Doctor Sleep

by Stephen King

  "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 dtor36@nhmlx.com.

  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 porn." In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires--even zombies--but hardly ever became those things.

  It was also nice to have a grown man stand up for her, and it didn't hurt that he was handsome, in a scruffy kind of way that reminded her a little of Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, a show she and Emma Deane secretly watched on Em's computer.

  She sent Uncle Dan's email not just to her trash but to the permanent trash, which Emma called "the nuclear boyfriend file." (As if you had any, Em, Abra thought snidely.) Then she turned off her computer and closed the lid. She didn't email him back. She didn't have to. She just had to close her eyes.

  Zip-zip.

  Message sent, Abra headed for the shower.

  6

  When Dan came back with his morning coffee, there was a new communique on his blackboard.

  You can tell Dr. John but NOT MY PARENTS.

  No. Not her parents. At least not yet. But Dan had no doubt they'd find out something was going on, and probably sooner rather than later. He would cross that bridge (or burn it) when he came to it. Right now he had a lot of other things to do, beginning with a call.

  A child answered, and when he asked for Rebecca, the phone was dropped with a clunk and there was a distant, going-away cry of "Gramma! It's for you!" A few seconds later, Rebecca Clausen was on the line.

  "Hi, Becka, it's Dan Torrance."

  "If it's about Mrs. Ouellette, I had an email this morning from--"

  "That's not it. I need to ask for some time off."

  "Doctor Sleep wants time off? I don't believe it. I had to practically kick you out the door last spring to take your vacation, and you were still in once or twice a day. Is it a family matter?"

  Dan, with Abra's theory of relativity in mind, said it was.

  CHAPTER TEN

  GLASS ORNAMENTS

  1

  Abra's father was standing at the kitchen counter in his bathrobe and beating eggs in a bowl when the kitchen phone rang. Upstairs, the shower was pounding. If Abra followed her usual Sunday morning MO, it would continue to pound until the hot water gave out.

  He checked the incoming call window. It was a 617 area code, but the number following wasn't the one in Boston he knew, the one that rang the landline in his grandmother-in-law's condo. "Hello?"

  "Oh, David, I'm so glad I got you." It was Lucy, and she sounded utterly exhausted.

  "Where are you? Why aren't you calling from your cell?"

  "Mass General, on a pay phone. You can't use cells in here, there are signs everywhere."

  "Is Momo all right? Are you?"

  "I am. As for Momes, she's stable . . . now . . . but for awhile it was pretty bad." A gulp. "It still is." That was when Lucy broke down. Not just crying, but sobbing her heart out.

  David waited. He was glad Abra was in the shower, and hoped the hot water would hold out for a long time. This sounded bad.

  At last Lucy was able to talk again. "This time she broke her arm."

  "Oh. Okay. Is that all?"

  "No, it is not all!" Nearly shouting at him in that why-are-men-so-stupid voice that he
absolutely loathed, the one he told himself was a part of her Italian heritage without ever considering that he might, on occasion, actually be quite stupid.

  He took a steadying breath. "Tell me, honey."

  She did, although twice she broke into sobs again, and David had to wait her out. She was dead beat, but that was only part of the problem. Mostly, he realized, she was just accepting in her gut what her head had known for weeks: her momo was really going to die. Maybe not peacefully.

  Concetta, who slept in only the thinnest of dozes now, had awakened after midnight and needed the toilet. Instead of buzzing for Lucy to bring the bedpan, she had tried to get up and go to the bathroom by herself. She had managed to swing her legs out onto the floor and sit up, but then dizziness had overcome her and she had tumbled off the bed, landing on her left arm. It hadn't just broken, it had shattered. Lucy, tired out from weeks of night nursing that she had never been trained to do, awoke to the sound of her grandmother's cries.

  "She wasn't just calling for help," Lucy said, "and she wasn't screaming, either. She was shrieking, like a fox that's had a limb torn off in one of those terrible leghold traps."

  "Honey, that must have been awful."

