Doctor Sleep (57 page)

“Don't think so,” Dan said.

She looked at him from the stove, where she was dishing up scrambled eggs.

“
You
woke her up. She heard your worry.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Sit down.” She paused. “Sit down,
Dan
. I guess I better get used to calling you that. Sit down and eat.”

Dan wasn't hungry, but he needed the fuel. He did as she said.

She sat across from him, sipping a glass of juice from the last carafe Concetta Reynolds would ever have delivered from Dean & DeLuca. “Older man with booze issues, starstruck younger woman. That's the picture I'm getting.”

“It's the one I got, too.” Dan shoveled the eggs in steadily and methodically, not tasting them.

“Coffee, Mr. . . . Dan?”

“Please.”

She went past the spilled sugar to the Bunn. “He's married, but his job takes him to a lot of faculty parties where there are a lot of pretty young gals. Not to mention a fair amount of blooming libido when the hour gets late and the music gets loud.”

“Sounds about right,” Dan said. “Maybe my mom used to go along to those parties, but then there was a kid to take care of at home and no money for babysitters.” She passed him a cup of coffee. He sipped it black before she could ask what he took in it. “Thanks. Anyway, they had a thing. Probably at one of the local motels. It sure wasn't in the back of his car—we had a VW Bug. Even a couple of horny acrobats couldn't have managed that.”

“Blackout screwing,” John said, coming into the room. His hair was standing up in sleep-quills at the back of his head. “That's what the oldtimers call it. Are there any more of those eggs?”

“Plenty,” Lucy said. “Abra left a message on the counter.”

“Really?” John went to look at it. “That was her?”

“Yes. I'd know her printing anywhere.”

“Holy shit, this could put Verizon out of business.”

She didn't smile. “Sit down and eat, John. You've got ten minutes, then I'm going to wake up Sleeping Beauty in there on the couch.” She sat down. “Go on, Dan.”

“I don't know if she thought my dad would leave my mom for her or not, and I doubt if you'll find the answer to that one in her trunk. Unless maybe she left a diary. All I know—based on what Dave said and what Concetta told me later—is that she hung around for awhile. Maybe hoping, maybe just partying, maybe both. But by the time she found out she was pregnant, she must have given up. For all I know, we might have been in Colorado by then.”

“Do you suppose your mother ever found out?”

“I don't know, but she must have wondered how faithful he was, especially on the nights when he came in late and shitfaced. I'm
sure she knew that drunks don't limit their bad behavior to betting the ponies or tucking five-spots into the cleavages of the waitresses down at the Twist and Shout.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Are you all right? You look exhausted.”

“I'm okay. But you're not the only one who's trying to process all this.”

“She died in a car accident,” Lucy said. She had turned from Dan and was looking fixedly at the bulletin board on the fridge. In the middle was a photograph of Concetta and Abra, who looked about four, walking hand in hand through a field of daisies. “The man with her was a lot older. And drunk. They were going fast. Momo didn't want to tell me, but around the time I turned eighteen, I got curious and nagged her into giving me at least some of the details. When I asked if my mother was drunk, too, Chetta said she didn't know. She said the police have no reason to test passengers who are killed in fatal accidents, only the driver.” She sighed. “It doesn't matter. We'll leave the family stories for another day. Tell me what's happened to my daughter.”

He did. At some point, he turned around and saw Dave Stone standing in the doorway, tucking his shirt into his pants and watching him.

Dan started with how Abra had gotten in touch with him, first using Tony as a kind of intermediary. Then how Abra had come in contact with the True Knot: a nightmare vision of the one she called “the baseball boy.”

“I remember that nightmare,” Lucy said. “She woke me up, screaming. It had happened before, but it was the first time in two or three years.”

Dave frowned. “I don't remember that at all.”

“You were in Boston, at a conference.” She turned to Dan. “Let
me see if I've got this. These people aren't people, they're . . . what? Some kind of vampires?”

“In a way, I suppose. They don't sleep in coffins during the day or turn into bats by moonlight, and I doubt if crosses and garlic bother them, but they're parasites, and they're certainly not human.”

“Human beings don't disappear when they die,” John said flatly.

“You really saw that happen?”

“We did. All three of us.”

“In any case,” Dan said, “the True Knot isn't interested in ordinary children, only those who have the shining.”

“Children like Abra,” Lucy said.

“Yes. They torture them before killing them—to purify the steam, Abra says. I keep picturing moonshiners making white lightning.”

“They want to . . . inhale her,” Lucy said. Still trying to get it straight in her head. “Because she has the shining.”

“Not just the shining, but a
great
shining. I'm a flashlight. She's a lighthouse. And she
knows
about them. She knows what they are.”

“There's more,” John said. “What we did to those men at Cloud Gap . . . as far as this Rose is concerned, that's down to Abra, no matter who actually did the killing.”

“What else could she expect?” Lucy asked indignantly. “Don't they understand self-defense?
Survival?
”

“What Rose understands,” Dan said, “is that there's a little girl who has challenged her.”

“Challenged—?”

“Abra got in touch telepathically. She told Rose that she was coming after her.”

“She
what
?”

“That temper of hers,” Dave said quietly. “I've told her a hundred times it would get her in trouble.”

“She's not going anywhere
near
that woman, or her child-killing friends,” Lucy said.

Dan thought:
Yes . . . and no
. He took Lucy's hand. She started to pull away, then didn't.

“The thing you have to understand is really quite simple,” he said.
“They will never stop.”

“But—”

“No buts, Lucy. Under other circumstances, Rose still might have decided to disengage—this is one crafty old she-wolf—but there's one other factor.”

“Which is?”

“They're sick,” John said. “Abra says it's the measles. They might even have caught it from the Trevor boy. I don't know if you'd call that divine retribution or just irony.”

