Doctor Sleep

Flatirons by noon. As he watched the Rockies draw closer, Dan thought of all the wandering years he had avoided them. That in turn made him think of some poem or other, one about how you could spend years running, butin the end you always wound up facing yourself ina hotel room, with a naked bulb hanging overhead and a revolver on the table.
    Because they had time, they left the freeway and drove into Boulder. Billy was hungry. Dan wasn’t . . . but he was curious. Billy pulled the truck into a sandwich shop parking lot, but when he asked Dan what he could get him, Dan only shook his head.
    “Sure? You got a lot ahead of you.”
    “I’ll eat when this is over.”
    “Well . . .”
    Billy went into the Subway for a Buffalo Chicken. Dan got in touch with Abra. The wheel turned.
    Ping .
    When Billy came out, Dan nodded to his wrapped footlong. “Save that a couple of minutes. As long as we’re in Boulder, there’s something I want to check out.”
    Five minutes later, they were on Arapahoe Street. Two blocks from the seedy little bar-and-café district, he told Billyto pull over. “Go on and chow that chicken. I won’t be long.”
    Dan got out of the truck and stood on the cracked sidewalk, looking at a slumped three-story building with a sign in the window reading EFFICIENCY APTS GOOD STUDENT VALUE. The lawn was balding. Weeds grew up through the cracks in the sidewalk. He had doubted that this place would still be here, had believed that Arapahoe would nowbe a street of condos populated by well-to-do slackers who drank lattes from Starbucks, checked their Facebook pages half a dozen times a day, and Twittered like mad bastards. But here it was, and looking—so far as he could tell—exactly as it had back in the day.
    Billy joined him, sandwich in one hand. “We’ve still got seventy-five miles ahead of us, Danno. Best we get our asses up the pass.”
    “Right,” Dan said, then went on looking at the building with the peeling green paint. Once a little boy had lived here; once he had sat on the very piece of curbing where Billy Freeman now stood munching his chicken footlong. A little boy waiting for his daddy to come home from his job interview at the Overlook Hotel. Hehad a balsa glider, that little boy, but the wing was busted. It was okay,though. When his daddy came home, he would fix it with tape and glue. Then maybe they would fly it together. His daddy had been a scary man, and how that little boy had loved him.
    Dan said, “I lived here with my mother and father before we moved up to the Overlook. Not much, is it?”
    Billy shrugged. “I seen worse.”
    In his wandering years, Dan had, too. Deenie’s apartment in Wilmington, for instance.
    He pointed left. “There were a bunch of bars down that way. One was called the Broken Drum. Looks like urban renewal missed this side of town, so maybe it’s still there. When my father and I walked past it, he’d always stop and look in the window, and I could feel how thirsty he was to go inside. So thirsty it made me thirsty. I drank a lot of years to quench that thirst, but it never really goesaway. My dad knew that, even then.”
    “But you loved him, I guess.”
    “I did.” Still looking at that shambling, rundown apartment house. Not much, but Dan couldn’t help wondering how different their lives might have been if they had stayed there. If the Overlook had not ensnared them. “He was good and bad and I loved both sides of him. God help me, I guess I still do.”
    “You and most kids,” Billysaid. “You love your folks and hope for the best. What else can you do? Come on, Dan. If we’re gonna do this, we have to go.”
    Half an hour later, Boulder was behind them and they were climbing into the Rockies.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    GHOSTIE PEOPLE
    1
    Although sunset was approaching—in New Hampshire, at least—Abra was still on the back stoop, looking down at the river. Hoppy was sitting nearby, on the lid of the composter. Lucy and David came out and sat on either side of her. John Dalton watched them from the kitchen, holding a cold cup of coffee. His black bag was on the counter, but there was nothing init he could use this evening.
    “You should come in and have some supper,” Lucy said, knowing that Abra wouldn’t—probably couldn’t—until this was over. But you clung to the known. Because everything looked normal, and because the danger was over a thousand miles away, that was easier for her than for her daughter. Although