  Standing in a first-floor alcove where there were snack machines and--mirabile dictu--a few working phones, her body aching and covered with drying sweat (she could smell herself, and it sure wasn't Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue), her head pounding with the first migraine she'd had in four years, Lucia Stone knew she could never tell him how awful it had really been. What a stinking revelation it had been. You thought you understood the basic fact--woman grows old, woman grows feeble, woman dies--and then you discovered there was quite a lot more to it. You found that out when you found the woman who had written some of the greatest poetry of her generation lying in a puddle of her own piss, shrieking at her granddaughter to make the pain stop, make it stop, oh madre de Cristo, make it stop. When you saw the formerly smooth forearm twisted like a washrag and heard the poet call it a cunting thing and then wish herself dead so the hurting would stop.

  Could you tell your husband how you were still half asleep, and frozen with the fear that anything you did would be the wrong thing? Could you tell him that she scratched your face when you tried to move her and howled like a dog that had been run over in the street? Could you explain what it was like to leave your beloved grandmother sprawled on the floor while you dialed 911, and then sat beside her waiting for the ambulance, making her drink Oxycodone dissolved in water through a bendy-straw? How the ambulance didn't come and didn't come and you thought of that Gordon Lightfoot song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," the one that asks if anyone knows where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? The waves rolling over Momo were waves of pain, and she was foundering, and they just kept coming.

  When she began to scream again, Lucy had gotten both arms under her and lifted her onto her bed in a clumsy clean-and-jerk that she knew she'd feel in her shoulders and lower back for days, if not weeks. Stopping her ears to Momo's cries of put me down, you're killing me. Then Lucy sat against the wall, gasping, her hair plastered to her cheeks in strings while Momo wept and cradled her hideously deformed arm and asked why Lucia would hurt her like that and why this was happening to her.

  At last the ambulance had come, and a man--Lucy didn't know his name but blessed him in her incoherent prayers--had given Momes a shot that put her out. Could you tell your husband you wished the shot had killed her?

  "It was pretty awful," was all she said. "I'm so glad Abra didn't want to come down this weekend."

  "She did, but she had lots of homework, and said she had to go to the library yesterday. It must have been a big deal, because you know how she usually pesters me about going to the football game." Babbling. Stupid. But what else was there? "Luce, I'm so goddamned sorry you had to go through that alone."

  "It's just . . . if you could have heard her screaming. Then you might understand. I never want to hear anyone scream like that again. She's always been so great at staying calm . . . keeping her head when all about her are losing theirs . . ."

  "I know--"

  "And then to be reduced to what she was last night. The only words she could remember were cunt and shit and piss and fuck and meretrice and--"

  "Let it go, honey." Upstairs, the shower had quit. It would only take Abra a few minutes to dry off and jump into her Sunday grubs; she'd be down soon enough, shirttail flying and sneaker laces flapping.

  But Lucy wasn't quite ready to let it go. "I remember a poem she wrote once. I can't quote it word for word, but it started something like this: 'God's a connoisseur of fragile things, and decorates His cloudy outlook with ornaments of finest glass.' I used to think that was a rather conventionally pretty idea for a Concetta Reynolds poem, almost twee."

  And here was his Abba-Doo--their Abba-Doo--with her skin flushed from the shower. "Everything all right, Daddy?"

  David held up a hand: Wait a minute.

  "Now I know what she really meant, and I'll never be able to read that poem again."

  "Abby's here, hon," he said in a falsely jolly voice.

  "Good. I'll need to talk to her. I'm not going to bawl anymore, so don't worry, but we can't protect her from this."

  "Maybe from the worst of it?" he asked gently. Abra was standing by the table, her wet hair pulled into a couple of horsetails that made her look ten again. Her expression was grave.

  "Maybe," she agreed, "but I can't do this anymore, Davey. Not even with day help. I thought I could, but I can't. There's a hospice in Frazier, just a little way down the road. The intake nurse told me about it. I think hospitals must keep a list for just this type of situation. Anyway, the place is called Helen Rivington House. I called them before I called you, and they have a vacancy as of today. I guess God pushed another of His ornaments off the mantelpiece last night."

