Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(5)

Danny looked into Dick’s face for a long time, probing the thoughts and images behind his forehead. At last he said, “You wanted your father to get the money. But he never did.”

“No. Black Grampa left it all to a home for Negro orphans in Alabama, and I bet I know why, too. But that’s neither here nor there.”

“And your good gramma never knew? She never guessed?”

“She knew there was something, but I kep it blocked away, and she left me alone about it. Just told me that when I was ready to talk, she was ready to listen. Danny, when Andy Hallorann died—it was a stroke—I was the happiest boy on earth. My ma said I didn’t have to go to the funeral, that I could stay with Gramma Rose—my White Gramma—if I wanted to, but I wanted to go. You bet I did. I wanted to make sure old Black Grampa was really dead.

“It rained that day. Everybody stood around the grave under black umbrellas. I watched his coffin—the biggest and best one in his shop, I have no doubt—go into the ground, and I thought about all the times he’d twisted my balls and all the cigarette butts in my cake and the one he put out on my foot and how he ruled the dinner table like the crazy old king in that Shakespeare play. But most of all I thought about Charlie Manx—who Grampa had no doubt made up out of whole cloth—and how Black Grampa could never call Charlie Manx on the long-distance to come in the night and take me away in his fancy car to live with the other stolen boys and girls.

“I peeped over the edge of the grave—‘Let the boy see,’ my pa said when my ma tried to pull me back—and I scoped the coffin down in that wet hole and I thought, ‘Down there you’re six feet closer to hell, Black Grampa, and pretty soon you’ll be all the way, and I hope the devil gives you a thousand with a hand that’s on fire.’?”

Dick reached into his pants pocket and brought out a pack of Marlboros with a book of matches tucked under the cellophane. He put a cigarette in his mouth and then had to chase it with the match because his hand was trembling and his lips were trembling, too. Danny was astounded to see tears standing in Dick’s eyes.

Now knowing where this story was headed, Danny asked: “When did he come back?”

Dick dragged deep on his cigarette and exhaled smoke through a smile. “You didn’t need to peek inside my head to get that, did you?”

“Nope.”

“Six months later. I came home from school one day and he was laying naked on my bed with his half-rotted prick all rared up. He said, ‘You come on and sit on this, Dickie-Bird. You give me a thousand and I’ll give you two thousand.’ I screamed but there was no one there to hear it. My ma and pa, they was both working, my ma in a restaurant and my dad at a printing press. I ran out and slammed the door. And I heard Black Grampa get up . . . thump . . . and cross the room . . . thump-thump-thump . . . and what I heard next . . .”

“Fingernails,” Danny said in a voice that was hardly there. “Scratching on the door.”

“That’s right. I didn’t go in again until that night, when my ma and pa were both home. He was gone, but there were . . . leavings.”

“Sure. Like in our bathroom. Because he was going bad.”

“That’s right. I changed the bed myself, which I could do because my ma showed me how two years before. She said I was too old to need a housekeeper anymore, that housekeepers were for little white boys and girls like the ones she took care of before she got her hostessing job at Berkin’s Steak House. About a week later, I see ole Black Grampa in the park, a-settin in a swing. He had his suit on, but it was all covered with gray stuff—the mold that was growing on it down in his coffin, I think.”

“Yeah,” Danny said. He spoke in a glassy whisper. It was all he could manage.

“His fly was open, though, with his works stickin out. I’m sorry to tell you all this, Danny, you’re too young to hear about such things, but you need to know.”

“Did you go to the White Gramma then?”

“Had to. Because I knew what you know: he’d just keep comin back. Not like . . . Danny, have you ever seen dead people? Regular dead people, I mean.” He laughed because that sounded funny. It did to Danny, too. “Ghosts.”

“A few times. Once there were three of them standing around a railroad crossing. Two boys and a girl. Teenagers. I think . . . maybe they got killed there.”

Dick nodded. “Mostly they stick close to where they crossed over until they finally get used to bein dead and move on. Some of the folks you saw in the Overlook were like that.”

“I know.” The relief in being able to talk about these things—to someone who knew—was indescribable. “And this one time there was a woman at a restaurant. The kind, you know, where they have tables outside?”

Dick nodded again.

“I couldn’t see through that one, but no one else saw her, and when a waitress pushed in the chair she was sitting in, the ghost lady disappeared. Do you see them sometimes?”

“Not for years, but you’re stronger in the shining than I was. It goes back some as you get older—”

“Good,” Danny said fervently.

“—but you’ll have plenty left even when you’re grown up, I think, because you started with so much. Regular ghosts aren’t like the woman you saw in Room 217 and again in your bathroom. That’s right, isn’t it?”