My God, did you think I was going to share a large pile of dirty laundry with the hotels caretaker? Who in heavens name do you think you are? And how could those old stories possibly affect you anyway? Or do you think there are ghosts parading up and down the halls of the west wing wearing bedsheets and crying Woe!? No, I dont think there are any ghosts. But you raked up a lot of my personal history before you gave me the job. You had me on the carpet, quizzing me about my ability to take care of your hotel like a little boy in front of the teachers desk for peeing in the coatroom. You embarrassed me. I just do not believe your cheek, your bloody damned impertinence, Ullman said. He sounded as if he might be choking. Id like to sack you. And perhaps I will. I think Al Shockley might object. Strenuously. And I think you may have finally overestimated Mr. Shockleys commitment to you, Mr. Torrance. For a moment Jacks headache came back in all its thudding glory, and he closed his eyes against the pain. As if from a distance away he heard himself ask Who owns the Overlook now? Is it still Derwent Enterprises? Or are you too smallfry to know? I think that will do, Mr. Torrance. You are an employee of the hotel, no different from a busboy or a kitchen pot scrubber. I have no intention of Okay, Ill write Al, Jack said. Hell know; after all, hes on the Board of Directors. And I might just add a little P.S. to the effect that Derwent doesnt own it. What? I couldnt quite make that out. I said Derwent doesnt own it. The stockholders are all Easterners. Your friend Mr. Shockley owns the largest block of stock himself, better than thirtyfive percent. You would know better than I if he has any ties to Derwent. Who else? I have no intention of divulging the names of the other stockholders to you, Mr. Torrance. I intend to bring this whole matter to the attention of One other question. I am under no obligation to you. Most of the Overlooks historysavory and unsavory alikeI found in a scrapbook that was in the cellar. Big thing with white leather covers. Gold thread for binding. Do you have any idea whose scrapbook that might be? None at all. Is it possible it could have belonged to Grady? The caretaker who killed himself? Mr. Torrance, Ullman said in tones of deepest frost, I am by no means sure that Mr. Grady could read, let alone dig out the rotten apples you have been wasting my time with. Im thinking of writing a book about the Overlook Hotel. I thought if I actually got through it, the owner of the scrapbook would like to have an acknowledgment at the front. I think writing a book about the Overlook would be very unwise, Ullman said. Especially a book done from your  uh, point of view. Your opinion doesnt surprise me. His headache was all gone now. There had been that one flash of pain, and that was all. His mind felt sharp and accurate, all the way down to millimeters. It was the way he usually felt only when the writing was going extremely well or when he had a threedrink buzz on. That was another thing he had forgotten about Excedrin; he didnt know if it worked for others, but for him crunching three tablets was like an instant high. Now he said What youd like is some sort of commissioned guidebook that you could hand out free to the guests when they checked in. Something with a lot of glossy photos of the mountains at sunrise and sunset and a lemonmeringue text to go with it. Also a section on the colorful people who have stayed there, of course excluding the really colorful ones like Gienelli and his friends. If I felt I could fire you and be a hundred percent certain of my own job instead of just ninetyfive percent, Ullman said in clipped, strangled tones, I would fire you right this minute, over the telephone. But since I feel that five percent of uncertainty, I intend to call Mr. Shockley the moment youre off the line  which will be soon, or so I devoutly hope. Jack said, There isnt going to be anything in the book that isnt true, you know. Theres no need to dress it up. (Why are you baiting him? Do you want to be fired?) I dont care if Chapter Five is about the Pope of Rome screwing the shade of the Virgin Mary, Ullman said, his voice rising. I want you out of my hotel! Its not your hotel! Jack screamed, and slammed the receiver into its cradle. He sat on the stool breathing hard, a little scared now, (a little? hell, a lot) wondering why in the name of God he had called Ullman in the first place. (You lost your temper again, Jack.) Yes. Yes, he had. No sense trying to deny it. And the hell of it was, he had no idea how much influence that cheap little prick had over Al, no more than he knew how much bullshit Al would take from him in the name of auld lang syne. If Ullman was as good as he claimed to be, and if he gave Al a hegoesorIgo ultimatum, might not Al be forced to take it? He closed his eyes and tried to imagine telling Wendy. Guess what, babe? I lost another job. This time I had to go through two thousand miles of Bell Telephone cable to find someone to punch out, but I managed it. He opened his eyes and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. He wanted a drink. Hell, he needed one. There was a caf just down the street, surely he had time for a quick beer on his way up to the park, just one to lay the dust  He clenched his hands together helplessly. The question recurred Why had he called Ullman in the first place? The number of the SurfSand in Lauderdale had been written in a small notebook by the phone and the CB radio in the officeplumbers numbers, carpenters, glaziers, electricians, others. Jack had copied it onto the matchbook cover shortly after getting out of bed, the idea of calling Ullman fullblown and gleeful in his mind. But to what purpose? Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a fullblown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family. Could it be true? Was he afraid somewhere inside that the Overlook might be just what he needed to finish his play and generally collect up his shit and get it together? Was he blowing the whistle on himself? Please God no, dont let it be that way. Please. He closed his eyes and an image immediately arose on the darkened screen of his inner lids sticking his hand through that hole in the shingles to pull out the rotted flashing, the sudden needling sting, his own agonized, startled cry in the still and unheeding air Oh you goddam fucking son of a bitch  Replaced with an image two years earlier, himself stumbling into the house at three in the morning, drunk, falling over a table and sprawling fulllength on the floor, cursing, waking Wendy up on the couch. Wendy turning on the light, seeing his clothes ripped and smeared from some cloudy parkinglot scuffle that had occurred at a vaguely remembered honkytonk just over the New Hampshire border hours before, crusted blood under his nose, now looking up at his wife, blinking stupidly in the light like a mole in the sunshine, and Wendy saying dully, You son of a bitch, you woke Danny up. If you dont care about yourself, cant you care a little bit about us? Oh, why do I even bother talking to you? The telephone rang, making him jump. He snatched it off the cradle, illogically sure it must be either Ullman or Al Shockley. What? he barked. Your overtime, sir. Three dollars and fifty cents. Ill have to break some ones, he said. Wait a minute. He put the phone on the shelf, deposited his last six quarters, then went out to the cashier to get more. He performed the transaction automatically, his mind running in a single closed circle like a squirrel on an exercise wheel. Why had he called Ullman? Because Ullman had embarrassed him? He had been embarrassed before, and by real mastersthe Grand Master, of course, being himself. Simply to crow at the man, expose his hypocrisy? Jack didnt think he was that petty. His mind tried to seize on the scrapbook as a valid reason, but that wouldnt hold water either. The chances of Ullman knowing who the owner was were no more than two in a thousand. At the interview, he had treated the cellar as another countrya nasty underdeveloped one at that. If he had really wanted to know, he would have called Watson, whose winter number was also in the office notebook. Even Watson would not have been a sure thing, but surer than Ullman. And telling him about the book idea, that had been another stupid thing. Incredibly stupid. Besides jeopardizing his job, he could be closing off wide channels of information once Ullman called around and told people to beware of New Englanders bearing questions about the Overlook Hotel. He could have done his researches quietly, mailing off polite letters, perhaps even arranging some interviews in the spring  and then laughed up his sleeve at Ullmans rage when the book came out and he was safely awayThe Masked Author Strikes Again. Instead he had made that damned senseless call, lost his temper, antagonized Ullman, and brought out all of the hotel managers little Caesar tendencies. Why? If it wasnt an effort to get himself thrown out of the good job Al had snagged for him, then what was it? He deposited the rest of the money in the slots and hung up the phone. It really was the senseless kind of thing he might have done if he had been drunk. But he had been sober; dead cold sober. Walking out of the drugstore he crunched another Excedrin into his mouth, grimacing yet relishing the bitter taste. On the walk outside he met Wendy and Danny. Hey, we were just coming after you, Wendy said. Snowing, dont you know. Jack blinked up. So it is. It was snowing hard. Sidewinders Main Street was already heavily powdered, the center line obscured. Danny had his head tilted up to the white sky, his mouth open and his tongue out to catch some of the fat flakes drifting down. Do you think this is it? Wendy asked. Jack shrugged. I dont know. I was hoping for another week or two of grace. We still might get it. Grace, that was it. (Im sorry, Al. Grace, your mercy. For your mercy. One more chance. I am heartily sorry) How many times, over how many years, had hea grown manasked for the mercy of another chance? He was suddenly so sick of himself, so revolted, that he could have groaned aloud. Hows your headache? she asked, studying him closely. He put an arm around her and hugged her tight. Better. Come on, you two, lets go home while we still can. They walked back to where the hotel truck was slantparked against the curb, Jack in the middle, his left arm around Wendys shoulders, his right hand holding Dannys hand. He had called it home for the first time, for better or worse. As he got behind the trucks wheel it occurred to him that while he was fascinated by the Overlook, he didnt much like it. He wasnt sure it was good for either his wife or his son or himself. Maybe that was why he had called Ullman. To be fired while there was still time. He backed the truck out of its parking space and headed them out of town and up into the mountains. CHAPTER TWENTYONE NIGHT THOUGHTS It was ten oclock. Their quarters were filled with counterfeit sleep. Jack lay on his side facing the wall, eyes open, listening to Wendys slow and regular breathing. The taste of dissolved aspirin was still on his tongue, making it feel rough and slightly numb. Al Shockley had called at quarter of six, quarter of eight back East. Wendy had been downstairs with Danny, sitting in front of the lobby fireplace and reading. Person to person, the operator said, for Mr. Jack Torrance. Speaking. He had switched the phone to his right hand, had dug his handkerchief out of his back pocket with his left, and had wiped his tender