Doctor Sleep (20 page)

He thought:
Canny
.

He thought:
Worthless pups need to take their medicine. And you know where they sell it, don't you? Damn near everywhere
.

The wind rose in a furious gust, making the turret groan. When it died, the blackboard girl was there. He could almost hear her breathing.

He lifted one hand out from beneath the comforters. For a moment it only hung there in the cold air, and then he felt hers—small, warm—slip into it. “Abra,” he said. “Your name is Abra, but sometimes people call you Abby. Isn't that right?”

No answer came, but he didn't really need one. All he needed was the sensation of that warm hand in his. It only lasted for a few seconds, but it was long enough to soothe him. He closed his eyes and slept.

Twenty miles away, in the little town of Anniston, Abra Stone lay awake. The hand that had enfolded hers held on for a moment or two. Then it turned to mist and was gone. But it had been there.
He
had been there. She had found him in a dream, but when she woke, she had discovered the dream was real. She was standing in the doorway of a room. What she had seen there was terrible and wonderful at the same time. There was death, and death was scary,
but there had also been helping. The man who was helping hadn't been able to see her, but the cat had. The cat had a name like hers, but not exactly.

He didn't see me but he felt me. And we were together just now. I think I helped him, like he helped the man who died
.

That was a good thought. Holding onto it (as she had held the phantom hand), Abra rolled over on her side, hugged her stuffed rabbit to her chest, and went to sleep.

The True Knot wasn't incorporated, but if it had been, certain side o' the road communities in Maine, Florida, Colorado, and New Mexico would have been referred to as “company towns.” These were places where all the major businesses and large plots of land could be traced back, through a tangle of holding companies, to them. The True's towns, with colorful names like Dry Bend, Jerusalem's Lot, Oree, and Sidewinder, were safe havens, but they never stayed in those places for long; mostly they were migratory. If you drive the turnpikes and main-traveled highways of America, you may have seen them. Maybe it was on I-95 in South Carolina, somewhere south of Dillon and north of Santee. Maybe it was on I-80 in Nevada, in the mountain country west of Draper. Or in Georgia, while negotiating—slowly, if you know what's good for you—that notorious Highway 41 speedtrap outside Tifton.

How many times have you found yourself behind a lumbering RV, eating exhaust and waiting impatiently for your chance to pass? Creeping along at forty when you could be doing a perfectly legal sixty-five or even seventy? And when there's finally a hole in the fast lane and you pull out, holy God, you see a long line of those damn things, gas hogs driven at exactly ten miles an hour below the legal speed limit by bespectacled golden oldies who hunch over their steering wheels, gripping them like they think they're going to fly away.

Or maybe you've encountered them in the turnpike rest areas, when you stop to stretch your legs and maybe drop a few quarters into one of the vending machines. The entrance ramps to those rest stops always divide in two, don't they? Cars in one parking lot, long-haul trucks and RVs in another. Usually the lot for the big rigs and RVs is a little farther away. You might have seen the True's rolling motorhomes parked in that lot, all in a cluster. You might have seen their owners walking up to the main building—slow, because many of them look old and some of them are pretty darn fat—always in a group, always keeping to themselves.

Sometimes they pull off at one of the exits loaded with gas stations, motels, and fast-food joints. And if you see those RVs parked at McDonald's or Burger King, you keep on going because you know they'll all be lined up at the counter, the men wearing floppy golf hats or long-billed fishing caps, the women in stretch pants (usually powder-blue) and shirts that say things like ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDCHILDREN! or JESUS IS KING or HAPPY WANDERER. You'd rather go half a mile farther down the road, to the Waffle House or Shoney's, wouldn't you? Because you know they'll take forever to order, mooning over the menu, always wanting their Quarter Pounders without the pickles or their Whoppers without the sauce. Asking if there are any interesting tourist attractions in the area, even though anyone can see this is just another nothing three-stoplight burg where the kids leave as soon as they graduate from the nearest high school.

You hardly see them, right? Why would you? They're just the RV People, elderly retirees and a few younger compatriots living their rootless lives on the turnpikes and blue highways, staying at campgrounds where they sit around in their Walmart lawnchairs and cook on their hibachis while they talk about investments and fishing tournaments and hotpot recipes and God knows what. They're the ones who always stop at fleamarkets and yardsales, parking their damn dinosaurs nose-to-tail half on the shoulder and half on the road, so you have to slow to a crawl in order to creep by. They are the opposite of the motorcycle clubs you sometimes see on
those same turnpikes and blue highways; the Mild Angels instead of the wild ones.

They're annoying as hell when they descend en masse on a rest area and fill up all the toilets, but once their balky, road-stunned bowels finally work and you're able to take a pew yourself, you put them out of your mind, don't you? They're no more remarkable than a flock of birds on a telephone wire or a herd of cows grazing in a field beside the road. Oh, you might wonder how they can afford to fill those fuel-guzzling monstrosities (because they
must
be on comfy fixed incomes, how else could they spend all their time driving around like they do), and you might puzzle over why anyone would want to spend their golden years cruising all those endless American miles between Hoot and Holler, but beyond that, you probably never spare them a thought.

And if you happen to be one of those unfortunate people who's ever lost a kid—nothing left but a bike in the vacant lot down the street, or a little cap lying in the bushes at the edge of a nearby stream—you probably never thought of
them
. Why would you? No, it was probably some hobo. Or (worse to consider, but horribly plausible) some sick fuck from your very own town, maybe your very own neighborhood, maybe even
your very own street,
some sick killer pervo who's very good at looking normal and will go on looking normal until someone finds a clatter of bones in the guy's basement or buried in his backyard. You'd never think of the RV People, those midlife pensioners and cheery older folks in their golf hats and sun visors with appliquéd flowers on them.

