Doctor Sleep Page 7

  Dan didn't think it was crazy at all, and now he understood why he had heard Billy Freeman's thoughts so clearly, and without even trying. He remembered something Dick Hallorann had told him once--Dick, who had been his first adult friend. Lots of people have got a little of what I call the shining, but mostly it's just a twinkle--the kind of thing that lets em know what the DJ's going to play next on the radio or that the phone's gonna ring pretty soon.

  Billy Freeman had that little twinkle. That gleam.

  "I guess this Cary Kingsley would be the one to talk to, huh?"

  "Casey, not Cary. But yeah, he's the man. He's run municipal services in this town for twenty-five years."

  "When would be a good time?"

  "Right about now, I sh'd think." Billy pointed. "Yonder pile of bricks across the street's the Frazier Municipal Building and town offices. Mr. Kingsley's in the basement, end of the hall. You'll know you're there when you hear disco music comin down through the ceiling. There's a ladies' aerobics class in the gym every Tuesday and Thursday."

  "All right," Dan said, "that's just what I'm going to do."

  "Got your references?"

  "Yes." Dan patted the duffel, which he had leaned against Teenytown Station.

  "And you didn't write them yourself, nor nothin?"

  Danny smiled. "No, they're straight goods."

  "Then go get im, tiger."

  "Okay."

  "One other thing," Billy said as Dan started away. "He's death on drinkin. If you're a drinkin man and he asts you, my advice is . . . lie."

  Dan nodded and raised his hand to show he understood. That was a lie he had told before.

  6

  Judging by his vein-congested nose, Casey Kingsley had not always been death on drinkin. He was a big man who didn't so much inhabit his small, cluttered office as wear it. Right now he was rocked back in the chair behind his desk, going through Dan's references, which were neatly kept in a blue folder. The back of Kingsley's head almost touched the downstroke of a plain wooden cross hanging on the wall beside a framed photo of his family. In the picture, a younger, slimmer Kingsley posed with his wife and three bathing-suited kiddos on a beach somewhere. Through the ceiling, only slightly muted, came the sound of the Village People singing "YMCA," accompanied by the enthusiastic stomp of many feet. Dan imagined a gigantic centipede. One that had recently been to the local hairdresser and was wearing a bright red leotard about nine yards long.

  "Uh-huh," Kingsley said. "Uh-huh . . . yeah . . . right, right, right . . ."

  There was a glass jar filled with hard candies on the corner of his desk. Without looking up from Dan's thin sheaf of references, he took off the top, fished one out, and popped it into his mouth. "Help yourself," he said.

  "No, thank you," Dan said.

  A queer thought came to him. Once upon a time, his father had probably sat in a room like this, being interviewed for the position of caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. What had he been thinking? That he really needed a job? That it was his last chance? Maybe. Probably. But of course, Jack Torrance had had hostages to fortune. Dan did not. He could drift on for awhile if this didn't work out. Or try his luck at the hospice. But . . . he liked the town common. He liked the train, which made adults of ordinary size look like Goliaths. He liked Teenytown, which was absurd and cheerful and somehow brave in its self-important small-town-America way. And he liked Billy Freeman, who had a pinch of the shining and probably didn't even know it.

  Above them, "YMCA" was replaced by "I Will Survive." As if he had just been waiting for a new tune, Kingsley slipped Dan's references back into the folder's pocket and passed them across the desk.

  He's going to turn me down.

  But after a day of accurate intuitions, this one was off the mark. "These look fine, but it strikes me that you'd be a lot more comfortable working at Central New Hampshire Hospital or the hospice here in town. You might even qualify for Home Helpers--I see you've got a few medical and first aid qualifications. Know your way around a defibrillator, according to these. Heard of Home Helpers?"

  "Yes. And I thought about the hospice. Then I saw the town common, and Teenytown, and the train."

  Kingsley grunted. "Probably wouldn't mind taking a turn at the controls, would you?"

