Doctor Sleep

got ten minutes, then I’m going to wake up Sleeping Beauty in there on the couch.” She sat down. “Go on, Dan.”
    “I don’t know if she thought my dad would leave my mom for her or not, and I doubt if you’ll find the answer to that one in her trunk. Unless maybe she left a diary. AllI know—based on what Dave said and what Concetta told me later—is that she hung around for awhile. Maybe hoping, maybe just partying, maybe both. But by the time she found out she was pregnant, she must have given up. For all I know, we might have been in Colorado by then.”
    “Do you suppose your mother ever found out?”
    “I don’t know, but she must have wondered how faithful he was, especiallyon the nights when he came in late and shitfaced. I’msure she knew that drunks don’t limit their bad behavior to betting the ponies or tucking five-spots into the cleavages of the waitresses down at the Twist and Shout.”
    She put a hand on his arm. “Are you all right? You look exhausted.”
    “I’m okay. But you’re not the only one who’s trying to process all this.”
    “She died in a car accident,”Lucy said. She had turned from Dan and was looking fixedly at the bulletin board on the fridge. In the middle was a photograph of Concetta and Abra, who looked about four, walking hand in hand through a field of daisies. “The man with her was a lot older. And drunk. They were going fast. Momo didn’t want to tell me, but around the time I turned eighteen, I got curious and nagged her into giving meat least some of the details. When I asked if my mother was drunk, too, Chetta said she didn’t know. She said the police have no reason to test passengers who are killed in fatal accidents, only the driver.” She sighed. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll leave the family stories for another day. Tell me what’s happened to my daughter.”
    He did. At some point, he turned around and saw Dave Stone standingin the doorway, tucking his shirt into his pants and watching him.
    12
    Dan started with how Abra had gotten in touch with him, first using Tony as a kind of intermediary. Then how Abra had come in contact with the True Knot: a nightmare vision of the one she called “the baseball boy.”
    “I remember that nightmare,” Lucy said. “She woke me up, screaming. It had happened before, but it was the firsttime in two or three years.”
    Dave frowned. “I don’t remember that at all.”
    “You were in Boston, at a conference.” She turned to Dan. “Letme see if I’ve got this. These people aren’t people, they’re . . . what? Some kind of vampires?”
    “In a way, I suppose. They don’t sleep in coffins during the day or turn into bats by moonlight, and I doubt if crosses and garlic bother them, but they’re parasites,and they’re certainly not human.”
    “Human beings don’t disappear when they die,” John said flatly.
    “You really saw that happen?”
    “We did. All three of us.”
    “In any case,” Dan said, “the True Knot isn’t interested in ordinary children, only those who have the shining.”
    “Children like Abra,” Lucy said.
    “Yes. They torture them before killing them—to purify the steam, Abra says. I keep picturingmoonshiners making white lightning.”
    “They want to . . . inhale her,” Lucy said. Still trying to get it straight in her head. “Because she has the shining.”
    “Not just the shining, but a great shining. I’m a flashlight. She’s a lighthouse. And she knows about them. She knows what they are.”
    “There’s more,” John said. “What we did to those men at Cloud Gap . . . as far as this Rose is concerned,that’s down to Abra, no matter who actually did the killing.”
    “What else could she expect?” Lucy asked indignantly. “Don’t they understand self-defense? Survival? ”
    “What Rose understands,” Dan said, “is that there’s a little girl who has challenged her.”
    “Challenged—?”
    “Abra got in touch telepathically. She told Rose that she was coming after her.”
    “She what ?”
    “That temper of hers,” Davesaid quietly. “I’ve told her a hundred times it would get her in trouble.”
    “She’s not going anywhere near that woman, or her child-killing friends,” Lucy said.
    Dan thought: Yes . . . and no . He took Lucy’s hand. She started to pull away, then didn’t.
    “The thing you have to understand is really quite simple,” he said. “They will never stop.”
    “But—”
    “No buts, Lucy. Under