Doctor Sleep

call?”
    “Danny, tell me something. How come you’re so good at whatyou do?”
    “I don’t really know.” This was at least half true. Maybe even seventy percent. He had lived with the shining all his life and still didn’t understand it.
    “Junk aside, the turret’s hot in the summer and cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey in the winter.”
    “That can be rectified,” Dan had said.
    “Don’t talk to me about your rectum.” Mrs. Clausen peered sternly at him fromabove her half-glasses. “If the board knew what I was letting you do, they’d probably have me weaving baskets in that assisted living home down in Nashua. The one with the pink walls and the piped-in Mantovani.” She snorted. “Doctor Sleep, indeed.”
    “I’m not the doctor,” Dan said mildly. He knew he was going to get what he wanted. “Azzie’s the doctor. I’m just his assistant.”
    “Azreel’s the fucking cat, ” she said. “A raggedy-ass stray that wandered in off the street and got adopted by guests who have now all gone to the Great Who Knows. All he cares about is his twice-daily bowl of Friskies.”
    To this Dan hadn’t responded. There was no need, because they both knew it wasn’t true.
    “I thought you had a perfectly good place on Eliot Street. Pauline Robertson thinks the sun shines out of yourasshole. I know because I sing with her in the church choir.”
    “What’s your favorite hymn?” Dan asked. “ ‘What a Fucking Friend We Have in Jesus’?”
    She showed the Rebecca Clausen version of a smile. “Oh, verywell. Clean out the room. Move in. Have it wired for cable, put in quadraphonic sound, set up a wetbar. What the hell do I care, I’m only the boss.”
    “Thanks, Mrs. C.”
    “Oh, and don’t forgetthe space heater, okay? See if you can’t find something from a yard sale with a nice frayed cord. Burn the fucking place down some cold February night. Then they can put up a brick monstrosity to match the abortions on either side of us.”
    Dan stood up and raised the back of his hand to his forehead in a half-assed British salute. “Whatever you say, boss.”
    She waved a hand at him. “Get outtahere before I change my mind, doc.”
    8
    He did put in a space heater, but the cord wasn’t frayed and it was the kind that shut off immediately if it tipped over. There was never going to be any air-conditioning in the third-floor turret room, but a couple of fans from Walmart placed in the open windows provided a nice cross-draft. It got plenty hot just the same on summer days, but Dan was almostnever there in the daytime. And summer nights in New Hampshire were usually cool.
    Most of the stuff that had been stashed up there was disposable junk, but he kept a big grammar school–style blackboard he found leaning against one wall. It had been hidden for fifty years or more behind an ironmongery of ancient and grievously wounded wheelchairs. The blackboard was useful. On it he listed thehospice’s patients and their room numbers, erasing the names of the folks who passed away and adding names as new folks checked in. In the spring of 2004, there were thirty-two names on the board. Ten were in Rivington One and twelve in Rivington Two—these were the ugly brick buildings flanking the Victorian home where the famous Helen Rivington had once lived and written thrilling romance novelsunder the pulsating name of Jeannette Montparsse.The rest of the patients were housed on the two floors below Dan’s cramped but serviceable turret apartment.
    Was Mrs. Rivington famous for anything besides writing bad novels? Dan had asked Claudette Albertson not long after starting work at the hospice. They were in the smoking area at the time, practicing their nasty habit. Claudette, a cheerfulAfrican American RN with the shoulders of an NFL left tackle, threw back her head and laughed.
    “You bet! For leaving this town a shitload of money, honey! And giving away this house, of course. She thought old folks should have a place where they could die with dignity.”
    And in Rivington House, most of them did. Dan—with Azzie to assist—was now a part of that. He thought he had found his calling.The hospice now felt like home.
    9
    On the morning of Abra’s birthday party, Dan got out of bed and saw that all the names on his blackboard had been erased. Written where they had been, in large and straggling letters, was a single word:
    hEll
    Dan sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear for a long time,