Doctor Sleep (38 page)

Moving with confidence, Rose opened one of the drawers.

The instant she reached inside, an earsplitting alarm began to bray
and brilliant white spotlights blazed on all around the room, beating down on her with heat as well as light. For the first time in a great many years, Rose the Hat, once Rose O'Hara from County Antrim in Northern Ireland, was caught completely off-guard. Before she could pull her hand out of the drawer, it slammed shut. The pain was enormous. She screamed and jerked backward, but she was held fast.

Her shadow jumped high on the wall, but not just hers. She turned her head and saw the little girl bearing down on her. Only she wasn't little anymore. Now she was a young woman wearing a leather jerkin with a dragon on her blooming chest and a blue band to hold back her hair. The bike had become a white stallion. Its eyes, like those of the warrior-woman, were blazing.

The warrior-woman had a lance.

(
You came back Dan said you would and you did  
)

And then—unbelievable in a rube, even one loaded with big steam—
pleasure.

(
GOOD
)

The child who was no longer a child had been lying in wait for her. She had laid a trap, she meant to kill Rose . . . and considering Rose's state of mental vulnerability, she probably could.

Summoning every bit of her strength, Rose fought back, not with some comic-book lance, but with a blunt battering ram that had all her years and will behind it.

(
GET AWAY FROM ME! GET THE FUCK BACK! NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU'RE JUST A LITTLE GIRL!
)

The girl's grown-up vision of herself—her avatar—kept coming, but she flinched as Rose's thought hit her, and the lance crashed into the wall of file drawers to Rose's immediate left instead of into her side, which was where it had been aimed.

The kid (
that's all she is,
Rose kept telling herself  ) wheeled her horse away and Rose turned to the drawer that had caught her. She braced her free hand above it and pulled with all her might, ignoring the pain. At first the drawer held. Then it gave a little and she was able to pull out the heel of her hand. It was scraped and bleeding.

Something else was happening. There was a fluttering sensation in her head, as if a bird were flying around up there. What new shit was this?

Expecting that goddamned lance to drive into her back at any moment, Rose yanked with all her might. Her hand slipped all the way out and she curled her fingers into a fist just in time. If she'd waited even an instant, the drawer would have cut them off when it slammed shut. Her nails throbbed, and she knew when she had a chance to look at them, they would be plum-colored with trapped blood.

She turned. The girl was gone. The room was empty. But that fluttering sensation continued. If anything, it had intensified. Suddenly the pain in her hand and wrist was the last thing on Rose's mind. She wasn't the only one who had ridden the turntable, and it didn't matter that her eyes were still shut back in the real world, where she lay on her double bed.

The fucking brat was in another room filled with file drawers.

Her room. Her head.

Instead of the burglar, Rose had become the burgled.

(
GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT
)

The fluttering didn't stop; it sped up. Rose shoved away her panic, fought for clarity and focus, found some. Just enough to set the turntable in motion again, even though it had become weirdly heavy.

(
turn, world  
)

As it did, she felt the maddening flutter in her head first diminish and then cease as the little girl was rotated back to wherever she came from.

Except that's not right, and this is far too serious for you to indulge in the luxury of lying to yourself.
You
came to
her.
And walked right into a trap. Why? Because in spite of all you knew, you underestimated
.

Rose opened her eyes, sat up, and swung her feet onto the carpet. One of them struck the empty canister and she kicked it away. The Sidewinder t-shirt she had pulled on before lying down was damp; she reeked of sweat. It was a piggy smell, entirely unattractive. She
looked unbelievingly at her hand, which was scraped and bruised and swelling. Her fingernails were going from purple to black, and she guessed she might lose at least two of them.

“But I
didn't
know,” she said. “There was no way I could.” She hated the whine she heard in her voice. It was the voice of a querulous old woman. “No way at all.”

She had to get out of this goddam camper. It might be the biggest, luxiest one in the world, but right now it felt the size of a coffin. She made her way to the door, holding onto things to keep her balance. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard before she went out. Ten to two. Everything had happened in just twenty minutes. Incredible.

How much did she find out before I got free of her? How much does she know?

No way of telling for sure, but even a little could be dangerous. The brat had to be taken care of, and soon.

Rose stepped out into the pale early moonlight and took half a dozen long, steadying breaths of fresh air. She began to feel a little better, a little more herself, but she couldn't let go of that
fluttering
sensation. The feeling of having someone else inside her—a rube, no less—looking at her private things. The pain had been bad, and the surprise of being trapped that way was worse, but the worst thing of all was the humiliation and sense of violation. She had been
stolen
from.

You are going to pay for that, princess. You just messed in with the wrong bitch
.

A shape was moving toward her. Rose had settled on the top step of her RV, but now she stood up, tense, ready for anything. Then the shape got closer and she saw it was Crow. He was dressed in pajama bottoms and slippers.

“Rose, I think you better—” He stopped. “What the hell happened to your hand?”

“Never mind my fucking hand,” she snapped. “What are you doing here at two in the morning? Especially when you knew I was apt to be busy?”

“It's Grampa Flick,” Crow said. “Apron Annie says he's dying.”

Instead of pine-scented air freshener and Alcazar cigars, Grampa Flick's Fleetwood this morning smelled of shit, disease, and death. It was also crowded. There were at least a dozen members of the True Knot present, some gathered around the old man's bed, many more sitting or standing in the living room, drinking coffee. The rest were outside. Everyone looked stunned and uneasy. The True wasn't used to death among their own.

“Clear out,” Rose said. “Crow and Nut—you stay.”

“Look at him,” Petty the Chink said in a trembling voice. “Them spots! And 'e's cycling like crazy, Rose! Oh, this is 'orrible!”