lips with it. Then he lit a cigarette. Als voice then, strong in his ear Jackyboy, what in the name of God are you up to? Hi, Al. He snuffed the cigarette and groped for the Excedrin bottle. Whats going on, Jack? I got this weird phone call from Stuart Ullman this afternoon. And when Stu Ullman calls long distance out of his own pocket, you know the shit has hit the fan. Ullman has nothing to worry about, Al. Neither do you. What exactly is the nothing we dont have to worry about? Stu made it sound like a cross between blackmail and a National Enquirer feature on the Overlook. Talk to me, boy. I wanted to poke him a little, Jack said. When I came up here to be interviewed, he had to drag out all my dirty laundry. Drinking problem. Lost your last job for racking over a student. Wonder if youre the right man for this. Et cetera. The thing that bugged me was that he was bringing all this up because he loved the goddam hotel so much. The beautiful Overlook. The traditional Overlook. The bloody sacred Overlook. Well, I found a scrapbook in the basement. Somebody had put together all the less savory aspects of Ullmans cathedral, and it looked to me like a little black mass had been going on after hours. I hope thats metaphorical, Jack. Als voice sounded frighteningly cold. It is. But I did find out I know the hotels history. Jack ran a hand through his hair. So I called him up and poked him with it. I admit it wasnt very bright, and I sure wouldnt do it again. End of story. Stu says youre planning to do a little dirtylaundryairing yourself. Stu is an asshole! he barked into the phone. I told him I had an idea of writing about the Overlook, yes. I do. I think this place forms an index of the whole postWorld War II American character. That sounds like an inflated claim, stated so baldly  I know it does  but its all here, Al! My God, it could be a great book. But its far in the future, I can promise you that, Ive got more on my plate right now than I can eat, and Jack, thats not good enough. He found himself gaping at the black receiver of the phone, unable to believe what he had surely heard. What? Al, did you say I said what I said. How long is far in the future, Jack? For you it may be two years, maybe five. For me its thirty or forty, because I expect to be associated with the Overlook for a long time. The thought of you doing some sort of a scumjob on my hotel and passing it off as a great piece of American writing, that makes me sick. Jack was speechless. I tried to help you, Jackyboy. We went through the war together, and I thought I owed you some help. You remember the war? I remember it, he muttered, but the coals of resentment had begun to glow around his heart. First Ullman, then Wendy, now Al. What was this? National Lets Pick Jack Torrance Apart Week? He clamped his lips more tightly together, reached for his cigarettes, and knocked them off onto the floor. Had he ever liked this cheap prick talking to him from his mahoganylined den in Vermont? Had he really? Before you hit that Hatfield kid, Al was saying, I had talked the Board out of letting you go and even had them swung around to considering tenure. You blew that one for yourself. I got you this hotel thing, a nice quiet place for you to get yourself together, finish your play, and wait it out until Harry Effinger and I could convince the rest of those guys that they made a big mistake. Now it looks like you want to chew my arm off on your way to a bigger killing. Is that the way you say thanks to your friends, Jack? No, he whispered. He didnt dare say more. His head was throbbing with the hot, acidetched words that wanted to get out. He tried desperately to think of Danny and Wendy, depending on him, Danny and Wendy sitting peacefully downstairs in front of the fire and working on the first of the secondgrade reading primers, thinking everything was AOK. If he lost this job, what then? Off to California in that tired old VW with the distintegrating fuel pump like a family of dustbowl Okies? He told himself he would get down on his knees and beg Al before he let that happen, but still the words struggled to pour out, and the hand holding the hot wires of his rage felt greased. What? Al said sharply. No, he said. That is not the way I treat my friends. And you know it. How do I know it? At the worst, youre planning to smear my hotel by digging up bodies that were decently buried years ago. At the best, you call up my temperamental but extremely competent hotel manager and work him into a frenzy as part of some  some stupid kids game. It was more than a game, Al. Its easier for you. You dont have to take some rich friends charity. You dont need a friend in court because you are the court. The fact that you were one step from a brownbag lush goes pretty much unmentioned, doesnt it? I suppose it does, Al said. His voice had dropped a notch and he sounded tired of the whole thing. But Jack, Jack  I cant help that. I cant change that. I know, Jack said emptily. Am I fired? I guess you better tell me if I am. Not if youll do two things for me. All right. Hadnt you better hear the conditions before you accept them? No. Give me your deal and Ill take it. Theres Wendy and Danny to think about. If you want my balls, Ill send them airmail. Are you sure selfpity is a luxury you can afford, Jack? He had closed his eyes and slid an Excedrin between his dry lips. At this point I feel its the only one I can afford. Fire away  no pun intended. Al was silent for a moment. Then he said First, no more calls to Ullman. Not even if the place burns down. If that happens, call the maintenance man, that guy who swears all the time, you know who I mean  Watson. Yes. Okay. Done. Second, you promise me, Jack. Word of honor. No book about a famous Colorado mountain hotel with a history. For a moment his rage was so great that he literally could not speak. The blood beat loudly in his ears. It was like getting a call from some twentiethcentury Medici prince  no portraits of my family with their warts showing, please, or back to the rabble youll go. I subsidize no pictures but pretty pictures. When you paint the daughter of my good friend and business partner, please omit birthmark or back to the rabble youll go. Of course were friends  we are both civilized men, arent we? Weve shared bed and board and bottle. Well always be friends, and the dog collar I have on you will always be ignored by mutual consent, and Ill take good and benevolent care of you. All I ask in return is your soul. Small item. We can even ignore the fact that youve handed it over, the way we ignore the dog collar. Remember, my talented friend, there are Michelangelos begging everywhere in the streets of Rome  Jack? You there? He made a strangled noise that was intended to be the word yes. Als voice was firm and very sure of itself. I really dont think Im asking so much, Jack. And there will be other books. You just cant expect me to subsidize you while you  All right, agreed. I dont want you to think Im trying to control your artistic life, Jack. You know me better than that. Its just that Al? What? Is Derwent still involved with the Overlook? Somehow? I dont see how that can possibly be any concern of yours, Jack. No, he said distantly. I suppose it isnt. Listen, Al, I think I hear Wendy calling me for something. Ill get back to you. Sure thing, Jackyboy. Well have a good talk. How are things? Dry? (YOUVE GOT YOUR POUND OF FLESH BLOOD AND ALL NOW CANT YOU LEAVE ME ALONE?) As a bone. Here too. Im actually beginning to enjoy sobriety. If Ill get back, Al. Wendy Sure. Okay. And so he had hung up and that was when the cramps had come, hitting him like lightning bolts, making him curl up in front of the telephone like a penitent, hands over his belly, head throbbing like a monstrous bladder. The moving wasp, having stung, moves on  It had passed a little when Wendy came upstairs and asked him who had been on the phone. Al, he said. He called to ask how things were going. I said they were fine. Jack, you look terrible. Are you sick? Headaches back. Im going to bed early. No sense trying to write. Can I get you some warm milk? He smiled wanly. That would be nice. And now he lay beside her, feeling her warm and sleeping thigh against his own. Thinking of the conversation with Al, how he had groveled, still made him hot and cold by turns. Someday there would be a reckoning. Someday there would be a book, not the soft and thoughtful thing he had first considered, but a gemhard work of research, photo section and all, and he would pull apart the entire Overlook history, nasty, incestuous ownership deals and all. He would spread it all out for the reader like a dissected crayfish. And if Al Shockley had connections with the Derwent empire, then God help him. Strung up like piano wire, he lay staring into the dark, knowing it might be hours yet before he could sleep. Wendy Torrance lay on her back, eyes closed, listening to the sound of her husbands slumberthe long inhale, the brief hold, the slightly guttural exhale. Where did he go when he slept, she wondered. To some amusement park, a Great Barrington of dreams where all the riders were free and there was no wife mother along to tell them theyd had enough hot dogs or that theyd better be going if they wanted to get home by dark? Or was it some fathomsdeep bar where the drinking never stopped and the batwings were always propped open and all the old companions were gathered around the electronic hockey game, glasses in hand, Al Shockley prominent among them with his tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone? A place where both she and Danny were excluded and the boogie went on endlessly? Wendy was worried about him, the old, helpless worry that she had hoped was behind her forever in Vermont, as if worry could somehow not cross state lines. She didnt like what the Overlook seemed to be doing to Jack and Danny. The most frightening thing, vaporous and unmentioned, perhaps unmentionable, was that all of Jacks drinking symptoms had come back, one by one  all but the drink itself. The constant wiping of the lips with hand or handkerchief, as if to rid them of excess moisture. Long pauses at the typewriter, more balls of paper in the wastebasket. There had been a bottle of Excedrin on the telephone table tonight after Al had called him, but no water glass. He had been chewing them again. He got irritated over little things. He would unconsciously start snapping his fingers in a nervous rhythm when things got too quiet. Increased profanity. She had begun to worry about his temper, too. It would almost come as a relief if he would lose it, blow off steam, in much the same way that he went down to the basement first thing in the morning and last thing at night to dump the press on the boiler. It would almost be good to see him curse and kick a chair across the room or slam a door. But those things, always an integral part of his temperament, had almost wholly ceased. Yet she had the feeling that Jack was more and more often angry with her or Danny, but was refusing to let it out. The boiler had a pressure gauge old, cracked, clotted with grease, but still workable, Jack had none. She had never been able to read him very well. Danny could, but Danny wasnt talking. And the call from Al. At about the same time it had come, Danny had lost all interest in the story they had been reading. He left her to sit by the fire and crossed to the main desk where Jack had constructed a roadway for his Matchbox cars and trucks. The Violent Violet Volkswagen was there and Danny had begun to push it rapidly back and