Doctor Sleep (2 page)

His mother knew about the no-talking thing. It had happened after Danny had ventured into Room 217 at the Overlook.

“Will you talk to Dick?”

Lying in his bed, looking up at her, he nodded. His mother called, even though it was four in the morning.

Late the next day, Dick came. He brought something with him. A present.

After Wendy called Dick—she made sure Danny heard her doing it—Danny went back to sleep. Although he was now eight and in the third grade, he was sucking his thumb. It hurt her to see him do that. She went to the bathroom door and stood looking at it. She was afraid—Danny had made her afraid—but she had to go, and
she had no intention of using the sink as he had. The image of how she would look teetering on the edge of the counter with her butt hanging over the porcelain (even if there was no one there to see) made her wrinkle her nose.

In one hand she had the hammer from her little box of widow's tools. As she turned the knob and pushed the bathroom door open, she raised it. The bathroom was empty, of course, but the ring of the toilet seat was down. She never left it that way before going to bed, because she knew if Danny wandered in, only ten percent awake, he was apt to forget to put it up and piss all over it. Also, there was a smell. A bad one. As if a rat had died in the walls.

She took a step in, then two. She saw movement and whirled, hammer upraised, to hit whoever

(
whatever
)

was hiding behind the door. But it was only her shadow. Scared of her own shadow, people sometimes sneered, but who had a better right than Wendy Torrance? After the things she had seen and been through, she knew that shadows could be dangerous. They could have teeth.

No one was in the bathroom, but there was a discolored smear on the toilet seat and another on the shower curtain. Excrement was her first thought, but shit wasn't yellowish-purple. She looked more closely and saw bits of flesh and decayed skin. There was more on the bathmat, in the shape of footprints. She thought them too small—too
dainty
—to be a man's.

“Oh God,” she whispered.

She ended up using the sink after all.

Wendy nagged her son out of bed at noon. She managed to get a little soup and half a peanut butter sandwich into him, but then he went back to bed. He still wouldn't speak. Hallorann arrived shortly after five in the afternoon, behind the wheel of his now ancient (but
perfectly maintained and blindingly polished) red Cadillac. Wendy had been standing at the window, waiting and watching as she had once waited and watched for her husband, hoping Jack would come home in a good mood. And sober.

She rushed down the stairs and opened the door just as Dick was about to ring the bell marked TORRANCE 2A. He held out his arms and she rushed into them at once, wishing she could be enfolded there for at least an hour. Maybe two.

He let go and held her at arm's length by her shoulders. “You're lookin fine, Wendy. How's the little man? He talkin again?”

“No, but he'll talk to you. Even if he won't do it out loud to start with, you can—” Instead of finishing, she made a finger-gun and pointed it at his forehead.

“Not necessarily,” Dick said. His smile revealed a bright new pair of false teeth. The Overlook had taken most of the last set on the night the boiler blew. Jack Torrance swung the mallet that took Dick's dentures and Wendy's ability to walk without a hitch in her stride, but they both understood it had really been the Overlook. “He's very powerful, Wendy. If he wants to block me out, he will. I know from my own experience. Besides, it'd be better if we talk with our mouths. Better for him. Now tell me everything that happened.”

After she did that, Wendy took him into the bathroom. She had left the stains for him to see, like a beat cop preserving the scene of a crime for the forensic team. And there
had
been a crime. One against her boy.

Dick looked for a long time, not touching, then nodded. “Let's see if Danny's up and in the doins.”

He wasn't, but Wendy's heart was lightened by the look of gladness that came into her son's face when he saw who was sitting beside him on the bed and shaking his shoulder.

(
hey Danny I brought you a present
)

(
it's not my birthday
)

Wendy watched them, knowing they were speaking but not knowing what it was about.

Dick said, “Get on up, honey. We're gonna take a walk on the beach.”

(
Dick she came back Mrs. Massey from Room 217 came back
)

Dick gave his shoulder another shake. “Talk out loud, Dan. You're scarin your ma.”

Danny said, “What's my present?”

Dick smiled. “That's better. I like to hear you, and Wendy does, too.”

