Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(157)

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but I don’t like it. She’s looking at him really hard. We have to go right now.”

“I need to do something first. Try to be ready, and don’t be scared.”

Dan closed his eyes and went to the storage room at the back of his mind. Real lockboxes would have been covered with dust after all these years, but the two he’d put here as a child were as fresh as ever. Why not? They were made of pure imagination. The third—the new one—had a faint aura hanging around it, and he thought: No wonder I’m sick.

Never mind. That one had to stay for the time being. He opened the oldest of the other two, ready for anything, and found . . . nothing. Or almost. In the lockbox that had held Mrs. Massey for thirty-two years, there was a heap of dark gray ash. But in the other . . .

He realized how foolish telling her not to be scared had been.

Abra shrieked.


10

On the back stoop of the house in Anniston, Abra began to jerk. Her legs spasmed; her feet rattled a tattoo on the steps; one hand—flopping like a fish dragged to a riverbank and left to die there—sent the ill-used and bedraggled Hoppy flying.

“What’s wrong with her?” Lucy screamed.

She rushed for the door. David stood frozen—transfixed by the sight of his seizing daughter—but John got his right arm around Lucy’s waist and his left around her upper chest. She bucked against him. “Let me go! I have to go to her!”

“No!” John shouted. “No, Lucy, you can’t!”

She would have broken free, but now David had her, too.

She subsided, looking first at John. “If she dies out there, I’ll see you go to jail for it.” Next, her gaze—flat-eyed and hostile—went to her husband. “You I’ll never forgive.”

“She’s quieting,” John said.

On the stoop, Abra’s tremors moderated, then stopped. But her cheeks were wet, and tears squeezed from beneath her closed lids. In the day’s dying light, they clung to her lashes like jewels.


11

In Danny Torrance’s childhood bedroom—a room now made only of memory—Abra clung to Dan with her face pressed against his chest. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “The monster—is it gone?”

“Yes,” Dan said.

“Swear on your mother’s name?”

“Yes.”

She raised her head, first looking at him to assure herself he was telling the truth, then daring to scan the room. “That smile.” She shuddered.

“Yes,” Dan said. “I think . . . he’s glad to be home. Abra, are you going to be all right? Because we have to do this right now. Time’s up.”

“I’m all right. But what if . . . it . . . comes back?”

Dan thought of the lockbox. It was open, but could be closed again easily enough. Especially with Abra to help him. “I don’t think he . . . it . . . wants anything to do with us, honey. Come on. Just remember: if I tell you to go back to New Hampshire, you go.”

Once again she didn’t reply, and there was no time to discuss it. Time was up. He stepped through the French doors. They gave on the end of the path. Abra walked beside him, but lost the solidity she’d had in the room of memory and began to flicker again.

Out here she’s almost a ghostie person herself, Dan thought. It brought home to him just how much she had put herself at risk. He didn’t like to think about how tenuous her hold on her own body might now be.

Moving rapidly—but not running; that would attract Rose’s eye, and they had at least seventy yards to cover before the rear of the Overlook Lodge would block them from the lookout platform—Dan and his ghostie-girl companion crossed the lawn and took the flagstone walk that ran between the tennis courts.

They reached the back of the kitchen, and at last the bulk of the Lodge hid them from the platform. Here was the steady rumble of an exhaust fan and the spoiled-meat smell of garbage cans. He tried the rear door and found it unlocked, but paused a moment before opening it.

(are they all)

(yes all but Rose she hurry up Dan you have to because)

Abra’s eyes, flickering like those of a child in an old black-and-white movie, were wide with dismay. “She knows something’s wrong.”


12

Rose turned her attention to the bitchgirl, still sitting in the passenger seat of the truck, head bowed, still as could be. Abra wasn’t watching her uncle—if he was her uncle—and she was making no move to get out. The alarm meter in Rose’s head went from Danger Yellow to Condition Red.

“Hey!” The voice came floating up to her on the thin air. “Hey, you old bag! Watch this!”

She snapped her gaze back to the man in the parking lot and stared, close to flabbergasted, as he raised his hands over his head and then turned a big, unsteady cartwheel. She thought he was going to go on his ass, but the only thing that fell to the pavement was his hat. What it exposed was the fine white hair of a man in his seventies. Maybe even his eighties.

Rose looked back at the girl in the truck, who remained perfectly still with her head bent. She had absolutely no interest in the uncle’s antics. Suddenly it clicked and Rose understood what she would have seen right away, had the trick not been so outrageous: it was a mannequin.

But she’s here! Token Charlie feels her, all of them in the Lodge feel her, they’re all together and they know—