Doctor Sleep (64 page)

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.

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 dragged 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rose was at the head of the steps leading down from the platform when 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.

She struggled to her feet, reset her hat at the proper jaunty angle without even thinking about it, and walked to the railing. The man from the pickup truck was staring up at her, but she paid scant attention to him. His treacherous little job was done. She might deal with him later, but now she had eyes only for the Overlook Lodge. The girl was there, but also far away. Her bodily presence at the True's campground was little more than a phantom. The one who was whole—a real person, a rube—was a man she had never seen before. And a steamhead. His voice in her mind was clear and cold.

(
hello Rose
)

There was a place nearby where the girl would cease to flicker. Where she would take on her physical body. Where she could be killed. Let Sarey take care of the steamhead man, but not until the steamhead man had taken care of the bitchgirl.

(
hello Danny hello little boy
)

Loaded with steam, she reached into him and swatted him to the hub of the wheel, barely hearing Abra's cry of bewilderment and terror as she turned to follow.

And when Dan was where Rose wanted him, for a moment too surprised to keep his guard up, she poured all her fury into him. She poured it into him like steam.

Dan Torrance opened his eyes. Sunlight shot through them and into his aching head, threatening to set his brains on fire. It was the hangover to end all hangovers. Loud snoring from beside him: a nasty, annoying sound that could only be some drunk chick sleeping it off at the wrong end of the rainbow. Dan turned his head that way and saw the woman sprawled on her back beside him. Vaguely familiar. Dark hair spread around her in a halo. Wearing an oversize Atlanta Braves t-shirt.

This isn't real. I'm not here. I'm in Colorado, I'm at Roof O' the World, and I have to end it.

The woman rolled over, opened her eyes, and stared at him. “God, my head,” she said. “Get me some of that coke, daddy. It's in the living room.”

He stared at her in amazement and growing fury. The fury seemed to come from nowhere, but hadn't it always been that way? It was its own thing, a riddle wrapped in an enigma. “Coke? Who bought coke?”

She grinned, revealing a mouth that contained only a single discolored tooth. Then he knew who she was. “
You
did, daddy. Now go get it. Once my head's clear, I'll throw you a nice fuck.”

Somehow he was back in this sleazy Wilmington apartment, naked, next to Rose the Hat.

“What have you done? How did I get here?”

She threw her head back and laughed. “Don't you like this place? You should; I furnished it from your own head. Now do what I told you, asshole. Get the fucking blow.”

“Where's Abra? What did you do with Abra?”

“Killed her,” Rose said indifferently. “She was so worried about you she dropped her guard and I tore her open from throat to belly. I wasn't able to suck up as much of her steam as I wanted, but I got quite a lo—”