Doctor Sleep: A Novel

as Abra can’t read something that isn’t there. But on a deeper level, we both knew. Hell, we even said it out loud. If anyone asked what we were doing together, we were going to say I was her uncle. Which I am. I should have realized consciously sooner than I did.”
    “This is coincidence beyond coincidence,” Dave said, shaking his head.
    “It’s not. It’s the farthest thing in the world from coincidence. Lucy, I understand that you’re confused and angry. I’ll tell you everything I know, but it will take some time. Thanks to John and your husband and Abra—her most of all—we’ve got some.”
    “On the way,” Lucy said. “You can tell me on the way to Abra.”
    “All right,” Dan said, “on the way. But three hours’ sleep first.”
    She was shaking her head before he finished. “No, now. I have to see her as soon as I possibly can. Don’t you understand? She’s my daughter, she’s been kidnapped, and I have to see her !”
    “She’s been kidnapped, but now she’s safe,” Dan said.
    “You say that, of course you do, but you don’t know.”
    “ Abra says it,” he replied. “And she does know. Listen, Mrs. Stone—Lucy—she’s asleep right now, and she needs her sleep.” I do, too. I’ve got a long trip ahead of me, and I think it’s going to be a hard one. Very hard .
    Lucy was looking at him closely. “Are you all right?”
    “Just tired.”
    “We all are,” John said. “It’s been . . . a stressful day.” He uttered a brief yap of laughter, then pressed both hands over his mouth like a child who’s said a naughty word.
    “I can’t even call her and hear her voice,” Lucy said. She spoke slowly, as if trying to articulate a difficult precept. “Because they’re sleeping off the drugs this man . . . the one you say she calls the Crow . . . put into her.”
    “Soon,” Dave said. “You’ll see her soon.” He put his hand over hers. For a moment Lucy looked as if she would shake it off. She clasped it instead.
    “I can start on the way back to your grandmother’s,” Dan said. He got up. It was an effort. “Come on.”
    8
    He had time to tell her how a lost man had ridden a northbound bus out of Massachusetts, and how—just over the New Hampshire state line—he’d tossed what would turn out to be his last bottle of booze into a trash can with IF YOU NO LONGER NEED IT, LEAVE IT HERE stenciled on the side. He told them how his childhood friend Tony had spoken up for the first time in years when the bus had rolled into Frazier. This is the place, Tony had said.
    From there he doubled back to a time when he had been Danny instead of Dan (and sometimes doc, as in what’s up, doc ), and his invisible friend Tony had been an absolute necessity. The shining was only one of the burdens that Tony helped him bear, and not the major one. The major one was his alcoholic father, a troubled and ultimately dangerous man whom both Danny and his mother had loved deeply—perhaps as much because of his flaws as in spite of them.
    “He had a terrible temper, and you didn’t have to be a telepath to know when it was getting the best of him. For one thing, he was usually drunk when it happened. I know he was loaded on the night he caught me in his study, messing with his papers. He broke my arm.”
    “How old were you?” Dave asked. He was riding in the backseat with his wife.
    “Four, I think. Maybe even younger. When he was on the warpath, he had this habit of rubbing his mouth.” Danny demonstrated. “Do you know anyone else who does that when she’s upset?”
    “Abra,” Lucy said. “I thought she got it from me.” She raised her right hand toward her mouth, then captured it with her left and returned it to her lap. Dan had seen Abra do exactly the same thing on the bench outside the Anniston Public Library, on the day they’d met in person for the first time. “I thought she got her temper from me, too. I can be . . . pretty ragged sometimes.”
    “I thought of my father the first time I saw her do the mouth-rubbing thing,” Dan said, “but I had other things on my mind. So I forgot.” This made him think of Watson, the caretaker at the Overlook, who had first shown the hotel’s untrustworthy furnace boiler to his father. You have to watch it, Watson had said. Because she creeps . But in the end, Jack Torrance had forgotten. It was the reason Dan was still alive.
    “Are you telling me you figured out this family relationship from one little habit?