Doctor Sleep: A Novel

Billy’s, making a connected circle. A teeny séance in Teenytown.
    “Beatles music,” Billy said. “On the piano instead of the guitar. It was . . . I dunno. It made em crazy for awhile.”
    John stared at him.
    “Listen,” Dan said, “you have her permission to talk. She wants you to. Trust me on this, John.”
    John Dalton considered for almost a full minute. Then he told them everything, with one exception.
    That stuff about The Simpsons being on all the TV channels was just too weird.
    4
    When he was finished, John asked the obvious question: How did Dan know Abra Stone?
    From his back pocket Dan produced a small, battered notebook. On the cover was a photo of waves crashing against a headland and the motto NO GREAT THING IS CREATED SUDDENLY.
    “You used to carry this, didn’t you?” John asked.
    “Yes. You know Casey K.’s my sponsor, right?”
    John rolled his eyes. “Who could forget, when every time you open your mouth in a meeting, you start with ‘My sponsor, Casey K., always says.’ ”
    “John, nobody loves a smartass.”
    “My wife does,” he said. “Because I’m a studly smartass.”
    Dan sighed. “Look in the book.”
    John paged through it. “These are meetings. From 2001.”
    “Casey told me I had to do ninety-in-ninety, and keep track. Look at the eighth one.”
    John found it. Frazier Methodist Church. A meeting he didn’t often go to, but one he knew. Printed below the notation, in elaborate capital letters, was the word ABRA.
    John looked up at Dan not quite unbelievingly. “She got in touch with you when she was two months old ?”
    “You see my next meeting just below it,” Dan said, “so I couldn’t have added her name later just to impress you. Unless I faked the whole book, that is, and there are plenty of people in the Program who’ll remember seeing me with it.”
    “Including me,” John said.
    “Yeah, including you. In those days, I always had my meeting book in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. They were my security blankets. I didn’t know who she was then, and I didn’t much care. It was just one of those random touchings. The way a baby in a crib might reach out and brush your nose.
    “Then, two or three years later, she wrote a word on a scheduling blackboard I keep in my room. The word was hello. She kept in contact after that, every once in awhile. Kind of touching base. I’m not even sure she was aware she was doing it. But I was there. When she needed help, I was the one she knew, and the one she reached out to.”
    “What kind of help does she need? What kind of trouble is she in?” John turned to Billy. “Do you know?”
    Billy shook his head. “I never heard of her, and I hardly ever go to Anniston.”
    “Who said Abra lives in Anniston?”
    Billy cocked a thumb at Dan. “ He did. Didn’t he?”
    John turned back to Dan. “All right. Say I’m convinced. Let’s have the whole thing.”
    Dan told them about Abra’s nightmare of the baseball boy. The shapes holding flashlights on him. The woman with the knife, the one who had licked the boy’s blood off her palms. About how, much later, Abra had come across the boy’s picture in the Shopper .
    “And she could do this why? Because the kid they killed was another one of these shiners?”
    “I’m pretty sure that’s how the initial contact happened. He must have reached out while these people were torturing him—Abra has no doubt that’s what they did—and that created a link.”
    “One that continued even after the boy, this Brad Trevor, was dead?”
    “I think her later point of contact may have been something the Trevor kid owned—his baseball glove. And she was able to link to his killers because one of them put it on. She doesn’t know how she does it, and neither do I. All I know for sure is that she’s immensely powerful.”
    “The way you are.”
    “Here’s the thing,” Dan said. “These people—if they are people—are led by the woman who did the actual killing. On the day Abra came across the picture of Brad Trevor on a missing-children page in the local rag, she got in this woman’s head. And the woman got in Abra’s. For a few seconds they looked through each other’s eyes.” He held up his hands, made fists, and rotated them. “Turn and turn about. Abra thinks they may come for her, and so do I. Because she could be a danger to them.”
    “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” Billy asked.
    Dan looked at him,