Doctor Sleep: A Novel

there. Wendy Torrance had a valid excuse: she’d predeceased him. Her son, however . . .
    Had he been in some dive, full of whiskey and playing truck-driving songs on the jukebox, when Dick passed on? Maybe in jail for the night on a drunk-and-disorderly?
    Cause of death had been a heart attack. He scrolled back up and checked the date: January 19, 1999. The man who had saved Dan’s life and the life of his mother had been dead almost fifteen years. There would be no help from that quarter.
    From behind him, he heard the soft squeak of chalk on slate. He sat where he was for a moment, with his cooling food and his laptop before him. Then, slowly, he turned around.
    The chalk was still on the ledge at the bottom of the blackboard, but a picture was appearing, anyway. It was crude but recognizable. It was a baseball glove. When it was done, her chalk—invisible, but still making that low squeaking sound—drew a question mark in the glove’s pocket.
    “I need to think about it,” he said, but before he could do so, the intercom buzzed, paging Doctor Sleep.

CHAPTER NINE
    THE VOICES OF OUR DEAD FRIENDS
    1
    At a hundred and two, Eleanor Ouellette was the oldest resident of Rivington House in that fall of 2013, old enough so her last name had never been Americanized. She answered not to Wil-LET but to a much more elegant French pronunciation: Oooh-LAY . Dan sometimes called her Miss Oooh-La-La, which always made her smile. Ron Stimson, one of four docs who made regular day-rounds at the hospice, once told Dan that Eleanor was proof that living was sometimes stronger than dying. “Her liver function is nil, her lungs are shot from eighty years of smoking, she has colorectal cancer—moving at a snail’s pace, but extremely malignant—and the walls of her heart are as thin as a cat’s whisker. Yet she continues.”
    If Azreel was right (and in Dan’s experience, he was never wrong), Eleanor’s long-term lease on life was about to expire, but she certainly didn’t look like a woman on the threshold. She was sitting up in bed, stroking the cat, when Dan walked in. Her hair was beautifully permed—the hairdresser had been in just the day before—and her pink nightie was as immaculate as always, the top half giving a bit of color to her bloodless cheeks, the bottom half spread away from the sticks of her legs like a ballgown.
    Dan raised his hands to the sides of his face, the fingers spread and wiggling. “ Ooh-la-la! Une belle femme! Je suis amoureux! ”
    She rolled her eyes, then cocked her head and smiled at him. “Maurice Chevalier you ain’t, but I like you, cher . You’re cheery, which is important, you’re cheeky, which is more important, and you’ve got a lovely bottom, which is all -important. The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and you have a good one. In my prime, I would have corked it with my thumb and then eaten you alive. Preferably by the pool of Le Meridien in Monte Carlo, with an admiring audience to applaud my frontside and backside efforts.”
    Her voice, hoarse but cadenced, managed to render this image charming rather than vulgar. To Dan, Eleanor’s cigarette rasp was the voice of a cabaret singer who had seen and done it all even before the German army goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées in the spring of 1940. Washed up, maybe, but far from washed out. And while it was true she looked like the death of God in spite of the faint color reflected onto her face by her craftily chosen nightgown, she had looked like the death of God since 2009, the year she had moved into Room 15 of Rivington One. Only Azzie’s attendance said that tonight was different.
    “I’m sure you would have been marvelous,” he said.
    “Are you seeing any ladies, cher ?”
    “Not currently, no.” With one exception, and she was years too young for amour .
    “A shame. Because in later years, this ”—she raised a bony forefinger, then let it dip—“becomes this . You’ll see.”
    He smiled and sat on her bed. As he had sat on so many. “How are you feeling, Eleanor?”
    “Not bad.” She watched Azzie jump down and oil out the door, his work for the evening done. “I’ve had many visitors. They made your cat nervous, but he stuck it out until you came.”
    “He’s not my cat, Eleanor. He belongs to the house.”
    “No,” she said, as if the subject no longer interested her much, “he’s yours.”
    Dan doubted if Eleanor had had even one visitor—other than Azreel, that