Doctor Sleep (16 page)

He huffed out a breath and looked at the ceiling, as if for inspiration. Concetta squeezed his arm. “Go on. At least he hasn't called for the men with the butterfly nets yet.”

“Okay, it's like there's always a wind blowing through the house, only you can't exactly feel it or see what it's doing. I keep thinking the curtains are going to billow and the pictures are going to fly off the walls, but they never do. Other stuff does happen, though. Two or three times a week—sometimes two or three times a
day
—the circuit breakers trip. We've had two different electricians out, on four different occasions. They check the circuits and tell us everything is hunky-dory. Some mornings we come downstairs and the cushions from the chairs and the sofa are on the floor. We tell Abra to put her toys away before bed and unless she's overtired and cranky, she's very good about it. But sometimes the toybox will be open the next morning and some of the toys will be back on the floor. Usually the blocks. They're her favorites.”

He paused for a moment, now looking at the eye chart on the far wall. John thought Concetta would prod him to go on, but she kept silent.

“Okay, this is totally weird, but I swear to you it happened. One night when we turned on the TV,
The Simpsons
were on every channel. Abra laughed like it was the biggest joke in the world. Lucy freaked out. She said, ‘Abra Rafaella Stone, if you're doing that, stop it right
now!' Lucy hardly ever speaks sharply to her, and when she does, Abra just dissolves. Which is what happened that night. I turned off the TV, and when I turned it on again, everything was back to normal. I could give you half a dozen other things . . . incidents . . . phenomena . . . but most of it's so small you'd hardly even notice.” He shrugged. “Like I say, you get used to it.”

John said, “I'll come to the party. After all that, how can I resist?”

“Probably nothing will happen,” Dave said. “You know the old joke about how to stop a leaky faucet, don't you? Call the plumber.”

Concetta snorted. “If you really believe that, sonny-boy, I think you might get a surprise.” And, to Dalton: “Just getting him here was like pulling teeth.”

“Give it a rest, Momo.” Color had begun to rise in Dave's cheeks.

John sighed. He had sensed the antagonism between these two before. He didn't know the cause of it—some kind of competition for Lucy, perhaps—but he didn't want it breaking out into the open now. Their bizarre errand had turned them into temporary allies, and that was the way he wanted to keep it.

“Save the sniping.” He spoke sharply enough so they looked away from each other and back at him, surprised. “I believe you. I've never heard of anything remotely like this before . . .”

Or had he? He trailed off, thinking of his lost watch.

“Doc?” David said.

“Sorry. Brain cramp.”

At this they both smiled. Allies again. Good.

“Anyway, no one's going to send for the men in the white coats. I accept you both as level-headed folks, not prone to hysteria or hallucination. I might guess some bizarre form of Munchausen syndrome was at work if it was just one person claiming these . . . these psychic outbreaks . . . but it's not. It's all three of you. Which raises the question, what do you want me to do?”

Dave seemed at a loss, but his grandmother-in-law was not. “Observe her, the way you would any child with a disease—”

The color had begun to leave David Stone's cheeks, but now it rushed back.
Slammed
back. “Abra is not sick,” he snapped.

She turned to him. “I know that!
Cristo!
Will you let me finish?”

Dave put on a longsuffering expression and raised his hands. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“Just don't jump down my throat, David.”

John said, “If you insist on bickering, children, I'll have to send you to the Quiet Room.”

Concetta sighed. “This is very stressful. For all of us. I'm sorry, Davey, I used the wrong word.”

“No prob,
cara
. We're in this together.”

She smiled briefly. “Yes. Yes, we are. Observe her as you'd observe any child with an undiagnosed condition, Dr. Dalton. That's all we can ask, and I think it's enough for now. You may have some ideas. I hope so. You see . . .”

She turned to David Stone with an expression of helplessness that John thought was probably rare on that firm face.

“We're afraid,” Dave said. “Me, Lucy, Chetta—scared to death. Not of her, but for her. Because she's just
little,
do you see? What if this power of hers . . . I don't know what else to call it . . . what if it hasn't topped out yet? What if it's still growing? What do we do then? She could . . . I don't know . . .”

“He
does
know,” Chetta said. “She could lose her temper and hurt herself or someone else. I don't know how likely that is, but just thinking it
could
happen . . .” She touched John's hand. “It's awful.”

Dan Torrance knew he would be living in the turret room of the Helen Rivington House from the moment he had seen his old friend Tony waving to him from a window that on second look turned out to be boarded shut. He asked Mrs. Clausen, the Rivington's chief supervisor, about the room six months or so after going to work at the hospice as janitor/orderly . . . and unofficial doctor in residence. Along with his faithful sidekick Azzie, of course.

“That room's junk from one end to the other,” Mrs. Clausen
had said. She was a sixtysomething with implausibly red hair. She was possessed of a sarcastic, often dirty mouth, but she was a smart and compassionate administrator. Even better, from the standpoint of HRH's board of directors, she was a tremendously effective fund-raiser. Dan wasn't sure he liked her, but he had come to respect her.

“I'll clean it out. On my own time. It would be better for me to be right here, don't you think? On call?”

