Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(11)

9

Rose thought she’d give up, that was what they did when the pain became too much, but this was one tough babe. She came swirling back into existence, screaming all the way. Her newly arrived hands seized Rose’s with mad strength and bore down. Rose leaned forward, hardly noticing the pain.

“I know what you want, honeydoll. Come back and you can have it.” She lowered her mouth to Andi’s, caressing Andi’s upper lip with her tongue until the lip turned to mist. But the eyes stayed, fixed on Rose’s.

“Sabbatha hanti,” they chanted. “Lodsam hanti. Cahanna risone hanti.”

Andi came back, growing a face around her staring, pain-filled eyes. Her body followed. For a moment Rose could see the bones of her arms, the bones in the fingers clutching hers, then they were once more dressed in flesh.

Rose kissed her again. Even in her pain Andi responded, and Rose breathed her own essence down the younger woman’s throat.

I want this one. And what I want, I get.

Andi began to fade again, but Rose could feel her fighting it. Getting on top of it. Feeding herself with the screaming life-force she had breathed down her throat and into her lungs instead of trying to push it away.

Taking steam for the first time.


10

The newest member of the True Knot spent that night in Rose O’Hara’s bed, and for the first time in her life found something in sex besides horror and pain. Her throat was raw from the screaming she’d done on the lawn recliner, but she screamed again as this new sensation—pleasure to match the pain of her Turning—took her body and once more seemed to render it transparent.

“Scream all you want,” Rose said, looking up from between her thighs. “They’ve heard plenty of them. The good as well as the bad.”

“Is sex like this for everybody?” If so, what she had missed! What her bastard father had stolen from her! And people thought she was a thief???

“It’s like this for us, when we’ve taken steam,” Rose said. “That’s all you need to know.”

She lowered her head and it began again.


11

Not long before midnight, Token Charlie and Baba the Russian were sitting on the lower step of Token Charlie’s Bounder, sharing a joint and looking up at the moon. From Rose’s EarthCruiser came more screams.

Charlie and Baba turned to each other and grinned.

“Someone is likin it,” Baba remarked.

“What’s not to like?” Charlie said.


12

Andi woke in the day’s first early light with her head pillowed on Rose’s breasts. She felt entirely different; she felt no different at all. She lifted her head and saw Rose looking at her with those remarkable gray eyes.

“You saved me,” Andi said. “You brought me back.”

“I couldn’t have done it alone. You wanted to come.” In more ways than one, honeydoll.

“What we did after . . . we can’t do it again, can we?”

Rose shook her head, smiling. “No. And that’s okay. Some experiences absolutely cannot be topped. Besides, my man will be back today.”

“What’s his name?”

“He answers to Henry Rothman, but that’s just for the rubes. His True name is Crow Daddy.”

“Do you love him? You do, don’t you?”

Rose smiled, drew Andi closer, kissed her. But she did not answer.

“Rose?”

“Yes?”

“Am I . . . am I still human?”

To this Rose gave the same answer Dick Hallorann had once given young Danny Torrance, and in the same cold tone of voice: “Do you care?”

Andi decided she didn’t. She decided she was home.





MAMA


1

There was a muddle of bad dreams—someone swinging a hammer and chasing him down endless halls, an elevator that ran by itself, hedges in the shapes of animals that came to life and closed in on him—and finally one clear thought: I wish I were dead.

Dan Torrance opened his eyes. Sunlight shot through them and into his aching head, threatening to set his brains on fire. The hangover to end all hangovers. His face was throbbing. His nostrils were clogged shut except for a tiny pinhole in the left one that allowed in a thread of air. Left one? No, it was the right. He could breathe through his mouth, but it was foul with the taste of whiskey and cigarettes. His stomach was a ball of lead, full of all the wrong things. Morning-after junkbelly, some old drinking buddy or other had called that woeful sensation.

Loud snoring from beside him. Dan turned his head that way, although his neck screamed in protest and another bolt of agony shot him through the temple. He opened his eyes again, but just a little; no more of that blazing sun, please. Not yet. He was lying on a bare mattress on a bare floor. A bare woman lay sprawled on her back beside him. Dan looked down and saw that he was also alfresco.

Her name is . . . Dolores? No. Debbie? That’s closer, but not quite—

Deenie. Her name was Deenie. He had met her in a bar called the Milky Way, and it had all been quite hilarious until . . .

He couldn’t remember, and one look at his hands—both swollen, the knuckles of the right scuffed and scabbed—made him decide he didn’t want to remember. And what did it matter? The basic scenario never changed. He got drunk, someone said the wrong thing, chaos and bar-carnage followed. There was a dangerous dog inside his head. Sober, he could keep it on a leash. When he drank, the leash disappeared. Sooner or later I’ll kill someone. For all he knew, he had last night.