Doctor Sleep (56 page)

“So right in front of you,” John said. “Dan, does Abra know?”

“Sure.” Dan smiled, remembering Abra's theory of relativity.

“She got it from your mind?” Lucy asked. “Using her telepathy thing?”

“No, because
I
didn't know. Even someone as talented as Abra can't read something that isn't there. But on a deeper level, we both
knew. Hell, we even said it out loud. If anyone asked what we were doing together, we were going to say I was her uncle. Which I am. I should have realized consciously sooner than I did.”

“This is coincidence beyond coincidence,” Dave said, shaking his head.

“It's not. It's the farthest thing in the world from coincidence. Lucy, I understand that you're confused and angry. I'll tell you everything I know, but it will take some time. Thanks to John and your husband and Abra—her most of all—we've got some.”

“On the way,” Lucy said. “You can tell me on the way to Abra.”

“All right,” Dan said, “on the way. But three hours' sleep first.”

She was shaking her head before he finished. “No, now. I have to see her as soon as I possibly can. Don't you understand? She's my daughter, she's been kidnapped, and
I have to see her
!”

“She's been kidnapped, but now she's safe,” Dan said.

“You say that, of course you do, but you don't know.”

“
Abra
says it,” he replied. “And she
does
know. Listen, Mrs. Stone—Lucy—she's asleep right now, and she needs her sleep.”
I do, too. I've got a long trip ahead of me, and I think it's going to be a hard one. Very hard
.

Lucy was looking at him closely. “Are you all right?”

“Just tired.”

“We all are,” John said. “It's been . . . a stressful day.” He uttered a brief yap of laughter, then pressed both hands over his mouth like a child who's said a naughty word.

“I can't even call her and hear her voice,” Lucy said. She spoke slowly, as if trying to articulate a difficult precept. “Because they're sleeping off the drugs this man . . . the one you say she calls the Crow . . . put into her.”

“Soon,” Dave said. “You'll see her soon.” He put his hand over hers. For a moment Lucy looked as if she would shake it off. She clasped it instead.

“I can start on the way back to your grandmother's,” Dan said. He got up. It was an effort. “Come on.”

He had time to tell her how a lost man had ridden a northbound bus out of Massachusetts, and how—just over the New Hampshire state line—he'd tossed what would turn out to be his last bottle of booze into a trash can with IF YOU NO LONGER NEED IT, LEAVE IT HERE stenciled on the side. He told them how his childhood friend Tony had spoken up for the first time in years when the bus had rolled into Frazier.
This is the place,
Tony had said.

From there he doubled back to a time when he had been Danny instead of Dan (and sometimes doc, as in
what's up, doc
), and his invisible friend Tony had been an absolute necessity. The shining was only one of the burdens that Tony helped him bear, and not the major one. The major one was his alcoholic father, a troubled and ultimately dangerous man whom both Danny and his mother had loved deeply—perhaps as much because of his flaws as in spite of them.

“He had a terrible temper, and you didn't have to be a telepath to know when it was getting the best of him. For one thing, he was usually drunk when it happened. I know he was loaded on the night he caught me in his study, messing with his papers. He broke my arm.”

“How old were you?” Dave asked. He was riding in the backseat with his wife.

“Four, I think. Maybe even younger. When he was on the warpath, he had this habit of rubbing his mouth.” Danny demonstrated. “Do you know anyone else who does that when she's upset?”

“Abra,” Lucy said. “I thought she got it from me.” She raised her right hand toward her mouth, then captured it with her left and returned it to her lap. Dan had seen Abra do exactly the same thing on the bench outside the Anniston Public Library, on the day they'd met in person for the first time. “I thought she got her temper from me, too. I can be . . . pretty ragged sometimes.”

“I thought of my father the first time I saw her do the mouth-rubbing
thing,” Dan said, “but I had other things on my mind. So I forgot.” This made him think of Watson, the caretaker at the Overlook, who had first shown the hotel's untrustworthy furnace boiler to his father.
You have to watch it,
Watson had said.
Because she creeps
. But in the end, Jack Torrance had forgotten. It was the reason Dan was still alive.

“Are you telling me you figured out this family relationship from one little habit? That's quite a deductive leap, especially when it's you and I who look alike, not you and Abra—she gets most of her looks from her father.” Lucy paused, thinking. “But of course you share another family trait—Dave says you call it the shining.
That's
how you knew, isn't it?”

Dan shook his head. “I made a friend the year my father died. His name was Dick Hallorann, and he was the cook at the Overlook Hotel. He also had the shining, and he told me lots of people had a little bit of it. He was right. I've met plenty of people along the way who shine to a greater or lesser degree. Billy Freeman, for one. Which is why he's with Abra right now.”

John swung the Suburban into the little parking area behind Concetta's condo, but for the time being, none of them got out. In spite of her worry about her daughter, Lucy was fascinated by this history lesson. Dan didn't have to look at her to know it.

“If it wasn't the shining, what was it?”

“When we were going out to Cloud Gap on the
Riv,
Dave mentioned that you found a trunk in storage at Concetta's building.”

“Yes. My mother's. I had no idea Momo had saved some of her things.”

“Dave told John and me that she was quite the party girl, back in the day.” It was actually Abra that Dave had been talking to, via telepathic link, but this was something Dan felt it might be better for his newly discovered half sister not to know, at least for the time being.

Lucy flashed Dave the reproachful look reserved for spouses who have been telling tales out of school, but said nothing.

