Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(16)

There was a downtown shelter called Hope House (which the winos of course called Hopeless House), but Dan had no intention of going there. You could sleep free, but if you had a bottle they’d take it away. Wilmington was full of by-the-night flops and cheap motels where nobody gave a shit what you drank, snorted, or injected, but why would you waste good drinking money on a bed and a roof when the weather was warm and dry? He could worry about beds and roofs when he headed north. Not to mention getting his few possessions out of the room on Burney Street without his landlady’s notice.

The moon was rising over the river. The blanket was spread out behind him. Soon he would lie down on it, pull it around him in a cocoon, and sleep. He was just high enough to be happy. The takeoff and the climb-out had been rough, but now all that low-altitude turbulence was behind him. He supposed he wasn’t leading what straight America would call an exemplary life, but for the time being, all was fine. He had a bottle of Old Sun (purchased at a liquor store a prudent distance from Golden’s Discount) and half a hero sandwich for breakfast tomorrow. The future was cloudy, but tonight the moon was bright. All was as it should be.

(Canny)

Suddenly the kid was with him. Tommy. Right here with him. Reaching for the blow. Bruises on his arm. Blue eyes.

(Canny)

He saw this with an excruciating clarity that had nothing to do with the shining. And more. Deenie lying on her back, snoring. The red imitation leather wallet. The wad of food stamps with U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE printed on them. The money. The seventy dollars. Which he had taken.

Think about the moon. Think about how serene it looks rising over the water.

For awhile he did, but then he saw Deenie on her back, the red imitation leather wallet, the wad of food stamps, the pitiful crumple of cash (much of it now gone). Most clearly of all he saw the kid reaching for the blow with a hand that looked like a starfish. Blue eyes. Bruised arm.

Canny, he said.

Mama, he said.

Dan had learned the trick of measuring out his drinks; that way the booze lasted longer, the high was mellower, and the next day’s headache lighter and more manageable. Sometimes, though, the measuring thing went wrong. Shit happened. Like at the Milky Way. That had been more or less an accident, but tonight, finishing the bottle in four long swallows, was on purpose. Your mind was a blackboard. Booze was the eraser.

He lay down and pulled the stolen blanket around him. He waited for unconsciousness, and it came, but Tommy came first. Atlanta Braves shirt. Sagging diaper. Blue eyes, bruised arm, starfish hand.

Canny. Mama.

I will never speak of this, he told himself. Not to anyone.

As the moon rose over Wilmington, North Carolina, Dan Torrance lapsed into unconsciousness. There were dreams of the Overlook, but he would not remember them upon waking. What he remembered upon waking were the blue eyes, the bruised arm, the reaching hand.

He managed to get his possessions and went north, first to upstate New York, then to Massachusetts. Two years passed. Sometimes he helped people, mostly old people. He had a way of doing that. On too many drunk nights, the kid would be the last thing he thought of and the first thing that came to mind on the hungover mornings-after. It was the kid he always thought of when he told himself he was going to quit the drinking. Maybe next week; next month for sure. The kid. The eyes. The arm. The reaching starfish hand.

Canny.

Mama.

PART ONE

ABRA

CHAPTER ONE

WELCOME TO TEENYTOWN

1

After Wilmington, the daily drinking stopped.

He’d go a week, sometimes two, without anything stronger than diet soda. He’d wake up without a hangover, which was good. He’d wake up thirsty and miserable—wanting—which wasn’t. Then there would come a night. Or a weekend. Sometimes it was a Budweiser ad on TV that set him off—fresh-faced young people with nary a beergut among them, having cold ones after a vigorous volleyball game. Sometimes it was seeing a couple of nice-looking women having after-work drinks outside some pleasant little café, the kind of place with a French name and lots of hanging plants. The drinks were almost always the kind that came with little umbrellas. Sometimes it was a song on the radio. Once it was Styx, singing “Mr. Roboto.” When he was dry, he was completely dry. When he drank, he got drunk. If he woke up next to a woman, he thought of Deenie and the kid in the Braves t-shirt. He thought of the seventy dollars. He even thought of the stolen blanket, which he had left in the stormdrain. Maybe it was still there. If so, it would be moldy now.

Sometimes he got drunk and missed work. They’d keep him on for awhile—he was good at what he did—but then would come a day. When it did, he would say thank you very much and board a bus. Wilmington became Albany and Albany became Utica. Utica became New Paltz. New Paltz gave way to Sturbridge, where he got drunk at an outdoor folk concert and woke up the next day in jail with a broken wrist. Next up was Weston, after that came a nursing home on Martha’s Vineyard, and boy, that gig didn’t last long. On his third day the head nurse smelled booze on his breath and it was seeya, wouldn’t want to beya. Once he crossed the path of the True Knot without realizing it. Not in the top part of his mind, anyway, although lower down—in the part that shone—there was something. A smell, fading and unpleasant, like the smell of burned rubber on a stretch of turnpike where there has been a bad accident not long before.

From Martha’s Vineyard he took MassLines to Newburyport. There he found work in a don’t-give-much-of-a-shit veterans’ home, the kind of place where old soldiers were sometimes left in wheelchairs outside empty consulting rooms until their peebags overflowed onto the floor. A lousy place for patients, a better one for frequent f**kups like himself, although Dan and a few others did as well by the old soldiers as they could. He even helped a couple get over when their time came. That job lasted awhile, long enough for the Saxophone President to turn the White House keys over to the Cowboy President.