Doctor Sleep: A Novel

from one decaying hand. He reeked of the grave. “Great party, isn’t it?” he asked.
    Danny turned and walked away, very quickly.
    When school was over, he called Dick long-distance at the restaurant where Dick worked in Key West. “Another one of the Overlook People found me. How many boxes can I have, Dick? In my head, I mean.”
    Dick chuckled. “As many as you need, honey. That’s the beauty of the shining. You think my Black Grampa’s the only one I ever had to lock away?”
    “Do they die in there?”
    This time there was no chuckle. This time there was a coldness in Dick’s voice the boy had never heard before. “Do you care?”
    Danny didn’t.
    When the onetime owner of the Overlook showed up again shortly after New Year’s—this time in Danny’s bedroom closet—Danny was ready. He went into the closet and closed the door. Shortly afterward, a second mental lockbox went up on the high mental shelf beside the one that held Mrs. Massey. There was more pounding, and some inventive cursing that Danny saved for his own later use. Pretty soon it stopped. There was silence from the Derwent lockbox as well as the Massey lockbox. Whether or not they were alive (in their undead fashion) no longer mattered.
    What mattered was they were never getting out. He was safe.
    That was what he thought then. Of course, he also thought he would never take a drink, not after seeing what it had done to his father.
    Sometimes we just get it wrong.

RATTLESNAKE
    1
    Her name was Andrea Steiner, and she liked movies but she didn’t like men. This wasn’t surprising, since her father had raped her for the first time when she was eight. He had gone on raping her for that same number of years. Then she had put a stop to it, first popping his balls, one after the other, with one of her mother’s knitting needles, and then putting that same needle, red and dripping, in her rapist-sire’s left eyesocket. The balls had been easy, because he was sleeping, but the pain had been enough to wake him in spite of her special talent. She was a big girl, though, and he was drunk. She had been able to hold him down with her body just long enough to administer the coup de grâce.
    Now she had years eight times four, she was a wanderer on the face of America, and an ex-actor had replaced the peanut farmer in the White House. The new fellow had an actor’s unlikely black hair and an actor’s charming, untrustworthy smile. Andi had seen one of his movies on TV. In it, the man who would be president played a guy who lost his legs when a train ran over them. She liked the idea of a man without legs; a man without legs couldn’t chase you down and rape you.
    Movies, they were the thing. Movies took you away. You could count on popcorn and happy endings. You got a man to go with you, that way it was a date and he paid. This movie was a good one, with fighting and kissing and loud music. It was called Raiders of the Lost Ark . Her current date had his hand under her skirt, high up on her bare thigh, but that was all right; a hand wasn’t a prick. She had met him in a bar. She met most of the men she went on dates with in bars. He bought her a drink, but a free drink wasn’t a date; it was just a pickup.
    What’s this about? he’d asked her, running the tip of his finger over her upper left arm. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse, so the tattoo showed. She liked the tattoo to show when she was out looking for a date. She wanted men to see it. They thought it was kinky. She had gotten it in San Diego the year after she killed her father.
    It’s a snake, she said. A rattler. Don’t you see the fangs?
    Of course he did. They were big fangs, out of all proportion to the head. A drop of poison hung from one.
    He was a businessman type in an expensive suit, with lots of combed-back presidential hair and the afternoon off from whatever paper-pushing crap he did for work. His hair was mostly white instead of black and he looked about sixty. Close to twice her age. But that didn’t matter to men. He wouldn’t have cared if she was sixteen instead of thirty-two. Or eight. She remembered something her father had said once: If they’re old enough to pee, they’re old enough for me .
    Of course I see them, the man who was now sitting beside her had said, but what does it mean?
    Maybe you’ll find out, Andi replied. She touched her upper lip with her tongue. I have another tattoo. Somewhere else.
    Can I see it?
    Maybe. Do you like movies?
    He