Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(24)

The roar of the wind was dreadfully familiar, loaded with hollow threat. Winds blew everywhere, but it only sounded like this in the high country. It was as if some angry god were pounding the world with an air mallet.

I used to call his booze the Bad Stuff, Dan thought. Only sometimes it’s the Good Stuff. When you wake up from a nightmare that you know is at least fifty percent shining, it’s the Very Good Stuff.

One drink would send him back to sleep. Three would guarantee not just sleep but dreamless sleep. Sleep was nature’s doctor, and right now Dan Torrance felt sick and in need of strong medicine.

Nothing’s open. You lucked out there.

Well. Maybe.

He turned on his side, and something rolled against his back when he did. No, not something. Someone. Someone had gotten into bed with him. Deenie had gotten into bed with him. Only it felt too small to be Deenie. It felt more like a—

He scrambled out of bed, landed awkwardly on the floor, and looked over his shoulder. It was Deenie’s little boy, Tommy. The right side of his skull was caved in. Bone splinters protruded through bloodstained fair hair. Gray scaly muck—brains—was drying on one cheek. He couldn’t be alive with such a hellacious wound, but he was. He reached out to Dan with one starfish hand.

“Canny,” he said.

The screaming began again, only this time it wasn’t Deenie and it wasn’t the wind.

This time it was him.


12

When he woke for the second time—real waking, this time—he wasn’t screaming at all, only making a kind of low growling deep in his chest. He sat up, gasping, the bedclothes puddled around his waist. There was no one else in his bed, but the dream hadn’t yet dissolved, and looking wasn’t enough. He threw back the bedclothes, and that still wasn’t enough. He ran his hands down the bottom sheet, feeling for fugitive warmth, or a dent that might have been made by small hips and buttocks. Nothing. Of course not. So then he looked under the bed and saw only his borrowed boots.

The wind was blowing less strongly now. The storm wasn’t over, but it was winding down.

He went to the bathroom, then whirled and looked back, as if expecting to surprise someone. There was just the bed, with the covers now lying on the floor at the foot. He turned on the light over the sink, splashed his face with cold water, and sat down on the closed lid of the commode, taking long breaths, one after the other. He thought about getting up and grabbing a cigarette from the pack lying beside his book on the room’s one small table, but his legs felt rubbery and he wasn’t sure they’d hold him. Not yet, anyway. So he sat. He could see the bed and the bed was empty. The whole room was empty. No problem there.

Only . . . it didn’t feel empty. Not yet. When it did, he supposed he would go back to bed. But not to sleep. For this night, sleep was done.


13

Seven years before, working as an orderly in a Tulsa hospice, Dan had made friends with an elderly psychiatrist who was suffering from terminal liver cancer. One day, when Emil Kemmer had been reminiscing (not very discreetly) about a few of his more interesting cases, Dan had confessed that ever since childhood, he had suffered from what he called double dreaming. Was Kemmer familiar with the phenomenon? Was there a name for it?

Kemmer had been a large man in his prime—the old black-and-white wedding photo he kept on his bedside table attested to that—but cancer is the ultimate diet program, and on the day of this conversation, his weight had been approximately the same as his age, which was ninety-one. His mind had still been sharp, however, and now, sitting on the closed toilet and listening to the dying storm outside, Dan remembered the old man’s sly smile.

“Usually,” he had said in his heavy German accent, “I am paid for my diagnoses, Daniel.”

Dan had grinned. “Guess I’m out of luck, then.”

“Perhaps not.” Kemmer studied Dan. His eyes were bright blue. Although he knew it was outrageously unfair, Dan couldn’t help imagining those eyes under a Waffen-SS coal-scuttle helmet. “There’s a rumor in this deathhouse that you are a kid with a talent for helping people die. Is this true?”

“Sometimes,” Dan said cautiously. “Not always.” The truth was almost always.

“When the time comes, will you help me?”

“If I can, of course.”

“Good.” Kemmer sat up, a laboriously painful process, but when Dan moved to help, Kemmer had waved him away. “What you call double dreaming is well known to psychiatrists, and of particular interest to Jungians, who call it false awakening. The first dream is usually a lucid dream, meaning the dreamer knows he is dreaming—”

“Yes!” Dan cried. “But the second one—”

“The dreamer believes he is awake,” Kemmer said. “Jung made much of this, even ascribing precognitive powers to these dreams . . . but of course we know better, don’t we, Dan?”

“Of course,” Dan had agreed.

“The poet Edgar Allan Poe described the false awakening phenomenon long before Carl Jung was born. He wrote, ‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.’ Have I answered your question?”

“I think so. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Now I believe I could drink a little juice. Apple, please.”


14

Precognitive powers . . . but of course we know better.