Doctor Sleep: A Novel

five seconds, then had to drop her gaze. But what her eyes fell upon when she did were those smooth breasts, unharnessed but with no sign of a sag. And when she looked up again, her eyes only got as far as the woman’s lips. Those coral-pink lips.
    “You’re thirty-two,” Rose said. “Oh, it only shows a little—because you’ve led a hard life. A life on the run. But you’re still pretty. Stay with us, live with us, and ten years from now you really will be twenty-eight.”
    “That’s impossible.”
    Rose smiled. “A hundred years from now, you’ll look and feel thirty-five. Until you take steam, that is. Then you’ll be twenty-eight again, only you’ll feel ten years younger. And you’ll take steam often. Live long, stay young, and eat well: those are the things I’m offering. How do they sound?”
    “Too good to be true,” Andi said. “Like those ads about how you can get life insurance for ten dollars.”
    She wasn’t entirely wrong. Rose hadn’t told any lies (at least not yet), but there were things she wasn’t saying. Like how steam was sometimes in short supply. Like how not everyone lived through the Turning. Rose judged this one might, and Walnut, the True’s jackleg doctor, had cautiously concurred, but nothing was sure.
    “And you and your friends call yourself—?”
    “They’re not my friends, they’re my family. We’re the True Knot.” Rose laced her fingers together and held them in front of Andi’s face. “And what’s tied can never be untied. You need to understand that.”
    Andi, who already knew that a girl who has been raped can never be unraped, understood perfectly.
    “Do I really have any other choice?”
    Rose shrugged. “Only bad ones, dear. But it’s better if you want it. It will make the Turning easier.”
    “Does it hurt? This Turning?”
    Rose smiled and told the first outright lie. “Not at all.”
    7
    A summer night on the outskirts of a Midwestern city.
    Somewhere people were watching Harrison Ford snap his bullwhip; somewhere the Actor President was no doubt smiling his untrustworthy smile; here, in this campground, Andi Steiner was lying on a discount-store lawn recliner, bathed in the headlights of Rose’s EarthCruiser and someone else’s Winnebago. Rose had explained to her that, while the True Knot owned several campgrounds, this wasn’t one of them. But their advance man was able to four-wall places like this, businesses tottering on the edge of insolvency. America was suffering a recession, but for the True, money was not a problem.
    “Who is this advance man?” Andi had asked.
    “Oh, he’s a very winning fellow,” Rose had said, smiling. “Able to charm the birdies down from the trees. You’ll meet him soon.”
    “Is he your special guy?”
    Rose had laughed at that and caressed Andi’s cheek. The touch of her fingers caused a hot little worm of excitement in Andi’s stomach. Crazy, but there it was. “You’ve got a twinkle, don’t you? I think you’ll be fine.”
    Maybe, but as she lay here, Andi was no longer excited, only scared. News stories slipped through her mind, ones about bodies found in ditches, bodies found in wooded clearings, bodies found at the bottom of dry wells. Women and girls. Almost always women and girls. It wasn’t Rose who scared her—not exactly—and there were other women here, but there were also men.
    Rose knelt beside her. The glare of the headlights should have turned her face into a harsh and ugly landscape of blacks and whites, but the opposite was true: it only made her more beautiful. Once again she caressed Andi’s cheek. “No fear,” she said. “No fear.”
    She turned to one of the other women, a pallidly pretty creature Rose called Silent Sarey, and nodded. Sarey nodded back and went into Rose’s monster RV. The others, meanwhile, began to form a circle around the lawn recliner. Andi didn’t like that. There was something sacrificial about it.
    “No fear. Soon you’ll be one of us, Andi. One with us.”
    Unless, Rose thought, you cycle out. In which case, we’ll just burn your clothes in the incinerator behind the comfort stations and move on tomorrow. Nothing ventured, nothing gained .
    But she hoped that wouldn’t happen. She liked this one, and a sleeper talent would come in handy.
    Sarey returned with a steel canister that looked like a thermos bottle. She handed it to Rose, who removed the red cap. Beneath was a nozzle and a valve. To Andi the canister looked like an