Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(79)

“I’m sure you would have been marvelous,” he said.

“Are you seeing any ladies, cher?”

“Not currently, no.” With one exception, and she was years too young for amour.

“A shame. Because in later years, this”—she raised a bony forefinger, then let it dip—“becomes this. You’ll see.”

He smiled and sat on her bed. As he had sat on so many. “How are you feeling, Eleanor?”

“Not bad.” She watched Azzie jump down and oil out the door, his work for the evening done. “I’ve had many visitors. They made your cat nervous, but he stuck it out until you came.”

“He’s not my cat, Eleanor. He belongs to the house.”

“No,” she said, as if the subject no longer interested her much, “he’s yours.”

Dan doubted if Eleanor had had even one visitor—other than Azreel, that was. Not tonight, not in the last week or month, not in the last year. She was alone in the world. Even the dinosaur of an accountant who had overseen her money matters for so many years, lumbering in to visit her once every quarter and toting a briefcase the size of a Saab’s trunk, had now gone to his reward. Miss Ooh-La-La claimed to have relatives in Montreal, “but I have not quite enough money left to make visiting me worthwhile, cher.”

“Who’s been in, then?” Thinking she might mean Gina Weems or Andrea Bottstein, the two nurses working the three-to-eleven in Riv One tonight. Or possibly Poul Larson, a slow-moving but decent orderly whom Dan thought of as the anti–Fred Carling, had stopped by for a natter.

“As I said, many. They are passing even now. An endless parade of them. They smile, they bow, a child wags his tongue like a dog’s tail. Some of them speak. Do you know the poet George Seferis?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t.” Were there others here? He had reason to believe it was possible, but he had no sense of them. Not that he always did.

“Mr. Seferis asks, ‘Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?’ The children are the saddest. There was a boy here who fell down a well.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, and a woman who committed suicide with a bedspring.”

He felt not even the slightest hint of a presence. Could his encounter with Abra Stone have sapped him? It was possible, and in any case, the shining came and went in tides he had never been able to chart. He didn’t think that was it, however. He thought Eleanor had probably lapsed into dementia. Or she might be having him on. It wasn’t impossible. Quite the wag was Eleanor Ooh-La-La. Someone—was it Oscar Wilde?—was reputed to have made a joke on his deathbed: Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.

“You are to wait,” Eleanor said. There was no humor in her voice now. “The lights will announce an arrival. There may be other disturbances. The door will open. Then your visitor will come.”

Dan looked doubtfully at the door to the hall, which was open already. He always left it open, so Azzie could leave if he wanted to. He usually did, once Dan showed up to take over.

“Eleanor, would you like some cold juice?”

“I would if there were ti—” she began, and then the life ran out of her face like water from a basin with a hole in it. Her eyes fixed at a point over his head and her mouth fell open. Her cheeks sagged and her chin dropped almost to her scrawny chest. The top plate of her dentures also dropped, slid over her lower lip, and hung in an unsettling open-air grin.

Fuck, that was quick.

Carefully, he hooked a finger beneath the denture plate and removed it. Her lip pulled out, then snapped back with a tiny plip sound. Dan put the plate on her night table, started to get up, then settled back. He waited for the red mist the old Tampa nurse had called the gasp . . . as though it were a pulling-in instead of a letting-out. It didn’t come.

You are to wait.

All right, he could do that, at least for awhile. He reached for Abra’s mind and found nothing. Maybe that was good. She might already be taking pains to guard her thoughts. Or maybe his own ability—his sensitivity—had departed. If so, it didn’t matter. It would be back. It always had been, at any rate.

He wondered (as he had before) why he had never seen flies on the face of any Rivington House guest. Maybe because he didn’t need to. He had Azzie, after all. Did Azzie see something with those wise green eyes of his? Maybe not flies, but something? He must.

Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?

It was so quiet on this floor tonight, and still so early! There was no sound of conversation from the common room at the end of the hall. No TV or radio played. He couldn’t hear the squeak of Poul’s sneakers or the low voices of Gina and Andrea down at the nurses’ station. No phone rang. As for his watch—

Dan raised it. No wonder he couldn’t hear its faint ticking. It had stopped.

The overhead fluorescent bar went off, leaving only Eleanor’s table lamp. The fluorescent came back on, and the lamp flickered out. It came on again and then it and the overhead went off together. On . . . off . . . on.

“Is someone here?”

The pitcher on the night table rattled, then stilled. The dentures he had removed gave a single unsettling clack. A queer ripple ran along the sheet of Eleanor’s bed, as if something beneath it had been startled into sudden motion. A puff of warm air pressed a quick kiss against Dan’s cheek, then was gone.