Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(41)

Abra first looked at the floor, where the silverware drawer lay. Some of the knives and forks had bounced free when the drawer shot from its socket, but they were all there. Not the spoons, however. The spoons were hanging from the ceiling, as if drawn upward and held by some exotic magnetic attraction. A couple swung lazily from the overhead light fixtures. The biggest, a serving spoon, dangled from the exhaust hood of the stove.

All kids had their own self-comforting mechanisms. John knew from long experience that for most it was a thumb socked securely in the mouth. Abra’s was a little different. She cupped her right hand over the lower half of her face and rubbed her lips with her palm. As a result, her words were muffled. John took the hand away—gently. “What, honey?”

In a small voice she said, “Am I in trouble? I . . . I . . .” Her small chest began to hitch. She tried to put her comfort-hand back, but John held it. “I wanted to be like Minstrosio.” She began to weep. John let her hand go and it went to her mouth, rubbing furiously.

David picked her up and kissed her cheek. Lucy put her arms around them both and kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “No, honey, no. No trouble. You’re fine.”

Abra buried her face against her mother’s neck. As she did it, the spoons fell. The clatter made them all jump.


13

Two months later, with summer just beginning in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, David and Lucy Stone sat in John Dalton’s office, where the walls were papered with smiling photographs of the children he had treated over the years—many now old enough to have kids of their own.

John said, “I hired a computer-savvy nephew of mine—at my own expense, and don’t worry about it, he works cheap—to see if there were any other documented cases like your daughter’s, and to research them if there were. He restricted his search to the last thirty years and found over nine hundred.”

David whistled. “That many!”

John shook his head. “Not that many. If it were a disease—and we don’t need to revisit that discussion, because it’s not—it would be as rare as elephantiasis. Or Blaschko’s lines, which basically turns those who have it into human zebras. Blaschko’s affects about one in every seven million. This thing of Abra’s would be on that order.”

“What exactly is Abra’s thing?” Lucy had taken her husband’s hand and was holding it tightly. “Telepathy? Telekinesis? Some other tele?”

“Those things clearly play a part. Is she telepathic? Since she knows when people are coming to visit, and knew Mrs. Judkins had been hurt, the answer seems to be yes. Is she telekinetic? Based on what we saw in your kitchen on the day of her birthday party, the answer is a hard yes. Is she psychic? A precognate, if you want to fancy it up? We can’t be so sure of that, although the 9/11 thing and the story of the twenty-dollar bill behind the dresser are both suggestive. But what about the night your television showed The Simpsons on all the channels? What do you call that? Or what about the phantom Beatles tune? It would be telekinesis if the notes came from the piano . . . but you say they didn’t.”

“So what’s next?” Lucy asked. “What do we watch out for?”

“I don’t know. There’s no predictive path to follow. The trouble with the field of psychic phenomena is that it isn’t a field at all. There’s too much charlatanry and too many people who are just off their damn rockers.”

“So you can’t tell us what to do,” Lucy said. “That’s the long and short of it.”

John smiled. “I can tell you exactly what to do: keep on loving her. If my nephew is right—and you have to remember that A, he’s only seventeen, and B, he’s basing his conclusions on unstable data—you’re apt to keep seeing weird stuff until she’s a teenager. Some of it may be gaudy weird stuff. Around thirteen or fourteen, it’ll plateau and then start to subside. By the time she’s in her twenties, the various phenomena she’s generating will probably be negligible.” He smiled. “But she’ll be a terrific poker player all her life.”

“What if she starts seeing dead people, like the little boy in that movie?” Lucy asked. “What do we do then?”

“Then I guess you’d have proof of life after death. In the meantime, don’t buy trouble. And keep your mouths shut, right?”

“Oh, you bet,” Lucy said. She managed a smile, but given the fact she’d nibbled most of her lipstick off, it didn’t look very confident. “The last thing we want is our daughter on the cover of Inside View.”

“Thank God none of the other parents saw that thing with the spoons,” David said.

“Here’s a question,” John said. “Do you think she knows how special she is?”

The Stones exchanged a look.

“I . . . don’t think so,” Lucy said at last. “Although after the spoons . . . we made sort of a big deal about it . . .”

“A big deal in your mind,” John said. “Probably not hers. She cried a little, then went back out with a smile on her face. There was no shouting, scolding, spanking, or shaming. My advice is to let it ride for the time being. When she gets a little older, you can caution her about not doing any of her special tricks at school. Treat her as normal, because mostly she is. Right?”