She sat down on Danny"s bed and rocked him back and forth, soothing him with nonsensical words repeated over and over. She looked up at Jack and there was only worry in his eyes now. He raised questioning eyebrows at her. She shook her head faintly.
"Danny," she said. "Danny, Danny, Danny. "S okay, doc. "S fine." At last Danny was quiet, only faintly trembling in her arms. Yet it was Jack he spoke to first, Jack who was now sitting beside them on the bed, and she felt the old faint pang (It"s him first and it"s always been him first) of jealousy. Jack had shouted at him, she had comforted him, yet it was to his father that Danny said, "I"m sorry if I was bad."
"Nothing to be sorry for, doc." Jack ruffled his hair. "What the h.e.l.l happened in there?"
Danny shook his head slowly, dazedly. "I... I don"t know. Why did you tell me to stop stuttering, Daddy? I don"t stutter."
"Of course not," Jack said heartily, but Wendy felt a cold finger touch her heart. Jack suddenly looked scared, as if he"d seen something that might just have been a ghost.
"Something about the timer..." Danny muttered.
"What?" Jack was leaning forward, and Danny flinched in her arms.
"Jack, you"re scaring him!" she said, and her voice was high, accusatory. It suddenly came to her that they were all scared. But of what?
"I don"t know, I don"t know," Danny was saying to his father. "What... what did I say, Daddy?"
"Nothing," Jack muttered. He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth with it. Wendy had a moment of that sickening time-is-running- backward feeling again. It was a gesture she remembered well from his drinking days.
"Why did you lock the door, Danny?" she asked gently. "Why did you do that?"
"Tony," he said. "Tony told me to." They exchanged a glance over the top of his head.
"Did Tony say why, son?" Jack asked quietly.
"I was brushing my teeth and I was thinking about my reading," Danny said.
"Thinking real bard. And... and I saw Tony way down in the mirror. He said he had to show me again."
"You mean he was behind you?" Wendy asked.
"No, he was in the mirror." Danny was very emphatic on this point. "Way down deep. And then I went through the mirror. The next thing I remember Daddy was shaking me and I thought I was being bad again." Jack winced as if struck.
"No, doc," he said quietly.
"Tony told you to lock the door?" Wendy asked, brushing his hair.
"Yes."
"And what did he want to show you?" Danny tensed in her arms; it was as if the muscles in his body had turned into something like piano wire. "I don"t remember," he said, distraught. "I don"t remember. Don"t ask me. I... I don"t remember nothing!"
"Shh," Wendy said, alarmed. She began to rock him again. "It"s all right if you don"t remember, bon. Sure it is." At last Danny began to relax again.
"Do you want me to stay a little while? Read you a story?"
"No. Just the night light." He looked shyly at his father. "Would you stay, Daddy? For a minute?"
"Sure, doc." Wendy sighed. "I"ll be in the living room, Jack."
"Okay." She got up and watched as Danny slid under the covers. He seemed very small.
"Are you sure you"re okay, Danny?"
"I"m okay. Just plug in Snoopy, Mom."
"Sure." She plugged in the night light, which showed Snoopy lying fast asleep on top of his doghouse. He had never wanted a night light until they moved into the Overlook, and then he had specifically requested one. She turned off the lamp and the overhead and looked back at them, the small white circle of Danny"s face, and Jack"s above it. She hesitated a moment (and then I went through the mirror) and then left them quietly.
"You sleepy?" Jack asked, brushing Danny"s hair off his forehead.
"Yeah."
"Want a drink of water?"
"No... " There was silence for five minutes. Danny was still beneath his hand. Thinking the boy had dropped off, he was about to get up and leave quietly when Danny said from the brink of sleep.
"Roque.," Jack turned back, all zero at the bone.
"Danny-?"
"You"d never hurt Mommy, would you, Daddy?"
"No."
"Or me?"
"No." Silence again, spinning out.
"Daddy?"
"What?"
"Tony came and told me about roque."
"Did he, doc? What did he say?"
"I don"t remember much. Except he said it was in innings. Like baseball. Isn"t that funny?"
"Yes." Jack"s heart was thudding dully in his chest. How could the boy possibly know a thing like that? Roque was played by innings, not like baseball but like cricket.
"Daddy...?" He was almost asleep now.
"What?"
"What"s redrum?"
"Red drum? Sounds like something an Indian might take on the warpath." Silence.
"Hey, doc?" But Danny was asleep, breathing in long, slow strokes. Jack sat looking down at him for a moment, and a rush of love pushed through him like tidal water. Why had he yelled at the boy like that? It was perfectly normal for him to stutter a little. He had been coming out of a daze or some weird kind of trance, and stuttering was perfectly normal under those circ.u.mstances. Perfectly. And he hadn"t said timer at all. It had been something else, nonsense, gibberish.
How had he known roque was played in innings? Had someone told him? Ullman?
Hallorann?
He looked down at his hands. They were made into tight, clenched fists of tension (G.o.d how i need a drink) and the nails were digging into his palms like tiny brands. Slowly he forced them to open.
"I love you, Danny," he whispered. "G.o.d knows I do." He left the room. He had lost his temper again, only a little, but enough to make him feel sick and afraid. A drink would blunt that feeling, oh yes. It would blunt that (Something about the timer) and everything else. There was no mistake about those words at all. None. Each had come out clear as a bell. He paused in the hallway, looking back, and automatically wiped his lips with his handkerchief.
Their shapes were only dark silhouettes in the glow of the night light. Wendy, wearing only panties, went to his bed and tucked him in again; he had kicked the covers back. Jack stood in the doorway, watching as she put her inner wrist against his forehead.
