Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(51)

Mrs. Kozy got up with the squashed ice cream sandwich sticking to the back of her dress. Snakebite Andi put her arm around the woman’s mostly nonexistent waist and led her to the other Kozy chair, pausing long enough to pull the melting ice cream sandwich off her butt. Soon the two of them sat side by side, eyes shut.

“You’ll sleep all night,” Andi instructed them. “Mister can dream about chasing young girls. Missus, you can dream he died of a heart attack and left you a million-dollar insurance policy. How’s that sound? Sound good?”

She snapped on the TV and turned it up loud. Pat Sajak was being embraced by a woman with enormous jahoobies who had just finished solving the puzzle, which was NEVER REST ON YOUR LAURELS. Andi took a moment to admire the mammoth mammaries, then turned back to the Kozys.

“When the eleven o’clock news is over, you can turn off the TV and go to bed. When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t remember I was here. Any questions?”

They had none. Andi left them and hurried back to the cluster of RVs. She was hungry, had been for weeks, and tonight there would be plenty for everybody. As for tomorrow . . . it was Rose’s job to worry about that, and as far as Snakebite Andi was concerned, she was welcome to it.


4

It was full dark by eight o’clock. At nine, the True gathered in the Kozy Kampground’s picnic area. Rose the Hat came last, carrying the canister. A small, greedy murmur went up at the sight of it. Rose knew how they felt. She was plenty hungry herself.

She mounted one of the initial-scarred picnic tables and looked at them one by one. “We are the True Knot.”

“We are the True Knot,” they responded. Their faces were solemn, their eyes avid and hungry. “What is tied may never be untied.”

“We are the True Knot, and we endure.”

“We endure.”

“We are the chosen ones. We are the fortunate ones.”

“We are chosen and fortunate.”

“They are the makers; we are the takers.”

“We take what they make.”

“Take this and use it well.”

“We will use it well.”

Once, early in the last decade of the twentieth century, there had been a boy from Enid, Oklahoma, named Richard Gaylesworthy. I swear that child can read my mind, his mother sometimes said. People smiled at this, but she wasn’t kidding. And maybe not just her mind. Richard got A’s on tests he hadn’t even studied for. He knew when his father was going to come home in a good mood and when he was going to come home fuming about something at the plumbing supply company he owned. Once the boy begged his mother to play the Pick Six lottery because he swore he knew the winning numbers. Mrs. Gaylesworthy refused—they were good Baptists—but later she was sorry. Not all six of the numbers Richard wrote down on the kitchen note-minder board came up, but five did. Her religious convictions had cost them seventy thousand dollars. She had begged the boy not to tell his father, and Richard had promised he wouldn’t. He was a good boy, a lovely boy.

Two months or so after the lottery win that wasn’t, Mrs. Gaylesworthy was shot to death in her kitchen and the good and lovely boy disappeared. His body had long since rotted away beneath the gone-to-seed back field of an abandoned farm, but when Rose the Hat opened the valve on the silver canister, his essence—his steam—escaped in a cloud of sparkling silver mist. It rose to a height of about three feet above the canister, and spread out in a plane. The True stood looking up at it with expectant faces. Most were trembling. Several were actually weeping.

“Take nourishment and endure,” Rose said, and raised her hands until her spread fingers were just below the flat plane of mist. She beckoned. The mist immediately began to sink, taking on an umbrella shape as it descended toward those waiting below. When it enveloped their heads, they began to breathe deeply. This went on for five minutes, during which several of them hyperventilated and swooned to the ground.

Rose felt herself swelling physically and sharpening mentally. Every fragrant odor of this spring night declared itself. She knew that the faint lines around her eyes and mouth were disappearing. The white strands in her hair were turning dark again. Later tonight, Crow would come to her camper, and in her bed they would burn like torches.

They inhaled Richard Gaylesworthy until he was gone—really and truly gone. The white mist thinned and then disappeared. Those who had fainted sat up and looked around, smiling. Grampa Flick grabbed Petty the Chink, Barry’s wife, and did a nimble little jig with her.

“Let go of me, you old donkey!” she snapped, but she was laughing.

Snakebite Andi and Silent Sarey were kissing deeply, Andi’s hands plunged into Sarey’s mouse-colored hair.

Rose leaped down from the picnic table and turned to Crow. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, grinning back at her.

Everything’s cool, that grin said, and so it was. For now. But in spite of her euphoria, Rose thought of the canisters in her safe. Now there were thirty-eight empties instead of thirty-seven. Their backs were a step closer to the wall.


5

The True rolled out the next morning just after first light. They took Route 12 to I-64, the fourteen RVs in a nose-to-tail caravan. When they reached the interstate they would spread out so they weren’t quite so obviously together, staying in touch by radio in case trouble arose.

Or if opportunity knocked.