Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(53)
Rose dropped to one knee beside him and sighed. “I would if I could, son, but I can’t.”
His eyes found Barry. “You said you were one of the good guys! I heard you! You said so!”
“Sorry, pal.” Barry didn’t look sorry. What he looked was hungry. “It’s not personal.”
Brad shifted his eyes back to Rose. “Are you going to hurt me? Please don’t hurt me.”
Of course they were going to hurt him. It was regrettable, but pain purified steam, and the True had to eat. Lobsters also felt pain when they were dropped into pots of boiling water, but that didn’t stop the rubes from doing it. Food was food, and survival was survival.
Rose put her hands behind her back. Into one of these, Greedy G placed a knife. It was short but very sharp. Rose smiled down at the boy and said, “As little as possible.”
The boy lasted a long time. He screamed until his vocal cords ruptured and his cries became husky barks. At one point, Rose paused and looked around. Her hands, long and strong, wore bloody red gloves.
“Something?” Crow asked.
“We’ll talk later,” Rose said, and went back to work. The light of a dozen flashlights had turned a piece of ground behind the ethanol plant into a makeshift operating theater.
Brad Trevor whispered, “Please kill me.”
Rose the Hat gave him a comforting smile. “Soon.”
But it wasn’t.
Those husky barks recommenced, and eventually they turned to steam.
At dawn, they buried the boy’s body. Then they moved on.
CHAPTER SIX
WEIRD RADIO
1
It hadn’t happened in at least three years, but some things you don’t forget. Like when your child begins screaming in the middle of the night. Lucy was on her own because David was attending a two-day conference in Boston, but she knew if he’d been there, he would have raced her down the hall to Abra’s room. He hadn’t forgotten, either.
Their daughter was sitting up in bed, her face pale, her hair standing out in a sleep-scruff all around her head, her eyes wide and staring blankly into space. The sheet—all she needed to sleep under during warm weather—had been pulled free and was balled up around her like a crazy cocoon.
Lucy sat beside her and put an arm around Abra’s shoulders. It was like hugging stone. This was the worst part, before she came all the way out of it. Being ripped from sleep by your daughter’s screams was terrifying, but the nonresponsiveness was worse. Between the ages of five and seven, these night terrors had been fairly common, and Lucy was always afraid that sooner or later the child’s mind would break under the strain. She would continue to breathe, but her eyes would never unlock from whatever world it was that she saw and they couldn’t.
It won’t happen, David had assured her, and John Dalton had doubled down on that. Kids are resilient. If she’s not showing any lingering after-effects—withdrawal, isolation, obsessional behavior, bedwetting—you’re probably okay.
But it wasn’t okay for children to wake themselves, shrieking, from nightmares. It wasn’t okay that sometimes wild piano chords sounded from downstairs in the aftermath, or that the faucets in the bathroom at the end of the hall might turn themselves on, or that the light over Abra’s bed sometimes blew out when she or David flipped the switch.
Then her invisible friend had come, and intervals between nightmares had grown longer. Eventually they stopped. Until tonight. Not that it was night anymore, exactly; Lucy could see the first faint glow on the eastern horizon, and thank God for that.
“Abs? It’s Mommy. Talk to me.”
There was still nothing for five or ten seconds. Then, at last, the statue Lucy had her arm around relaxed and became a little girl again. Abra took a long, shuddering breath.
“I had one of my bad dreams. Like in the old days.”
“I kind of figured that, honey.”
Abra could hardly ever remember more than a little, it seemed. Sometimes it was people yelling at each other or hitting with their fists. He knocked the table over chasing after her, she might say. Another time the dream had been of a one-eyed Raggedy Ann doll lying on a highway. Once, when Abra was only four, she told them she had seen ghostie people riding The Helen Rivington, which was a popular tourist attraction in Frazier. It ran a loop from Teenytown out to Cloud Gap, and then back again. I could see them because of the moonlight, Abra told her parents that time. Lucy and David were sitting on either side of her, their arms around her. Lucy still remembered the dank feel of Abra’s pajama top, which was soaked with sweat. I knew they were ghostie people because they had faces like old apples and the moon shone right through.
By the following afternoon Abra had been running and playing and laughing with her friends again, but Lucy had never forgotten the image: dead people riding that little train through the woods, their faces like transparent apples in the moonlight. She had asked Concetta if she had ever taken Abra on the train during one of their “girl days.” Chetta said no. They had been to Teenytown, but the train had been under repairs that day so they rode the carousel instead.
Now Abra looked up at her mother and said, “When will Daddy be back?”
“Day after tomorrow. He said he’d be in time for lunch.”
“That’s not soon enough,” Abra said. A tear spilled from her eye, rolled down her cheek, and plopped onto her pajama top.