  Dan lied without hesitation. "No, sir, I don't think I'd care for that." To admit he'd like to sit in the scavenged GTO driver's seat and lay his hands on that cut-down steering wheel would almost certainly lead to a discussion of his driver's license, then to a further discussion of how he'd lost it, and then to an invitation to leave Mr. Casey Kingsley's office forthwith. "I'm more of a rake-and-lawnmower guy."

  "More of a short-term employment guy, too, from the looks of this paperwork."

  "I'll settle someplace soon. I've worked most of the wanderlust out of my system, I think." He wondered if that sounded as bullshitty to Kingsley as it did to him.

  "Short term's about all I can offer you," Kingsley said. "Once the schools are out for the summer--"

  "Billy told me. If I decide to stay once summer comes, I'll try the hospice. In fact, I might put in an early application, unless you'd rather I don't do that."

  "I don't care either way." Kingsley looked at him curiously. "Dying people don't bother you?"

  Your mother died there, Danny thought. The shine wasn't gone after all, it seemed; it was hardly even hiding. You were holding her hand when she passed. Her name was Ellen.

  "No," he said. Then, with no reason why, he added: "We're all dying. The world's just a hospice with fresh air."

  "A philosopher, yet. Well, Mr. Torrance, I think I'm going to take you on. I trust Billy's judgment--he rarely makes a mistake about people. Just don't show up late, don't show up drunk, and don't show up with red eyes and smelling of weed. If you do any of those things, down the road you'll go, because the Rivington House won't have a thing to do with you--I'll make sure of it. Are we clear on that?"

  Dan felt a throb of resentment

  (officious prick)

  but suppressed it. This was Kingsley's playing field and Kingsley's ball. "Crystal."

  "You can start tomorrow, if that suits. There are plenty of rooming houses in town. I'll make a call or two if you want. Can you stand paying ninety a week until your first paycheck comes in?"

  "Yes. Thank you, Mr. Kingsley."

  Kingsley waved a hand. "In the meantime, I'd recommend the Red Roof Inn. My ex-brother-in-law runs it, he'll give you a rate. We good?"

  "We are." It had all happened with remarkable speed, the way the last few pieces drop into a complicated thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Dan told himself not to trust the feeling.

  Kingsley rose. He was a big man and it was a slow process. Dan also got to his feet, and when Kingsley stuck his ham of a hand over the cluttered desk, Dan shook it. Now from overhead came the sound of KC and the Sunshine Band telling the world that's the way they liked it, oh-ho, uh-huh.

  "I hate that boogie-down shit," Kingsley said.

  No, Danny thought. You don't. It reminds you of your daughter, the one who doesn't come around much anymore. Because she still hasn't forgiven you.

  "You all right?" Kingsley asked. "You look a little pale."

  "Just tired. It was a long bus ride."

  The shining was back, and strong. The question was, why now?

  7

  Three days into the job, ones Dan spent painting the bandstand and blowing last fall's dead leaves off the common, Kingsley ambled across Cranmore Avenue and told him he had a room on Eliot Street, if he wanted it. Private bathroom part of the deal, tub and shower. Eighty-five a week. Dan wanted it.

  "Go on over on your lunch break," Kingsley said. "Ask for Mrs. Robertson." He pointed a finger that was showing the first gnarls of arthritis. "And don't you fuck up, Sunny Jim, because she's an old pal of mine. Remember that I vouched for you on some pretty thin paper and Billy Freeman's intuition."

  Dan said he wouldn't fuck up, but the extra sincerity he tried to inject into his
voice sounded phony to his own ears. He was thinking of his father again, reduced to begging jobs from a wealthy old friend after losing his teaching position in Vermont. It was strange to feel sympathy for a man who had almost killed you, but the sympathy was there. Had people felt it necessary to tell his father not to fuck up? Probably. And Jack Torrance had fucked up anyway. Spectacularly. Five stars. Drinking was undoubtedly a part of it, but when you were down, some guys just seemed to feel an urge to walk up your back and plant a foot on your neck instead of helping you to stand. It was lousy, but so much of human nature was. Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

  "And see if Billy can find some boots that'll fit you. He's squirreled away about a dozen pairs in the equipment shed, although the last time I looked, only half of them matched."

