Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(6)

“Yes,” Danny said. “Mrs. Massey’s real. She leaves pieces of herself. You saw them. So did Mom . . . and she doesn’t shine.”

“Let’s walk back,” Dick said. “It’s time you saw what I brought you.”

8

The return to the parking lot was even slower, because Dick was winded. “Cigarettes,” he said. “Don’t ever start, Danny.”

“Mom smokes. She doesn’t think I know, but I do. Dick, what did your White Gramma do? She must have done something, because your Black Grampa never got you.”

“She gave me a present, same like I’m gonna give you. That’s what a teacher does when the pupil is ready. Learning itself is a present, you know. The best one anybody can give or get.

“She wouldn’t call Grampa Andy by his name, she just called him”—Dick grinned—“the preevert. I said what you said, that he wasn’t a ghost, he was real. And she said yes, that was true, because I was making him real. With the shining. She said that some spirits—angry spirits, mostly—won’t go on from this world, because they know what’s waiting for them is even worse. Most eventually starve away to nothing, but some of them find food. ‘That’s what the shining is to them, Dick,’ she told me. ‘Food. You’re feeding that preevert. You don’t mean to, but you are. He’s like a mosquito who’ll keep circling and then landing for more blood. Can’t do nothing about that. What you can do is turn what he came for against him.”

They were back at the Cadillac. Dick unlocked the doors, then slid behind the steering wheel with a sigh of relief. “Once upon a time I could’ve walked ten miles and run another five. Nowadays, a little walk down the beach and my back feels like a hoss kicked it. Go on, Danny. Open your present.”

Danny stripped off the silver paper and discovered a box made of green-painted metal. On the front, below the latch, was a little keypad.

“Hey, neat!”

“Yeah? You like it? Good. I got it at the Western Auto. Pure American steel. The one White Gramma Rose gave me had a padlock, with a little key I wore around my neck, but that was long ago. This is the nineteen eighties, the modern age. See the number pad? What you do is put in five numbers you’re sure you won’t forget, then push the little button that says SET. Then, anytime you want to open the box, you punch your code.”

Danny was delighted. “Thanks, Dick! I’ll keep my special things in it!” These would include his best baseball cards, his Cub Scouts Compass Badge, his lucky green rock, and a picture of him and his father, taken on the front lawn of the apartment building where they’d lived in Boulder, before the Overlook. Before things turned bad.

“That’s fine, Danny, I want you to do that, but I want you to do something else.”

“What?”

“I want you to know this box, inside and out. Don’t just look at it; touch it. Feel it all over. Then stick your nose inside and see if there’s a smell. It needs to be your closest friend, at least for awhile.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to put another one just like it in your mind. One that’s even more special. And the next time that Massey bitch comes around, you’ll be ready for her. I’ll tell you how, just like ole White Gramma told me.”

Danny didn’t talk much on the ride back to the apartment. He had a lot to think about. He held his present—a lockbox made of strong metal—on his lap.

9

Mrs. Massey returned a week later. She was in the bathroom again, this time in the tub. Danny wasn’t surprised. A tub was where she had died, after all. This time he didn’t run. This time he went inside and closed the door. She beckoned him forward, smiling. Danny came, also smiling. In the other room, he could hear the television. His mother was watching Three’s Company.

“Hello, Mrs. Massey,” Danny said. “I brought you something.”

At the last moment she understood and began to scream.

10

Moments later, his mom was knocking at the bathroom door. “Danny? Are you all right?”

“Fine, Mom.” The tub was empty. There was some goo in it, but Danny thought he could clean that up. A little water would send it right down the drain. “Do you have to go? I’ll be out pretty soon.”

“No. I just . . . I thought I heard you call.”

Danny grabbed his toothbrush and opened the door. “I’m a hundred percent cool. See?” He gave her a big smile. It wasn’t hard, now that Mrs. Massey was gone.

The troubled look left her face. “Good. Make sure you brush the back ones. That’s where the food goes to hide.”

“I will, Mom.”

From inside his head, far inside, where the twin of his special lockbox was stored on a special shelf, Danny could hear muffled screaming. He didn’t mind. He thought it would stop soon enough, and he was right.

11

Two years later, on the day before the Thanksgiving break, halfway up a deserted stairwell in Alafia Elementary, Horace Derwent appeared to Danny Torrance. There was confetti on the shoulders of his suit. A little black mask hung from one decaying hand. He reeked of the grave. “Great party, isn’t it?” he asked.

Danny turned and walked away, very quickly.

When school was over, he called Dick long-distance at the restaurant where Dick worked in Key West. “Another one of the Overlook People found me. How many boxes can I have, Dick? In my head, I mean.”