Doctor Sleep

the confabulation of a very bright little ten-year-old girl. But they would only half believe it, and Lucy hardly believed it at all. How many ten-year-olds knew what a hospice was, even if they mispronounced it?
    “Tell me about the boy in your dream.” Now that Abra was calmed down, this conversation seemed safer. “Tell me who was hurting him, Abba-Doo.”
    “I don’t remember, except he thoughtBarney was supposed to be his friend. Or maybe it was Barry. Momma, can I have Hoppy?”
    Her stuffed rabbit, now sitting in lop-eared exile on the highest shelf in her room. Abra hadn’t slept with him in at least two years. Lucy got the Hopster and put him in her daughter’s arms. Abra hugged the rabbit to her pink pajama top and was asleep almost at once. With luck, she’d be out for another hour,maybe even two. Lucy sat beside her, looking down.
    Let this stop for good in another few years, just like John said it would. Better yet, let it stop today, this very morning. No more, please. No more hunting through the local papers to see if some little boy was killed by his stepfather or beaten to death by bullies who were high on glue, or something. Let it end.
    “God,” she said in a verylow voice, “if you’re there, would you do something for me? Would you break the radio in my little girl’s head?”
    2
    When the True headed west again along I-80, rolling toward the town in the Colorado high country where they would spend the summer (always assuming the opportunity to collect some nearby big steam did not come up), Crow Daddy was riding in the shotgun seat of Rose’s EarthCruiser.Jimmy Numbers, the True’s whizbang accountant, was piloting Crow’s Affinity Country Coach for the time being. Rose’s satellite radio was tuned to Outlaw Country and currently playing Hank Jr.’s “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.” It was a good tune, and Crow let it run its course before pushing the OFF button.
    “You said we’d talk later. This is later. What happened back there?”
    “We had a looker,”Rose said.
    “Really?” Crow raised his eyebrows. He had taken as much of the Trevor kid’s steam as any of them, but he looked no younger. He rarely did after eating. On the other hand, he rarely looked older between meals, unless the gap was very long. Rose thought it was a good trade-off. Probably something in his genes. Assuming they still had genes. Nut said they almost certainly did. “A steamhead,you mean.”
    She nodded. Ahead of them, I-80 unrolled under a faded blue denim sky dotted with drifting cumulus clouds.
    “Big steam?”
    “Oh yeah. Huge.”
    “How far away?”
    “East Coast. I think.”
    “You’re saying someone looked in from what, almost fifteen hundred miles away?”
    “Could have been even further. Could have been way the hell and gone up in Canada.”
    “Boy or girl?”
    “Probably a girl, butit was only a flash. Three seconds at most. Does it matter?”
    It didn’t. “How many canisters could you fill from a kid with that much steam in the boiler?”
    “Hard to say. Three, at least.” This time it was Rose who was lowballing. She guessed the unknown looker might fill ten canisters, maybe even a dozen. The presence had been brief but muscular. The looker had seen what they were doing, andher horror (if it was a her) had been strong enough to freeze Rose’s hands and make her feel a momentary loathing. It wasn’t her own feeling, of course—gutting a rube was no more loathsome than gutting a deer—but a kind of psychic ricochet.
    “Maybe we ought to turn around,” Crow said. “Get her while the getting’s good.”
    “No. I think this one’s still getting stronger. We’ll let her ripen a bit.”
    “Is that something you know or just intuition?”
    Rose waggled her hand in the air.
    “An intuition strong enough to risk her getting killed by a hit-and-run driver or grabbed by some child-molesting perv?” Crow said this without irony. “Or what about leukemia, or some other cancer? You know they’re susceptible to stuff like that.”
    “If you asked Jimmy Numbers, he’d say the actuarial tables areon our side.” Rose smiled and gave his thigh an affectionate pat. “You worry too much, Daddy. We’ll go on to Sidewinder, as planned, then head down to Florida in a couple of months. Both Barry and Grampa Flick think this might be a big year for hurricanes.”
    Crow made a face. “That’s like scavenging out of Dumpsters.”
    “Maybe, but the scraps in some of those