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But suddenly his daddy was there, looking at him in mortal agony, and a sorrow so great that Danny’s heart flamed within his chest.
“Doc,” Jack Torrance said. “Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you.”
“No,” Danny said. He took one of his father’s bloody hands and kissed it. “It’s almost over.”
Danny stood without moving. There was no place he could run where the Overlook was not. He recognized it suddenly, fully, painlessly. For the first time in his life he had an adult thought, an adult feeling, the essence of his experience in this bad place—a sorrowful distillation: (Mommy and Daddy can’t help me and I’m alone.)
It was impossible to say just how long it went on. But when it turned its attention back to Danny, his father was gone forever. What remained of the face became a strange, shifting composite, many faces mixed imperfectly into one.
In 217 the bathtub suddenly split in two, letting out a small flood of greenish, noxious-smelling water. In the Presidential Suite the wallpaper suddenly burst into flames. The batwing doors of the Colorado Lounge suddenly snapped their hinges and fell to the dining room floor. Beyond the basement arch, the great piles and stacks of old papers caught fire and went up with a blowtorch hiss. Boiling water rolled over the flames but did not quench them.
Like burning autumn leaves below a wasps’ nest, they whirled and blackened.
“We have to go around to the equipment shed!
They had a momentarily clear view into the Overlook’s lobby. The gasflame coming up through the shattered floor was like a giant birthday candle, fierce yellow at its heart and blue around its flickering edges. In that moment it seemed only to be lighting, not destroying. They could see the registration desk with its silver bell, the credit card decals, the old-fashioned, scrolled cash register, the small figured throw rugs, the high-backed chairs, horsehair hassocks. Danny could see the small sofa by the fireplace where the three nuns had sat on the day they had come up—closing day. But this
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only Hallorann who saw the final thing, and he never spoke of it. From the window of the Presidential Suite he thought he saw a huge dark shape issue, blotting out the snowfield behind it. For a moment it assumed the shape of a huge, obscene manta, and then the wind seemed to catch it, to
tear it and shred it like old dark paper. It fragmented, was caught in a whirling eddy of smoke, and a moment later it was gone as if it had never been. But in those few seconds as it whirled blackly, dancing like negative motes of light, he remembered something from his childhood…fifty years ago, or more. He and his brother had come upon a huge nest of ground wasps just north of their farm.
(Do it! Do it, you weak-kneed no-balls nigger! Kill them! KILL THEM BOTH!)
After a while the shed began to burn, too.
And the long darkness was over.
Then she had still been mostly girl. Now she was a woman, a human being who had been dragged around to the dark side of the moon and had come back able to put the pieces back together. But those pieces, Hallorann thought, they never fit just the same way again. Never in this world.
“What about those dreams he’s been havin?” “Better,” Wendy said. “Only one this week. It used to be every night, sometimes two and three times. The explosions. The hedges. And most of all…you know.”
“The two of you are going to be okay,” he repeated. “Can’t you feel it?”
“You’re missin your dad, aren’t you?” Danny nodded. “You always know.”
