Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(97)

“You know better than that, Johnny. Why does any alcoholic drink?”

“Because he’s an alcoholic?”

“Bingo. Simple as can be. Cut through the psychobabble and you’re left with the stark truth. We drank because we’re drunks.”

John laughed. “Casey K. has truly indoctrinated you.”

“Well, there’s also the heredity thing,” Dan said. “Casey always kicks that part to the curb, but it’s there. Did your father drink?”

“Him and mother dearest both. They could have kept the Nineteenth Hole at the country club in business all by themselves. I remember the day my mother took off her tennis dress and jumped into the pool with us kids. The men applauded. My dad thought it was a scream. Me, not so much. I was nine, and until I went to college I was the boy with the Striptease Mommy. Yours?”

“My mother could take it or leave it alone. Sometimes she used to call herself Two Beers Wendy. My dad, however . . . one glass of wine or can of Bud and he was off to the races.” Dan glanced at the odometer and saw they still had forty miles to go. “You want to hear a story? One I’ve never told anybody? I should warn you, it’s a weird one. If you think the shining begins and ends with paltry shit like telepathy, you’re way short.” He paused. “There are other worlds than these.”

“You’ve . . . um . . . seen these other worlds?” Dan had lost track of John’s mind, but DJ suddenly looked a little nervous. As if he thought the guy sitting next to him might suddenly stick his hand in his shirt and declare himself the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte.

“No, just some of the people who live there. Abra calls them the ghostie people. Do you want to hear, or not?”

“I’m not sure I do, but maybe I better.”

Dan didn’t know how much this New England pediatrician would believe about the winter the Torrance family had spent at the Overlook Hotel, but found he didn’t particularly care. Telling it in this nondescript car, under this bright Midwestern sky, would be good enough. There was one person who would have believed it all, but Abra was too young, and the story was too scary. John Dalton would have to do. But how to begin? With Jack Torrance, he supposed. A deeply unhappy man who had failed at teaching, writing, and husbanding. What did the baseball players call three strikeouts in a row? The Golden Sombrero? Dan’s father had had only one notable success: when the moment finally came—the one the Overlook had been pushing him toward from their first day in the hotel—he had refused to kill his little boy. If there was a fitting epitaph for him, it would be . . .

“Dan?”

“My father tried,” he said. “That’s the best I can say for him. The most malevolent spirits in his life came in bottles. If he’d tried AA, things might have been a lot different. But he didn’t. I don’t think my mother even knew there was such a thing, or she would have suggested he give it a shot. By the time we went up to the Overlook Hotel, where a friend of his got him a job as the winter caretaker, his picture could have been next to dry drunk in the dictionary.”

“That’s where the ghosts were?”

“Yes. I saw them. He didn’t, but he felt them. Maybe he had his own shining. Probably he did. Lots of things are hereditary, after all, not just a tendency toward alcoholism. And they worked on him. He thought they—the ghostie people—wanted him, but that was just another lie. What they wanted was the little boy with the great big shine. The same way this True Knot bunch wants Abra.”

He stopped, remembering how Dick, speaking through Eleanor Ouellette’s dead mouth, had answered when Dan had asked where the empty devils were. In your childhood, where every devil comes from.

“Dan? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Dan said. “Anyway, I knew something was wrong in that goddam hotel even before I stepped through the door. I knew when the three of us were still living pretty much hand-to-mouth down in Boulder, on the Eastern Slope. But my father needed a job so he could finish a play he was working on . . .”


7

By the time they reached Adair, he was telling John how the Overlook’s boiler had exploded, and how the old hotel had burned to the ground in a driving blizzard. Adair was a two-stoplight town, but there was a Holiday Inn Express, and Dan noted the location.

“That’s where we’ll be checking in a couple of hours from now,” he told John. “We can’t go digging for treasure in broad daylight, and besides, I’m dead for sleep. Haven’t been getting much lately.”

“All that really happened to you?” John asked in a subdued voice.

“It really did.” Dan smiled. “Think you can believe it?”

“If we find the baseball glove where she says it is, I’ll have to believe a lot of things. Why did you tell me?”

“Because part of you thinks we’re crazy to be here, in spite of what you know about Abra. Also because you deserve to know that there are . . . forces. I’ve encountered them before; you haven’t. All you’ve seen is a little girl who can do assorted psychic parlor tricks like hanging spoons on the ceiling. This isn’t a boys’ treasure hunt game, John. If the True Knot finds out what we’re up to, we’ll be pinned to the target right along with Abra Stone. If you decided to bail on this business, I’d make the sign of the cross in front of you and say go with God.”