  The day was sunny, the air balmy. Dan, who was working in jeans and a Utica Blue Sox t-shirt, looked up at the nearly cloudless sky and then back at Casey Kingsley.

  "Yeah, I know how it looks, but this is mountain country, pal. NOAA claims we're going to have a nor'easter, and it'll drop maybe a foot. Won't last long--poor man's fertilizer is what New Hampshire folks call April snow--but there's also gonna be gale-force winds. So they say. I hope you can use a snowblower as well as a leaf blower." He paused. "I also hope your back's okay, because you and Billy'll be picking up plenty of dead limbs tomorrow. Might be cutting up some fallen trees, too. You okay with a chainsaw?"

  "Yes, sir," Dan said.

  "Good."

  8

  Dan and Mrs. Robertson came to amicable terms; she even offered him an egg salad sandwich and a cup of coffee in the communal kitchen. He took her up on it, expecting all the usual questions about what had brought him to Frazier and where he had been before. Refreshingly, there were none. Instead she asked him if he had time to help her close the shutters on the downstairs windows in case they really did get what she called "a cap o' wind." Dan agreed. There weren't many mottoes he lived by, but one was always get in good with the landlady; you never know when you might have to ask her for a rent extension.

  Back on the common, Billy was waiting with a list of chores. The day before, the two of them had taken the tarps off all the kiddie rides. That afternoon they put them back on, and shuttered the various booths and concessions. The day's final job was backing the Riv into her shed. Then they sat in folding chairs beside the Teenytown station, smoking.

  "Tell you what, Danno," Billy said, "I'm one tired hired man."

  "You're not the only one." But he felt okay, muscles limber and tingling. He'd forgotten how good outdoors work could be when you weren't also working off a hangover.

  The sky had scummed over with clouds. Billy looked up at them and sighed. "I hope to God it don't snow n blow as hard as the radio says, but it probably will. I found you some boots. They don't look like much, but at least they match."

  Dan took the boots with him when he walked across town to his new accommodations. By then the wind was picking up and the day was growing dark. That morning, Frazier had felt on the edge of summer. This evening the air held the face-freezing dampness of coming snow. The side streets were deserted and the houses buttoned up.

  Dan turned the corner from Morehead Street onto Eliot and paused. Blowing down the sidewalk, attended by a skeletal scutter of last year's autumn leaves, was a battered tophat, such as a magician might wear. Or maybe an actor in an old musical comedy, he thought. Looking at it made him feel cold in his bones, because it wasn't there. Not really.

  He closed his eyes, slow-counted to five with the strengthening wind flapping the legs of his jeans around his shins, then opened them again. The leaves were still there, but the tophat was gone. It had just been the shining, producing one of its vivid, unsettling, and usually senseless visions. It was always stronger when he'd been sober for a little while, but never as strong as it had been since coming to Frazier. It was as if the air here were different, somehow. More conducive to those strange transmissions from Planet Elsewhere. Special.

  The way the Overlook was special.

  "No," he said. "No, I don't believe that."

  A few drinks and it all goes away, Danny. Do you believe that?

  Unfortunately, he did.

  9

  Mrs. Robertson's was a rambling old Colonial, and Dan's third-floor room had a view of the mountains to the west. That was a panorama he could have done without. His recollections of the Overlook had faded to hazy gray over the years, but as he unpacked his few things, a memory surfaced . . . and it was a kind of surfacing, like some nasty organic artifact (the decayed body of a small animal, say) floating to the surface of a deep lake.

  It was dusk when the first real snow came. We stood on the porch of that big old empty hotel, my dad in the middle, my mom on one side, me on the other. He had his arms around us. It was okay then. He wasn't drinking then. At first the snow fell in perfectly straight lines, but then the wind picked up and it started to blow sideways, drifting against the sides of the porch and coating those--

  He tried to block it off, but it got through.

  --those hedge animals. The ones that sometimes moved around when you weren't looking.

