Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(80)

Dan raised it. No wonder he couldn’t hear its faint ticking. It had stopped.

The overhead fluorescent bar went off, leaving only Eleanor’s table lamp. The fluorescent came back on, and the lamp flickered out. It came on again and then it and the overhead went off together. On . . . off . . . on.

“Is someone here?”

The pitcher on the night table rattled, then stilled. The dentures he had removed gave a single unsettling clack. A queer ripple ran along the sheet of Eleanor’s bed, as if something beneath it had been startled into sudden motion. A puff of warm air pressed a quick kiss against Dan’s cheek, then was gone.

“Who is it?” His heartbeat remained regular, but he could feel it in his neck and wrists. The hair on the back of his neck felt thick and stiff. He suddenly knew what Eleanor had been seeing in her last moments: a parade of

(??ghostie people)

the dead, passing into her room from one wall and passing out through the other. Passing out? No, passing on. He didn’t know Seferis, but he knew Auden: Death takes the rolling-in-money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. She had seen them all and they were here n—

But they weren’t. He knew they weren’t. The ghosts Eleanor had seen were gone and she had joined their parade. He had been told to wait. He was waiting.

The door to the hall swung slowly shut. Then the bathroom door opened.

From Eleanor Ouellette’s dead mouth came a single word: “Danny.”


2

When you enter the town of Sidewinder, you pass a sign reading WELCOME TO THE TOP OF AMERICA! It isn’t, but it’s close. Twenty miles from the place where the Eastern Slope becomes the Western, a dirt road splits off from the main highway, winding north. The burned-in-wood sign arched over this byway reads WELCOME TO THE BLUEBELL CAMPGROUND! STAY AWHILE, PARTNER!

That sounds like good old western hospitality, but locals know that more often than not the road is gated shut, and when it is, a less friendly sign hangs from it: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. How they do business is a mystery to the folks in Sidewinder, who’d like to see the Bluebell open every day the upcountry roads aren’t snowed in. They miss the commerce the Overlook used to bring in, and hoped the campground would at least partially make up for it (although they know that Camper People don’t have the kind of money the Hotel People used to pump into the local economy). That hasn’t been the case. The general consensus is that the campground is some rich corporation’s tax haven, a designated money-loser.

It’s a haven, all right, but the corporation it shelters is the True Knot, and when they are in residence, the only RVs in the big parking lot are their RVs, with Rose the Hat’s EarthCruiser standing tallest among them.

On that September evening, nine members of the True were gathered in the high-ceilinged, pleasantly rustic building known as Overlook Lodge. When the campground was open to the public, the Lodge served as a restaurant that put on two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. The food was prepared by Short Eddie and Big Mo (rube names Ed and Maureen Higgins). Neither was up to Dick Hallorann’s culinary standards—few were!—but it’s hard to screw up too badly on the things Camper People like to eat: meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, pancakes drenched in Log Cabin syrup, meatloaf, chicken stew, meatloaf, Tuna Surprise, and meatloaf with mushroom gravy. After dinner, the tables were cleared for bingo or card parties. On weekends, there were dances. These festivities took place only when the campground was open. This evening—as, three time zones east, Dan Torrance sat beside a dead woman and waited for his visitor—there was business of a different sort to transact in Overlook Lodge.

Jimmy Numbers was at the head of a single table that had been set up in the middle of the polished bird’s-eye maple floor. His PowerBook was open, the desktop displaying a photograph of his hometown, which happened to be deep in the Carpathian Mountains. (??Jimmy liked to joke that his grandfather had once entertained a young London solicitor named Jonathan Harker.)

Clustered around him, looking down at the screen, were Rose, Crow Daddy, Barry the Chink, Snakebite Andi, Token Charlie, Apron Annie, Diesel Doug, and Grampa Flick. None of them wanted to stand next to Grampa, who smelled as if he might have had a minor disaster in his pants and then forgotten to shower it off (a thing that happened more and more frequently these days), but this was important and they put up with him.

Jimmy Numbers was an unassuming guy with a receding hairline and a pleasant if vaguely simian face. He looked about fifty, which was one-third of his actual age. “I googled Lickety-Spliff and got nothing useful, which is what I expected. In case you care, lickety-spliff is teenage slang that means to do something really slow instead of really fast—”

“We don’t,” Diesel Doug said. “And by the way, you smell a trifle rank, Gramps. No offense, but when was the last time you wiped your ass?”

Grampa Flick bared his teeth—eroded and yellow, but all his own—at Doug. “Your wife wiped it for me just this morning, Deez. With her face, as it happens. Kinda nasty, but she seems to like that kind of thi—”

“Shut your heads, both of you,” Rose said. Her voice was toneless and unthreatening, but Doug and Grampa both shrank away from her, their faces those of chastened schoolboys. “Go on, Jimmy. But stay on point. I want to have a concrete plan, and soon.”

“The rest of them are going to be reluctant no matter how concrete the plan is,” Crow said. “They’re going to say it’s been a good year for steam. That movie theater thing, the church fire in Little Rock, and the terrorist thing in Austin. Not to mention Juárez. I was dubious about going south of the border, but it was good.”