“Go on,” Rose said. She spoke gently and gave Petty a comforting squeeze on the shoulder when what she felt like doing was kicking her fat Cockney ass right out the door. She was a lazy gossip, good for nothing but warming Barry's bed, and probably not very good at that. Rose guessed that nagging was more Petty's specialty. When she wasn't scared out of her mind, that is.

“Come on, folks,” Crow said. “If he
is
going to die, he doesn't need to do it with an audience.”

“He'll pull through,” Harpman Sam said. “Tougher'n a boiled owl, that's Grampa Flick.” But he put his arm around Baba the Russian, who looked devastated, and hugged her tight against him for a moment.

They got moving, some taking a last look back over their
shoulders before going down the steps to join the others. When it was just the three of them, Rose approached the bed.

Grampa Flick stared up at her without seeing her. His lips had pulled back from his gums. Great patches of his fine white hair had fallen out on the pillowcase, giving him the look of a distempered dog. His eyes were huge and wet and filled with pain. He was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, and his scrawny body was stippled with red marks that looked like pimples or insect bites.

She turned to Walnut and said, “What in hell are those?”

“Koplik's spots,” he said. “That's what they look like to me, anyway. Although Koplik's are usually just inside the mouth.”

“Talk English.”

Nut ran his hands through his thinning hair. “I think he's got the measles.”

Rose gaped in shock, then barked laughter. She didn't want to stand here listening to this shit; she wanted some aspirin for her hand, which sent out a pain-pulse with every beat of her heart. She kept thinking about how the hands of cartoon characters looked when they got whopped with a mallet. “We don't catch rube diseases!”

“Well . . . we never used to.”

She stared at him furiously. She wanted her hat, she felt naked without it, but it was back in the EarthCruiser.

Nut said, “I can only tell you what I see, which is red measles, also known as rubeola.”

A rube disease called rubeola. How too fucking perfect.

“That is just . . .
horseshit
!”

He flinched, and why not? She sounded strident even to herself, but . . . ah, Jesus God,
measles
? The oldest member of the True Knot dying of a childhood disease even children didn't catch anymore?

“That baseball-playing kid from Iowa had a few spots on him, but I never thought . . . because yeah, it's like you say. We don't catch their diseases.”

“He was
years
ago!”

“I know. All I can think is that it was in the steam, and it kind of
hibernated. There are diseases that do that, you know. Lie passive, sometimes for years, then break out.”

“Maybe with rubes!” She kept coming back to that.

Walnut only shook his head.

“If Gramp's got it, why don't we all have it? Because those childhood diseases—chicken pox, measles, mumps—run through rube kids like shit through a goose. It doesn't make sense.” Then she turned to Crow Daddy and promptly contradicted herself. “What the fuck were you thinking when you let a bunch of them in to stand around and breathe his air?”

Crow just shrugged, his eyes never leaving the shivering old man on the bed. Crow's narrow, handsome face was pensive.

“Things change,” Nut said. “Just because we had immunity to rube diseases fifty or a hundred years ago doesn't mean we have it now. For all we know, this could be part of a natural process.”

“Are you telling me there's anything natural about
that
?” She pointed to Grampa Flick.

“A single case doesn't make an epidemic,” Nut said, “and it
could
be something else. But if this happens again, we'll have to put whoever it happens to in complete quarantine.”

“Would it help?”

He hesitated a long time. “I don't know. Maybe we do have it, all of us. Maybe it's like an alarm clock set to go off or dynamite on a timer. According to the latest scientific thinking, that's sort of how rubes age. They go along and go along, pretty much the same, and then something turns off in their genes. The wrinkles start showing up and all at once they need canes to walk with.”

Crow had been watching Grampa. “There he goes.
Fuck
.”

Grampa Flick's skin was turning milky. Then translucent. As it moved toward complete transparency, Rose could see his liver, the shriveled gray-black bags of his lungs, the pulsing red knot of his heart. She could see his veins and arteries like the highways and turnpikes on her in-dash GPS. She could see the optic nerves that connected his eyes to his brain. They looked like ghostly strings.

Then he came back. His eyes moved, caught Rosie's, held them.
He reached out and took her unhurt hand. Her first impulse was to pull away—if he had what Nut said he had, he was contagious—but what the hell. If Nut was right, they had all been exposed.

“Rose,” he whispered. “Don't leave me.”

“I won't.” She sat down beside him on the bed, her fingers entwined in his. “Crow?”

“Yes, Rose.”

“The package you had sent to Sturbridge—they'll hold it, won't they?”

“Sure.”

“All right, we'll see this through. But we can't afford to wait too long. The little girl is a lot more dangerous than I thought.” She sighed. “Why do problems always come in bunches?”

“Did she do that to your hand, somehow?”

That was a question she didn't want to answer directly. “I won't be able to go with you, because she knows me now.”
Also,
she thought but didn't say,
because if this is what Walnut thinks it is, the rest will need me here to play Mother Courage.
“But we have to have her. It's more important than ever.”

“Because?”

“If she's had the measles, she'll have the rube immunity to catching it again. That might make her steam useful in all sorts of ways.”

“The kids get vaccinated against all that crap now,” Crow said.

Rose nodded. “That could work, too.”

Grampa Flick once more began to cycle. It was hard to watch, but Rose made herself to do it. When she could no longer see the old fellow's organs through his fragile skin, she looked at Crow and held up her bruised and scraped hand.

“Also . . . she needs to be taught a lesson.”

When Dan woke up in his turret room on Monday, the schedule had once more been wiped from his blackboard and replaced with a
message from Abra. At the top was a smiley-face. All the teeth were showing, which gave it a gleeful look.

She came! I was ready and I hurt her!

I REALLY DID!!

She deserves it, so HOORAY!!!

I need to talk to you, not this way or 'Net.

Same place as before 3PM