Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(26)

There were no visions.

After they clocked out, he took Billy to the Chuck Wagon and ordered them steak dinners. Billy offered to buy the beer. Dan shook his head. “Staying away from alcohol. Reason being, once I start, it’s sometimes hard to stop.”

“You could talk to Kingsley about that,” Billy said. “He got himself a booze divorce about fifteen years ago. He’s all right now, but his daughter still don’t talk to him.”

They drank coffee with the meal. A lot of it.

Dan went back to his third-floor Eliot Street lair tired, full of hot food and glad to be sober. There was no TV in his room, but he had the last part of the Sandford novel, and lost himself in it for a couple of hours. He kept an ear out for the wind, but it did not rise. He had an idea that last night’s storm had been winter’s final shot. Which was fine with him. He turned in at ten and fell asleep almost immediately. His early morning visit to the Red Apple now seemed hazy, as if he had gone there in a fever delirium and the fever had now passed.


18

He woke in the small hours, not because the wind was blowing but because he had to piss like a racehorse. He got up, shuffled to the bathroom, and turned on the light inside the door.

The tophat was in the tub, and full of blood.

“No,” he said. “I’m dreaming.”

Maybe double dreaming. Or triple. Quadruple, even. There was something he hadn’t told Emil Kemmer: he was afraid that eventually he would get lost in a maze of phantom nightlife and never be able to find his way out again.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Only this was real. So was the hat. No one else would see it, but that changed nothing. The hat was real. It was somewhere in the world. He knew it.

From the corner of his eye, he saw something written on the mirror over the sink. Something written in lipstick.

I must not look at it.

Too late. His head was turning; he could hear the tendons in his neck creaking like old doorhinges. And what did it matter? He knew what it said. Mrs. Massey was gone, Horace Derwent was gone, they were securely locked away in the boxes he kept far back in his mind, but the Overlook was still not done with him. Written on the mirror, not in lipstick but in blood, was a single word:

REDRUM

Beneath it, lying in the sink, was a bloodstained Atlanta Braves t-shirt.

It will never stop, Danny thought. The Overlook burned and the most terrible of its revenants went into the lockboxes, but I can’t lock away the shining, because it isn’t just inside me, it is me. Without booze to at least stun it, these visions will go on until they drive me insane.

He could see his face in the mirror with REDRUM floating in front of it, stamped on his forehead like a brand. This was not a dream. There was a murdered child’s shirt in his washbasin and a hatful of blood in his tub. Insanity was coming. He could see its approach in his own bulging eyes.

Then, like a flashlight beam in the dark, Hallorann’s voice: Son, you may see things, but they’re like pictures in a book. You weren’t helpless in the Overlook when you were a child, and you’re not helpless now. Far from it. Close your eyes and when you open them, all this crap will be gone.

He closed his eyes and waited. He tried to count off the seconds, but only made it to fourteen before the numbers were lost in the roaring confusion of his thoughts. He half expected hands—perhaps those of whoever owned the hat—to close around his neck. But he stood there. There was really nowhere else to go.

Summoning all his courage, Dan opened his eyes. The tub was empty. The washbasin was empty. There was nothing written on the mirror.

But it will be back. Next time maybe it’ll be her shoes—those cork sandals. Or I’ll see her in the tub. Why not? That’s where I saw Mrs. Massey, and they died the same way. Except I never stole Mrs. Massey’s money and ran out on her.

“I gave it a day,” he told the empty room. “I did that much.”

Yes, and although it had been a busy day, it had also been a good day, he’d be the first to admit it. The days weren’t the problem. As for the nights . . .

The mind was a blackboard. Booze was the eraser.


19

Dan lay awake until six. Then he dressed and once more made the trek to the Red Apple. This time he did not hesitate, only instead of extracting two bottles of Bird from the cooler, he took three. What was it they used to say? Go big or go home. The clerk bagged the bottles without comment; he was used to early wine purchasers. Dan strolled to the town common, sat on one of the benches in Teenytown, and took one of the bottles out of the bag, looking down at it like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull. Through the green glass, what was inside looked like rat poison instead of wine.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Dan said, and loosened the cap.

This time it was his mother who spoke up. Wendy Torrance, who had smoked right to the bitter end. Because if suicide was the only option, you could at least choose your weapon.

Is this how it ends, Danny? Is this what it was all for?

He turned the cap widdershins. Then tightened it. Then back the other way. This time he took it off. The smell of the wine was sour, the smell of jukebox music and crappy bars and pointless arguments followed by fistfights in parking lots. In the end, life was as stupid as one of those fights. The world wasn’t a hospice with fresh air, the world was the Overlook Hotel, where the party never ended. Where the dead were alive forever. He raised the bottle to his lips.