“Yes.” It was all she dared say. Otherwise they'd hear the tremble in her voice and be concerned. She didn't want that.

“While we're gone, you might want to give the bathroom a cleaning,” Dick said to her. “Have you got kitchen gloves?”

She nodded.

“Good. Wear them.”

The beach was two miles away. The parking lot was surrounded by tawdry beachfront attractions—funnel cake concessions, hotdog stands, souvenir shops—but this was the tag end of the season, and none were doing much business. They had the beach itself almost entirely to themselves. On the ride from the apartment, Danny had held his present—an oblong package, quite heavy, wrapped in silver paper—on his lap.

“You can open it after we talk a bit,” Dick said.

They walked just above the waves, where the sand was hard and gleaming. Danny walked slowly, because Dick was pretty old. Someday he'd die. Maybe even soon.

“I'm good to go another few years,” Dick said. “Don't you worry about that. Now tell me about last night. Don't leave anything out.”

It didn't take long. The hard part would have been finding words to explain the terror he now felt, and how it was mingled with a suffocating sense of certainty: now that she'd found him, she'd never
leave. But because it was Dick, he didn't need words, although he found some.

“She'll come back. I know she will. She'll come back and come back until she gets me.”

“Do you remember when we met?”

Although surprised at the change of direction, Danny nodded. It had been Hallorann who gave him and his parents the guided tour on their first day at the Overlook. Very long ago, that seemed.

“And do you remember the first time I spoke up inside your head?”

“I sure do.”

“What did I say?”

“You asked me if I wanted to go to Florida with you.”

“That's right. And how did it make you feel, to know you wasn't alone anymore? That you wasn't the only one?”

“It was great,” Danny said. “It was so great.”

“Yeah,” Hallorann said. “Yeah, course it was.”

They walked in silence for a bit. Little birds—peeps, Danny's mother called them—ran in and out of the waves.

“Did it ever strike you funny, how I showed up when you needed me?” He looked down at Danny and smiled. “No. It didn't. Why would it? You was just a child, but you're a little older now. A
lot
older in some ways. Listen to me, Danny. The world has a way of keeping things in balance. I believe that. There's a saying: When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. I was your teacher.”

“You were a lot more than that,” Danny said. He took Dick's hand. “You were my friend. You saved us.”

Dick ignored this . . . or seemed to. “My gramma also had the shining—do you remember me telling you that?”

“Yeah. You said you and her could have long conversations without even opening your mouths.”

“That's right. She taught me. And it was her
great
-gramma that taught her, way back in the slave days. Someday, Danny, it will be your turn to be the teacher. The pupil will come.”

“If Mrs. Massey doesn't get me first,” Danny said morosely.

They came to a bench. Dick sat down. “I don't dare go any further; I might not make it back. Sit beside me. I want to tell you a story.”

“I don't want stories,” Danny said. “She'll come back, don't you get it? She'll come
back
and come
back
and come
back
.”

“Shut your mouth and open your ears. Take some instruction.” Then Dick grinned, displaying his gleaming new dentures. “I think you'll get the point. You're far from stupid, honey.”

Dick's mother's mother—the one with the shining—lived in Clearwater. She was the White Gramma. Not because she was Caucasian, of course, but because she was
good
. His father's father lived in Dunbrie, Mississippi, a rural community not far from Oxford. His wife had died long before Dick was born. For a man of color in that place and time, he was wealthy. He owned a funeral parlor. Dick and his parents visited four times a year, and young Dick Hallorann hated those visits. He was terrified of Andy Hallorann, and called him—only in his own mind, to speak it aloud would have earned him a smack across the chops—the Black Grampa.

“You know about kiddie-fiddlers?” Dick asked Danny. “Guys who want children for sex?”

“Sort of,” Danny said cautiously. Certainly he knew not to talk to strangers, and never to get into a car with one. Because they might do stuff to you.

“Well, old Andy was more than a kiddie-fiddler. He was a damn sadist, as well.”

“What's that?”

“Someone who enjoys giving pain.”

Danny nodded in immediate understanding. “Like Frankie Listrone at school. He gives kids Indian burns and Dutch rubs. If he can't make you cry, he stops. If he can, he
never
stops.”

