Doctor Sleep (39 page)

Dan lay back on his bed, covered his eyes, and went looking for her. He found her walking to school with three of her friends, which struck him as dangerous in itself. For the friends as well as for Abra. He hoped Billy was there and on the job. He also hoped Billy would be discreet and not get tagged by some zealous Neighborhood Watch type as a suspicious character.

(
I can come John and I don't leave until tomorrow but it has to be fast and we have to be careful  
)

(
yes okay good  
)

Dan was once more seated on a bench outside the ivy-covered Anniston Library when Abra emerged, dressed for school in a red jumper and snazzy red sneakers. She held a knapsack by one strap. To Dan she looked as if she'd grown an inch since the last time he'd seen her.

She waved. “Hi, Uncle Dan!”

“Hello, Abra. How was school?”

“Great! I got an A on my biology report!”

“Sit down a minute and tell me about it.”

She crossed to the bench, so filled with grace and energy she almost seemed to dance. Eyes bright, color high: a healthy after-school teenager with all systems showing green. Everything about her said ready-steady-go. There was no reason for this to make Dan feel uneasy, but it did. One very good thing: a nondescript Ford
pickup was parked half a block down, the old guy behind the wheel sipping a take-out coffee and reading a magazine. Appearing to read a magazine, at least.

(
Billy?
)

No answer, but he looked up from his magazine for a moment, and that was enough.

“Okay,” Dan said in a lower voice. “I want to hear exactly what happened.”

She told him about the trap she had set, and how well it had worked. Dan listened with amazement, admiration . . . and that growing sense of unease. Her confidence in her abilities worried him. It was a kid's confidence, and the people they were dealing with weren't kids.

“I just told you to set an alarm,” he said when she had finished.

“This was better. I don't know if I could have gone at her that way if I wasn't pretending to be Daenerys in the
Game of Thrones
books, but I think so. Because she killed the baseball boy and lots of others. Also because . . .” For the first time her smile faltered a little. As she was telling her story, Dan had seen what she would look like at eighteen. Now he saw what she had looked like at nine.

“Because what?”

“She's not human. None of them are. Maybe they were once, but not anymore.” She straightened her shoulders and tossed her hair back. “But I'm stronger. She knew it, too.”

(
I thought she pushed you away
)

She frowned at him, annoyed, wiped at her mouth, then caught her hand doing it and returned it to her lap. Once it was there, the other one clasped it to keep it still. There was something familiar about this gesture, but why wouldn't there be? He'd seen her do it before. Right now he had bigger things to worry about.

(
next time I'll be ready if there
is
a next time
)

That might be true. But if there was a next time, the woman in the hat would be ready, too.

(
I only want you to be careful  
)

“I will. For sure.” This, of course, was what all kids said in order
to placate the adults in their lives, but it still made Dan feel better. A little, anyway. Besides, there was Billy in his F-150 with the faded red paint.

Her eyes were dancing again. “I found lots of stuff out. That's why I needed to see you.”

“What stuff?”

“Not where she is, I didn't get that far, but I did find . . . see, when she was in my head, I was in hers. Like swapsies, you know? It was full of drawers, like being in the world's biggest library reference room, although maybe I only saw it that way because
she
did. If she had been looking at computer screens in my head,
I
might have seen computer screens.”

“How many of her drawers did you get into?”

“Three. Maybe four. They call themselves the True Knot. Most of them are old, and they really are like vampires. They look for kids like me. And like you were, I guess. Only they don't drink blood, they breathe in the stuff that comes out when the special kids die.” She winced in disgust. “The more they hurt them before, the stronger that stuff is. They call it steam.”

“It's red, right? Red or reddish-pink?”

He felt sure of this, but Abra frowned and shook her head. “No, white. A bright white cloud. Nothing red about it. And listen: they can store it! What they don't use they put it in these thermos bottle thingies. But they never have enough. I saw this show once, about sharks? It said they're always on the move, because they never have enough to eat. I think the True Knot is like that.” She grimaced. “They're naughty, all right.”

