Doctor Sleep: A Novel

to the disgusting ear again and whispered, “Sleep deeper. As deep as you can. The pain you feel will only be a dream.” She opened her purse and took out a pearl-handled knife. It was small, but the blade was razor-sharp. “What will the pain be?”
    “Only a dream,” Mr. Businessman muttered into the knot of his tie.
    “That’s right, sweetie.” She put an arm around him and quickly slashed double Vs into his right cheek—a cheek so fat it would soon be a jowl. She took a moment to admire her work in the chancy light of the projector’s colored dream-beam. Then the blood sheeted down. He would wake up with his face on fire, the right arm of his expensive suitcoat drenched, and in need of an emergency room.
    And how will you explain it to your wife? You’ll think of something, I’m sure. But unless you have plastic surgery, you’ll see my marks every time you look in the mirror. And every time you go looking for a little strange in one of the bars, you’ll remember how you got bitten by a rattlesnake. One in a blue skirt and a white sleeveless blouse.
    She tucked the two fifties and five twenties into her purse, clicked it shut, and was about to get up when a hand fell on her shoulder and a woman murmured in her ear. “Hello, dear. You can see the rest of the movie another time. Right now you’re coming with us.”
    Andi tried to turn, but hands seized her head. The terrible thing about them was that they were inside .
    After that—until she found herself in Rose’s EarthCruiser in a going-to-seed campground on the outskirts of this Midwestern city—all was darkness.
    6
    When she woke up, Rose gave her a cup of tea and talked to her for a long time. Andi heard everything, but most of her attention was taken up by the woman who had abducted her. She was a presence, and that was putting it mildly. Rose the Hat was six feet tall, with long legs in tapered white slacks and high breasts inside a t-shirt branded with the UNICEF logo and motto: Whatever It Takes To Save a Child . Her face was that of a calm queen, serene and untroubled. Her hair, now unbound, tumbled halfway down her back. The scuffed tophat cocked on her head was jarring, but otherwise she was the most beautiful woman Andi Steiner had ever seen.
    “Do you understand what I’ve been telling you? I’m giving you an opportunity here, Andi, and you should not take it lightly. It’s been twenty years or more since we’ve offered anyone what I’m offering you.”
    “And if I say no? What then? Do you kill me? And take this . . .” What had she called it? “This steam?”
    Rose smiled. Her lips were rich and coral pink. Andi, who considered herself asexual, nonetheless wondered what that lipstick would taste like.
    “You don’t have enough steam to bother with, dear, and what you do have would be far from yummy. It would taste the way the meat from a tough old cow tastes to a rube.”
    “To a what?”
    “Never mind, just listen. We won’t kill you. What we’ll do if you say no is to wipe out all memory of this little conversation. You will find yourself on the side of the road outside some nothing town—Topeka, maybe, or Fargo—with no money, no identification, and no memory of how you got there. The last thing you’ll remember is going into that movie theater with the man you robbed and mutilated.”
    “He deserved to be mutilated!” Andi spat out.
    Rose stood on her tiptoes and stretched, her fingers touching the roof of the RV. “That’s your business, honeydoll, I’m not your psychiatrist.” She wasn’t wearing a bra; Andi could see the shifting punctuation marks of her nipples against her shirt. “But here’s something to consider: we’ll take your talent as well as your money and your no doubt bogus identification. The next time you suggest that a man go to sleep in a darkened movie theater, he’ll turn to you and ask what the fuck you’re talking about.”
    Andi felt a cold trickle of fear. “You can’t do that.” But she remembered the terribly strong hands that had reached inside her brain and felt quite sure this woman could. She might need a little help from her friends, the ones in the RVs and motorhomes gathered around this one like piglets at a sow’s teats, but oh yes—she could.
    Rose ignored this. “How old are you, dear?”
    “Twenty-eight.” She had been shading her age since hitting the big three-oh.
    Rose looked at her, smiling, saying nothing. Andi met those beautiful gray eyes for