Doctor Sleep: A Novel

in his pockets, and looked at her.
    “I’m sorry,” Rose said. “I’m a little on edge, all right? I want to do this and get it done. And you don’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”
    3
    Dan sat looking at the late Eleanor Ouellette. The open eyes, now beginning to glaze. The tiny hands with their palms upturned. Most of all at the open mouth. Inside was all the clockless silence of death.
    “Who are you?” Thinking: As if I didn’t know . Hadn’t he wished for answers?
    “You grew up fine.” The lips didn’t move, and there seemed to be no emotion in the words. Perhaps death had robbed his old friend of his human feelings, and what a bitter shame that would be. Or perhaps it was someone else, masquerading as Dick. Something else.
    “If you’re Dick, prove it. Tell me something only he and I could know.”
    Silence. But the presence was still here. He felt it. Then:
    “You asked me why Mrs. Brant wanted the car-park man’s pants.”
    Dan at first had no idea what the voice was talking about. Then he did. The memory was on one of the high shelves where he kept all the bad Overlook memories. And his lockboxes, of course. Mrs. Brant had been a checkout on the day Danny arrived with his parents, and he had caught a random thought from her as the Overlook’s valet delivered her car: I’d sure like to get into his pants .
    “You were just a little boy with a great big radio inside your head. I felt sorry for you. I was scared for you, too. And I was right to be scared, wasn’t I?”
    In that there was a faint echo of his old friend’s kindness and humor. It was Dick, all right. Dan looked at the dead woman, dumbfounded. The lights in the room flickered on and off again. The water pitcher gave another brief jitter.
    “I can’t stay long, son. It hurts to be here.”
    “Dick, there’s a little girl—”
    “Abra.” Almost a sigh. “She’s like you. It all comes around.”
    “She thinks there’s a woman who may be after her. She wears a hat. It’s an old-fashioned tophat. Sometimes she only has one long tooth on top. When she’s hungry. This is what she told me, anyway.”
    “Ask your question, son. I can’t stay. This world is a dream of a dream to me now.”
    “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