forth. Pretending to read her own book but actually looking at Danny over the top of it, she had seen an odd amalgam of the ways she and Jack expressed anxiety. The wiping of the lips. Running both hands nervously through his hair, as she had done while waiting for Jack to come home from his round of the bars. She couldnt believe Al had called just to ask how things were going. If you wanted to shoot the bull, you called Al. When Al called you, that was business. Later, when she had come back downstairs, she had found Danny curled up by the fire again, reading the secondgradeprimer adventures of Joe and Rachel at the circus with their daddy in complete, absorbed attention. The fidgety distraction had completely disappeared. Watching him, she had been struck again by the eerie certainty that Danny knew more and understood more than there was room for in Dr. (Just call me Bill) Edmondss philosophy. Hey, time for bed, doc, shed said. Yeah, okay. He marked his place in the book and stood up. Wash up and brush your teeth. Okay. Dont forget to use the floss. I wont. They stood side by side for a moment, watching the wax and wane of the coals of the fire. Most of the lobby was chilly and drafty, but this circle around the fireplace was magically warm, and hard to leave. It was Uncle Al on the phone, she said casually. Oh yeah? Totally unsurprised. I wonder if Uncle Al was mad at Daddy, she said, still casually. Yeah, he sure was, Danny said, still watching the fire. He didnt want Daddy to write the book. What book, Danny? About the hotel. The question framed on her lips was one she and Jack had asked Danny a thousand times How do you know that? she hadnt asked him. She didnt want to upset him before bed, or make him aware that they were casually discussing his knowledge of things he had no way of knowing at all. And he did know, she was convinced of that. Dr. Edmondss patter about inductive reasoning and subconscious logic was just that patter. Her sister  how had Danny known she was thinking about Aileen in the waiting room that day? And (I dreamed Daddy had an accident.) She shook her head, as if to clear it. Go wash up, doc. Okay. He ran up the stairs toward their quarters. Frowning, she had gone into the kitchen to warm Jacks milk in a saucepan. And now, lying wakeful in her bed and listening to her husbands breathing and the wind outside (miraculously, theyd had only another flurry that afternoon; still no heavy snow), she let her mind turn fully to her lovely, troubling son, born with a caul over his face, a simple tissue of membrane that doctors saw perhaps once in every seven hundred births, a tissue that the old wives tales said betokened the second sight. She decided that it was time to talk to Danny about the Overlook  and high time she tried to get Danny to talk to her. Tomorrow. For sure. The two of them would be going down to the Sidewinder Public Library to see if they could get him some secondgradelevel books on an extended loan through the winter, and she would talk to him. And frankly. With that thought she felt a little easier, and at last began to drift toward sleep. Danny lay awake in his bedroom, eyes open, left arm encircling his aged and slightly worseforwear Pooh (Pooh had lost one shoebutton eye and was oozing stuffing from half a dozen sprung seams), listening to his parents sleep in their bedroom. He felt as if he were standing unwilling guard over them. The nights were the worst of all. He hated the nights and the constant howl of the wind around the west side of the hotel. His glider floated overhead from a string. On his bureau the VW model, brought up from the roadway setup downstairs, glowed a dimly fluorescent purple. His books were in the bookcase, his coloring books on the desk. A place for everything and everything in its place, Mommy said. Then you know where it is when you want it. But now things had been misplaced. Things were missing. Worse still, things had been added, things you couldnt quite see, like in one of those pictures that said CAN YOU SEE THE INDIANS? And if you strained and squinted, you could see some of themthe thing you had taken for a cactus at first glance was really a brave with a knife clamped in his teeth, and there were others hiding in the rocks, and you could even see one of their evil, merciless faces peering through the spokes of a covered wagon wheel. But you could never see all of them, and that was what made you uneasy. Because it was the ones you couldnt see that would sneak up behind you, a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping knife in the other  He shifted uneasily in his bed, his eyes searching out the comforting glow of the night light. Things were worse here. He knew that much for sure. At first they hadnt been so bad, but little by little  his daddy thought about drinking a lot more. Sometimes he was angry at Mommy and didnt know why. He went around wiping his lips with his handkerchief and his eyes were far away and cloudy. Mommy was worried about him and Danny, too. He didnt have to shine into her to know that; it had been in the anxious way she had questioned him on the day the fire hose had seemed to turn into a snake. Mr. Hallorann said he thought all mothers could shine a little bit, and she had known on that day that something had happened. But not what. He had almost told her, but a couple of things had held him back. He knew that the doctor in Sidewinder had dismissed Tony and the things that Tony showed him as perfectly (well almost) normal. His mother might not believe him if he told her about the hose. Worse, she might believe him in the wrong way, might think he was LOSING HIS MARBLES. He understood a little about LOSING YOUR MARBLES, not as much as he did about GETTING A BABY, which his mommy had explained to him the year before at some length, but enough. Once, at nursery school, his friend Scott had pointed out a boy named Robin Stenger, who was moping around the swings with a face almost long enough to step on. Robins father taught arithmetic at Daddys school, and Scotts daddy taught history there. Most of the kids at the nursery school were associated either with Stovington Prep or with the small IBM plant just outside of town. The prep kids chummed in one group, the IBM kids in another. There were crossfriendships, of course, but it was natural enough for the kids whose fathers knew each other to more or less stick together. When there was an adult scandal in one group, it almost always filtered down to the children in some wildly mutated form or other, but it rarely jumped to the other group. He and Scotty were sitting in the play rocketship when Scotty jerked his thumb at Robin and said You know that kid? Yeah, Danny said. Scott leaned forward. His dad LOST HIS MARBLES last night. They took him away. Yeah? Just for losing some marbles? Scotty looked disgusted. He went crazy. You know. Scott crossed his eyes, flopped out his tongue, and twirled his index fingers in large elliptical orbits around his ears. They took him to THE BUGHOUSE. Wow, Danny said. When will they let him come back? Nevernevernever, Scotty said darkly. In the course of that day and the next, Danny heard that a.) Mr. Stenger had tried to kill everybody in his family, including Robin, with his World War II souvenir pistol; b.) Mr. Stenger ripped the house to pieces while he was STINKO; c.) Mr. Stenger had been discovered eating a bowl of dead bugs and grass like they were cereal and milk and crying while he did it; d.) Mr. Stenger had tried to strangle his wife with a stocking when the Red Sox lost a big ball game. Finally, too troubled to keep it to himself, he had asked Daddy about Mr. Stenger. His daddy had taken him on his lap and had explained that Mr. Stenger had been under a great deal of strain, some of it about his family and some about his job and some of it about things that nobody but doctors could understand. He had been having crying fits, and three nights ago he had gotten crying and couldnt stop it and had broken a lot of things in the Stenger home. It wasnt LOSING YOUR MARBLES, Daddy said, it was HAVING A BREAKDOWN, and Mr. Stenger wasnt in a BUGHOUSE but in a SANNYTARIUM. But despite Daddys careful explanations, Danny was scared. There didnt seem to be any difference at all between LOSING YOUR MARBLES and HAVING A BREAKDOWN, and whether you called it a BUGHOUSE or a SANNYTARIUM, there were still bars on the windows and they wouldnt let you out if you wanted to go.


And his father, quite innocently, had confirmed another of Scottys phrases unchanged, one that filled Danny with a vague and unformed dread. In the place where Mr. Stenger now lived, there were THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS. They came to get you in a truck with no windows, a truck that was gravestone gray. It rolled up to the curb in front of your house and THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS got out and took you away from your family and made you live in a room with soft walls. And if you wanted to write home, you had to do it with Crayolas. When will they let him come back? Danny asked his father. Just as soon as hes better, doc. But when will that be? Danny had persisted. Dan, Jack said, NO ONE KNOWS. And that was the worst of all. It was another way of saying nevernevernever. A month later, Robins mother took him out of nursery school and they moved away from Stovington without Mr. Stenger. That had been over a year ago, after Daddy stopped taking the Bad Stuff but before he had lost his job. Danny still thought about it often. Sometimes when he fell down or bumped his head or had a bellyache, he would begin to cry and the memory would flash over him, accompanied by the fear that he would not be able to stop crying, that he would just go on and on, weeping and wailing, until his daddy went to the phone, dialed it, and said Hello? This is Jack Torrance at 149 Mapleline Way. My son here cant stop crying. Please send THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS to take him to the SANNYTARIUM. Thats right, hes LOST HIS MARBLES. Thank you. And the gray truck with no windows would come rolling up to his door, they would load him in, still weeping hysterically, and take him away. When would he see his mommy and daddy again? NO ONE KNOWS. It was this fear that had kept him silent. A year older, he was quite sure that his daddy and mommy wouldnt let him be taken away for thinking a fire hose was a snake, his rational mind was sure of that, but still, when he thought of telling them, that old memory rose up like a stone filling his mouth and blocking words. It wasnt like Tony; Tony had always seemed perfectly natural (until the bad dreams, of course), and his parents had also seemed to accept Tony as a more or less natural phenomenon. Things like Tony came from being BRIGHT, which they both assumed he was (the same way they assumed they were BRIGHT), but a fire hose that turned into a snake, or seeing blood and brains on the wall of the Presidential Sweet when no one else could, those things would not be natural. They had already taken him to see a regular doctor. Was it not reasonable to assume that THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS might come next? Still he might have told them except he was sure, sooner or later, that they would want to take him away from the hotel. And he wanted desperately to get away from the Overlook. But he also knew that this was his daddys last chance, that he was here at the Overlook to do more than take care of the place. He was here to work on his papers. To get over losing his job. To love