And mostly you'd be right. There are thousands of RV People, but by 2011 there was only one Knot left in America: the
True
Knot. They liked moving around, and that was good, because they had to. If they stayed in one place, they'd eventually attract attention, because they don't age like other people. Apron Annie or Dirty Phil (rube names Anne Lamont and Phil Caputo) might appear to grow twenty years older overnight. The Little twins (Pea and Pod) might snap back from twenty-two to twelve (or almost), the age at which they Turned, but their Turning was long ago. The only member
of the True who's actually young is Andrea Steiner, now known as Snakebite Andi . . . and even she's not as young as she looks.

A tottery, grumpy old lady of eighty suddenly becomes sixty again. A leathery old gent of seventy is able to put away his cane; the skin-tumors on his arms and face disappear.

Black-Eyed Susie loses her hitching limp.

Diesel Doug goes from half blind with cataracts to sharp-eyed, his bald spot magically gone. All at once, hey presto, he's forty-five again.

Steamhead Steve's crooked back straightens. His wife, Baba the Red, ditches those uncomfortable continence pants, puts on her rhinestone-studded Ariat boots, and says she wants to go out line dancing.

Given time to observe such changes, people would wonder and people would talk. Eventually some reporter would turn up, and the True Knot shied away from publicity the way vampires supposedly shy away from sunlight.

But since they
don't
live in one place (and when they stop for an extended period in one of their company towns, they keep to themselves), they fit right in. Why not? They wear the same clothes as the other RV People, they wear the same el cheapo sunglasses, they buy the same souvenir t-shirts and consult the same AAA roadmaps. They put the same decals on their Bounders and 'Bagos, touting all the peculiar places they've visited (I HELPED TRIM THE WORLD'S BIGGEST TREE IN CHRISTMASLAND!), and you find yourself looking at the same bumper stickers while you're stuck behind them (OLD BUT NOT DEAD, SAVE MEDICARE, I'M A CONSERVATIVE AND
I VOTE!!
), waiting for a chance to pass. They eat fried chicken from the Colonel and buy the occasional scratch ticket in those EZ-on, EZ-off convenience stores where they sell beer, bait, ammo,
Motor Trend
magazine, and ten thousand kinds of candybars. If there's a bingo hall in the town where they stop, a bunch of them are apt to go on over, take a table, and play until the last cover-all game is finished. At one of those games, Greedy G (rube name Greta Moore) won five hundred
dollars. She gloated over that for
months,
and although the members of the True have all the money they need, it pissed off some of the other ladies to no end. Token Charlie wasn't too pleased, either. He said he'd been waiting on B7 for five pulls from the hopper when the G finally bingoed.

“Greedy, you're one lucky bitch,” he said.

“And you're one unlucky bastard,” she replied. “One unlucky
black
bastard.” And went off chortling.

If one of them happens to get speed-trapped or stopped for some minor traffic offense—it's rare, but it does happen—the cop finds nothing but valid licenses, up-to-date insurance cards, and paperwork in apple-pie order. No voices are raised while the cop's standing there with his citation book, even if it's an obvious scam. The charges are never disputed, and all fines are paid promptly. America is a living body, the highways are its arteries, and the True Knot slips along them like a silent virus.

But there are no dogs.

Ordinary RV People travel with lots of canine company, usually those little shit-machines with white fur, gaudy collars, and nasty tempers. You know the kind; they have irritating barks that hurt your ears and ratty little eyes full of disturbing intelligence. You see them sniffing their way through the grass in the designated pet-walking areas of the turnpike rest stops, their owners trailing behind, pooper-scoopers at the ready. In addition to the usual decals and bumper stickers on the motorhomes of these ordinary RV People, you're apt to see yellow diamond-shaped signs reading POMERANIAN ON BOARD or I
MY POODLE.

Not the True Knot. They don't like dogs, and dogs don't like them. You might say dogs see
through
them. To the sharp and watchful eyes behind the cut-rate sunglasses. To the strong and long-muscled hunters' legs beneath the polyester slacks from Walmart. To the sharp teeth beneath the dentures, waiting to come out.

They don't like dogs, but they like certain children.

Oh yes, they like certain children very much.

In May of 2011, not long after Abra Stone celebrated her tenth birthday and Dan Torrance his tenth year of AA sobriety, Crow Daddy knocked on the door of Rosie the Hat's EarthCruiser. The True was currently staying at the Kozy Kampground outside Lexington, Kentucky. They were on their way to Colorado, where they would spend most of the summer in one of their bespoke towns, this one a place Dan sometimes revisited in his dreams. Usually they were in no hurry to get anywhere, but there was some urgency this summer. All of them knew it but none of them talked about it.

Rose would take care of it. She always had.

“Come,” she said, and Crow Daddy stepped in.

When on a business errand, he always stepped out in good suits and expensive shoes polished to a mirror gloss. If he was feeling particularly old-school, he might even carry a walking stick. This morning he was wearing baggy pants held up by suspenders, a strappy t-shirt with a fish on it (KISS MY BASS printed beneath), and a flat workman's cap, which he swept off as he closed the door behind him. He was her sometime lover as well as her second-in-command, but he never failed to show respect. It was one of many things Rose liked about him. She had no doubt that the True could carry on under his leadership if she died. For awhile, at least. But for another hundred years? Perhaps not.
Probably
not. He had a silver tongue and cleaned up well when he had to deal with the rubes, but Crow had only rudimentary planning skills, and no real vision.

This morning he looked troubled.