Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(82)

“There are others. The tophat woman’s friends. Abra saw them with flashlights. Who are they?”

Silence again. But Dick was still there. Changed, but there. Dan could feel him in his nerve endings, and as a kind of electricity skating on the damp surfaces of his eyes.

“They are the empty devils. They are sick and don’t know it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No. And that’s good. If you had ever met them—if they had ever gotten so much as a sniff of you—you’d be long dead, used and thrown away like an empty carton. That’s what happened to the one Abra calls the baseball boy. And many others. Children who shine are prey to them, but you already guessed that, didn’t you? The empty devils are on the land like a cancer on the skin. Once they rode camels in the desert; once they drove caravans across eastern Europe. They eat screams and drink pain. You had your horrors at the Overlook, Danny, but at least you were spared these folks. Now that the strange woman has her mind fixed on the girl, they won’t stop until they have her. They might kill her. They might Turn her. Or they might keep her and use her until she’s all used up, and that would be worst of all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Scoop her out. Make her empty like them.” From the dead mouth there came an autumnal sigh.

“Dick, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Get the girl what she asked for.”

“Where are they, these empty devils?”

“In your childhood, where every devil comes from. I’m not allowed to say more.”

“How do I stop them?”

“The only way is to kill them. Make them eat their own poison. Do that and they disappear.”

“The woman in the hat, the strange woman, what’s her name? Do you know?”

From down the hall came the clash of a mop-bucket squeegee, and Poul Larson began to whistle. The air in the room changed. Something that had been delicately balanced now began to swing out of true.

“Go to your friends. The ones who know what you are. It seems to me you grew up fine, son, but you still owe a debt.” There was a pause, and then the voice that both was and wasn’t Dick Hallorann’s spoke one final time, in a tone of flat command: “Pay it.”

Red mist rose from Eleanor’s eyes, nose, and open mouth. It hung over her for perhaps five seconds, then disappeared. The lights were steady. So was the water in the pitcher. Dick was gone. Dan was here with only a corpse.

Empty devils.

If he had ever heard a more terrible phrase, he couldn’t remember it. But it made sense . . . if you had seen the Overlook for what it really was. That place had been full of devils, but at least they had been dead devils. He didn’t think that was true of the woman in the tophat and her friends.

You still owe a debt. Pay it.

Yes. He had left the little boy in the sagging diaper and the Braves t-shirt to fend for himself. He would not do that with the girl.

4

Dan waited at the nurses’ station for the funeral hack from Geordie & Sons, and saw the covered gurney out the back door of Rivington One. Then he went to his room and sat looking down at Cranmore Avenue, now perfectly deserted. A night wind blew, stripping the early-turning leaves from the oaks and sending them dancing and pirouetting up the street. On the far side of the town common, Teenytown was equally deserted beneath a couple of orange hi-intensity security lights.

Go to your friends. The ones who know what you are.

Billy Freeman knew, had almost from the first, because Billy had some of what Dan had. And if Dan owed a debt, he supposed Billy did, too, because Dan’s larger and brighter shining had saved Billy’s life.

Not that I’d put it that way to him.

Not that he’d have to.

Then there was John Dalton, who had lost a watch and who just happened to be Abra’s pediatrician. What had Dick said through Eleanor Ooh-La-La’s dead mouth? It all comes around.

As for the thing Abra had asked for, that was even easier. Getting it, though . . . that might be a little complicated.

5

When Abra got up on Sunday morning, there was an email message from [email protected].

Abra: I have spoken to a friend using the talent we share, and am convinced that you are in danger. I want to speak about your situation to another friend, one we have in common: John Dalton. I will not do so unless I have your permission. I believe John and I can retrieve the object you drew on my blackboard.

Have you set your burglar alarm? Certain people may be looking for you, and it’s very important they not find you. You must be careful. Good wishes and STAY SAFE. Delete this email.

Uncle D.

She was more convinced by the fact of his email than its content, because she knew he didn’t like communicating that way; he was afraid her parents would snoop in her mail and think she was exchanging notes with Chester the Molester.

If they only knew about the molesters she really had to worry about.

She was frightened, but also—now that it was bright daylight and there was no beautiful lunatic in a tophat peering in the window at her—rather excited. It was sort of like being in one of those love-and-horror supernatural novels, the kind Mrs. Robinson in the school library sniffily called “tweenager  p**n .” In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires—even zombies—but hardly ever became those things.