MommyWendy. And until very recently, it had seemed that all those things were happening. It was only lately that Daddy had begun to have trouble. Since he found those papers. (This inhuman place makes human monsters.) What did that mean? He had prayed to God, but God hadnt told him. And what would Daddy do if he stopped working here? He had tried to find out from Daddys mind, and had become more and more convinced that Daddy didnt know. The strongest proof had come earlier this evening when Uncle Al had called his daddy up on the phone and said mean things and Daddy didnt dare say anything back because Uncle Al could fire him from this job just the way that Mr. Crommert, the Stovington headmaster, and the Board of Directors had fired him from his schoolteaching job. And Daddy was scared to death of that, for him and Mommy as well as himself. So he didnt dare say anything. He could only watch helplessly and hope that there really werent any Indians at all, or if there were that they would be content to wait for bigger game and let their little threewagon train pass unmolested. But he couldnt believe it, no matter how hard he tried. Things were worse at the Overlook now. The snow was coming, and when it did, any poor options he had would be abrogated. And after the snow, what? What then, when they were shut in and at the mercy of whatever might have only been toying with them before? (Come out here and take your medicine!) What then? REDRUM. He shivered in his bed and turned over again. He could read more now. Tomorrow maybe he would try to call Tony, he would try to make Tony show him exactly what REDRUM was and if there was any way he could prevent it. He would risk the nightmares. He had to know. Danny was still awake long after his parents false sleep had become the real thing. He rolled in his bed, twisting the sheets, grappling with a problem years too big for him, awake in the night like a single sentinel on picket. And sometime after midnight, he slept, too, and then only the wind was awake, prying at the hotel and hooting in its gables under the bright gimlet gaze of the stars. CHAPTER TWENTYTWO IN THE TRUCK I see a bad moon arising. I see trouble on the way. I see earthquakes and lightnin. I see bad times today. Dont go round tonight, Its bound to take your life, Theres a bad moon on the rise. Someone had added a very old Buick car radio under the hotel trucks dashboard, and now, tinny and choked with static, the distinctive sound of John Fogertys Creedence Clearwater Revival band came out of the speaker. Wendy and Danny were on their way down to Sidewinder. The day was clear and bright. Danny was turning Jacks orange library card over and over in his hands and seemed cheerful enough, but Wendy thought he looked drawn and tired, as if he hadnt been sleeping enough and was going on nervous energy alone. The song ended and the disc jockey came on. Yeah, thats Creedence. And speakin of bad moon, it looks like it may be risin over the KMTX listening area before long, hard as it is to believe with the beautiful, springlike weather weve enjoyed for the last couplethree days. The KMTX Fearless Forecaster says high pressure will give way by one oclock this afternoon to a widespread lowpressure area which is just gonna grind to a stop in our KMTX area, up where the air is rare. Temperatures will fall rapidly, and precipitation should start around dusk. Elevations under seven thousand feet, including the metroDenver area, can expect a mixture of sleet and snow, perhaps freezing on some roads, and nothin but snow up here, cuz. Were lookin at one to three inches below seven thousand and possible accumulations of six to ten inches in Central Colorado and on the Slope. The Highway Advisory Board says that if youre plannin to tour the mountains in your car this afternoon or tonight, you should remember that the chain law will be in effect. And dont go nowhere unless you have to. Remember, the announcer added jocularly, thats how the Donners got into trouble. They just werent as close to the nearest SevenEleven as they thought. A Clairol commercial came on, and Wendy reached down and snapped the radio off. You mind? Huhuh, thats okay. He glanced out at the sky, which was bright blue. Guess Daddy picked just the right day to trim those hedge animals, didnt he? I guess he did, Wendy said. Sure doesnt look much like snow, though, Danny added hopefully. Getting cold feet? Wendy asked. She was still thinking about that crack the disc jockey had made about the Donner Party. Nah, I guess not. Well, she thought, this is the time. If youre going to bring it up, do it now or forever hold your peace. Danny, she said, making her voice as casual as possible, would you be happier if we went away from the Overlook? If we didnt stay the winter? Danny looked down at his hands. I guess so, he said. Yeah. But its Daddys job. Sometimes, she said carefully, I get the idea that Daddy might be happier away from the Overlook, too. They passed a sign which read SIDEWINDER 18 MI. and then she took the truck cautiously around a hairpin and shifted up into second. She took no chances on these downgrades; they scared her silly. Do you really think so? Danny asked. He looked at her with interest for a moment and then shook his head. No, I dont think so. Why not? Because hes worried about us, Danny said, choosing his words carefully. It was hard to explain, he understood so little of it himself. He found himself harking back to an incident he had told Mr. Hallorann about, the big kid looking at department store TV sets and wanting to steal one. That had been distressing, but at least it had been clear what was going on, even to Danny, then little more than an infant. But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by selfdoubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didnt understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard. He thinks  Danny began again, and then looked at his mother quickly. She was watching the road, not looking at him, and he felt he could go on. He thinks maybe well be lonely. And then he thinks that he likes it here and its a good place for us. He loves us and doesnt want us to be lonely  or sad  but he thinks even if we are, it might be okay in the LONGRUN. Do you know LONGRUN? She nodded. Yes, dear. I do. Hes worried that if we left he couldnt get another job. That wed have to beg, or something. Is that all? No, but the rest is all mixed up. Because hes different now. Yes, she said, almost sighing. The grade eased a little and she shifted cautiously back to third gear. Im not making this up, Mommy. Honest to God. I know that, she said, and smiled. Did Tony tell you? No, he said. I just know. That doctor didnt believe in Tony, did he? Never mind that doctor, she said. I believe in Tony. I dont know what he is or who he is, if hes a part of you thats special or if he comes from  somewhere outside, but I do believe in him, Danny. And if you  he  think we should go, we will. The two of us will go and be together with Daddy again in the spring. He looked at her with sharp hope. Where? A motel? Hon, we couldnt afford a motel. It would have to be at my mothers. The hope in Dannys face died out. I know he said, and stopped. What? Nothing, he muttered. She shifted back to second as the grade steepened again. No, doc, please dont say that. This talk is something we should have had weeks ago, I think. So please. What is it you know? I wont be mad. I cant be mad, because this is too important. Talk straight to me. I know how you feel about her, Danny said, and sighed. How do I feel? Bad, Danny said, and then rhyming, singsong, frightening her Bad. Sad. Mad. Its like she wasnt your mommy at all. Like she wanted to eat you. He looked at her, frightened. And I dont like it there. Shes always thinking about how she would be better for me than you. And how she could get me away from you. Mommy, I dont want to go there. Id rather be at the Overlook than there. Wendy was shaken. Was it that bad between her and her mother? God, what hell for the boy if it was and he could really read their thoughts for each other. She suddenly felt more naked than naked, as if she had been caught in an obscene act. All right, she said. All right, Danny. Youre mad at me, he said in a small, neartotears voice. No, Im not. Really Im not. Im just sort of shook up. They were passing a SIDEWINDER 15 MI. sign, and Wendy relaxed a little. From here on in the road was better. I want to ask you one more question, Danny. I want you to answer it as truthfully as you can. Will you do that? Yes, Mommy, he said, almost whispering. Has your daddy been drinking again? No, he said, and smothered the two words that rose behind his lips after that simple negative Not yet. Wendy relaxed a little more. She put a hand on Dannys jeansclad leg and squeezed it. Your daddy has tried very hard, she said softly. Because he loves us. And we love him, dont we? He nodded gravely. Speaking almost to herself she went on Hes not a perfect man, but he has tried  Danny, hes tried to hard! When he  stopped  he went through a kind of hell. Hes still going through it. I think if it hadnt been for us, he would have just let go. I want to do whats right. And I dont know. Should we go? Stay? Its like a choice between the fat and the fire. I know. Would you do something for me, doc? What? Try to make Tony come. Right now. Ask him if were safe at the Overlook. I already tried, Danny said slowly. This morning. What happened? Wendy asked. What did he say? He didnt come, Danny said. Tony didnt come. And he suddenly burst into tears. Danny, she said, alarmed. Honey, dont do that. Please The truck swerved across the double yellow line and she pulled it back, scared. Dont take me to Grammas, Danny said through his tears. Please, Mommy, I dont want to go there, I want to stay with Daddy All right, she said softly. All right, thats what well do. She took a Kleenex out of the pocket of her Westernstyle shirt and handed it to him. Well stay. And everything will be fine. Just fine. CHAPTER TWENTYTHREE IN THE PLAYGROUND Jack came out onto the porch, tugging the tab of his zipper up under his chin, blinking into the bright air. In his left hand he was holding a batterypowered hedgeclipper. He tugged a fresh handkerchief out of his back pocket with his right hand, swiped his lips with it, and tucked it away. Snow, they had said on the radio. It was hard to believe, even though he could see the clouds building up on the far horizon. He started down the path to the topiary, switching the hedgeclipper over to the other hand. It wouldnt be a long job, he thought; a little touchup would do it. The cold nights had surely stunted their growth. The rabbits ears looked a little fuzzy, and two of the dogs legs had grown fuzzy green bonespurs, but the lions and the buffalo looked fine. Just a little haircut would do the trick, and then let the snow come. The concrete path ended as abruptly as a diving board. He stepped off it and walked past the drained pool to the gravel path which wound through the hedge sculptures and into the playground itself. He walked over to the rabbit and pushed the button on the handle of the clippers. It hummed into quiet life. Hi, Brer Rabbit, Jack said. How are you today? A little off the top and get some of the extra off your ears? Fine. Say, did you hear the one about the traveling salesman and the old lady with a pet poodle? His voice sounded unnatural and stupid in his ears, and he stopped. It occurred to him that he didnt care much for these hedge animals. It had always seemed slightly perverted to him to clip