Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(43)

“All right,” Dan said. “I’m on my way.”

3

After working at the hospice for awhile, Dan had come to realize there was a class system even for the dying. The guest accommodations in the main house were bigger and more expensive than those in Rivington One and Two. In the Victorian manse where Helen Rivington had once hung her hat and written her romances, the rooms were called suites and named after famous New Hampshire residents. Charlie Hayes was in Alan Shepard. To get there, Dan had to pass the snack alcove at the foot of the stairs, where there were vending machines and a few hard plastic chairs. Fred Carling was plopped down in one of these, munching peanut butter crackers and reading an old issue of Popular Mechanics. Carling was one of three orderlies on the midnight-to-eight shift. The other two rotated to days twice a month; Carling never did. A self-proclaimed night owl, he was a beefy time-server whose arms, sleeved out in a tangle of tats, suggested a biker past.

“Well lookit here,” he said. “It’s Danny-boy. Or are you in your secret identity tonight?”

Dan was still only half awake and in no mood for joshing. “What do you know about Mr. Hayes?”

“Nothing except the cat’s in there, and that usually means they’re going to go tits-up.”

“No bleeding?”

The big man shrugged. “Well yeah, he had a little noser. I put the bloody towels in a plague-bag, just like I’m s’posed to. They’re in Laundry A, if you want to check.”

Dan thought of asking how a nosebleed that took more than one towel to clean up could be characterized as little, and decided to let it go. Carling was an unfeeling dolt, and how he’d gotten a job here—even on the night shift, when most of the guests were either asleep or trying to be quiet so they wouldn’t disturb anyone else—was beyond Dan. He suspected somebody might have pulled a wire or two. It was how the world worked. Hadn’t his own father pulled a wire to get his final job, as caretaker at the Overlook Hotel? Maybe that wasn’t proof positive that who you knew was a lousy way to get a job, but it certainly seemed suggestive.

“Enjoy your evening, Doctor Sleeeep,” Carling called after him, making no effort to keep his voice down.

At the nurses’ station, Claudette was charting meds while Janice Barker watched a small TV with the sound turned down low. The current program was one of those endless ads for colon cleanser, but Jan was watching with her eyes wide and her mouth hung ajar. She started when Dan tapped his fingernails on the counter and he realized she hadn’t been fascinated but half asleep.

“Can either of you tell me anything substantive about Charlie? Carling knows from nothing.”

Claudette glanced down the hall to make sure Fred Carling wasn’t in view, then lowered her voice, anyway. “That man’s as useless as boobs on a bull. I keep hoping he’ll get fired.”

Dan kept his similar opinion to himself. Constant sobriety, he had discovered, did wonders for one’s powers of discretion.

“I checked him fifteen minutes ago,” Jan said. “We check them a lot when Mr. *cat comes to visit.”

“How long’s Azzie been in there?”

“He was meowing outside the door when we came on duty at midnight,” Claudette said, “so I opened it for him. He jumped right up on the bed. You know how he does. I almost called you then, but Charlie was awake and responsive. When I said hi, he hi’d me right back and started petting Azzie. So I decided to wait. About an hour later, he had a nosebleed. Fred cleaned him up. I had to tell him to put the towels in a plague-bag.”

Plague-bags were what the staff called the dissolvable plastic sacks in which clothing, linen, and towels contaminated with bodily fluids or tissue were stored. It was a state regulation that was supposed to minimize the spread of blood-borne pathogens.

“When I checked him forty or fifty minutes ago,” Jan said, “he was asleep. I gave him a shake. He opened his eyes, and they were all bloodshot.”

“That’s when I called Emerson,” Claudette said. “And after I got the big no-way-Jose from the girl on service, I called you. Are you going down now?”

“Yes.”

“Good luck,” Jan said. “Ring if you need something.”

“I will. Why are you watching an infomercial for colon cleanser, Jannie? Or is that too personal?”

She yawned. “At this hour, the only other thing on is an infomercial for the Ahh Bra. I already have one of those.”

4

The door of the Alan Shepard Suite was standing half open, but Dan knocked anyway. When there was no response, he pushed it all the way open. Someone (probably one of the nurses; it almost certainly hadn’t been Fred Carling) had cranked up the bed a little. The sheet was pulled to Charlie Hayes’s chest. He was ninety-one, painfully thin, and so pale he hardly seemed to be there at all. Dan had to stand still for thirty seconds before he could be absolutely sure the old man’s pajama top was going up and down. Azzie was curled beside the scant bulge of one hip. When Dan came in, the cat surveyed him with those inscrutable eyes.

“Mr. Hayes? Charlie?”

Charlie’s eyes didn’t open. The lids were bluish. The skin beneath them was darker, a purple-black. When Dan got to the side of the bed, he saw more color: a little crust of blood beneath each nostril and in one corner of the folded mouth.