White stuff. Not red but white. It still had to be what the old nurse had called the gasp, but a different kind. Because it came from healthy young people instead of old ones dying of almost every disease the flesh was heir to? Because they were what Abra called “the special kids?” Both?

She was nodding. “Both, probably.”

“Okay. But the thing that matters most is that they know about you.
She
knows.”

“They're a little scared I might tell someone about them, but not too scared.”

“Because you're just a kid, and no one believes kids.”

“Right.” She blew her bangs off her forehead. “Momo would believe me, but she's going to die. She's going to your hot spice, Dan. Hospice, I mean. You'll help her, won't you? If you're not in Iowa?”

“All I can. Abra—are they coming for you?”

“Maybe, but if they do it won't be because of what I know. It will be because of what I
am
.” Her happiness was gone now that she was facing this head-on. She rubbed at her mouth again, and when she dropped her hand, her lips were parted in an angry smile.
This girl has a temper,
Dan thought. He could relate to that. He had a temper himself. It had gotten him in trouble more than once.

“
She
won't come, though. That bitch. She knows I know her now, and I'll sense her if she gets close, because we're sort of tied together. But there are others. If they come for me, they'll hurt anyone who gets in their way.”

Abra took his hands in hers, squeezing hard. This worried Dan, but he didn't make her let go. Right now she needed to touch someone she trusted.

“We have to stop them so they can't hurt my daddy, or my mom, or any of my friends. And so they won't kill any more kids.”

For a moment Dan caught a clear picture from her thoughts—not sent, just there in the foreground. It was a collage of photos. Children, dozens of them, under the heading HAVE YOU SEEN ME? She was wondering how many of them had been taken by the True Knot, murdered for their final psychic gasp—the obscene delicacy this bunch lived on—and left in unmarked graves.

“
You have to get that baseball glove
. If I have it, I'll be able to find out where Barry the Chunk is. I know I will. And the rest of them will be where he is. If you can't kill them, at least you can report them to the police. Get me that glove, Dan,
please
.”

“If it's where you say it is, we'll get it. But in the meantime, Abra, you have to watch yourself.”

“I will, but I don't think she'll try sneaking into my head again.”
Abra's smile reemerged. In it, Dan saw the take-no-prisoners warrior woman she sometimes pretended to be—Daenerys, or whoever. “If she does, she'll be sorry.”

Dan decided to let this go. They had been together on this bench as long as he dared. Longer, really. “I've set up my own security system on your behalf. If you looked into me, I imagine you could find out what it is, but I don't want you to do that. If someone else from this Knot tries to go prospecting in your head—not the woman in the hat, but someone else—they can't find out what you don't know.”

“Oh. Okay.” He could see her thinking that anyone else who tried that would be sorry, too, and this increased his sense of unease.

“Just . . . if you get in a tight place, yell
Billy
with all your might. Got that?”

(  
yes the way you once called for your friend Dick
)

He jumped a little. Abra smiled. “I wasn't peeking; I just—”

“I understand. Now tell me one thing before you go.”

“What?”

“Did you really get an A on your bio report?”

At quarter to eight on that Monday evening, Rose got a double break on her walkie. It was Crow. “Better get over here,” he said. “It's happening.”

The True was standing around Grampa's RV in a silent circle. Rose (now wearing her hat at its accustomed gravity-defying angle) cut through them, pausing to give Andi a hug, then went up the steps, rapped once, and let herself in. Nut was standing with Big Mo and Apron Annie, Grampa's two reluctant nurses. Crow was sitting on the end of the bed. He stood up when Rose came in. He was showing his age this evening. Lines bracketed his mouth, and there were a few threads of white silk in his black hair.

We need to take steam,
Rose thought.
And when this is over, we will
.

