Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(54)

“Abs? It’s Mommy. Talk to me.”

There was still nothing for five or ten seconds. Then, at last, the statue Lucy had her arm around relaxed and became a little girl again. Abra took a long, shuddering breath.

“I had one of my bad dreams. Like in the old days.”

“I kind of figured that, honey.”

Abra could hardly ever remember more than a little, it seemed. Sometimes it was people yelling at each other or hitting with their fists. He knocked the table over chasing after her, she might say. Another time the dream had been of a one-eyed Raggedy Ann doll lying on a highway. Once, when Abra was only four, she told them she had seen ghostie people riding The Helen Rivington, which was a popular tourist attraction in Frazier. It ran a loop from Teenytown out to Cloud Gap, and then back again. I could see them because of the moonlight, Abra told her parents that time. Lucy and David were sitting on either side of her, their arms around her. Lucy still remembered the dank feel of Abra’s pajama top, which was soaked with sweat. I knew they were ghostie people because they had faces like old apples and the moon shone right through.

By the following afternoon Abra had been running and playing and laughing with her friends again, but Lucy had never forgotten the image: dead people riding that little train through the woods, their faces like transparent apples in the moonlight. She had asked Concetta if she had ever taken Abra on the train during one of their “girl days.” Chetta said no. They had been to Teenytown, but the train had been under repairs that day so they rode the carousel instead.

Now Abra looked up at her mother and said, “When will Daddy be back?”

“Day after tomorrow. He said he’d be in time for lunch.”

“That’s not soon enough,” Abra said. A tear spilled from her eye, rolled down her cheek, and plopped onto her pajama top.

“Soon enough for what? What do you remember, Abba-Doo?”

“They were hurting the boy.”

Lucy didn’t want to pursue this, but felt she had to. There had been too many correlations between Abra’s earlier dreams and things that had actually happened. It was David who had spotted the picture of the one-eyed Raggedy Ann in the North Conway Sun, under the heading THREE KILLED IN OSSIPEE CRASH. It was Lucy who had hunted out police blotter items about domestic violence arrests in the days following two of Abra’s people were yelling and hitting dreams. Even John Dalton agreed that Abra might be picking up transmissions on what he called “the weird radio in her head.”

So now she said, “What boy? Does he live around here? Do you know?”

Abra shook her head. “Far away. I can’t remember.” Then she brightened. The speed at which she came out of these fugues was to Lucy almost as eerie as the fugues themselves. “But I think I told Tony. He might tell his daddy.”

Tony, her invisible friend. She hadn’t mentioned him in a couple of years, and Lucy hoped this wasn’t some sort of regression. Ten was a little old for invisible friends.

“Tony’s daddy might be able to stop it.” Then Abra’s face clouded. “I think it’s too late, though.”

“Tony hasn’t been around in awhile, has he?” Lucy got up and fluffed out the displaced sheet. Abra giggled when it floated against her face. The best sound in the world, as far as Lucy was concerned. A sane sound. And the room was brightening all the time. Soon the first birds would begin to sing.

“Mommy, that tickles!”

“Mommies like to tickle. It’s part of their charm. Now, what about Tony?”

“He said he’d come any time I needed him,” Abra said, settling back under the sheet. She patted the bed beside her, and Lucy lay down, sharing the pillow. “That was a bad dream and I needed him. I think he came, but I can’t really remember. His daddy works in a hot spice.”

This was new. “Is that like a chili factory?”

“No, silly, it’s for people who are going to die.” Abra sounded indulgent, almost teacherly, but a shiver went up Lucy’s back.

“Tony says that when people get so sick they can’t get well, they go to the hot spice and his daddy tries to make them feel better. Tony’s daddy has a cat with a name like mine. I’m Abra and the cat is Azzie. Isn’t that weird, but in a funny way?”

“Yes. Weird but funny.”

John and David would both probably say, based on the similarity of the names, that the stuff about the cat was the confabulation of a very bright little ten-year-old girl. But they would only half believe it, and Lucy hardly believed it at all. How many ten-year-olds knew what a hospice was, even if they mispronounced it?

“Tell me about the boy in your dream.” Now that Abra was calmed down, this conversation seemed safer. “Tell me who was hurting him, Abba-Doo.”

“I don’t remember, except he thought Barney was supposed to be his friend. Or maybe it was Barry. Momma, can I have Hoppy?”

Her stuffed rabbit, now sitting in lop-eared exile on the highest shelf in her room. Abra hadn’t slept with him in at least two years. Lucy got the Hopster and put him in her daughter’s arms. Abra hugged the rabbit to her pink pajama top and was asleep almost at once. With luck, she’d be out for another hour, maybe even two. Lucy sat beside her, looking down.

Let this stop for good in another few years, just like John said it would. Better yet, let it stop today, this very morning. No more, please. No more hunting through the local papers to see if some little boy was killed by his stepfather or beaten to death by bullies who were high on glue, or something. Let it end.