Doctor Sleep (29 page)

“What's up, Rosie-girl?” Crow Daddy.

“We've got a problem.”

Of course it was also an opportunity. A kid with enough in her boiler to set off a blast like that—to not only detect Rose but send her reeling—wasn't just a steamhead but the find of the century. She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.

“Talk to me.” All business now.

“A little over two years ago. The kid in Iowa. Remember him?”

“Sure.”

“You also remember me telling you we had a looker?”

“Yeah. East Coast. You thought it was probably a girl.”

“It was a girl, all right. She just found me again. I was in Sam's, minding my own business, and then all at once there she was.”

“Why, after all this time?”

“I don't know and I don't care. But we have to have her, Crow. We
have
to have her.”

“Does she know who you are? Where
we
are?”

Rose had thought about this while walking to the truck. The intruder hadn't seen her, of that much she was sure. The kid had been on the inside looking out. As to what she
had
seen? A supermarket aisle. How many of those were there in America? Probably a million.

“I don't think so, but that's not the important part.”

“Then what is?”

“Remember me telling you she was big steam?
Huge
steam? Well, she's even bigger than that. When I tried to turn it around on her, she blew me out of her head like I was a piece of milkweed
fluff. Nothing like that's ever happened to me before. I would have said it was impossible.”

“Is she potential True or potential food?”

“I don't know.” But she did. They needed steam—
stored
steam—a lot more than they needed fresh recruits. Besides, Rose wanted no one in the True with that much power.

“Okay, how do we find her? Any ideas?”

Rose thought of what she'd seen through the girl's eyes before she had been so unceremoniously booted back to Sam's Supermarket in Sidewinder. Not much, but there had been a store . . .

She said, “The kids call it the Lickety-Spliff.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, never mind. I need to think about it. But we're going to have her, Crow. We've
got
to have her.”

There was a pause. When he spoke again, Crow sounded cautious. “The way you're talking, there might be enough to fill a dozen canisters. If, that is, you really don't want to try Turning her.”

Rose gave a distracted, yapping laugh. “If I'm right, we don't
have
enough canisters to store the steam from this one. If she was a mountain, she'd be Everest.” He made no reply. Rose didn't need to see him or poke into his mind to know he was flabbergasted. “Maybe we don't have to do either one.”

“I don't follow.”

Of course he didn't. Long-think had never been Crow's specialty. “Maybe we don't have to Turn her
or
kill her. Think cows.”

“Cows.”

“You can butcher one and get a couple of months' worth of steaks and hamburgers. But if you keep it alive and take care of it, it will give milk for six years. Maybe even eight.”

Silence. Long. She let it stretch. When he replied, he sounded more cautious than ever. “I've never heard of anything like that. We kill em once we've got the steam or if they've got something we need and they're strong enough to survive the Turn, we Turn em. The way we Turned Andi back in the eighties. Grampa Flick might say different, if you believe him he remembers all the way back to
when Henry the Eighth was killing his wives, but I don't think the True has ever tried just holding onto a steamhead. If she's as strong as you say, it could be dangerous.”

Tell me something I don't know. If you'd felt what I did, you'd call me crazy to even think about it. And maybe I am. But . . .

But she was tired of spending so much of her time—the whole family's time—scrambling for nourishment. Of living like tenth-century Gypsies when they should have been living like the kings and queens of creation. Which was what they were.

“Talk to Grampa, if he's feeling better. And Heavy Mary, she's been around almost as long as Flick. Snakebite Andi. She's new, but she's got a good head on her shoulders. Anyone else you think might have valuable input.”

“Jesus, Rosie. I don't know—”

“Neither do I, not yet. I'm still reeling. All I'm asking right now is for you to do some spadework. You are the advance man, after all.”

“Okay . . .”

“Oh, and make sure you talk to Walnut. Ask him what drugs might keep a rube child nice and docile for a long period of time.”

“This girl doesn't sound like much of a rube to me.”

“Oh, she is. A big old fat rube milk-cow.”

Not exactly true. A great big white whale, that's what she is.

Rose ended the call without waiting to see if Crow Daddy had anything else to say. She was the boss, and as far as she was concerned, the discussion was over.

She's a white whale, and I want her.

But Ahab hadn't wanted
his
whale just because Moby would provide tons of blubber and almost endless barrels of oil, and Rose didn't want the girl because she might—given the right drug cocktails and a lot of powerful psychic soothing—provide a nearly endless supply of steam. It was more personal than that. Turn her? Make her part of the True Knot? Never. The kid had kicked Rose the Hat out of her head as if she were some annoying religious goofball going door-to-door and handing out end-of-the-world
tracts. No one had ever given her that kind of bum's rush before. No matter how powerful she was, she had to be taught a lesson.

And I'm just the woman for the job
.

Rose the Hat started her truck, pulled out of the supermarket parking lot, and headed for the family-owned Bluebell Campground. It was a really beautiful location, and why not? One of the world's great resort hotels had once stood there.

But of course, the Overlook had burned to the ground long ago.

The Renfrews, Matt and Cassie, were the neighborhood's party people, and they decided on the spur of the moment to have an Earthquake Barbecue. They invited everyone on Richland Court, and almost everyone came. Matt got a case of soda, a few bottles of cheap wine, and a beer-ball from the Lickety-Split up the street. It was a lot of fun, and David Stone enjoyed himself tremendously. As far as he could tell, Abra did, too. She hung with her friends Julie and Emma, and he made sure that she ate a hamburger and some salad. Lucy had told him they had to be vigilant about their daughter's eating habits, because she'd reached the age when girls started to be very conscious about their weight and looks—the age at which anorexia or bulimia were apt to show their skinny, starveling faces.

