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when she opened her eyes to disclose blank silver pupils and began to grin at him. Horror came when (she had started to get out and come after him.)
“But it’s him too,” Danny said. “It’s Daddy. And it’s you. It wants all of us. It’s tricking Daddy, it’s fooling him, trying to make him think it wants him the most. It wants me the most, but it will take all of us.”
Tomorrow—” “What about tomorrow?” He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“She lives on the twentieth floor uptown, the elevator is broken down. So I walk one-two flight three flight four…” (—Lou, Lou, skip to m’ Lou—) His singing broke off. He listened. (—Skip to m’ Lou my daarlin’—) The voice was in his head, so much a part of him, so frighteningly close that it might have been a part of his own thoughts. It was soft and infinitely sly. Mocking him. Seeming to say: (Oh yes, you’ll like it here. Try it, you’ll like it. Try it, you’ll liiiiiike it—)
Now his ears were open and he could hear them again, the gathering, ghosts or spirits or maybe the hotel itself, a dreadful funhouse where all the sideshows ended in death, where all the specially painted boogies were really alive, where hedges walked, where a small silver key could start the obscenity. Soft and sighing, rustling like the endless winter wind that played under the eaves at night, the deadly lulling wind the summer tourists never heard. It was like the somnolent hum of summer wasps in a ground nest, sleepy, deadly, beginning to wake up. They were ten thousand feet high. (Why is
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Dick Hallorann’s Nana, who had grown up on south...
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years before the turn of the century, would have c...
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A hoarse voice, made brutal with drink, shouted: “Unmask and let’s fuck!”
Stairs and hallways and ceilings and rooms aflame like the castle in the last reel of a Frankenstein movie. The flames spreading into the wings, hurrying up the black-and-blue-twined carpets like eager guests. The silk wallpaper charring and curling. There were no sprinklers, only those outmoded hoses and no one to use them. And there wasn’t a fire engine in the world that could get here before late March. Burn, baby, burn. In twelve hours there would be nothing left but the bare bones.
(It’s my last chance.)
(A fire…eighty thousand dollars.)
Another memory occurred to him, a childhood memory. There had been a wasps’ nest in the lower branches of their apple tree behind the house.
Bolo Bouncer and singing monotonously over and over: “Your cheating heart… will make you weep… your cheating heart… is gonna tell on you.”
“The smoke makes em drunk, Jacky. Go get my gascan.”
At this point a drink would be medicinal. That was just it, by God. An anesthetic. He had done his duty and now he could use a little anesthetic—something
Just a little drink. Just one. To ease the pain.
He had served the Overlook, and now the Overlook would serve him. He was sure of it.
Danny awoke with a muffled gasp from a terrible dream. There had been an explosion. A fire. The Overlook was burning up. He and his mommy were watching it from the front lawn.
And then his daddy had burst out of the Overlook’s big double doors, and he was burning like a torch. His clothes were in flames, his skin had acquired a
dark and sinister tan that was growing darker by the moment, his hair was a burning bush.
He had a curious feeling that some great tragedy (fire? explosion?) had been averted by inches.
They were going to die, all three of them, and when the Overlook opened next late spring, they would be right here to greet the guests along with the rest of the spooks. The woman in the tub. The dogman. The horrible dark thing that had been in the cement tunnel. They would be— (Stop! Stop that now!)
“I’ll make you stop it! You goddam puppy! I’ll make you stop it because I am your FATHER!”
(!!! DICK PLEASE COME QUICK WE’RE IN BAD TROUBLE DICK WE NEED) And that was all. It was suddenly gone. No fading out this time. The communication had been chopped off cleanly, as if with a knife. It scared him.
“It wasn’t that,” Hallorann said. “I’ve got a steel plate in my head. From Korea. Every now and then it gives me a twinge. Vibrates, don’t you know. Scrambles the signal.” “Is that so?” “Yes, ma’am.”
Around him, he could hear the Overlook Hotel coming to life. It was hard to say just how he knew, but he guessed it wasn’t greatly different from the perceptions Danny had from time to time…like father, like son. Wasn’t that how it was popularly expressed?
It was as if another Overlook now lay scant inches beyond this one, separated from the real world (if there is such a thing as a “real world,” Jack thought) but gradually coming into balance with it.
He could hear all of them, the beautiful strangers. He was becoming aware of them as they must have been aware of him from the very start. All the rooms of the Overlook were occupied this morning. A full house.
“you will meet the manager in due time. He has, in fact, decided to make you his agent in this matter. Now drink your drink.” “Drink your drink,” they all echoed.
“Roll… out… the barrel… and we’ll have… a barrel… of fun…”
He was looking at the dogman with amused contempt as he sang. “—because the gang’s… all… here!”
Jack brought the drink to his mouth and downed it in three long gulps, the gin highballing down his throat like a moving van in a tunnel, exploding in his stomach, rebounding up to his brain in one leap where it seized hold of him with a final convulsing fit of the shakes.
He had hurt Danny once, but that had been before he had learned how to handle his liquor. Those days were behind him now. He would never hurt Danny again. Not for the world.
and a part of him, perhaps the last tiny spark of sobriety, tried to tell him that it was 6 A.M. on a morning in December. But time had been canceled. (The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shurring sound / layer on layer …)
burn it down. I corrected them. I corrected them most harshly. And when my wife tried to stop me from doing my duty, I corrected her.”
He did see. He had been too easy with them. Husbands and fathers did have certain responsibilities.
They did not understand. That in itself was no crime, but they were willfully not understanding. He was not ordinarily a harsh man. But he did believe in punishment. And if his son and his wife had willfully set themselves against his wishes, against the things he knew were best for them, then didn’t he have a certain duty—?
“I… but… if they could just leave… I mean, after all, it’s me the manager wants, isn’t it? It must be. Because—”
Your son has a very great talent, one that the manager could use to even further improve the Overlook, to further… enrich it, shall we say?
A certain scrapbook was left in the basement for you to find—” “By whom?” Jack asked eagerly. “By the manager, of course.
Think how much further you yourself could go in the Overlook’s organizational structure. Perhaps… in time… to the very top.”
into a spongy, muddy ruin. A ruin that once had been— “UNMASK!” (—the Red Death held sway over all!)
(This is what it’s like to stick your whole hand into the nest.)
Loneliness surged over him suddenly and completely. He cried out with sudden wretchedness and honestly wished he were dead.
There was no answer. In this well-padded (cell) room,
the weather over Denver had worsened suddenly and unexpectedly,
(Buddy-boy, this is some fucked-up cavalry charge.)
But she had never envisioned herself prowling halls and staircases like a nervous felon, with a knife clasped in one hand to use against Jack.
What would she do if he came at her right now, she wondered. If he should pop up from behind the dark, varnished registration desk with its pile of triplicate forms and its little silver-plated
plated bell, like some murderous jack-in-the-box, pun intended, a grinning jack-in-the-box with a cleaver in one hand and no sense at all left behind his eyes. Would she stand frozen with terror, or was there enough of the primal mother in her to fight him for her son until one of them was dead? She didn’t know.