and torture a plain old hedge into something that it wasnt. Along one of the highways in Vermont there had been a hedge billboard on a high slope overlooking the road, advertising some kind of ice cream. Making nature peddle ice cream, that was just wrong. It was grotesque. (You werent hired to philosophize, Torrance.) Ah, that was true. So true. He clipped along the rabbits ears, brushing a small litter of sticks and twigs off onto the grass. The hedgeclipper hummed in that low and rather disgustingly metallic way that all batterypowered appliances seem to have. The sun was brilliant but it held no warmth, and now it wasnt so hard to believe that snow was coming. Working quickly, knowing that to stop and think when you were at this kind of a task usually meant making a mistake, Jack touched up the rabbits face (up this close it didnt look like a face at all, but he knew that at a distance of twenty paces or so light and shadow would seem to suggest one; that, and the viewers imagination) and then zipped the clippers along its belly. That done, he shut the clippers off, walked down toward the playground, and then turned back abruptly to get it all at once, the entire rabbit. Yes, it looked all right. Well, he would do the dog next. But if it was my hotel, he said, Id cut the whole damn bunch of you down. He would, too. Just cut them down and resod the lawn where theyd been and put in half a dozen small metal tables with gaily colored umbrellas. People could have cocktails on the Overlooks lawn in the summer sun. Sloe gin fizzes and margaritas and pink ladies and all those sweet tourist drinks. A rum and tonic, maybe. Jack took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and slowly rubbed his lips with it. Come on, come on, he said softly. That was nothing to be thinking about. He was going to start back, and then some impulse made him change his mind and he went down to the playground instead. It was funny how you never knew kids, he thought. He and Wendy had expected Danny would love the playground; it had everything a kid could want. But Jack didnt think the boy had been down half a dozen times, if that. He supposed if there had been another kid to play with, it would have been different. The gate squeaked slightly as he let himself in, and then there was crushed gravel crunching under his feet. He went first to the playhouse, the perfect scale model of the Overlook itself. It came up to his lower thigh, just about Dannys height when he was standing up. Jack hunkered down and looked in the thirdfloor windows. The giant has come to eat you all up in your beds, he said hollowly. Kiss your TripleA rating goodbye. But that wasnt funny, either. You could open the house simply by pulling it apartit opened on a hidden hinge. The inside was a disappointment. The walls were painted, but the place was mostly hollow. But of course it would have to be, he told himself, or how else could the kids get inside? What play furniture might go with the place in the summer was gone, probably packed away in the equipment shed. He closed it up and heard the small click as the latch closed. He walked over to the slide, set the hedgeclipper down, and after a glance back at the driveway to make sure Wendy and Danny hadnt returned, he climbed to the top and sat down. This was the big kids slide, but the fit was still uncomfortably tight for his grownup ass. How long had it been since he had been on a slide? Twenty years? It didnt seem possible it could be that long, it didnt feel that long, but it had to be that, or more. He could remember his old man taking him to the park in Berlin when he had been Dannys age, and he had done the whole bitslide, swings, teetertotters, everything. He and the old man would have a hot dog lunch and buy peanuts from the man with the cart afterward. They would sit on a bench to eat them and dusky clouds of pigeons would flock around their feet. Goddam scavenger birds, his dad would say, dont you feed them, Jacky. But they would both end up feeding them, and giggling at the way they ran after the nuts, the greedy way they ran after the nuts. Jack didnt think the old man had ever taken his brothers to the park. Jack had been his favorite, and even so Jack had taken his lumps when the old man was drunk, which was a lot of the time. But Jack had loved him for as long as he was able, long after the rest of the family could only hate and fear him. He pushed off with his hands and went to the bottom, but the trip was unsatisfying. The slide, unused, had too much friction and no really pleasant speed could be built up. And his ass was just too big. His adult feet thumped into the slight dip where thousands of childrens feet had landed before him. He stood up, brushed at the seat of his pants, and looked at the hedgeclipper. But instead of going back to it he went to the swings, which were also a disappointment. The chains had built up rust since the close of the season, and they squealed like things in pain. Jack promised himself he would oil them in the spring. You better stop it, he advised himself. Youre not a kid anymore. You dont need this place to prove it. But he went on to the cement ringsthey were too small for him and he passed them upand then to the security fence which marked the edge of the grounds. He curled his fingers through the links and looked through, the sun crosshatching shadowlines on his face like a man behind bars. He recognized the similarity himself and he shook the chain link, put a harried expression on his face, and whispered Lemme outta here! Lemme outta here! But for the third time, not funny. It was time to get back to work. That was when he heard the sound behind him. He turned around quickly, frowning, embarrassed, wondering if someone had seen him fooling around down here in kiddie country. His eyes ticked off the slides, the opposing angles of the seesaws, the swings in which only the wind sat. Beyond all that to the gate and the low fence that divided the playground from the lawn and the topiarythe lions gathered protectively around the path, the rabbit bent over as if to crop grass, the buffalo ready to charge, the crouching dog. Beyond them, the putting green and the hotel itself. From here he could even see the raised lip of the roque court on the Overlooks western side. Everything was just as it had been. So why had the flesh of his face and hands begun to creep, and why had the hair along the back of his neck begun to stand up, as if the flesh back there had suddenly tightened? He squinted up at the hotel again, but that was no answer. It simply stood there, its windows dark, a tiny thread of smoke curling from the chimney, coming from the banked fire in the lobby. (Buster, you better get going or theyre going to come back and wonder if you were doing anything all the while.) Sure, get going. Because the snow was coming and he had to get the damn hedges trimmed. It was part of the agreement. Besides, they wouldnt dare (Who wouldnt? What wouldnt? Dare do what?) He began to walk back toward the hedgeclipper at the foot of the big kids slide, and the sound of his feet crunching on the crushed stone seemed abnormally loud. Now the flesh on his testicles had begun to creep too, and his buttocks felt hard and heavy, like stone. (Jesus, what is this?) He stopped by the hedgeclipper, but made no move to pick it up. Yes, there was something different. In the topiary. And it was so simple, so easy to see, that he just wasnt picking it up. Come on, he scolded himself, you just trimmed the fucking rabbit, so whats the (thats it) His breath stopped in his throat. The rabbit was down on all fours, cropping grass. Its belly was against the ground. But not ten minutes ago it had been up on its hind legs, of course it had been, he had trimmed its ears  and its belly. His eyes darted to the dog. When he had come down the path it had been sitting up, as if begging for a sweet. Now it was crouched, head tilted, the clipped wedge of mouth seeming to snarl silently. And the lions (oh no, baby, oh no, uhuh, no way) the lions were closer to the path. The two on his right had subtly changed positions, had drawn closer together. The tail of the one on the left now almost jutted out over the path. When he had come past them and through the gate, that lion had been on the right and he was quite sure its tail had been curled around it. They were no longer protecting the path; they were blocking it. Jack put his hand suddenly over his eyes and then took it away. The picture didnt change. A soft sigh, too quiet to be a groan, escaped him. In his drinking days he had always been afraid of something like this happening. But when you were a heavy drinker you called it the DTsgood old Ray Milland in Lost Weekend, seeing the bugs coming out of the walls. What did you call it when you were cold sober? The question was meant to be rhetorical, but his mind answered it (you call it insanity) nevertheless. Staring at the hedge animals, he realized something had changed while he had his hand over his eyes. The dog had moved closer. No longer crouching, it seemed to be in a running posture, haunches flexed, one front leg forward, the other back. The hedge mouth yawned wider, the pruned sticks looked sharp and vicious. And now he fancied he could see faint eye indentations in the greenery as well. Looking at him. Why do they have to be trimmed? he thought hysterically. Theyre perfect. Another soft sound. He involuntarily backed up a step when he looked at the lions. One of the two on the right seemed to have drawn slightly ahead of the other. Its head was lowered. One paw had stolen almost all the way to the low fence. Dear God, what next? (next it leaps over and gobbles you up like something in an evil nursery fable) It was like that game they had played when they were kids, red light. One person was it, and while he turned his back and counted to ten, the other players crept forward. When it got to ten, he whirled around, and if he caught anyone moving, they were out of the game. The others remained frozen in statue postures until it turned his back and counted again. They got closer and closer, and at last, somewhere between five and ten, you would feel a hand on your back  Gravel rattled on the path. He jerked his head around to look at the dog and it was halfway down the pathway, just behind the lions now, its mouth wide and yawning. Before, it had only been a hedge clipped in the general shape of a dog, something that lost all definition when you got up close to it. But now Jack could see that it had been clipped to look like a German shepherd, and shepherds could be mean. You could train shepherds to kill. A low rustling sound. The lion on the left had advanced all the way to the fence now; its muzzle was touching the boards. It seemed to be grinning at him. Jack backed up another two steps. His head was thudding crazily and he could feel the dry rasp of his breath in his throat. Now the buffalo had moved, circling to the right, behind and around the rabbit. The head was lowered, the green hedge horns pointing at him. The thing was, you couldnt watch all of them. Not all at once. He began to make a whining sound, unaware in his locked concentration that he was making any sound at all. His eyes darted from one hedge creature to the next, trying to see them move. The wind gusted, making a hungry rattling sound in the closematted branches. What kind of sound would there be if they got him? But of course he knew. A snapping, rending, breaking sound. It would be (no no NO NO I WILL NOT BELIEVE THIS NOT AT ALL!) He clapped his hands over his