Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(140)

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.


12

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.”


13

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.”