“That's bad, but this was worse.”

Dick lapsed into what would have looked like silence to a passerby, but the story went forward in a series of pictures and connecting phrases. Danny saw the Black Grampa, a tall man in a suit as black as he was, who wore a special kind of

(
fedora
)

hat on his head. He saw how there were always little buds of spittle at the corners of his mouth, and how his eyes were red-rimmed, like he was tired or had just gotten over crying. He saw how he would take Dick—younger than Danny was now, probably the same age he'd been that winter at the Overlook—on his lap. If they weren't alone, he might only tickle. If they were, he'd put his hand between Dick's legs and squeeze his balls until Dick thought he'd faint with the pain.

“Do you like that?” Grampa Andy would pant in his ear. He smelled of cigarettes and White Horse scotch. “Coss you do, every boy likes that. But even if you don't, you dassn't tell. If you do, I'll hurt you. I'll burn you.”

“Holy shit,” Danny said. “That's gross.”

“There were other things, too,” Dick said, “but I'll just tell you one. Grampy hired a woman to help out around the house after his wife died. She cleaned and cooked. At dinnertime, she'd slat out everything on the table at once, from salad to dessert, because that's the way ole Black Grampa liked it. Dessert was always cake or puddin. It was put down on a little plate or in a little dish next to your dinnerplate so you could look at it and want it while you plowed through the other muck. Grampa's hard and fast rule was you could
look
at dessert but you couldn't
eat
dessert unless you finished every bite of fried meat and boiled greens and mashed potatoes. You even had to clean up the gravy, which was lumpy and didn't have much taste. If it wasn't all gone, Black Grampa'd hand me a hunk of bread and say ‘Sop er up with that, Dickie-Bird, make that plate shine like the dog licked it.' That's what he called me, Dickie-Bird.

“Sometimes I couldn't finish no matter what, and then I didn't get the cake or the puddin. He'd take it and eat it himself. And
sometimes when I
could
finish all my dinner, I'd find he'd smashed a cigarette butt into my piece of cake or my vanilla puddin. He could do that because he always sat next to me. He'd make like it was a big joke. ‘Whoops, missed the ashtray,' he'd say. My ma and pa never put a stop to it, although they must have known that even if it was a joke, it wasn't a fair one to play on a child. They just made out like it was a joke, too.”

“That's really bad,” Danny said. “Your folks should have stood up for you. My mom does. My daddy would, too.”

“They were scairt of him. And they were right to be scairt. Andy Hallorann was a bad, bad motorcycle. He'd say, ‘Go on, Dickie, eat around it, that won't poison ya.' If I took a bite, he'd have Nonnie—that was his housekeeper's name—bring me a fresh dessert. If I wouldn't, it just sat there. It got so I could never finish my meal, because my stomach would get all upset.”

“You should have moved your cake or puddin to the other side of your plate,” Danny said.

“I tried that, sure, I wasn't born foolish. He'd just move it back, saying dessert went on the right.” Dick paused, looking out at the water, where a long white boat was trundling slowly across the dividing line between the sky and the Gulf of Mexico. “Sometimes when he got me alone he bit me. And once, when I said I'd tell my pa if he didn't leave me alone, he put a cigarette out on my bare foot. He said, ‘Tell him that, too, and see what good it does you. Your daddy knows my ways already and he'll never say a word, because he yella and because he wants the money I got in the bank when I die, which I ain't fixing to do soon.' ”

Danny listened in wide-eyed fascination. He had always thought the story of Bluebeard was the scariest of all time, the scariest there ever could be, but this one was worse. Because it was true.

“Sometimes he said that he knew a bad man named Charlie Manx, and if I didn't do what he wanted, he'd call Charlie Manx on the long-distance and he'd come in his fancy car and take me away to a place for bad children. Then Grampa would put his hand between my legs and commence squeezing. ‘So you ain't gonna
say a thing, Dickie-Bird. If you do, ole Charlie will come and keep you with the other children he done stole until you die. And when you do, you'll go to hell and your body will burn forever. Because you peached. It don't matter if anybody believes you or not, peaching is peaching.'