Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(111)
Nut was sitting beside Barry and feeding him more juice . . . when he could, that was. Barry had begun to cycle for real. He had little interest in juice and none at all in the poolside ménage à trois. He only looked at the screen because those were their orders. Each time he came back to his solid form, he groaned louder.
“Crow,” he said. “Get with me, Daddy.”
Crow was beside him in an instant, elbowing Walnut aside.
“Lean close,” Barry whispered, and—after one uneasy moment—Crow did as he was asked.
Barry opened his mouth, but the next cycle started before he could speak. His skin turned milky, then thinned to transparency. Crow could see his teeth locked together, the sockets that held his pain-filled eyes, and—worst of all—the shadowy crenellations of his brain. He waited, holding a hand that was no longer a hand but only a nestle of bones. Somewhere, at a great distance, that twanky disco music went on and on. Crow thought, They must be on drugs. You couldn’t f**k to music like that unless you were.
Slowly, slowly, Barry the Chink grew dense again. This time he screamed as he came back. Sweat stood out on his brow. So did the red spots, now so bright they looked like beads of blood.
He wet his lips and said, “Listen to me.”
Crow listened.
4
Dan did his best to empty his mind so Abra could fill it. He had driven the Riv out to Cloud Gap often enough for it to be almost automatic, and John was riding back by the caboose with the guns (two automatic pistols and Billy’s deer rifle). Out of sight, out of mind. Or almost. You couldn’t completely lose yourself even while you were asleep, but Abra’s presence was large enough to be a little scary. Dan thought if she stayed inside his head long enough, and kept broadcasting at her current power, he would soon be shopping for snappy sandals and matching accessories. Not to mention mooning over the groovy boys who made up the band ’Round Here.
It helped that she had insisted—at the last minute—that he take Hoppy, her old stuffed rabbit. “It will give me something to focus on,” she had said, all of them unaware that a not-quite-human gentleman whose rube name was Barry Smith would have understood perfectly. He had learned the trick from Grampa Flick, and used it many times.
It also helped that Dave Stone kept up a constant stream of family stories, many of which Abra had never heard before. And still, Dan wasn’t convinced any of this would have worked if the one in charge of finding her hadn’t been sick.
“Can’t the others do this location thing?” he had asked her.
“The lady in the hat could, even from halfway across the country, but she’s staying out of it.” That unsettling smile had once more curved Abra’s lips and exposed the tips of her teeth. It made her look far older than her years. “Rose is scared of me.”
Abra’s presence in Dan’s head wasn’t constant. Every now and then he would feel her leave as she went the other way, reaching out—oh so carefully—to the one who had been foolish enough to slip Bradley Trevor’s baseball glove on his hand. She said they had stopped in a town called Starbridge (Dan was pretty sure she meant Sturbridge) and left the turnpike there, moving along the secondary roads toward the bright blip of her consciousness. Later on they had stopped at a roadside café for lunch, not hurrying, making the final leg of the trip last. They knew where she was going now, and were perfectly willing to let her get there, because Cloud Gap was isolated. They thought she was making their job easier, and that was fine, but this was delicate work, a kind of telepathic laser surgery.
There had been one unsettling moment when a p**n ographic image filled Dan’s mind—some kind of group sex by a pool—but it had been gone almost at once. He supposed he had gotten a peek into her undermind, where—if you believed Dr. Freud—all sorts of primal images lurked. This was an assumption he would come to regret, although never to blame himself for; he had taught himself not to snoop into people’s most private things.
Dan held the Riv’s steering-yoke with one hand. The other was on the mangy stuffed bunny in his lap. Deep woods, now starting to flame with serious color, flowed by on both sides. In the right-hand seat—the so-called conductor’s seat—Dave rambled on, telling his daughter family stories and dancing at least one family skeleton out of the closet.
“When your mom called yesterday morning, she told me there’s a trunk stored in the basement of Momo’s building. It’s marked Alessandra. You know who that is, don’t you?”
“Gramma Sandy,” Dan said. Christ, even his voice sounded higher. Younger.
“Right you are. Now here’s something you might not know, and if that’s the case, you didn’t hear it from me. Right?”
“No, Daddy.” Dan felt his lips curve up as, some miles away, Abra smiled down at her current collection of Scrabble tiles: S P O N D L A.
“Your Gramma Sandy graduated from SUNY Albany—the State University of New York—and was doing her student teaching at a prep school, okay? Vermont, Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, I forget which. Halfway through her eight weeks, she up and quit. But she hung around for awhile, maybe picking up some part-time work, waitressing or something, for sure going to a lot of concerts and parties. She was . . .”
5
(a good-time girl)
That made Abra think of the three sex maniacs by the pool, smooching and gobbling to oldtime disco music. Uck. Some people had very strange ideas of what was a good time.