Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(77)

“Which we don’t have. You’re sure it was a Sam’s?”

“Huh?”

“She was in a Sam’s Supermarket?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“I know the chain. I’ve even shopped in one or two, but not around here.”

She grinned. “Course not, Uncle Dan, there aren’t any. They’re all out west. I went on Google for that, too.” The grin faded. “There are hundreds of them, all the way from Nebraska to California.”

“I need to think about this some more, and so do you. You can stay in touch with me by email if it’s important, but it would be better if we just”—he tapped his forehead—“zip-zip. You know?”

“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “The only good part of this is having a friend who knows how to zip-zip. And what it’s like.”

“Can you use the blackboard?”

“Sure. It’s pretty easy.”

“You need to keep one thing in mind, one above all others. The hat woman probably doesn’t know how to find you, but she knows you’re out there someplace.”

She had grown very still. He reached for her thoughts, but Abra was guarding them.

“Can you set a burglar alarm in your mind? So that if she’s someplace near, either mentally or in person, you’ll know?”

“You think she’s going to come for me, don’t you?”

“She might try. Two reasons. First, just because you know she exists.”

“And her friends,” Abra whispered. “She has lots of friends.”

(with flashlights)

“What’s the other reason?” And before he could reply: “Because I’d be good to eat. Like the baseball boy was good to eat. Right?”

There was no point denying it; to Abra his forehead was a window. “Can you set an alarm? A proximity alarm? That’s—”

“I know what proximity means. I don’t know, but I’ll try.”

He knew what she was going to say next before she said it, and there was no mind-reading involved. She was only a child, after all. This time when she took his hand, he didn’t pull away. “Promise you won’t let her get me, Dan. Promise.”

He did, because she was a kid and needed comforting. But of course there was only one way to keep such a promise, and that was to make the threat go away.

He thought it again: Abra, the trouble you’re getting me into.

And she said it again, but this time not out loud:

(sorry)

“Not your fault, kid. You didn’t

(ask for this)

“any more than I did. Go on in with your books. I have to get back to Frazier. I’m on shift tonight.”

“Okay. But we’re friends, right?”

“Totally friends.”

“I’m glad.”

“And I bet you’ll like The Fixer. I think you’ll get it. Because you’ve fixed a few things in your time, haven’t you?”

Pretty dimples deepened the corners of her mouth. “You’d know.”

“Oh, believe me,” Dan said.

He watched her start up the steps, then pause and come back. “I don’t know who the woman in the hat is, but I know one of her friends. His name is Barry the Chunk, or something like that. I bet wherever she is, Barry the Chunk is someplace close. And I could find him, if I had the baseball boy’s glove.” She looked at him, a steady level glance from those beautiful blue eyes. “I’d know, because for a little while, Barry the Chunk was wearing it.”

10

Halfway back to Frazier, mulling over Abra’s hat woman, Dan remembered something that sent a jolt straight through him. He almost swerved over the double yellow line, and an oncoming truck westbound on Route 16 honked at him irritably.

Twelve years ago it had been, when Frazier was still new to him and his sobriety had been extremely shaky. He’d been walking back to Mrs. Robertson’s, where he had just that day secured a room. A storm was coming, so Billy Freeman had sent him off with a pair of boots. They don’t look like much, but at least they match. And as he turned the corner from Morehead onto Eliot, he’d seen—

Just ahead was a rest area. Dan pulled in and walked toward the sound of running water. It was the Saco, of course; it ran through two dozen little New Hampshire towns between North Conway and Crawford Notch, connecting them like beads on a string.

I saw a hat blowing up the gutter. A battered old tophat like a magician might wear. Or an actor in an old musical comedy. Only it wasn’t really there, because when I closed my eyes and counted to five, it was gone.

“Okay, it was a shining,” he told the running water. “But that doesn’t necessarily make it the hat Abra saw.”

Only he couldn’t believe that, because later that night he’d dreamed of Deenie. She had been dead, her face hanging off her skull like dough on a stick. Dead and wearing the blanket Dan had stolen from a bum’s shopping cart. Stay away from the woman in the hat, Honeybear. That was what she’d said. And something else . . . what?

She’s the Queen Bitch of Castle Hell.

“You don’t remember that,” he told the running water. “Nobody remembers dreams twelve years later.”

But he did. And now he remembered the rest of what the dead woman from Wilmington had said: If you mess with her, she’ll eat you alive.