“Measles?”

“I know it doesn't sound like much, but believe me, it is. You know how, in the old days, measles could run through a whole family of kids? If that's happening to this True Knot, it could wipe them out.”

“Good!” Lucy cried. The angry smile on her face was one Dan knew well.

“Not if they think Abra's supersteam will cure them,” Dave said. “That's what you need to understand, hon. This isn't just a skirmish. To this bitch it's a fight to the death.” He struggled and then brought out the rest of it. Because it had to be said. “If Rose gets the chance, she'll eat our daughter alive.”

Lucy asked, “Where are they? This True Knot, where are they?”

“Colorado,” Dan said. “At a place called the Bluebell Campground in the town of Sidewinder.” That the site of the campground was the very place where he had once almost died at his father's hands was a thing he didn't want to say, because it would lead to more questions and more cries of coincidence. The one thing of which Dan was sure was that there were no coincidences.

“This Sidewinder must have a police department,” Lucy said. “We'll call them and get them on this.”

“By telling them what?” John's tone was gentle, nonargumentative.

“Well . . . that . . .”

“If you actually got the cops to go up there to the campground,” Dan said, “they'd find nothing but a bunch of middle-aged-going-on-older Americans. Harmless RV folks, the kind who always want to show you pictures of their grandkids. Their papers would all be in apple-pie order, from dog licenses to land deeds. The police wouldn't find guns if they managed to get a search warrant—which they wouldn't, no probable cause—because the True Knot doesn't need guns. Their weapons are up here.” Dan tapped his forehead. “You'd be the crazy lady from New Hampshire, Abra would be your crazy daughter who ran away from home, and we'd be your crazy friends.”

Lucy pressed her palms to her temples. “I can't believe this is happening.”

“If you did a search of records, I think you'd find that the True Knot—under whatever name they might be incorporated—has been very generous to that particular Colorado town. You don't shit in your nest, you feather it. Then, if bad times come, you have lots of friends.”

“These bastards have been around a long time,” John said. “Haven't they? Because the main thing they take from this steam is longevity.”

“I'm pretty sure that's right,” Dan said. “And as good Americans, I'm sure they've been busy making money the whole time. Enough to grease wheels a lot bigger than the ones that turn in Sidewinder. State wheels. Federal wheels.”

“And this Rose . . . she'll never stop.”

“No.” Dan was thinking of the precognitive vision he'd had of her. The cocked hat. The yawning mouth. The single tooth. “Her heart is set on your daughter.”

“A woman who stays alive by killing children
has
no heart,” Dave said.

“Oh, she has one,” Dan said. “But it's black.”

Lucy stood up. “No more talking. I want to go to her
now
.
Everybody use the bathroom, because once we leave, we're not stopping until we get to that motel.”

Dan said, “Does Concetta have a computer? If she does, I need to take a quick peek at something before we go.”

Lucy sighed. “It's in her study, and I think you can guess the password. But if you take more than five minutes, we're going without you.”

Rose lay awake in her bed, stiff as a poker, trembling with steam and fury.

When an engine started up at quarter past two, she heard it. Steamhead Steve and Baba the Russian. When another started at twenty till four, she heard that one, too. This time it was the Little twins, Pea and Pod. Sweet Terri Pickford was with them, no doubt looking nervously through the back window for any sign of Rose. Big Mo had asked to go along—
begged
to go along—but they had turned her down because Mo was carrying the disease.

Rose could have stopped them, but why bother? Let them discover what life was like in America on their own, with no True Knot to protect them in camp or watch their backs while they were on the road.
Especially when I tell Toady Slim to kill their credit cards and empty their rich bank accounts,
she thought.

Toady was no Jimmy Numbers, but he could still take care of it, and at the touch of a button. And he'd be there to do it. Toady would stick. So would all the good ones . . . or
almost
all the good ones. Dirty Phil, Apron Annie, and Diesel Doug were no longer on their way back. They had taken a vote and decided to head south instead. Deez had told them Rose was no longer to be trusted, and besides, it was long past time to cut the Knot.

Good luck with that, darling boy,
she thought, clenching and unclenching her fists.

Splitting the True was a
terrible
idea, but thinning the herd was
a good one. So let the weaklings run and the sicklings die. When the bitchgirl was also dead and they had swallowed her steam (Rose had no more illusions of keeping her prisoner), the twenty-five or so who were left would be stronger than ever. She mourned Crow, and knew she had no one who could step into his shoes, but Token Charlie would do the best he could. So would Harpman Sam . . . Bent Dick . . . Fat Fannie and Long Paul . . . Greedy G, not the brightest bulb, but loyal and unquestioning.

Besides, with the others gone, the steam she still had in storage would go farther and make them stronger. They would need to be strong.

Come to me, little bitchgirl,
Rose thought.
See how strong you are when there are two dozen against you. See how you like it when it's just you against the True. We'll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we'll drink your screams.

Rose stared up into the darkness, hearing the fading voices of the runners, the faithless ones.

At the door came a soft, timid knock. Rose lay silent for a moment or two, considering, then swung her legs out of bed.

“Come.”

She was naked but made no attempt to cover herself when Silent Sarey crept in, shapeless inside one of her flannel nightgowns, her mouse-colored bangs covering her brows and almost hanging in her eyes. As always, Sarey seemed hardly there even when she was.

“I'm sad, Loze.”

“I know you are. I'm sad, too.”

She wasn't—she was furious—but it sounded good.

“I miss Andi.”

Andi, yes—rube name Andrea Steiner, whose father had fucked the humanity out of her long before the True Knot had found her. Rose remembered watching her that day in the movie theater, and how, later, she had fought her way through the Turning with sheer guts and willpower. Snakebite Andi would have stuck. Snake would have walked through fire, if Rose said the True Knot needed her to.