Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(156)

(Charlie)

Token Charlie hit her back at once, and although he was ordinarily a feeble sender, now—boosted by the others in the main room of the Lodge—he came in loud and clear and nearly mad with excitement.

(I’m getting her steady and strong we all are she must be real close you must feel her)

Rose did, even though she was still working hard to keep her mind closed off so the bitchgirl couldn’t get in and mess with her.

(never mind that just tell the others to be ready if I need help)

Many voices came back, jumping all over each other. They were ready. Even those that were sick were ready to help all they could. She loved them for that.

Rose stared at the blond girl in the truck. She was looking down. Reading something? Nerving herself up? Praying to the God of Rubes, perhaps? It didn’t matter.

Come to me, bitchgirl. Come to Auntie Rose.

But it wasn’t the girl who got out, it was the uncle. Just as the bitch had said he would. Checking. He walked around the hood of the truck, moving slowly, looking everywhere. He leaned in the passenger window, said something to the girl, then moved away from the truck a little. He looked toward the Lodge, then turned to the platform rearing against the sky . . . and waved. The insolent bugger actually waved at her.

Rose didn’t wave back. She was frowning. An uncle. Why had her parents sent an uncle instead of bringing their bitch daughter themselves? For that matter, why had they allowed her to come at all?

She convinced them it was the only way. Told them that if she didn’t come to me, I’d come to her. That’s the reason, and it makes sense.

It did, but she felt a growing unease all the same. She had allowed the bitchgirl to set the ground rules. To that extent, at least, Rose had been manipulated. She had allowed it because this was her home ground and because she had taken precautions, but mostly because she had been angry. So angry.

She stared hard at the man in the parking lot. He was strolling around again, looking here and there, making sure she was alone. Perfectly reasonable, it was what she would have done, but she still had a gnawing intuition that what he was really doing was buying time, although why he would want to was beyond her.

Rose stared harder, now focusing on the man’s gait. She decided he wasn’t as young as she had first believed. He walked, in fact, like a man who was far from young. As if he had more than a touch of arthritis. And why was the little girl so still?

Rose felt the first pulse of real alarm.

Something was wrong here.

9

“She’s looking at Mr. Freeman,” Abra said. “We should go.”

He opened the French doors, but hesitated. Something in her voice. “What’s the trouble, Abra?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but I don’t like it. She’s looking at him really hard. We have to go right now.”

“I need to do something first. Try to be ready, and don’t be scared.”

Dan closed his eyes and went to the storage room at the back of his mind. Real lockboxes would have been covered with dust after all these years, but the two he’d put here as a child were as fresh as ever. Why not? They were made of pure imagination. The third—the new one—had a faint aura hanging around it, and he thought: No wonder I’m sick.

Never mind. That one had to stay for the time being. He opened the oldest of the other two, ready for anything, and found . . . nothing. Or almost. In the lockbox that had held Mrs. Massey for thirty-two years, there was a heap of dark gray ash. But in the other . . .

He realized how foolish telling her not to be scared had been.

Abra shrieked.

10

On the back stoop of the house in Anniston, Abra began to jerk. Her legs spasmed; her feet rattled a tattoo on the steps; one hand—flopping like a fish dragged to a riverbank and left to die there—sent the ill-used and bedraggled Hoppy flying.

“What’s wrong with her?” Lucy screamed.

She rushed for the door. David stood frozen—transfixed by the sight of his seizing daughter—but John got his right arm around Lucy’s waist and his left around her upper chest. She bucked against him. “Let me go! I have to go to her!”

“No!” John shouted. “No, Lucy, you can’t!”

She would have broken free, but now David had her, too.

She subsided, looking first at John. “If she dies out there, I’ll see you go to jail for it.” Next, her gaze—flat-eyed and hostile—went to her husband. “You I’ll never forgive.”

“She’s quieting,” John said.

On the stoop, Abra’s tremors moderated, then stopped. But her cheeks were wet, and tears squeezed from beneath her closed lids. In the day’s dying light, they clung to her lashes like jewels.

11

In Danny Torrance’s childhood bedroom—a room now made only of memory—Abra clung to Dan with her face pressed against his chest. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “The monster—is it gone?”

“Yes,” Dan said.

“Swear on your mother’s name?”

“Yes.”

She raised her head, first looking at him to assure herself he was telling the truth, then daring to scan the room. “That smile.” She shuddered.

“Yes,” Dan said. “I think . . . he’s glad to be home. Abra, are you going to be all right? Because we have to do this right now. Time’s up.”