Doctor Sleep

Swedish.
    “Say you want to ask Abraif there’s anything you should pick up at the store—bread or milk or something like that. If they say she went home, just say fine, you’ll reach her there.”
    “Then what?”
    Dan didn’t know. All he knew was that he needed to think. He needed to think about what was forgotten.
    John did know. “Then you try to reach Billy Freeman.”
    It was dusk, with the Riv ’s headlight cutting a visible cone up theaisle of the tracks, before Dave got bars on his phone. He called the Deanes’, and although he was clutching the now-deformed Hoppy in a mighty grip and large beads of sweat were trickling down his face, Dan thought he did a pretty good job. Could Abby come to the phone for a minute and tell him if they needed anything at the Stop & Shop? Oh? She did? Then he’d try her at home. He listened a momentlonger, said he’d be sure to do that, and ended the call. He looked at Dan, his eyes white-rimmed holes in his face.
    “Mrs. Deane wanted me to find out how Abra’s feeling. Apparently she went home complaining of menstrual cramps.” He hung his head. “I didn’t even know she’d started having periods. Lucy never said.”
    “There are things dads don’t need to know,” John said. “Now try Billy.”
    “I don’thave his number.” He gave a single chop of a laugh— HA ! “We’re one fucked-up posse.”
    Dan recited it from memory. Up ahead the trees were thinning, and he could see the glow of the streetlights along Frazier’s main drag.
    Dave punched in the number and listened. Listened some more, then killed the call. “Voice mail.”
    The three men were silent as the Riv broke out of the trees and rolled the lasttwo miles toward Teenytown. Dan tried again to reach Abra, throwing his mental voice with all the energy he couldmuster, and got nothing back. The one she called the Crow had probably knocked her out somehow. The tattoo woman had been carrying a needle. Probably the Crow had another one.
    You will remember what was forgotten .
    The origin of that thought arose from the very back of his mind, wherehe kept the lockboxes containing all the terrible memories of the Overlook Hotel and the ghosts who had infested it.
    “It was the boiler.”
    In the conductor’s seat, Dave glanced at him. “Huh?”
    “Nothing.”
    The Overlook’s heating system had been ancient. The steam pressure had to be dumped at regular intervals or it crept up and up to the point where the boiler could explode and send the wholehotel sky-high. In his steepening descent into dementia, Jack Torrance had forgotten this, but his young son had been warned. By Tony.
    Was this another warning, or just a maddening mnemonic brought on by stress and guilt? Because he did feel guilty. John was right, Abra was going to be a True target no matter what, but feelings were invulnerable to rational thought. It had been his plan, theplan had gone wrong, and he was on the hook.
    You will remember what was forgotten .
    Was it the voice of his old friend, trying to tell him something about their current situation, or just the gramophone?
    2
    Dave and John went back to the Stone house together. Dan followed in his own car, delighted to be alone with his thoughts. Not that it seemed to help. He was almost positive there was somethingthere, something real, but it wouldn’t come. He even tried to summon Tony, a thing he hadn’t attempted since his teenage years, and had no luck.
    Billy’s truck was no longer parked on Richland Court. To Dan, that made sense. The True Knot raiding party had come in theWinnebago. If they dropped the Crow off in Anniston, he would have been on foot and in need of a vehicle.
    The garage was open.Dave got out of John’s car before it pulled completely to a stop and ran inside, calling Abra’s name. Then, spotlighted in the headlights of John’s Suburban like an actor on a stage, he lifted something up and uttered a sound somewhere between a groan and a scream. As Dan pulled up next to the Suburban, he saw what it was: Abra’s backpack.
    The urge to drink came on Dan then, even stronger thanthe night he’d called John from the parking lot of the cowboy-boogie bar, stronger than in all the years since he’d picked up a white chip at his first meeting. The urge to simply reverse down the driveway, ignoring their shouts, and drive back to Frazier. There was a bar there called the Bull Moose. He’d been past it many times, always with the recovered drunk’s