Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(89)

“The way you are.”

“Here’s the thing,” Dan said. “These people—if they are people—are led by the woman who did the actual killing. On the day Abra came across the picture of Brad Trevor on a missing-children page in the local rag, she got in this woman’s head. And the woman got in Abra’s. For a few seconds they looked through each other’s eyes.” He held up his hands, made fists, and rotated them. “Turn and turn about. Abra thinks they may come for her, and so do I. Because she could be a danger to them.”

“There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” Billy asked.

Dan looked at him, waiting.

“People who can do this shining thing have something, right? Something these people want. Something they can only get by killing.”

“Yes.”

John said, “Does this woman know where Abra is?”

“Abra doesn’t think so, but you have to remember she’s only thirteen. She could be wrong.”

“Does Abra know where the woman is?”

“All she knows is that when this contact—this mutual seeing—occurred, the woman was in a Sam’s Supermarket. That puts it somewhere out West, but there are Sams in at least nine states.”

“Including Iowa?”

Dan shook his head.

“Then I don’t see what we can accomplish by going there.”

“We can get the glove,” Dan said. “Abra thinks if she has the glove, she can link to the man who had it on his hand for a little while. She calls him Barry the Chunk.”

John sat with his head lowered, thinking. Dan let him do it.

“All right,” John said at last. “This is crazy, but I’ll buy it. Given what I know of Abra’s history and given my own history with you, it’s actually kind of hard not to. But if this woman doesn’t know where Abra is, might it not be wiser to leave things alone? Don’t kick a sleeping dog and all that?”

“I don’t think this dog’s asleep,” Dan said. “These

(empty devils)

freaks want her for the same reason they wanted the Trevor boy—I’m sure Billy’s right about that. Also, they know she’s a danger to them. To put it in AA terms, she has the power to break their anonymity. And they may have resources we can only guess at. Would you want a patient of yours to live in fear, month after month and maybe year after year, always expecting some sort of paranormal Manson Family to show up and snatch her off the street?”

“Of course not.”

“These *s live on children like her. Children like I was. Kids with the shining.” He stared grimly into John Dalton’s face. “If it’s true, they need to be stopped.”

Billy said, “If I’m not going to Iowa, what am I supposed to do?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Dan said. “You’re going to get very familiar with Anniston in the week ahead. In fact, if Casey will give you time off, you’re going to stay at a motel there.”


5

Rose finally entered the meditative state she had been seeking. The hardest thing to let go of had been her worries about Grampa Flick, but she finally got past them. Got above them. Now she cruised within herself, repeating the old phrases—sabbatha hanti and lodsam hanti and cahanna risone hanti—over and over again, her lips barely moving. It was too early to seek the troublesome girl, but now that she’d been left alone and the world was quiet, both inside and out, she was in no hurry. Meditation for its own sake was a fine thing. Rose went about gathering her tools and focusing her concentration, working slowly and meticulously.

Sabbatha hanti, lodsam hanti, cahanna risone hanti: words that had been old when the True Knot moved across Europe in wagons, selling peat turves and trinkets. They had probably been old when Babylon was young. The girl was powerful, but the True was all-powerful, and Rose anticipated no real problem. The girl would be asleep, and Rose would move with quiet stealth, picking up information and planting suggestions like small explosives. Not just one worm, but a whole nest of them. Some the girl might detect, and disable.

Others, not.


6

Abra spoke with her mother on the phone for almost forty-five minutes that night after she’d finished her homework. The conversation had two levels. On the top one, they talked about Abra’s day, the school week ahead, and her costume for the upcoming Halloween Dance; they discussed the ongoing plans to have Momo moved north to the Frazier hospice (which Abra still thought of as the “hot spice”); Lucy brought Abra up-to-date on Momo’s condition, which she said was “actually pretty good, all things considered.”

On another level, Abra listened to Lucy’s nagging worry that she had somehow failed her grandmother, and to the truth of Momo’s condition: frightened, addled, racked with pain. Abra tried to send her mother soothing thoughts: it’s all right, Mom and we love you, Mom and you did the best you could, for as long as you were able. She liked to believe that some of these thoughts got through, but didn’t really believe it. She had many talents—the kind that were wonderful and scary at the same time—but changing another person’s emotional temperature had never been one of them.

Could Dan do that? She thought maybe he could. She thought he used that part of his shining to help people in the hot spice. If he could really do that, maybe he would help Momo when she got there. That would be good.