eyes, clutching at his hair, his forehead, his throbbing temples. And he stood like that for a long time, dread building until he could stand it no longer and he pulled his hands away with a cry. By the putting green the dog was sitting up, as if begging for a scrap. The buffalo was gazing with disinterest back toward the roque court, as it had been when Jack had come down with the clippers. The rabbit stood on its hind legs, ears up to catch the faintest sound, freshly clipped belly exposed. The lions, rooted into place, stood beside the path. He stood frozen for a long time, the harsh breath in his throat finally slowing. He reached for his cigarettes and shook four of them out onto the gravel. He stooped down and picked them up, groped for them, never taking his eyes from the topiary for fear the animals would begin to move again. He picked them up, stuffed three carelessly back into the pack, and lit the fourth. After two deep drags he dropped it and crushed it out. He went to the hedgeclipper and picked it up. Im very tired, he said, and now it seemed okay to talk out loud. It didnt seem crazy at all. Ive been under a strain. The wasps  the play  Al calling me like that. But its all right. He began to trudge back up to the hotel. Part of his mind tugged fretfully at him, tried to make him detour around the hedge animals, but he went directly up the gravel path, through them. A faint breeze rattled through them, that was all. He had imagined the whole thing. He had had a bad scare but it was over now. In the Overlooks kitchen he paused to take two Excedrin and then went downstairs and looked at papers until he heard the dim sound of the hotel truck rattling into the driveway. He went up to meet them. He felt all right. He saw no need to mention his hallucination. Hed had a bad scare but it was over now. CHAPTER TWENTYFOUR SNOW It was dusk. They stood on the porch in the fading light, Jack in the middle, his left arm around Dannys shoulders and his right arm around Wendys waist. Together they watched as the decision was taken out of their hands. The sky had been completely clouded over by twothirty and it had begun to snow an hour later, and this time you didnt need a weatherman to tell you it was serious snow, no flurry that was going to melt or blow away when the evening wind started to whoop. At first it had fallen in perfectly straight lines, building up a snowcover that coated everything evenly, but now, an hour after it had started, the wind had begun to blow from the northwest and the snow had begun to drift against the porch and the sides of the Overlooks driveway. Beyond the grounds the highway had disappeared under an even blanket of white. The hedge animals were also gone, but when Wendy and Danny had gotten home, she had commended him on the good job he had done. Do you think so? he had asked, and said no more. Now the hedges were buried under amorphous white cloaks. Curiously, all of them were thinking different thoughts but feeling the same emotion relief. The bridge had been crossed. Will it ever be spring? Wendy murmured. Jack squeezed her tighter. Before you know it. What do you say we go in and have some supper? Its cold out here. She smiled. All afternoon Jack had seemed distant and  well, odd. Now he sounded more like his normal self. Fine by me. How about you, Danny? Sure. So they went in together, leaving the wind to build to the lowpitched scream that would go on all nighta sound they would get to know well. Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly threequarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact that it was now cut off from the world. Or possibly it was pleased with the prospect. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster. CHAPTER TWENTYFIVE INSIDE 217 A week and a half later two feet of snow lay white and crisp and even on the grounds of the Overlook Hotel. The hedge menagerie was buried up to its haunches; the rabbit, frozen on its hind legs, seemed to be rising from a white pool. Some of the drifts were over five feet deep. The wind was constantly changing them, sculpting them into sinuous, dunelike shapes. Twice Jack had snowshoed clumsily around to the equipment shed for his shovel to clear the porch; the third time he shrugged, simply cleared a path through the towering drift lying against the door, and let Danny amuse himself by sledding to the right and left of the path. The truly heroic drifts lay against the Overlooks west side; some of them towered to a height of twenty feet, and beyond them the ground was scoured bare to the grass by the constant windflow. The firstfloor windows were covered, and the view from the dining room which Jack had so admired on closing day was now no more exciting than a view of a blank movie screen. Their phone had been out for the last eight days, and the CB radio in Ullmans office was now their only communications link with the outside world. 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.


Night temperatures had not gotten above 10, and although the thermometer by the kitchen service entrance sometimes got as high as 25 in the early afternoons, the steady knife edge of the wind made it uncomfortable to go out without a ski mask. But they all did go out on the days when the sun shone, usually wearing two sets of clothing and mittens on over their gloves. Getting out was almost a compulsive thing; the hotel was circled with the double track of Dannys Flexible Flyer. The permutations were nearly endless Danny riding while his parents pulled; Daddy riding and laughing while Wendy and Danny tried to pull (it was just possible for them to pull him on the icy crust, and flatly impossible when powder covered it); Danny and Mommy riding; Wendy riding by herself while her menfolk pulled and puffed white vapor like drayhorses, pretending she was heavier than she was. They laughed a great deal on these sled excursions around the house, but the whooping and impersonal voice of the wind, so huge and hollowly sincere, made their laughter seem tinny and forced. They had seen caribou tracks in the snow and once the caribou themselves, a group of five standing motionlessly below the security fence. They had all taken turns with Jacks Zeiss Ikon binoculars to see them better, and looking at them had given Wendy a weird, unreal feeling they were standing legdeep in the snow that covered the highway, and it came to her that between now and the spring thaw, the road belonged more to the caribou than it did to them. Now the things that men had made up here were neutralized. The caribou understood that, she believed. She had put the binoculars down and had said something about starting lunch and in the kitchen she had cried a little, trying to rid herself of the awful pentup feeling that sometimes fell on her like a large, pressing hand over her heart. She thought of the caribou. She thought of the wasps Jack had put out on the service entrance platform, under the Pyrex bowl, to freeze. There were plenty of snowshoes hung from nails in the equipment shed, and Jack found a pair to fit each of them, although Dannys pair was quite a bit outsized. Jack did well with them. Although he had not snowshoed since his boyhood in Berlin, New Hampshire, he retaught himself quickly. Wendy didnt care much for iteven fifteen minutes of tramping around on the outsized laced paddles made her legs and ankles ache outrageouslybut Danny was intrigued and working hard to pick up the knack. He still fell often, but Jack was pleased with his progress. He said that by February Danny would be skipping circles around both of them. This day was overcast, and by noon the sky had already begun to spit snow. The radio was promising another eight to twelve inches and chanting hosannas to Precipitation, that great god of Colorado skiers. Wendy, sitting in the bedroom and knitting a scarf, thought to herself that she knew exactly what the skiers could do with all that snow. She knew exactly where they could put it. Jack was in the cellar. He had gone down to check the furnace and boilersuch checks had become a ritual with him since the snow had closed them inand after satisfying himself that everything was going well he had wandered through the arch, screwed the lightbulb on, and had seated himself in an old and cobwebby camp chair he had found. He was leafing through the old records and papers, constantly wiping his mouth with his handkerchief as he did so. Confinement had leached his skin of its autumn tan, and as he sat hunched over the yellowed, crackling sheets, his reddishblond hair tumbling untidily over his forehead, he looked slightly lunatic. He had found some odd things tucked in among the invoices, bills of lading, receipts. Disquieting things. A bloody strip of sheeting. A dismembered teddy bear that seemed to have been slashed to pieces. A crumpled sheet of violet ladies stationery, a ghost of perfume still clinging to it beneath the musk of age, a note begun and left unfinished in faded blue ink Dearest Tommy, I cant think so well up here as Id hoped, about us I mean, of course, who else? Ha. Ha. Things keep getting in the way. Ive had strange dreams about things going bump in the night, can you believe that and That was all. The note was dated June 27, 1934. He found a hand puppet that seemed to be either a witch or a warlock  something with long teeth and a pointy hat, at any rate. It had been improbably tucked between a bundle of naturalgas receipts and a bundle of receipts for Vichy water. And something that seemed to be a poem, scribbled on the back of a menu in dark pencil Medoc  are you here?  Ive been sleepwalking again, my dear.  The plants are moving under the rug. No date on the menu, and no name on the poem, if it was a poem. Elusive, but fascinating. It seemed to him that these things were like pieces in a jigsaw, things that would eventually fit together if he could find the right linking pieces. And so he kept looking, jumping and wiping his lips every time the furnace roared into life behind him. Danny was standing outside Room 217 again. The passkey was in his pocket. He was staring at the door with a kind of drugged avidity, and his upper body seemed to twitch and jiggle beneath his flannel shirt. He was humming softly and tunelessly. He hadnt wanted to come here, not after the fire hose. He was scared to come here. He was scared that he had taken the passkey again, disobeying his father. He had wanted to come here. 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. And hadnt Mr. Hallorann said, I dont think theres anything here that can hurt you? (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. (Promises were made to be broken my dear redrum, to be broken. splintered. shattered. hammered apart. FORE!) His nervous humming broke into low, atonal song Lou, Lou, skip to m Lou, skip to m Lou my daaarlin  Hadnt Mr. Hallorann been right? Hadnt that been, in the end, the reason why he had kept silent and allowed the snow to close them in? Just close your eyes and it will be gone. What he had seen in the Presidential Sweet had gone away. And the snake had only been a fire hose that had fallen onto the rug. Yes, even the blood in the Presidential Sweet had been harmless, something old, something that had happened long before he was born or even thought of, something that was done with. Like a movie that only he could see. There was nothing, really nothing, in this hotel that could hurt him, and if he had to prove that to himself by going into this room, shouldnt he do so? 