  "Is Chetta awake? Have you discussed this--"

  "She came around a couple of hours ago, but she was muddy. Had the past and present all mixed together in a kind of salad."

  While I was still fast asleep, David thought guiltily. Dreaming about my book, no doubt.

  "When she clears up--I'm assuming she will--I'll tell her, as gently as I can, that the decision isn't hers to make. It's time for hospice care."

  "All right." When Lucy decided something--really decided--the best thing was to stand clear and let her work her will.

  "Dad? Is Mom okay? Is Momo?"

  Abra knew her mother was and her great-grandmother wasn't. Most of what Lucy had told her husband had come to her while she was still in the shower, standing there with shampoo and tears running down her cheeks. But she had gotten good at putting on happy faces until someone told her out loud that it was time to put on a sad one. She wondered if her new friend Dan had learned about the happy-face thing as a kid. She bet he had.

  "Chia, I think Abby wants to talk to you."

  Lucy sighed and said, "Put her on."

  David held out the phone to his daughter.

  2

  At 2 p.m. on that Sunday, Rose the Hat hung a sign reading DO NOT DISTURB ME UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY on the door of her plus-size RV. The coming hours had been carefully scheduled. She would eat no food today, and drink only water. Instead of mid-morning coffee, she had taken an emetic. When the time came to go after the girl's mind, she would be as clear as an empty glass.

  With no bodily functions to distract her, Rose would be able to find out everything she needed: the girl's name, her exact location, how much she knew, and--this was very important--who she might have talked to. Rose would lie still on her double bed in the EarthCruiser from four in the afternoon until ten in the evening, looking up at the ceiling and meditating. When her mind was as clear as her body, she would take steam from one of the canisters in the hidden compartment--just a whiff would be enough--and once again turn the world until she was in the girl and the girl was in her. At one in the morning Eastern Time, her quarry w
ould be dead asleep and Rose could pick through the contents of her mind at will. It might even be possible to plant a suggestion: Some men will come. They will help you. Go with them.

  But as that old-school farmer-poet Bobbie Burns pointed out more than two hundred years before, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and she had barely begun to recite the beginning phrases of her relaxation mantra when an agley came hammering at her door.

  "Go away!" she shouted. "Can't you read the sign?"

  "Rose, I've got Nut with me," Crow called. "I think he's got what you asked for, but he needs a go-ahead, and the timing on this thing is a bitch."

  She lay there for a moment, then blew out an angry breath and got up, snatching a Sidewinder t-shirt (KISS ME AT THE ROOF O' THE WORLD!) and pulling it over her head. It dropped to the tops of her thighs. She opened the door. "This better be good."

  "We can come back," Walnut said. He was a little man with a bald pate and Brillo pads of gray hair fluffing out above the tops of his ears. He held a sheet of paper in one hand.

  "No, just make it quick."

  They sat at the table in the combined kitchen/living room. Rose snatched the paper from Nut's hand and gave it a cursory glance. It was some sort of complicated chemical diagram filled with hexagons. It meant nothing to her. "What is it?"

  "A powerful sedative," Nut said. "It's new, and it's clean. Jimmy got this chem sheet from one of our assets in the NSA. It'll put her out with no chance of ODing her."

  "It could be what we need, all right." Rose knew she sounded grudging. "But couldn't it have waited until tomorrow?"

  "Sorry, sorry," Nut said meekly.

  "I'm not," Crow said. "If you want to move fast on this girl and snatch her clean, I'll not only have to make sure we can get some of this, I'll have to arrange for it to be shipped to one of our mail drops."

  The True had hundreds of these across America, most of them at Mail Boxes Etc. and various UPS stores. Using them meant planning days ahead, because they always traveled in their RVs. Members of the True would no more get on public transport than they would slit their own throats. Private air travel was possible but unpleasant; they suffered extreme altitude sickness. Walnut believed it had something to do with their nervous systems, which differed radically from those of the rubes. Rose's concern was with a certain taxpayer-funded nervous system. Very nervous. Homeland Security had been monitoring even private flights very closely since 9/11, and the True Knot's first rule of survival was never attract attention.