“Danny, tell me something. How come you're so good at what you do?”

“I don't really know.” This was at least half true. Maybe even seventy percent. He had lived with the shining all his life and still didn't understand it.

“Junk aside, the turret's hot in the summer and cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey in the winter.”

“That can be rectified,” Dan had said.

“Don't talk to
me
about your rectum.” Mrs. Clausen peered sternly at him from above her half-glasses. “If the board knew what I was letting you do, they'd probably have me weaving baskets in that assisted living home down in Nashua. The one with the pink walls and the piped-in Mantovani.” She snorted. “Doctor Sleep, indeed.”

“I'm not the doctor,” Dan said mildly. He knew he was going to get what he wanted. “Azzie's the doctor. I'm just his assistant.”

“Azreel's the fucking
cat,
” she said. “A raggedy-ass stray that wandered in off the street and got adopted by guests who have now all gone to the Great Who Knows. All he cares about is his twice-daily bowl of Friskies.”

To this Dan hadn't responded. There was no need, because they both knew it wasn't true.

“I thought you had a perfectly good place on Eliot Street. Pauline Robertson thinks the sun shines out of your asshole. I know because I sing with her in the church choir.”

“What's your favorite hymn?” Dan asked. “ ‘What a Fucking Friend We Have in Jesus'?”

She showed the Rebecca Clausen version of a smile. “Oh, very
well. Clean out the room. Move in. Have it wired for cable, put in quadraphonic sound, set up a wetbar. What the hell do I care, I'm only the boss.”

“Thanks, Mrs. C.”

“Oh, and don't forget the space heater, okay? See if you can't find something from a yard sale with a nice frayed cord. Burn the fucking place down some cold February night. Then they can put up a brick monstrosity to match the abortions on either side of us.”

Dan stood up and raised the back of his hand to his forehead in a half-assed British salute. “Whatever you say, boss.”

She waved a hand at him. “Get outta here before I change my mind, doc.”

He
did
put in a space heater, but the cord wasn't frayed and it was the kind that shut off immediately if it tipped over. There was never going to be any air-conditioning in the third-floor turret room, but a couple of fans from Walmart placed in the open windows provided a nice cross-draft. It got plenty hot just the same on summer days, but Dan was almost never there in the daytime. And summer nights in New Hampshire were usually cool.

Most of the stuff that had been stashed up there was disposable junk, but he kept a big grammar school–style blackboard he found leaning against one wall. It had been hidden for fifty years or more behind an ironmongery of ancient and grievously wounded wheelchairs. The blackboard was useful. On it he listed the hospice's patients and their room numbers, erasing the names of the folks who passed away and adding names as new folks checked in. In the spring of 2004, there were thirty-two names on the board. Ten were in Rivington One and twelve in Rivington Two—these were the ugly brick buildings flanking the Victorian home where the famous Helen Rivington had once lived and written thrilling romance novels under the pulsating name of Jeannette Montparsse.
The rest of the patients were housed on the two floors below Dan's cramped but serviceable turret apartment.

Was Mrs. Rivington famous for anything besides writing bad novels?
Dan had asked Claudette Albertson not long after starting work at the hospice. They were in the smoking area at the time, practicing their nasty habit. Claudette, a cheerful African American RN with the shoulders of an NFL left tackle, threw back her head and laughed.

“You bet! For leaving this town a shitload of money, honey! And giving away this house, of course. She thought old folks should have a place where they could die with dignity.”

And in Rivington House, most of them did. Dan—with Azzie to assist—was now a part of that. He thought he had found his calling. The hospice now felt like home.

On the morning of Abra's birthday party, Dan got out of bed and saw that all the names on his blackboard had been erased. Written where they had been, in large and straggling letters, was a single word:

hEll

Dan sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear for a long time, just looking. Then he got up and put one hand on the letters, smudging them a little, hoping for a shine. Even a little twinkle. At last he took his hand away, rubbing chalkdust on his bare thigh.

“Hello yourself,” he said . . . and then: “Would your name be Abra, by any chance?”

Nothing. He put on his robe, got his soap and towel, and went down to the staff shower on two. When he came back, he picked up the eraser he'd found to go with the board and began erasing the word. Halfway through, a thought

(
daddy says we'll have balloons
)

came to him, and he stopped, waiting for more. But no more came, so he finished erasing the board and then began replacing the names and room numbers, working from that Monday's attendance memo. When he came back upstairs at noon, he half expected the board to be erased again, the names and numbers replaced by
hEll
, but all was as he had left it.

Abra's birthday party was in the Stones' backyard, a restful sweep of green grass with apple and dogwood trees that were just coming into blossom. At the foot of the yard was a chainlink fence and a gate secured by a combination padlock. The fence was decidedly unbeautiful, but neither David nor Lucy cared, because beyond it was the Saco River, which wound its way southeast, through Frazier, through North Conway, and across the border into Maine. Rivers and small children did not mix, in the Stones' opinion, especially in the spring, when this one was wide and turbulent with melting snows. Each year the local weekly reported at least one drowning.