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 cant 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 im 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. He had stopped by the fire extinguisher, had put the brass nozzle back in the frame, and then had poked it repeatedly with his finger, heart thumping, whispering Come on and hurt me. Come on and hurt me, you cheap prick. Cant do it, can you? Huh? Youre nothing but a cheap fire hose. Cant do nothin but lie there. Come on, come on! He had felt insane with bravado. And nothing had happened. It was only a hose after all, only canvas and brass, you could hack it to pieces and it would never complain, never twist and jerk and bleed green slime all over the blue carpet, 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, Im late, said the white rabbit.) the white rabbit. Yes. Now there was a white rabbit out by the playground, once it had been green but now it was white, as if something had shocked it repeatedly on the snowy, windy nights and turned it old  Danny took the passkey from his pocket and slid it into the lock. Lou, Lou  (the white rabbit had been on its way to a croquet party to the Red Queens 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 isnt croquet though the mallets are too short this game is) (WHACKBOOM! Straight through the wicket.) (OFF WITH HIS HEEEEEAAAAAAAD) Danny pushed the door open. It swung smoothly, without a creak. He was standing just outside a large combination bedsitting room, and although the snow had not reached up this farthe highest drifts were still a foot below the secondfloor windowsthe room was dark because Daddy had closed all the shutters on the western exposure two weeks ago. He stood in the doorway, fumbled to his right, and found the switch plate. Two bulbs in an overhead cutglass fixture came on. Danny stepped farther in and looked around. The rug was deep and soft, a quiet rose color. Soothing. A double bed with a white coverlet. A writing desk (Pray tell me Why is a raven like a writing desk?) by the large shuttered window. During the season the Constant Writer (having a wonderful time, wish you were fear) would have a pretty view of the mountains to describe to the folks back home. He stepped farther in. Nothing here, nothing at all. Only an empty room, cold because Daddy was heating the east wing today. A bureau. A closet, its door open to reveal a clutch of hotel hangers, the kind you cant steal. A Gideon Bible on an endtable. To his left was the bathroom door, a fulllength mirror on it reflecting his own whitefaced image. That door was ajar and He watched his double nod slowly. Yes, thats where it was, whatever it was. In there. In the bathroom. His double walked forward, as if to escape the glass. It put its hand out, pressed it against his own. Then it fell away at an angle as the bathroom door swung open. He looked in. A long room, oldfashioned, like a Pullman car. Tiny white hexagonal tiles on the floor. At the far end, a toilet with the lid up. At the right, a washbasin and another mirror above it, the kind that hides a medicine cabinet. To the left, a huge white tub on claw feet, the shower curtain pulled closed. Danny stepped into the bathroom and walked toward the tub dreamily, as if propelled from outside himself, as if this whole thing were one of the dreams Tony had brought him, that he would perhaps see something nice when he pulled the shower curtain back, something Daddy had forgotten or Mommy had lost, something that would make them both happy So he pulled the shower curtain back. The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gasfilled belly rising out of the cold, icerimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Dannys, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws. Danny shrieked. But the sound never escaped his lips; turning inward and inward, it fell down in his darkness like a stone in a well. He took a single blundering step backward, hearing his heels clack on the white hexagonal tiles, and at the same moment his urine broke, spilling effortlessly out of him. The woman was sitting up. Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There was the minute sound of breaking ice shards. She was not breathing. She was a corpse, and dead long years. Danny turned and ran. Bolting through the bathroom door, his eyes starting from their sockets, his hair on end like the hair of a hedgehog about to be turned into a sacrificial (croquet? or roque?) ball, his mouth open and soundless. He ran fulltilt into the outside door of 217, which was now closed. He began hammering on it, far beyond realizing that it was unlocked, and he had only to turn the knob to let himself out. His mouth pealed forth deafening screams that were beyond human auditory range. He could only hammer on the door and hear the dead woman coming for him, bloated belly, dry hair, outstretched handssomething that had lain slain in that tub for perhaps years, embalmed there in magic. The door would not open, would not, would not, would not. And then the voice of Dick Hallorann came to him, so sudden and unexpected, so calm, that his locked vocal cords opened and he began to cry weaklynot with fear but with blessed relief. (I dont think they can hurt you  theyre like pictures in a book  close your eyes and theyll be gone.) His eyelids snapped down. His hands curled into balls. His shoulders hunched with the effort of his concentration (Nothing there nothing there not there at all NOTHING THERE THERE IS NOTHING!) Time passed. And he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realize that the door must be unlocked and he could go, when the yearsdamp, bloated, fishsmelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face. PART FOUR SNOWBOUND CHAPTER TWENTYSIX DREAMLAND Knitting made her sleepy. Today even Bartk would have made her sleepy, and it wasnt Bartk on the little phonograph, it was Bach. Her hands grew slower and slower, and at the time her son was making the acquaintance of Room 217s longterm resident, Wendy was asleep with her knitting on her lap. The yarn and needles rose in the slow time of her breathing. Her sleep was deep and she did not dream. Jack Torrance had fallen asleep too, but his sleep was light and uneasy, populated by dreams that seemed too vivid to be mere dreamsthey were certainly more vivid than any dreams he had ever had before. His eyes had begun to get heavy as he leafed through packets of milk bills, a hundred to a packet, seemingly tens of thousands all together. Yet he gave each one a cursory glance, afraid that by not being thorough he might miss exactly the piece of Overlookiana he needed to make the mystic connection that he was sure must be here somewhere. He felt like a man with a power cord in one hand, groping around a dark and unfamiliar room for a socket. If he could find it he would be rewarded with a view of wonders. He had come to grips with Al Shockleys phone call and his request; his strange experience in the playground had helped him to do that. That had been too damned close to some kind of breakdown, and he was convinced that it was his mind in revolt against Als highgoddamhanded request that he chuck his book project. It had maybe been a signal that his own sense of selfrespect could only be pushed so far before disintegrating entirely. He would write the book. If it meant the end of his association with Al Shockley, that would have to be. He would write the hotels biography, write it straight from the shoulder, and the introduction would be his hallucination that the topiary animals had moved. The title would be uninspired but workable Strange Resort The Story of the Overlook Hotel. Straight from the shoulder, yes, but it would not be written vindictively, in any effort to get back at Al or Stuart Ullman or George Hatfield or his father (miserable, bullying drunk that he had been) or anyone else, for that matter. He would write it because the Overlook had enchanted himcould any other explanation be so simple or so true? He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to. Five hundred gals whole milk. One hundred gals skim milk. Pd. Billed to acct. Three hundred pts orange juice. Pd. He slipped down farther in his chair, still holding a clutch of the receipts, but his eyes no longer looking at what was printed there. They had come unfocused. His lids were slow and heavy. His mind had slipped from the Overlook to his father, who had been a male nurse at the Berlin Community Hospital. Big man. A fat man who had towered to six feet two inches, he had been taller than Jack even when Jack got his full growth of six feet evennot that the old man had still been around then. Runt of the litter, he would say, and then cuff Jack lovingly and laugh. There had been two other brothers, both taller than their father, and Becky, who at fiveten had only been two inches shorter than Jack and taller than he for most of their childhood. His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside. Until he had been seven he had loved the tall, bigbellied man uncritically and strongly in spite of the spankings, the blackandblues, the occasional black eye. He could remember velvet summer nights, the house quiet, oldest brother Brett out with his girl, middle brother Mike studying something, Becky and their mother in the living room, watching something on the balky old TV; and he would sit in the hall dressed in a pajama singlet and nothing else, ostensibly playing with his trucks, actually waiting for the moment when the silence would be broken by the door swinging open with a large bang, the bellow of his fathers welcome when he saw Jacky was waiting, his own happy squeal in answer as this big man came down the hall, his pink scalp glowing beneath his crewcut in the glow of the hall light. In that light he always looked like some soft and flapping oversized ghost in his hospital whites, the shirt always untucked (and sometimes bloody), the pants cuffs drooping down over the black shoes. His father would sweep him into his arms and Jacky would be propelled deliriously upward, so fast it seemed he could feel air pressure settling against his skull like a cap made out of lead, up and up, both of them crying Elevator! Elevator!; and there had been nights when his father in his drunkenness had not stopped the upward lift of his slabmuscled arms soon enough and Jacky had gone right over his fathers flattopped head like a human projectile to crashland on the hall floor behind his dad. But on other nights his father would only sweep him into a giggling ecstasy, through the zone of air where beer hung around his fathers face like a mist of raindrops, to be twisted and turned and shaken like a laughing rag, and finally to be set down on his feet, hiccupping with reaction. The receipts slipped from his relaxing hand and seesawed down through the air to land lazily on the floor; his eyelids, which had settled shut with his fathers image tattooed on their backs like stereopticon images, opened a little bit and then slipped back down again. He twitched a little. Consciousness, like the receipts, like autumn aspen leaves, seesawed lazily downward. That had been the first phase of his relationship with his father, and as it was drawing to its end he had become aware that Becky and his brothers, all of them older, hated the father and that their mother, a nondescript woman who rarely spoke above a mutter, only suffered him because her Catholic upbringing said that she must. In those days it had not seemed strange to Jack that the father won all his arguments with his children by use of his fists, and it had not seemed strange that his own love should go hand in hand with his fear