“He also said that when Alessandra dropped out of SUNY Albany,
she was doing her student teaching at a prep school in Vermont or Massachusetts. My father taught English—until he lost his job for hurting a student, that is—in Vermont. At a school called Stovington Prep. And according to my mother, he was quite the party
boy
in those days. Once I knew that Abra and Billy were safe, I ran some numbers in my head. They seemed to add up, but I felt if anyone knew for sure, it would be Alessandra Anderson's mother.”

“
Did
she?” Lucy asked. She was leaning forward now, her hands on the console between the front seats.

“Not everything, and we didn't have long together, but she knew enough. She didn't remember the name of the school where your mother student-taught, but she knew it was in Vermont. And that she'd had a brief affair with her supervising teacher. Who was, she said, a published writer.” Dan paused. “My father was a published writer. Only a few stories, but some of them were in very good magazines, like the
Atlantic Monthly
. Concetta never asked her for the man's name, and Alessandra never volunteered it, but if her college transcript is in that trunk, I'm pretty sure you'll find that her supervisor was John Daniel Torrance.” He yawned and looked at his watch. “That's all I can do right now. Let's go upstairs. Three hours' sleep for all of us, then on to upstate New York. The roads will be empty, and we should be able to make great time.”

“Do you swear she's safe?” Lucy asked.

Dan nodded.

“All right, I'll wait. But only for three hours. As for sleeping . . .” She laughed. The sound had no humor in it.

When they entered Concetta's condo, Lucy strode directly to the microwave in the kitchen, set the timer, and showed it to Dan. He nodded, then yawned again. “Three thirty a.m., we're out of here.”

She studied him gravely. “I'd like to go without you, you know. Right this minute.”

He smiled a little. “I think you better hear the rest of the story first.”

She nodded grimly.

“That and the fact that my daughter needs to sleep off whatever is in her system are the only things holding me here. Now go lie down before you fall down.”

Dan and John took the guest room. The wallpaper and furnishings made it clear that it had been mostly kept for one special little girl, but Chetta must have had other guests from time to time, because there were twin beds.

As they lay in the dark, John said: “It's not a coincidence that this hotel you stayed in as a child is also in Colorado, is it?”

“No.”

“This True Knot is in the same town?”

“They are.”

“And the hotel was haunted?”

The ghostie people,
Dan thought. “Yes.”

Then John said something that surprised Dan and temporarily brought him back from the edge of sleep. Dave had been right—the easiest things to miss were the ones right in front of you. “It makes sense, I suppose . . . once you accept the idea there could be supernatural beings among us and feeding on us. An evil place would call evil creatures. They'd feel right at home there. Do you suppose this Knot has other places like that, in other parts of the country? Other . . . I don't know . . . cold spots?”

“I'm sure they do.” Dan put an arm over his eyes. His body ached and his head was pounding. “Johnny, I'd love to do the boys-having-a-sleepover thing with you, but I have to get some shuteye.”

“Okay, but . . .” John got up on one elbow. “All things being equal, you would have gone right from the hospital, like Lucy wanted. Because you care almost as much about Abra as they do. You think she's safe, but you could be wrong.”

“I'm not.” Hoping that was the truth. He had to hope so, because the simple fact was that he couldn't go, not now. If it had only been
to New York, maybe. But it wasn't, and he had to sleep. His whole body cried for it.

“What's wrong with you, Dan? Because you look terrible.”

“Nothing. Just tired.”

Then he was gone, first into darkness and then into a confused nightmare of running down endless halls while some Shape followed him, swinging a mallet from side to side, splitting wallpaper and driving up puffs of plaster dust.
Come out, you little shit!
the Shape yelled.
Come out, you worthless pup, and take your medicine!

Then Abra was with him. They were sitting on the bench in front of the Anniston Public Library, in the late-summer sun. She was holding his hand.
It's all right, Uncle Dan. It's all right. Before he died, your father turned that Shape out
.
You don't have to—

The library door banged open and a woman stepped into the sunlight. Great clouds of dark hair billowed around her head, yet her jauntily cocked tophat stayed on. It stayed on like magic.

“Oh, look,” she said. “It's Dan Torrance, the man who stole a woman's money while she was sleeping one off and then left her kid to be beaten to death.”

She smiled at Abra, revealing a single tooth. It looked as long and sharp as a bayonet.

“What will he do to you, little sweetie? What will he do to
you
?”

Lucy woke him promptly at three thirty, but shook her head when Dan moved to wake John. “Let him sleep a bit longer. And my husband is snoring on the couch.” She actually smiled. “It makes me think of the Garden of Gethsemane, you know. Jesus reproaching Peter, saying, ‘So you could not watch with me even one hour?' Or something like that. But I have no reason to reproach David, I guess—he saw it, too. Come on. I've made scrambled eggs. You look like you could use some. You're skinny as a rail.” She paused and added: “Brother.”

Dan wasn't particularly hungry, but he followed her into the kitchen. “Saw what, too?”

“I was going through Momo's papers—anything to keep my hands busy and pass the time—and I heard a clunk from the kitchen.”

She took his hand and led him to the counter between the stove and the fridge. There was a row of old-fashioned apothecary jars here, and the one containing sugar had been overturned. A message had been written in the spill.

I'm OK

Going back to sleep

Love U

In spite of how he felt, Dan thought of his blackboard and had to smile. It was so perfectly Abra.

“She must have woken up just enough to do that,” Lucy said.