Grampa Flick was cycling rapidly now: first transparent, then solid again, then transparent. But each transparency was longer, and more of him disappeared. He knew what was happening, Rose saw. His eyes were wide and terrified; his body writhed with the pain of the changes it was going through. She had always allowed herself to believe, on some deep level of her mind, in the True Knot's immortality. Yes, every fifty or a hundred years or so, someone died—like that big dumb Dutchman, Hands-Off Hans, who had been electrocuted by a falling powerline in an Arkansas windstorm not long after World War II ended, or Katie Patches, who had drowned, or Tommy the Truck—but those were exceptions. Usually the ones who fell were taken down by their own carelessness. So she had always believed. Now she saw she had been as foolish as rube children clinging to their belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

He cycled back to solidity, moaning and crying and shivering. “Make it stop, Rosie-girl, make it stop. It
hurts
—”

Before she could answer—and really, what could she have said?—he was fading again until there was nothing left of him but a sketch of bones and his staring, floating eyes. They were the worst.

Rose tried to contact him with her mind and comfort him that way, but there was nothing to hold onto. Where Grampa Flick had always been—often grumpy, sometimes sweet—there was now only a roaring windstorm of broken images. Rose withdrew from him, shaken. Again she thought,
This can't be happening
.

“Maybe we should put him out of his miz'y,” Big Mo said. She was digging her fingernails into Annie's forearm, but Annie didn't seem to feel it. “Give him a shot, or something. You got something in your bag, don't you, Nut? You must.”

“What good would it do?” Walnut's voice was hoarse. “Maybe earlier, but it's going too fast now. He's got no system for any drug to circulate in. If I gave him a hypo in the arm, we'd see it soaking into the bed five seconds later. Best to just let it happen. It won't be long.”

Nor was it. Rose counted four more full cycles. On the fifth,
even his bones disappeared. For a moment the eyeballs remained, staring first at her and then rolling to look at Crow Daddy. They hung above the pillow, which was still indented by the weight of his head and stained with Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic, of which he seemed to have an endless supply. She thought she remembered Greedy G telling her once that he bought it on eBay. eBay, for fuck's sweet sake!

Then, slowly, the eyes disappeared, too. Except of course they weren't really gone; Rose knew she'd be seeing them in her dreams later tonight. So would the others in attendance at Grampa Flick's deathbed. If they got any sleep at all.

They waited, none of them entirely convinced that the old man wouldn't appear before them again like the ghost of Hamlet's father or Jacob Marley or some other, but there was only the shape of his disappeared head, the stains left by his hair tonic, and the deflated pee- and shit-stained boxers he had been wearing.

Mo burst into wild sobs and buried her head in Apron Annie's generous bosom. Those waiting outside heard, and one voice (Rose would never know whose) began to speak. Another joined in, then a third and a fourth. Soon they were all chanting under the stars, and Rose felt a wild chill go zigzagging up her back. She reached out, found Crow's hand, and squeezed it.

Annie joined in. Mo next, her words muffled. Nut. Then Crow. Rose the Hat took a deep breath and added her voice to theirs.

Lodsam hanti,
we are the chosen ones.

Cahanna risone hanti,
we are the fortunate ones.

Sabbatha hanti, sabbatha hanti, sabbatha hanti.

We are the True Knot, and we endure.

Later, Crow joined her in her EarthCruiser. “You really won't be going east, will you?”

“No. You'll be in charge.”

“What do we do now?”

“Mourn him, of course. Unfortunately, we can only give him two days.”

The traditional period was seven: no fucking, no idle talk, no steam. Just meditation. Then a circle of farewell where everyone would step forward and say one memory of Grampa Jonas Flick and give up one object they had from him, or that they associated with him (Rose had already picked hers, a ring with a Celtic design Grampa had given her when this part of America had still been Indian country and she had been known as the Irish Rose). There was never a body when a member of the True died, so the objects of remembrance had to serve the purpose. Those things were wrapped in white linen and buried.