good,” Danny said fervently.

“—but you'll have plenty left even when you're grown up, I think, because you started with so much. Regular ghosts aren't like the woman you saw in Room 217 and again in your bathroom. That's right, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Danny said. “Mrs. Massey's
real
. She leaves pieces of herself. You saw them. So did Mom . . . and she doesn't shine.”

“Let's walk back,” Dick said. “It's time you saw what I brought you.”

The return to the parking lot was even slower, because Dick was winded. “Cigarettes,” he said. “Don't ever start, Danny.”

“Mom smokes. She doesn't think I know, but I do. Dick, what did your White Gramma do? She must have done something, because your Black Grampa never got you.”

“She gave me a present, same like I'm gonna give you. That's what a teacher does when the pupil is ready. Learning itself is a present, you know. The best one anybody can give or get.

“She wouldn't call Grampa Andy by his name, she just called him”—Dick grinned—“the
preevert
. I said what you said, that he wasn't a ghost, he was real. And she said yes, that was true, because I was
making
him real. With the shining. She said that some spirits—angry spirits, mostly—won't go on from this world, because they know what's waiting for them is even worse. Most eventually starve away to nothing, but some of them find food. ‘That's what the shining is to them, Dick,' she told me. ‘Food. You're feeding that preevert. You don't mean to, but you are. He's like a mosquito who'll keep circling and then landing for more blood. Can't do nothing about that. What you
can
do is turn what he came for against him.”

They were back at the Cadillac. Dick unlocked the doors, then slid behind the steering wheel with a sigh of relief. “Once upon a time I could've walked ten miles and run another five. Nowadays, a little walk down the beach and my back feels like a hoss kicked it. Go on, Danny. Open your present.”

Danny stripped off the silver paper and discovered a box made of green-painted metal. On the front, below the latch, was a little keypad.

“Hey, neat!”

“Yeah? You like it? Good. I got it at the Western Auto. Pure American steel. The one White Gramma Rose gave me had a padlock, with a little key I wore around my neck, but that was long ago. This is the nineteen eighties, the modern age. See the number pad? What you do is put in five numbers you're sure you won't forget, then push the little button that says SET. Then, anytime you want to open the box, you punch your code.”

Danny was delighted. “Thanks, Dick! I'll keep my special things in it!” These would include his best baseball cards, his Cub Scouts Compass Badge, his lucky green rock, and a picture of him and his father, taken on the front lawn of the apartment building where they'd lived in Boulder, before the Overlook. Before things turned bad.

“That's fine, Danny, I want you to do that, but I want you to do something else.”

“What?”

“I want you to know this box, inside and out. Don't just look at it; touch it. Feel it all over. Then stick your nose inside and see if there's a smell. It needs to be your closest friend, at least for awhile.”

“Why?”

“Because you're going to put another one just like it in your mind. One that's even more special. And the next time that Massey bitch comes around, you'll be ready for her. I'll tell you how, just like ole White Gramma told me.”

Danny didn't talk much on the ride back to the apartment. He had a lot to think about. He held his present—a lockbox made of strong metal—on his lap.

Mrs. Massey returned a week later. She was in the bathroom again, this time in the tub. Danny wasn't surprised. A tub was where she had died, after all. This time he didn't run. This time he went inside and closed the door. She beckoned him forward, smiling.
Danny came, also smiling. In the other room, he could hear the television. His mother was watching
Three's Company
.

“Hello, Mrs. Massey,” Danny said. “I brought you something.”

At the last moment she understood and began to scream.

Moments later, his mom was knocking at the bathroom door. “Danny? Are you all right?”

“Fine, Mom.” The tub was empty. There was some goo in it, but Danny thought he could clean that up. A little water would send it right down the drain. “Do you have to go? I'll be out pretty soon.”

“No. I just . . . I thought I heard you call.”

Danny grabbed his toothbrush and opened the door. “I'm a hundred percent cool. See?” He gave her a big smile. It wasn't hard, now that Mrs. Massey was gone.

The troubled look left her face. “Good. Make sure you brush the back ones. That's where the food goes to hide.”

“I will, Mom.”

From inside his head, far inside, where the twin of his special lockbox was stored on a special shelf, Danny could hear muffled screaming. He didn't mind. He thought it would stop soon enough, and he was right.

Two years later, on the day before the Thanksgiving break, halfway up a deserted stairwell in Alafia Elementary, Horace Derwent appeared to Danny Torrance. There was confetti on the shoulders of his suit. A little black mask hung from one decaying hand. He reeked of the grave. “Great party, isn't it?” he asked.

Danny turned and walked away, very quickly.

When school was over, he called Dick long-distance at the
restaurant where Dick worked in Key West. “Another one of the Overlook People found me. How many boxes can I have, Dick? In my head, I mean.”

Dick chuckled. “As many as you need, honey. That's the beauty of the shining. You think my Black Grampa's the only one
I
ever had to lock away?”

“Do they die in there?”

This time there was no chuckle. This time there was a coldness in Dick's voice the boy had never heard before. “Do you care?”

Danny didn't.

When the onetime owner of the Overlook showed up again shortly after New Year's—this time in Danny's bedroom closet—Danny was ready. He went into the closet and closed the door. Shortly afterward, a second mental lockbox went up on the high mental shelf beside the one that held Mrs. Massey. There was more pounding, and some inventive cursing that Danny saved for his own later use. Pretty soon it stopped. There was silence from the Derwent lockbox as well as the Massey lockbox. Whether or not they were alive (in their undead fashion) no longer mattered.

What mattered was they were never getting out. He was safe.

That was what he thought then. Of course, he also thought he would never take a drink, not after seeing what it had done to his father.

Sometimes we just get it wrong.

Her name was Andrea Steiner, and she liked movies but she didn't like men. This wasn't surprising, since her father had raped her for the first time when she was eight. He had gone on raping her for that same number of years. Then she had put a stop to it, first popping his balls, one after the other, with one of her mother's knitting needles, and then putting that same needle, red and dripping, in her rapist-sire's left eyesocket. The balls had been easy, because he was sleeping, but the pain had been enough to wake him in spite of her special talent. She was a big girl, though, and he was drunk. She had been able to hold him down with her body just long enough to administer the coup de grâce.

Now she had years eight times four, she was a wanderer on the face of America, and an ex-actor had replaced the peanut farmer in the White House. The new fellow had an actor's unlikely black hair and an actor's charming, untrustworthy smile. Andi had seen one of his movies on TV. In it, the man who would be president played a guy who lost his legs when a train ran over them. She liked the idea of a man without legs; a man without legs couldn't chase you down and rape you.

Movies, they were the thing. Movies took you away. You could count on popcorn and happy endings. You got a man to go with you, that way it was a date and he paid. This movie was a good one, with fighting and kissing and loud music. It was called
Raiders of
the Lost Ark
. Her current date had his hand under her skirt, high up on her bare thigh, but that was all right; a hand wasn't a prick. She had met him in a bar. She met most of the men she went on dates with in bars. He bought her a drink, but a free drink wasn't a date; it was just a pickup.