Doctor Sleep: A Novel

down by a kid whose idea of transportation was a bicycle and whose major concern before these last weeks had probably been when she might get breasts bigger than mosquito bumps.
    “But maybe I’ll give you a chance,” the bitchgirl said. Her confidence and breezy temerity were unbelievable. “Of course, if you take me up on it, I’ll wipe the floor with you. I won’t bother with the others, they’re dying already.” She actually laughed. “Choking on the baseball boy, and good for him.”
    “If you come, I’ll kill you,” Rose said. One hand found her throat, closed on it, and began to squeeze rhythmically. Later there would be bruises. “If you run, I’ll find you. And when I do, you’ll scream for hours before you die.”
    “I won’t run,” the girl said. “And we’ll see who does the screaming.”
    “How many will you have to back you up? Dear? ”
    “I’ll be alone.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “Read my mind,” the girl said. “Or are you afraid to do that, too?”
    Rose said nothing.
    “Sure you are. You remember what happened last time you tried it. I gave you a taste of your own medicine, and you didn’t like it, did you? Hyena. Child-killer. Coward .”
    “Stop . . . calling . . . me that.”
    “There’s a place up the hill from where you are. A lookout. It’s called Roof O’ the World. I found it on the internet. Be there at five o’clock Monday afternoon. Be there alone. If you’re not, if the rest of your pack of hyenas doesn’t stay in that meeting-hall place while we do our business, I’ll know. And I’ll go away.”
    “I’d find you,” Rose repeated.
    “You think?” Actually jeering at her.
    Rose shut her eyes and saw the girl. She saw her writhing on the ground, her mouth stuffed with stinging hornets and hot sticks jutting out of her eyes. No one talks to me like this. Not ever .
    “I suppose you might find me. But by the time you did, how many of your stinking True Knot would be left to back you up? A dozen? Ten? Maybe only three or four?”
    This idea had already occurred to Rose. For a child she’d never even seen face-to-face to reach the same conclusion was, in many ways, the most infuriating thing of all.
    “The Crow knew Shakespeare,” the bitchgirl said. “He quoted some to me not too long before I killed him. I know a little, too, because we had a Shakespeare unit in school. We only read one play, Romeo and Juliet, but Ms. Franklin gave us a printout with a whole list of famous lines from his other plays. Things like ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘It was Greek to me.’ Did you know those were from Shakespeare? I didn’t. Don’t you think it’s interesting?”
    Rose said nothing.
    “You’re not thinking about Shakespeare at all,” the bitchgirl said. “You’re thinking about how much you’d like to kill me. I don’t have to read your mind to know that.”
    “If I were you, I’d run,” Rose said thoughtfully. “As fast and as far as your baby legs can carry you. It wouldn’t do you any good, but you’d live a little longer.”
    The bitchgirl was not to be turned. “There was another saying. I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something like ‘Hoisted on your own petard.’ Ms. Franklin said a petard was a bomb on a stick. I think that’s sort of what’s happening to your tribe of cowards. You sucked the wrong kind of steam, and got stuck on a petard, and now the bomb is going off.” She paused. “Are you still there, Rose? Or did you run away?”
    “Come to me, dear,” Rose said. She had regained her calm. “If you want to meet me on the lookout, that’s where I’ll be. We’ll take in the view together, shall we? And see who’s the stronger.”
    She hung up before the bitchgirl could say anything else. She’d lost the temper she had vowed to keep, but she had at least gotten the last word.
    Or maybe not, because the one the bitchgirl kept using played over and over in her head, like a gramophone record stuck in a bad groove.
    Coward. Coward. Coward .
    4
    Abra replaced the telephone receiver carefully in its cradle. She looked at it; she even stroked its plastic surface, which was hot from her hand and wet with her sweat. Then, before she realized it was going to happen, she burst into loud, braying sobs. They stormed through her, cramping her stomach and shaking her body. She rushed to the bathroom, still crying, knelt in front of the toilet, and threw up.
    When she came out, Mr. Freeman was standing in