Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(95)

Abra took his hands in hers, squeezing hard. This worried Dan, but he didn’t make her let go. Right now she needed to touch someone she trusted.

“We have to stop them so they can’t hurt my daddy, or my mom, or any of my friends. And so they won’t kill any more kids.”

For a moment Dan caught a clear picture from her thoughts—not sent, just there in the foreground. It was a collage of photos. Children, dozens of them, under the heading HAVE YOU SEEN ME? She was wondering how many of them had been taken by the True Knot, murdered for their final psychic gasp—the obscene delicacy this bunch lived on—and left in unmarked graves.

“You have to get that baseball glove. If I have it, I’ll be able to find out where Barry the Chunk is. I know I will. And the rest of them will be where he is. If you can’t kill them, at least you can report them to the police. Get me that glove, Dan, please.”

“If it’s where you say it is, we’ll get it. But in the meantime, Abra, you have to watch yourself.”

“I will, but I don’t think she’ll try sneaking into my head again.” Abra’s smile reemerged. In it, Dan saw the take-no-prisoners warrior woman she sometimes pretended to be—Daenerys, or whoever. “If she does, she’ll be sorry.”

Dan decided to let this go. They had been together on this bench as long as he dared. Longer, really. “I’ve set up my own security system on your behalf. If you looked into me, I imagine you could find out what it is, but I don’t want you to do that. If someone else from this Knot tries to go prospecting in your head—not the woman in the hat, but someone else—they can’t find out what you don’t know.”

“Oh. Okay.” He could see her thinking that anyone else who tried that would be sorry, too, and this increased his sense of unease.

“Just . . . if you get in a tight place, yell Billy with all your might. Got that?”

(??yes the way you once called for your friend Dick)

He jumped a little. Abra smiled. “I wasn’t peeking; I just—”

“I understand. Now tell me one thing before you go.”

“What?”

“Did you really get an A on your bio report?”


4

At quarter to eight on that Monday evening, Rose got a double break on her walkie. It was Crow. “Better get over here,” he said. “It’s happening.”

The True was standing around Grampa’s RV in a silent circle. Rose (now wearing her hat at its accustomed gravity-defying angle) cut through them, pausing to give Andi a hug, then went up the steps, rapped once, and let herself in. Nut was standing with Big Mo and Apron Annie, Grampa’s two reluctant nurses. Crow was sitting on the end of the bed. He stood up when Rose came in. He was showing his age this evening. Lines bracketed his mouth, and there were a few threads of white silk in his black hair.

We need to take steam, Rose thought. And when this is over, we will.

Grampa Flick was cycling rapidly now: first transparent, then solid again, then transparent. But each transparency was longer, and more of him disappeared. He knew what was happening, Rose saw. His eyes were wide and terrified; his body writhed with the pain of the changes it was going through. She had always allowed herself to believe, on some deep level of her mind, in the True Knot’s immortality. Yes, every fifty or a hundred years or so, someone died—like that big dumb Dutchman, Hands-Off Hans, who had been electrocuted by a falling powerline in an Arkansas windstorm not long after World War II ended, or Katie Patches, who had drowned, or Tommy the Truck—but those were exceptions. Usually the ones who fell were taken down by their own carelessness. So she had always believed. Now she saw she had been as foolish as rube children clinging to their belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

He cycled back to solidity, moaning and crying and shivering. “Make it stop, Rosie-girl, make it stop. It hurts—”

Before she could answer—and really, what could she have said?—he was fading again until there was nothing left of him but a sketch of bones and his staring, floating eyes. They were the worst.

Rose tried to contact him with her mind and comfort him that way, but there was nothing to hold onto. Where Grampa Flick had always been—often grumpy, sometimes sweet—there was now only a roaring windstorm of broken images. Rose withdrew from him, shaken. Again she thought, This can’t be happening.

“Maybe we should put him out of his miz’y,” Big Mo said. She was digging her fingernails into Annie’s forearm, but Annie didn’t seem to feel it. “Give him a shot, or something. You got something in your bag, don’t you, Nut? You must.”

“What good would it do?” Walnut’s voice was hoarse. “Maybe earlier, but it’s going too fast now. He’s got no system for any drug to circulate in. If I gave him a hypo in the arm, we’d see it soaking into the bed five seconds later. Best to just let it happen. It won’t be long.”

Nor was it. Rose counted four more full cycles. On the fifth, even his bones disappeared. For a moment the eyeballs remained, staring first at her and then rolling to look at Crow Daddy. They hung above the pillow, which was still indented by the weight of his head and stained with Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic, of which he seemed to have an endless supply. She thought she remembered Greedy G telling her once that he bought it on eBay. eBay, for f*ck’s sweet sake!