What he didn't notice (although Lucy might have, had she been there) was that Abra wasn't joining in her friends' apparently nonstop gigglefest. And, after eating a bowl of ice cream (a
small
bowl), she asked her father if she could go back across the street and finish her homework.

“Okay,” David said, “but thank Mr. and Mrs. Renfrew first.”

This Abra would have done without having to be reminded, but she agreed without saying so.

“You're very welcome, Abby,” Mrs. Renfrew said. Her eyes were almost preternaturally bright from three glasses of white wine. “Isn't
this cool? We should have earthquakes more often. Although I was talking to Vicky Fenton—you know the Fentons, on Pond Street? That's just a block over and she said they didn't feel anything. Isn't that
weird
?”

“Sure is,” Abra agreed, thinking that when it came to weird, Mrs. Renfrew didn't know the half of it.

She finished her homework and was downstairs watching TV with her dad when Mom called. Abra talked to her awhile, then turned the phone over to her father. Lucy said something, and Abra knew what it had been even before Dave glanced at her and said, “Yeah, she's fine, just blitzed from homework, I think. They give the kids so much now. Did she tell you we had a little earthquake?”

“Going upstairs, Dad,” Abra said, and he gave her an absent wave.

She sat at her desk, turned on her computer, then turned it off again. She didn't want to play Fruit Ninja and she certainly didn't want to IM with anyone. She had to think about what to do, because she had to do
something
.

She put her schoolbooks in her backpack, then looked up and the woman from the supermarket was staring in at her from the window. That was impossible because the window was on the second floor, but she was there. Her skin was unblemished and purest white, her cheekbones high, her dark eyes wide-set and slightly tilted at the corners. Abra thought she might be the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Also, she realized at once, and without a shadow of a doubt, she was insane. Masses of black hair framed her perfect, somehow arrogant face, and streamed down over her shoulders. Staying in place on this wealth of hair in spite of the crazy angle at which it was cocked, was a jaunty tophat of scuffed velvet.

She's not really there, and she's not in my head, either. I don't know how I can be seeing her but I am and I don't think she kn—

The madwoman in the darkening window grinned, and when her lips spread apart, Abra saw she only had one tooth on top, a monstrous discolored tusk. She understood it had been the last thing Bradley Trevor had ever seen, and she screamed, screamed as loudly as she could . . . but only inside, because her throat was locked and her vocal cords were frozen.

Abra shut her eyes. When she opened them again, the grinning white-faced woman was gone.

Not there. But she could come. She knows about me and she could come
.

In that moment, she realized what she should have known as soon as she saw the abandoned factory. There was really only one person she could call on. Only one who could help her. She closed her eyes again, this time not to hide from a horrible vision looking in at her from the window, but to summon help.

(
TONY, I NEED YOUR DAD! PLEASE, TONY, PLEASE!
)

Still with her eyes shut—but now feeling the warmth of tears on her lashes and cheeks—she whispered, “Help me, Tony. I'm scared.”

The last run of the day on
The Helen Rivington
was called the Sunset Cruise, and many evenings when Dan wasn't on shift at the hospice, he took the controls. Billy Freeman, who had made the run roughly twenty-five thousand times during his years as a town employee, was delighted to turn them over.

“You never get tired of it, do you?” he asked Dan once.

“Put it down to a deprived childhood.”

It hadn't been, not really, but he and his mother had moved around a lot after the settlement money ran out, and she had worked a lot of jobs. With no college degree, most of them had been low-paying. She'd kept a roof over their heads and food on the table, but there had never been much extra.

Once—he'd been in high school, the two of them living in Bradenton, not far from Tampa—he'd asked her why she never dated. By then he was old enough to know she was still a very good-looking woman. Wendy Torrance had given him a crooked smile and said, “One man was enough for me, Danny. Besides, now I've got you.”

“How much did she know about your drinking?” Casey K. had asked him during one of their meetings at the Sunspot. “You started pretty young, right?”

Dan had needed to give that one some thought. “Probably more than I knew at the time, but we never talked about it. I think she
was afraid to bring it up. Besides, I never got in trouble with the law—not then, anyway—and I graduated high school with honors.” He had smiled grimly at Casey over his coffee cup. “And of course I never beat her up. I suppose that made a difference.”

Never got that train set, either, but the basic tenet AAs lived by was don't drink and things will get better. They did, too. Now he had the biggest little choo-choo a boy could wish for, and Billy was right, it never got old. He supposed it might in another ten or twenty years, but even then Dan thought he'd probably still offer to drive the last circuit of the day, just to pilot the
Riv
at sunset, out to the turnaround at Cloud Gap. The view was spectacular, and when the Saco was calm (which it usually was once its spring convulsions had subsided), you could see all the colors twice, once above and once below. Everything was silence at the far end of the
Riv
's run; it was as if God was holding His breath.

The trips between Labor Day and Columbus Day, when the
Riv
shut down for the winter, were the best of all. The tourists were gone, and the few riders were locals, many of whom Dan could now call by name. On weeknights like tonight, there were less than a dozen paying customers. Which was fine by him.

It was fully dark when he eased the
Riv
back into its dock at Teenytown Station. He leaned against the side of the first passenger car with his cap (ENGINEER DAN stitched in red above the bill) tipped back on his head, wishing his handful of riders a very good night. Billy was sitting on a bench, the glowing tip of his cigarette intermittently lighting his face. He had to be nearly seventy, but he looked good, had made a complete recovery from his abdominal surgery two years before, and said he had no plans to retire.

“What would I do?” he'd asked on the single occasion Dan had brought the subject up. “Retire to that deathfarm where you work? Wait for your pet cat to pay me a visit? Thanks but no thanks.”

When the last two or three riders had ambled on their way, probably in search of dinner, Billy butted his cigarette and joined him. “I'll put er in the barn. Unless you want to do that, too.”