Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(9)

“You don’t have enough steam to bother with, dear, and what you do have would be far from yummy. It would taste the way the meat from a tough old cow tastes to a rube.”

“To a what?”

“Never mind, just listen. We won’t kill you. What we’ll do if you say no is to wipe out all memory of this little conversation. You will find yourself on the side of the road outside some nothing town—Topeka, maybe, or Fargo—with no money, no identification, and no memory of how you got there. The last thing you’ll remember is going into that movie theater with the man you robbed and mutilated.”

“He deserved to be mutilated!” Andi spat out.

Rose stood on her tiptoes and stretched, her fingers touching the roof of the RV. “That’s your business, honeydoll, I’m not your psychiatrist.” She wasn’t wearing a bra; Andi could see the shifting punctuation marks of her nipples against her shirt. “But here’s something to consider: we’ll take your talent as well as your money and your no doubt bogus identification. The next time you suggest that a man go to sleep in a darkened movie theater, he’ll turn to you and ask what the f*ck you’re talking about.”

Andi felt a cold trickle of fear. “You can’t do that.” But she remembered the terribly strong hands that had reached inside her brain and felt quite sure this woman could. She might need a little help from her friends, the ones in the RVs and motorhomes gathered around this one like piglets at a sow’s teats, but oh yes—she could.

Rose ignored this. “How old are you, dear?”

“Twenty-eight.” She had been shading her age since hitting the big three-oh.

Rose looked at her, smiling, saying nothing. Andi met those beautiful gray eyes for five seconds, then had to drop her gaze. But what her eyes fell upon when she did were those smooth breasts, unharnessed but with no sign of a sag. And when she looked up again, her eyes only got as far as the woman’s lips. Those coral-pink lips.

“You’re thirty-two,” Rose said. “Oh, it only shows a little—because you’ve led a hard life. A life on the run. But you’re still pretty. Stay with us, live with us, and ten years from now you really will be twenty-eight.”

“That’s impossible.”

Rose smiled. “A hundred years from now, you’ll look and feel thirty-five. Until you take steam, that is. Then you’ll be twenty-eight again, only you’ll feel ten years younger. And you’ll take steam often. Live long, stay young, and eat well: those are the things I’m offering. How do they sound?”

“Too good to be true,” Andi said. “Like those ads about how you can get life insurance for ten dollars.”

She wasn’t entirely wrong. Rose hadn’t told any lies (at least not yet), but there were things she wasn’t saying. Like how steam was sometimes in short supply. Like how not everyone lived through the Turning. Rose judged this one might, and Walnut, the True’s jackleg doctor, had cautiously concurred, but nothing was sure.

“And you and your friends call yourself—?”

“They’re not my friends, they’re my family. We’re the True Knot.” Rose laced her fingers together and held them in front of Andi’s face. “And what’s tied can never be untied. You need to understand that.”

Andi, who already knew that a girl who has been raped can never be unraped, understood perfectly.

“Do I really have any other choice?”

Rose shrugged. “Only bad ones, dear. But it’s better if you want it. It will make the Turning easier.”

“Does it hurt? This Turning?”

Rose smiled and told the first outright lie. “Not at all.”


7

A summer night on the outskirts of a Midwestern city.

Somewhere people were watching Harrison Ford snap his bullwhip; somewhere the Actor President was no doubt smiling his untrustworthy smile; here, in this campground, Andi Steiner was lying on a discount-store lawn recliner, bathed in the headlights of Rose’s EarthCruiser and someone else’s Winnebago. Rose had explained to her that, while the True Knot owned several campgrounds, this wasn’t one of them. But their advance man was able to four-wall places like this, businesses tottering on the edge of insolvency. America was suffering a recession, but for the True, money was not a problem.

“Who is this advance man?” Andi had asked.

“Oh, he’s a very winning fellow,” Rose had said, smiling. “Able to charm the birdies down from the trees. You’ll meet him soon.”

“Is he your special guy?”

Rose had laughed at that and caressed Andi’s cheek. The touch of her fingers caused a hot little worm of excitement in Andi’s stomach. Crazy, but there it was. “You’ve got a twinkle, don’t you? I think you’ll be fine.”

Maybe, but as she lay here, Andi was no longer excited, only scared. News stories slipped through her mind, ones about bodies found in ditches, bodies found in wooded clearings, bodies found at the bottom of dry wells. Women and girls. Almost always women and girls. It wasn’t Rose who scared her—not exactly—and there were other women here, but there were also men.

Rose knelt beside her. The glare of the headlights should have turned her face into a harsh and ugly landscape of blacks and whites, but the opposite was true: it only made her more beautiful. Once again she caressed Andi’s cheek. “No fear,” she said. “No fear.”