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George Hatfield was a jock. He could be a calm, undemanding figure in the classroom, but when the right set of competitive stimuli was applied (like electrodes to the temples of Frankenstein’s monster, Jack thought wryly), he could become a juggernaut.
This is the perfect chapter to illustrate an unreliable narrator
“George, if you can control your stutter,
Control your temper
Jack’s temper slipped another notch.
“Yuh-yuh-you s-s-set it ahead! You huh-hate me b-because you nuh-nuh-nuh-know… you know… nuh-nuh—”
Then the exultation was simply buried in shame, and he felt the way he had after he had broken Danny’s arm. Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch. Please.
If he had set the timer ahead, it would have been just to…to put George out of his misery.
The back tires were already shredded, and the bug sat on the flats like a small, tired dog.
Jack had seen red, and remembered very little of the encounter that followed. He remembered a thick growl that seemed to issue from his own throat: “All right, George. If that’s how you want it, just come here and take your medicine.”
He had blinked around stupidly.
George cringed.
to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest.
They would pay. They would pay for stinging him.
“I suppose. If you think it’s foolish—” “I don’t. In fact, you can make appointments for all three of us. We’ll get our clean bills of health and then we can sleep easy at night.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“I hate them,” she said. “What…wasps?” “Anything that stings,” she said.
The actual act of his writing made her immensely hopeful, not because she expected great things from the play but because her husband seemed to be slowly closing a huge door on a roomful of monsters. He had had his shoulder to that door for a long time now, but at last it was swinging shut.
And with his double-sized red pencil curled into his pudgy right fist,
On his face was an expression that might be more commonly seen hovering over a graduate record exam in a college gym somewhere. She liked it less and less.
Another sign—and they were multiplying all the time—that there was another human being in the place, not just a carbon copy of one of them or a combination of both. It made her a little sad. Someday her child would be a stranger to her, and she would be strange to him…but not as strange as her own mother had become to her.
to make sure everything was okay. Jack didn’t look up; he was lost in the world he was making,
He’s losing his temper,
The water ran ceaselessly in the basin, and Wendy felt that she had suddenly stepped into some grinding nightmare where time ran backward, backward to the time when her drunken husband had broken her son’s arm and had then mewled over him in almost the exact same words. (Oh honey. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, doc. Please. So sorry.)
A dish fell to the floor and exploded. Ignoring it,
How else can you explain this?”
It’s not his fault. He didn’t do anything wrong. No accountability
an almost superstitious dread. They had come back. He had killed the wasps but they had come back.
In his mind he heard himself screaming into his frightened, crying son’s face: Don’t stutter!
They had come back.
It was the thing that would be forgotten,
The mechanical roaring sound, which he now recognized as the boiler at the Overlook which Daddy checked three or four times every day, had developed an ominous, rhythmic hitching. It began to sound like…like pounding. And the smell of mildew and wet, rotting paper was changing to something else—the high, junipery smell of the Bad Stuff. It hung around his daddy like a vapor as he reached for the book…and grasped it.
(This inhuman place makes human monsters. This inhuman place)
(Come out) (This inhuman place) (and take your medicine!) (makes human monsters.)
Jack said with a trace of pride.
When he was alone, he always skittered past these extinguishers as fast as he could. No particular reason. It just felt better to go fast. It felt safer.
“Not much,” he said, having to strive to keep his voice pleasant now. She was prying, just the way she had always pried and poked at him when they had been at Stovington and Danny was still a crib-infant.
“I remember it,” he muttered, but the coals of resentment had begun to glow around his heart.
Thinking of the conversation with Al, how he had groveled, still made him hot and cold by turns. Someday there would be a reckoning.
Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.
It snowed every day now, sometimes only brief flurries that powdered the glittering snow crust, sometimes for real, the low whistle of the wind cranking up to a womanish shriek that made the old hotel rock and groan alarmingly even in its deep cradle of snow.
“Medoc / are you here? / I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. / The plants are moving under the rug.”
Curiosity (killed the cat; satisfaction brought him back) was like a constant fishhook in his brain, a kind of nagging siren song that would not be appeased.
(You promised.) (Promises were made to be broken.) He jumped at that. It was as if that thought had come from outside, insectile, buzzing, softly cajoling.
“Lou, Lou, skip to m’ Lou…” (Curiosity killed the cat my dear redrum, redrum my dear, satisfaction brought him back safe and sound, from toes to crown; from head to ground he was safe and sound. He knew that those things) (are like scary pictures, they can’t hurt you, but oh my god) (what big teeth you have Grandma and is that a wolf in a BLUEBEARD suit or a BLUEBEARD in a wolf suit and i’m so) (glad you asked because curiosity killed that cat and it was the HOPE of satisfaction that brought him) up the hall, treading softly over the blue and twisting jungle carpet.
Come on and hurt me, you cheap prick.
because it was only a hose, not a nose and not a rose, not glass buttons or satin bows, not a snake in a sleepy doze…and he had hurried on, had hurried on because he was (“late, I’m late,” said the white rabbit.) the white rabbit. Yes. Now there was a white rabbit out by the playground,
(the white rabbit had been on its way to a croquet party to the Red Queen’s croquet party storks for mallets hedgehogs for balls) He touched the key, let his fingers wander over it. His head felt dry and sick. He turned the key and the tumblers thumped back smoothly. (OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD!) (this game isn’t croquet though the mallets are too short this game is) (WHACK-BOOM! Straight through the wicket.) (OFF WITH HIS HEEEEEAAAAAAAD—)
something Daddy had forgotten or Mommy had lost, something that would make them both happy—
Daddy, sobered up some (or perhaps only with the stupid cunning of any hard-pressed animal), told the doctor she had fallen downstairs.
The four children had been stunned to silence by the calm stupendousness of the lie.
in the hospital, their mother had corroborated their father’s story while holding the hand of the parish priest.