  He turned away from the window, his arms rashed out in gooseflesh. He'd gotten a sandwich from the Red Apple store and had planned to eat it while he started the John Sandford paperback he'd also picked up at the Red Apple, but after a few bites he rewrapped the sandwich and put it on the windowsill, where it would stay cold. He might eat the rest later, although he didn't think he'd be staying up much past nine tonight; if he got a hundred pages into the book, he'd be doing well.

  Outside, the wind continued to rise. Every now and then it gave a bloodcurdling scream around the eaves that made him look up from his book. Around eight thirty, the snow began. It was heavy and wet, quickly coating his window and blocking his view of the mountains. In a way, that was worse. The snow had blocked the windows in the Overlook, too. First just on the first floor . . . then on the second . . . and finally on the third.

  Then they had been entombed with the lively dead.

  My father thought they'd make him the manager. All he had to do was show his loyalty. By giving them his son.

  "His only begotten son," Dan muttered, then looked around as if someone else had spoken . . . and indeed, he did not feel alone. Not quite alone. The wind shrieked down the side of the building again, and he shuddered.

  Not too late to go back down to the Red Apple. Grab a bottle of something. Put all these unpleasant thoughts to bed.

  No. He was going to read his book. Lucas Davenport was on the case, and he was going to read his book.

  He closed it at quarter past nine and got into another rooming-house bed. I won't sleep, he thought. Not with the wind screaming like that.

  But he did.

  10

  He was sitting at the mouth of the stormdrain, looking down a scrubgrass slope at the Cape Fear River and the bridge that spanned it. The night was clear and the moon was full. There was no wind, no snow. And the Overlook was gone. Even if it hadn't burned to the ground during the tenure of the Peanut Farmer President, it would have been over a thousand miles from here. So why was he so frightened?

  Because he wasn't alone, that was why. There was someone behind him.

  "Want some advice, Honeybear?"

  The voice was liquid, wavering. Dan felt a chill go rushing down his back. His legs were colder still, prickled out in starpoints of gooseflesh. He could see those white bumps because he was wearing shorts. Of course he was wearing shorts. His brain might be that of a grown man, but it was currently sitting on top of a five-year-old's body.

  Honeybear. Who--?

  But he knew. He had told Deenie his name, but she didn't use it, just called him Honeybear instead.

  You don't remember that, and besides, this is just a dream.

  Of course it was. He was in Frazier, New Hampshire, sleeping while a spring snowstorm
howled outside Mrs. Robertson's rooming house. Still, it seemed wiser not to turn around. And safer--that, too.

  "No advice," he said, looking out at the river and the full moon. "I've been advised by experts. The bars and barbershops are full of them."

  "Stay away from the woman in the hat, Honeybear."

  What hat? he could have asked, but really, why bother? He knew the hat she was talking about, because he had seen it blowing down the sidewalk. Black as sin on the outside, lined with white silk on the inside.

  "She's the Queen Bitch of Castle Hell. If you mess with her, she'll eat you alive."

  He turned his head. He couldn't help it. Deenie was sitting behind him in the stormdrain with the bum's blanket wrapped around her naked shoulders. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks. Her face was bloated and dripping. Her eyes were cloudy. She was dead, probably years in her grave.

  You're not real, Dan tried to say, but no words came out. He was five again, Danny was five, the Overlook was ashes and bones, but here was a dead woman, one he had stolen from.

  "It's all right," she said. Bubbling voice coming from a swollen throat. "I sold the coke. Stepped on it first with a little sugar and got two hundred." She grinned, and water spilled through her teeth. "I liked you, Honeybear. That's why I came to warn you. Stay away from the woman in the hat."

  "False face," Dan said . . . but it was Danny's voice, the high, frail, chanting voice of a child. "False face, not there, not real."

  He closed his eyes as he had often closed them when he had seen terrible things in the Overlook. The woman began to scream, but he wouldn't open his eyes. The screaming went on, rising and falling, and he realized it was the scream of the wind. He wasn't in Colorado and he wasn't in North Carolina. He was in New Hampshire. He'd had a bad dream, but the dream was over.

  11

  According to his Timex, it was two in the morning. The room was cold, but his arms and chest were slimy with sweat.

  Want some advice, Honeybear?

  "No," he said. "Not from you."