fear of the elevator game which might end in a splintering crash on any given night; fear that his fathers bearish good humor on his day off might suddenly change to boarish bellowing and the smack of his good right hand; and sometimes, he remembered, he had even been afraid that his fathers shadow might fall over him while he was at play. It was near the end of this phase that he began to notice that Brett never brought his dates home, or Mike and Becky their chums. Love began to curdle at nine, when his father put his mother into the hospital with his cane. He had begun to carry the cane a year earlier, when a car accident had left him lame. After that he was never without it, long and black and thick and goldheaded. Now, dozing, Jacks body twitched in a remembered cringe at the sound it made in the air, a murderous swish, and its heavy crack against the wall  or against flesh. He had beaten their mother for no good reason at all, suddenly and without warning. They had been at the supper table. The cane had been standing by his chair. It was a Sunday night, the end of a threeday weekend for Daddy, a weekend which he had boozed away in his usual inimitable style. Roast chicken. Peas. Mashed potatoes. Daddy at the head of the table, his plate heaped high, snoozing or nearly snoozing. His mother passing plates. And suddenly Daddy had been wide awake, his eyes set deeply into their fat eyesockets, glittering with a kind of stupid, evil petulance. They flickered from one member of the family to the next, and the vein in the center of his forehead was standing out prominently, always a bad sign. One of his large freckled hands had dropped to the gold knob of his cane, caressing it. He said something about coffeeto this day Jack was sure it had been coffee that his father said. Momma had opened her mouth to answer and then the cane was whickering through the air, smashing against her face. Blood spurted from her nose. Becky screamed. Mommas spectacles dropped into her gravy. The cane had been drawn back, had come down again, this time on top of her head, splitting the scalp. Momma had dropped to the floor. He had been out of his chair and around to where she lay dazed on the carpet, brandishing the cane, moving with a fat mans grotesque speed and agility, little eyes flashing, jowls quivering as he spoke to her just as he had always spoken to his children during such outbursts. Now. Now by Christ. I guess youll take your medicine now. Goddam puppy. Whelp. Come on and take your medicine. The cane had gone up and down on her seven more times before Brett and Mike got hold of him, dragged him away, wrestled the cane out of his hand. Jack (little Jacky now he was little Jacky now dozing and mumbling on a cobwebby camp chair while the furnace roared into hollow life behind him) knew exactly how many blows it had been because each soft whump against his mothers body had been engraved on his memory like the irrational swipe of a chisel on stone. Seven whumps. No more, no less. He and Becky crying, unbelieving, looking at their mothers spectacles lying in her mashed potatoes, one cracked lens smeared with gravy. Brett shouting at Daddy from the back hall, telling him hed kill him if he moved. And Daddy saying over and over Damn little puppy. Damn little whelp. Give me my cane, you damn little pup. Give it to me. Brett brandishing it hysterically, saying yes, yes, Ill give it to you, just you move a little bit and Ill give you all you want and two extra. Ill give you plenty. Momma getting slowly to her feet, dazed, her face already puffed and swelling like an old tire with too much air in it, bleeding in four or five different places, and she had said a terrible thing, perhaps the only thing Momma had ever said which Jacky could recall word for word Whos got the newspaper? Your daddy wants the funnies. Is it raining yet? And then she sank to her knees again, her hair hanging in her puffed and bleeding face. Mike calling the doctor, babbling into the phone. Could he come right away? It was their mother. No, he couldnt say what the trouble was, not over the phone, not over a party line he couldnt. Just come. The doctor came and took Momma away to the hospital where Daddy had worked all of his adult life. Daddy, sobered up some (or perhaps only with the stupid cunning of any hardpressed animal), told the doctor she had fallen downstairs. There was blood on the tablecloth because he had tried to wipe her dear face with it. Had her glasses flown all the way through the living room and into the dining room to land in her mashed potatoes and gravy? the doctor asked with a kind of horrid, grinning sarcasm. Is that what happened, Mark? I have heard of folks who can get a radio station on their gold fillings and I have seen a man get shot between the eyes and live to tell about it, but that is a new one on me. Daddy had merely shook his head and said he didnt know; they must have fallen off her face when he brought her through into the dining room. The four children had been stunned to silence by the calm stupendousness of the lie. Four days later Brett quit his job in the mill and joined the Army. Jack had always felt it was not just the sudden and irrational beating his father had administered at the dinner table but the fact that, in the hospital, their mother had corroborated their fathers story while holding the hand of the parish priest. Revolted, Brett had left them to whatever might come. He had been killed in Dong Ho province in 1965, the year when Jack Torrance, undergraduate, had joined the active college agitation to end the war. He had waved his brothers bloody shirt at rallies that were increasingly well attended, but it was not Bretts face that hung before his eyes when he spokeit was his mothers dazed, uncomprehending face, his mother saying Whos got the newspaper? Mike escaped three years later when Jack was twelvehe went to UNH on a hefty Merit Scholarship. A year after that their father died of a sudden, massive stroke which occurred while he was prepping a patient for surgery. He had collapsed in his flapping and untucked hospital whites, dead possibly even before he hit the industrial blackandred hospital tiles, and three days later the man who had dominated Jackys life, the irrational white ghostgod, was underground. The stone read Mark Anthony Torrance, Loving Father. To that Jack would have added one line He Knew How to Play Elevator. There had been a great lot of insurance money. There are people who collect insurance as compulsively as others collect coins and stamps, and Mark Torrance had been that type. The insurance money came in at the same time the monthly policy payments and liquor bills stopped. For five years they had been rich. Nearly rich  In his shallow, uneasy sleep his face rose before him as if in a glass, his face but not his face, the wide eyes and innocent bowed mouth of a boy sitting in the hall with his trucks, waiting for his daddy, waiting for the white ghostgod, waiting for the elevator to rise up with dizzying, exhilarating speed through the saltandsawdust mist of exhaled taverns, waiting perhaps for it to go crashing down, spilling old clocksprings out of his ears while his daddy roared with laughter, and it (transformed into Dannys face, so much like his own had been, his eyes had been light blue while Dannys were cloudy gray, but the lips still made a bow and the complexion was fair; Danny in his study, wearing training pants, all his papers soggy and the fine misty smell of beer rising  a dreadful batter all in ferment, rising on the wings of yeast, the breath of taverns  snap of bone  his own voice, mewling drunkenly, Danny, you okay, doc?  Oh God oh God, your poor sweet arm  and that face transformed into) (mommas dazed face rising up from below the table, punched and bleeding, and momma was saying) (from your father. I repeat, an enormously important announcement from your father. Please stay tuned or tune immediately to the Happy Jack frequency. Repeat, tune immediately to the Happy Hour frequency. I repeat) A slow dissolve. Disembodied voices echoing up to him as if along an endless, cloudy hallway. (Things keep getting in the way, dear Tommy ) (Medoc, are you here? Ive been sleepwalking again, my dear. Its the inhuman monsters that I fear ) (Excuse me, Mr. Ullman, but isnt this the )  office, with its file cabinets, Ullmans big desk, a blank reservations book for next year already in placenever misses a trick, that Ullmanall the keys hanging neatly on their hooks (except for one, which one, which key, passkeypasskey, passkey, whos got the passkey? if we went upstairs perhaps wed see) and the big twoway radio on its shelf. He snapped it on. CB transmissions coming in short, crackly bursts. He switched the band and dialed across bursts of music, news, a preacher haranguing a softly moaning congregation, a weather report. And another voice which he dialed back to. It was his fathers voice. kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because theyll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. Right this minute that boy of yours is in where he shouldnt be. Trespassing. Thats what hes doing. Hes a goddam little pup. Cane him for it, Jacky, cane him within an inch of his life. Have a drink, Jacky my boy, and well play the elevator game. Then Ill go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it, of course you can. You must kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man His fathers voice, going up higher and higher, becoming something maddening, not human at all, something squealing and petulant and maddening, the voice of the GhostGod, the PigGod, coming dead at him out of the radio and No! he screamed back. Youre dead, youre in your grave, youre not in me at all! Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back, creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died. He raised the radio up and brought it down, and it smashed on the floor, spilling old clocksprings and tubes like the result of some crazy elevator game gone awry, making his fathers voice gone, leaving only his voice, Jacks voice, Jackys voice, chanting in the cold reality of the office dead, youre dead, youre dead! And the startled sound of Wendys feet hitting the floor over his head, and Wendys startled, frightened voice Jack? Jack! He stood, blinking down at the shattered radio. Now there was only the snowmobile in the equipment shed to link them to the outside world. He put his hands over his eyes and clutched at his temples. He was getting a headache. CHAPTER TWENTYSEVEN CATATONIC Wendy ran down the hall in her stocking feet and ran down the main stairs to the lobby two at a time. She didnt look up at the carpeted flight that led to the second floor, but if she had, she would have seen Danny standing at the top of them, still and silent, his unfocused eyes directed out into indifferent space, his thumb in his mouth, the collar and shoulders of his shirt damp. There were puffy bruises on his neck and just below his chin. Jacks cries had ceased, but that did nothing to ease her fear. Ripped out of her sleep by his voice, raised in that old hectoring pitch she remembered so well, she still felt that she was dreamingbut another part knew she was awake, and that terrified her more. She halfexpected to burst into the office and find him standing over Dannys sprawledout body, drunk and confused. She pushed through the door and Jack was standing there, rubbing at his temples with his fingers. His face was ghostwhite. The twoway CB radio lay at his feet in a sprinkling of broken glass. Wendy? he asked uncertainly.