Doctor Sleep

get in and mess with her.
    ( never mind that just tell the others to be ready if I need help )
    Many voices came back, jumping all over each other. They were ready. Even those that were sick were ready to help all they could. She loved them for that.
    Rose stared at the blond girl in the truck. She was looking down. Reading something?Nerving herself up? Praying to the God of Rubes, perhaps? It didn’t matter.
    Come to me, bitchgirl. Come to Auntie Rose .
    But it wasn’t the girl who got out, it was the uncle. Just as the bitch had said he would. Checking. He walked around the hood of the truck, moving slowly, looking everywhere. He leaned in the passenger window, said something to the girl, then moved away from the truck a little.He looked toward the Lodge, then turned to the platform rearing against the sky . . . and waved. The insolent bugger actually waved at her.
    Rose didn’t wave back. She was frowning. An uncle. Why had her parents sent an uncle instead of bringing their bitch daughter themselves? For that matter, why had they allowed her to come at all?
    She convinced them it was the only way. Told them that if she didn’t come to me, I’d come to her. That’s the reason, and it makes sense .
    It did, but she felt a growing unease all the same. She had allowed the bitchgirl to set the ground rules. To that extent, at least, Rose had been manipulated. She had allowed it because this was her home ground and because she had taken precautions, but mostly because she had been angry. So angry.
    She stared hardat the man in the parking lot. He was strolling around again, looking here and there, making sure she was alone. Perfectly reasonable, it was what she would have done, but she still had a gnawing intuition that what he was really doing was buying time, although why he would want to was beyond her.
    Rose stared harder, now focusing on the man’s gait. She decided he wasn’t as young as she had firstbelieved. He walked, in fact, like a man who was far from young. As if he had more than a touch of arthritis. And why was the little girl so still?
    Rose felt the first pulse of real alarm.
    Something was wrong here.
    9
    “She’s looking at Mr. Freeman,” Abra said. “We should go.”
    He opened the French doors, but hesitated. Something in her voice. “What’s the trouble, Abra?”
    “I don’t know. Maybenothing, but I don’t like it. She’s looking at him really hard . We have to go right now.”
    “I need to do something first. Try to be ready, and don’t be scared.”
    Dan closed his eyes and went to the storage room at the back of his mind. Real lockboxes would have been covered with dust after all these years, but the two he’d put here as a child were as fresh as ever. Why not? They were made of pureimagination. The third—the new one—had a faint aura hanging around it, and he thought: No wonder I’m sick .
    Never mind. That one had to stay for the time being. He opened the oldest of the other two, ready for anything, and found . . . nothing. Or almost. In the lockbox that had held Mrs. Massey for thirty-two years, there was a heap of dark gray ash. But in the other . . .
    He realized how foolishtelling her not to be scared had been.
    Abra shrieked.
    10
    On the back stoop of the house in Anniston, Abra began to jerk. Her legs spasmed; her feet rattled a tattoo on the steps; one hand—flopping like a fish dragged to a riverbank and left to die there—sent the ill-used and bedraggled Hoppy flying.
    “What’s wrong with her?” Lucy screamed.
    She rushed for the door. David stood frozen—transfixedby the sight of his seizing daughter—but John got his right arm around Lucy’s waist and his left around her upper chest. She bucked against him. “Let me go! I have to go to her!”
    “No!” John shouted. “No, Lucy, you can’t!”
    She would have broken free, but now David had her, too.
    She subsided, looking first at John. “If she dies out there, I’ll see you go to jail for it.” Next, her gaze—flat-eyedand hostile—went to her husband. “You I’ll never forgive.”
    “She’s quieting,” John said.
    On the stoop, Abra’s tremors moderated, then stopped. But her cheeks were wet, and tears squeezed from beneath her closed lids. In the day’s dying light, they clung to her lashes like jewels.
    11
    In Danny Torrance’s childhood bedroom—a room now made only of memory—Abra clung to Dan with her face pressed againsthis chest. When she spoke, her voice was