Doctor Sleep: A Novel

not long before she died, was a dozen drinks. Of course what Wendy had liked was her cigarettes, and they had killed her. Once upon a time Dan had promised himself he’d never get going with that habit, either. He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes.
    Billy Freeman looked at him, one eye squinted mostly shut. “I get feelins about people sometimes, and I got one about you.” He pronounced got as gut, in the New England fashion. “Had it even before you turned around and I saw your face. I think you might be the right guy for the spring cleanin I’m lookin at between now and the end of May. That’s how it feels to me, and I trust my feelins. Prob’ly crazy.”
    Dan didn’t think it was crazy at all, and now he understood why he had heard Billy Freeman’s thoughts so clearly, and without even trying. He remembered something Dick Hallorann had told him once—Dick, who had been his first adult friend. Lots of people have got a little of what I call the shining, but mostly it’s just a twinkle—the kind of thing that lets em know what the DJ’s going to play next on the radio or that the phone’s gonna ring pretty soon .
    Billy Freeman had that little twinkle. That gleam.
    “I guess this Cary Kingsley would be the one to talk to, huh?”
    “Casey, not Cary. But yeah, he’s the man. He’s run municipal services in this town for twenty-five years.”
    “When would be a good time?”
    “Right about now, I sh’d think.” Billy pointed. “Yonder pile of bricks across the street’s the Frazier Municipal Building and town offices. Mr. Kingsley’s in the basement, end of the hall. You’ll know you’re there when you hear disco music comin down through the ceiling. There’s a ladies’ aerobics class in the gym every Tuesday and Thursday.”
    “All right,” Dan said, “that’s just what I’m going to do.”
    “Got your references?”
    “Yes.” Dan patted the duffel, which he had leaned against Teenytown Station.
    “And you didn’t write them yourself, nor nothin?”
    Danny smiled. “No, they’re straight goods.”
    “Then go get im, tiger.”
    “Okay.”
    “One other thing,” Billy said as Dan started away. “He’s death on drinkin. If you’re a drinkin man and he asts you, my advice is . . . lie.”
    Dan nodded and raised his hand to show he understood. That was a lie he had told before.
    6
    Judging by his vein-congested nose, Casey Kingsley had not always been death on drinkin. He was a big man who didn’t so much inhabit his small, cluttered office as wear it. Right now he was rocked back in the chair behind his desk, going through Dan’s references, which were neatly kept in a blue folder. The back of Kingsley’s head almost touched the downstroke of a plain wooden cross hanging on the wall beside a framed photo of his family. In the picture, a younger, slimmer Kingsley posed with his wife and three bathing-suited kiddos on a beach somewhere. Through the ceiling, only slightly muted, came the sound of the Village People singing “YMCA,” accompanied by the enthusiastic stomp of many feet. Dan imagined a gigantic centipede. One that had recently been to the local hairdresser and was wearing a bright red leotard about nine yards long.
    “Uh-huh,” Kingsley said. “Uh-huh . . . yeah . . . right, right, right . . .”
    There was a glass jar filled with hard candies on the corner of his desk. Without looking up from Dan’s thin sheaf of references, he took off the top, fished one out, and popped it into his mouth. “Help yourself,” he said.
    “No, thank you,” Dan said.
    A queer thought came to him. Once upon a time, his father had probably sat in a room like this, being interviewed for the position of caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. What had he been thinking? That he really needed a job? That it was his last chance? Maybe. Probably. But of course, Jack Torrance had had hostages to fortune. Dan did not. He could drift on for awhile if this didn’t work out. Or try his luck at the hospice. But . . . he liked the town common. He liked the train, which made adults of ordinary size look like Goliaths. He liked Teenytown, which was absurd and cheerful and somehow brave in its self-important small-town-America way. And he liked Billy Freeman, who had a pinch of the shining and probably didn’t even know it.
    Above them, “YMCA” was replaced by “I Will Survive.” As if he had just been waiting for a new tune, Kingsley slipped Dan’s references