"Is he feverish?"
"No." She kissed his cheek.
"Thank G.o.d you made that appointment," he said as she came back to the doorway. "You think that guy knows his stuff?"
"The checker said he was very good. That"s all I know."
"If there"s something wrong, I"m going to send you and him to your mother"s, Wendy."
"No."
"I know," he said, putting an arm around her, "how you feel."
"You don"t know how I feel at all about her."
"Wendy, there"s no place else I can send you. You know that."
"If you came-"
"Without this job we"re done," he said simply. "You know that." Her silhouette nodded slowly. She knew it.
"When I had that interview with Ullman, I thought he was just blowing off his bazoo. Now I"m not so sure. Maybe I really shouldn"t have tried this with you two along. Forty miles from nowhere."
"I love you," she said. "And Danny loves you even more, if that"s possible. He would have been heartbroken, Jack. He will be, if you send us away."
"Don"t make it sound that way."
"If the doctor says there"s something wrong, I"ll look for a job in Sidewinder," she said. "If I can"t get one in Sidewinder, Danny and I will go to Boulder. I can"t go to my mother, Jack. Not on those terms. Don"t ask me. I ... I just can"t."
"I guess I know that. Cheer up. Maybe it"s nothing."
"Maybe."
"The appointment"s at two?"
"Yes."
"Let"s leave the bedroom door open, Wendy."
"I want to. But I think he"ll sleep through now." But he didn"t.
Boom... boom... boom boom BOOM BOOM- He fled the heavy, crashing, echoing sounds through twisting, mazelike corridors, his bare feet whispering over a deep-pile jungle of blue and black.
Each time he heard the roque mallet smash into the wall somewhere behind him he wanted to scream aloud. But he mustn"t. He mustn"t. A scream would give him away and then (then REDRUM) (Come out here and take your medicine, you f.u.c.king crybaby!) Oh and he could hear the owner of that voice coming, coming for him, charging up the hall like a tiger in an alien blue-black jungle. A man-eater.
(Come out here, you little son of a b.i.t.c.h!) If he could get to the stairs going down, if he could get off this third floor, he might be all right. Even the elevator. If he could remember what had been forgotten. But it was dark and in his terror he had lost his orientation.
He had turned down one corridor and then another, his heart leaping into his mouth like a hot" lump of ice, fearing that each turn would bring him face to face with the human tiger in these halls.
The booming was right behind him now, the awful hoa.r.s.e shouting.
The whistle the head of the mallet made cutting through the air (roque... stroke... roque... stroke... REDRUM) before it crashed into the wall. The soft whisper of feet on the jungle carpet. Panic squirting in his mouth like bitter juice.
(You will remember what was forgotten... but would he? What was it?) He fled around another corner and saw with creeping, utter horror that he was in a cul-de-sac. Locked doors frowned down at him from three sides. The west wing. He was in the west wing and outside he could hear the storm whooping and screaming, seeming to choke on its own dark throat filled with snow.
He backed up against the wall, weeping with terror now, his heart racing like the heart of a rabbit caught in a snare. When his back was against the light blue silk wallpaper with the embossed pattern of wavy lines, his legs gave way and he collapsed to the carpet, hands splayed on the jungle of woven vines and creepers, the breath whistling in and out of his throat.
Louder. Louder.
There was a tiger in the hall, and now the tiger was just around the corner, still crying out in that shrill and petulant and lunatic rage, the roque mallet slamming, because this tiger walked on two legs and it was- He woke with a sudden indrawn gasp, sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and staring into the darkness, hands crossed in front of his face.
Something on one hand. Crawling.
Wasps. Three of them.
They stung him then, seeming to needle all at once, and that was when all the images broke apart and fell on him in a dark flood and he began to shriek into the dark, the wasps clinging to his left hand, stinging again and again.
The lights went on and Daddy was standing there in his shorts, his eyes glaring. Mommy behind him, sleepy and scared.
"Get them o$ me!" Danny screamed.
"Oh my G.o.d," Jack said. He saw.
"Jack, what"s wrong with him? What"s wrong?" He didn"t answer her. He ran to the bed, scooped up Danny"s pillow, and slapped Danny"s thrashing left hand with it. Again. Again. Wendy saw lumbering, insectile forms rise into the air, droning.
"Get a magazine!" he yelled over his shoulder. "Kill them!"
"Wasps?" she said, and for a moment she was inside herself, almost detached in her realization. Then her mind crosspatched, and knowledge was connected to emotion. "Wasps, oh Jesus, Jack, you said-"
"Shut the f.u.c.k up and kill them!" he roared. "Will you do what I say!" One of them had landed on Danny"s reading desk. She took a coloring book off his worktable and slammed it down on the wasp. It left a viscous brown smear.
"There"s another one on the curtain," he said, and ran out past her with Danny in his arms.
He took the boy into their bedroom and put him on Wendy"s side of the makeshift double. "Lie right there, Danny. Don"t come back until I tell you.
Understand?" His face puffed and streaked with tears, Danny nodded.
"That"s my brave boy." Jack ran back down the hall to the stairs. Behind him he heard the coloring book slap twice, and then his wife screamed in pain. He didn"t slow but went down the stairs two by two into the darkened lobby. He went through Ullman"s office into the kitchen, slamming the heavy part of his thigh into the corner of Ullman"s oak desk, barely feeling it. He slapped on the kitchen overheads and crossed to the sink. The washed dishes from supper were still heaped up in the drainer, where Wendy had left them to drip-dry. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the big Pyrex bowl off the top. A dish fell to the floor and exploded. Ignoring it, he turned and ran back through the office and up the stairs.