He didn"t think such a thing was possible... in a normal mind. His hardest probings at his father had only brought him a dim picture of something like an octopus, whirling up into the hard blue sky. And on both occasions that he had concentrated hard enough to get this, Daddy had suddenly been staring at him in a sharp and frightening way, as if he knew what Danny was doing.
Now he was in the lobby, getting ready to go out. He went out a lot, taking his sled or wearing his snowshoes. He liked to get out of the hotel. When he was out in the sunshine, it seemed like a weight had slipped from his shoulders.
He pulled a chair over, stood on it, and got his parka and snow pants out of the ballroom closet, and then sat down on the chair to put them on. His boots were in the boot box and he pulled them on, his tongue creeping out into the corner of his mouth in concentration as he laced them and tied the rawhide into careful granny knots. He pulled on his mittens and his ski mask and was ready.
He tramped out through the kitchen to the back door, then paused. He was tired of playing out back, and at this time of day the hotel"s shadow would be cast over his play area. He didn"t even like being in the Overlook"s shadow. He decided he would put on his snowshoes and go down to the playground instead.
d.i.c.k Hallorann had told him to stay away from the topiary, but the thought of the hedge animals did not bother him much. They were buried under snowdrifts now, nothing showing but a vague hump that was the rabbit"s head and the lions" tails. Sticking out of the snow the way they were, the tails looked more absurd than frightening.
Danny opened the back door and got his snowshoes from the milk platform. Five minutes later he was strapping them to his feet on the front porch. His daddy had told him that he (Danny) had the hang of using the snowshoes-the lazy, shuffling stride, the twist of ankle that shook the powdery snow from the lacings just before the boot came back down-and all that remained was for him to build up the necessary muscles in his thighs and calves and ankles. Danny found it at his ankles got tired the fastest. Snowshoeing was almost as hard on your ankles as skating, because you had to keep clearing the lacings. Every five minutes or so he had to stop with his legs spread and the snowshoes fat on the snow to rest them.
But he didn"t have to rest on his way down to the playground because it was all downhill. Less than ten minutes after he struggled up and over the monstrous snow-dune that had drifted in on the Overlook"s front porch he was standing with his mittened hand on the playground slide. He wasn"t even breathing hard.
The playground seemed much nicer in the deep snow than it ever had during the autumn. It looked like a fairyland sculpture. The swing chains had been frozen in strange positions, the seats of the big kids" swings resting flush against the snow. The jungle gym was an ice-cave guarded by dripping icicle teeth. Only the chimneys of the play-Overlook stuck up over the snow (wish the other one was buried that way only not with us in it) and the tops of the cement rings protruded in two places like Eskimo igloos.
Danny tramped over there, squatted, and began to dig. Before long he had uncovered the dark mouth of one of them and he slipped into the cold tunnel. In his mind he was Patrick McGoohan, the Secret Agent Man (they had shown the reruns of that program twice on the Burlington TV channel and his daddy never missed them; he would skip a party to stay home and watch "Secret Agent" or "The Avengers" and Danny had always watched with him), on the run from KGB agents in the mountains of Switzerland. There had been avalanches in the area and the notorious KGB agent s...o...b.. had killed his girlfriend with a poison dart, but somewhere near was the Russian antigravity machine. Perhaps at the end of this very tunnel. He drew his automatic and went along the concrete tunnel, his eyes wide and alert, his breath pluming out.
The far end of the concrete ring was solidly blocked with snow. He tried digging through it and was amazed (and a little uneasy) to see how solid it was, almost like ice from the cold and the constant weight of more snow on top of it.
His make-believe game collapsed around him and he was suddenly aware that he felt closed in and extremely nervous in this tight ring of cement. He could hear his breathing; it sounded dank and quick and hollow. He was under the snow, and hardly any light filtered down the hole he had dug to get in here. Suddenly he wanted to be out in the sunlight more than anything, suddenly he remembered his daddy and mommy were sleeping and didn"t know there he was, that if the hole he dug caved in he would be trapped, and the Overlook didn"t like him.
Danny got turned around with some difficulty and crawled back along the length of the concrete ring, his snowshoes clacking woodenly together behind him, his palms crackling in last fall"s dead aspen leaves beneath him. He had just reached the end and the cold spill of light coming down from above when the snow did give in, a minor fall, but enough to powder his face and clog the opening he had wriggled down through and leave him in darkness.
For a moment his brain froze in utter panic and he could not think. Then, as if from far off, he heard his daddy telling him that he must never play at the Stovington dump, because sometimes stupid people hauled old refrigerators off to the dump without removing the doors and if you got in one and the door happened to shut on you, there was no way to get out. You would die in the darkness.
(You wouldn"t want a thing like that to happen to you, would you, doc?) (No, Daddy.) But it had happened, his frenzied mind told him, it had happened, he was in the dark, he was closed in, and it was as cold as a refrigerator. And- (something is in here with me.) His breath stopped in a gasp. An almost drowsy terror stole through his veins.
Yes. Yes. There was something in here with him, some awful thing the Overlook had saved for just such a chance as this. Maybe a huge spider that had burrowed down under the dead leaves, or a rat... or maybe the corpse of some little kid that had died here on the playground. Had that ever happened? Yes, he thought maybe it had. He thought of the woman in the tub. The blood and brains on the wall of the Presidential Sweet. Of some little kid, its head split open from a fall from the monkey bars or a swing, crawling after him in the dark, grinning, looking for one final playmate in its endless playground. Forever. In a moment he would hear it coming.
At the far end of the concrete ring, Danny heard the stealthy crackle of dead leaves as something came for him on its hands and knees. At any moment he would feel its cold hand close over his ankle- That thought broke his paralysis. He was digging at the loose fall of snow that choked the end of the concrete ring, throwing it back between his legs in powdery bursts like a dog digging for a bone. Blue light filtered down from above and Danny thrust himself up at it like a diver coming out of deep water.
He sc.r.a.ped his back on the lip of the concrete ring. One of his snowshoes twisted behind the other. Snow spilled down inside his ski mask and into the collar of his parka. He dug at the snow, clawed at it. It seemed to be trying to hold him, to suck him back down, back into the concrete ring where that unseen, leaf-crackling thing was, and keep him there. Forever.
Then he was out, his face was turned up to the sun, and he was crawling through the snow, crawling away from the half-buried cement ring, gasping harshly, his face almost comically white with powdered snow-a living fright- mask. He hobbled over to the jungle gym and sat down to readjust his snowshoes and get his breath. As he set them to rights and tightened the straps again, he never took his eyes from the hole at the end of the concrete ring. He waited to see if something would come out. Nothing did, and after three or four minutes, Danny"s breathing began to slow down. Whatever it was, it couldn"t stand the sunlight. It was cooped up down there, maybe only able to come out when it was dark... or when both ends of its circular prison were plugged with snow.
(but i"m safe now i"m safe i"ll just go back because now i"m) Something thumped softly behind him.
He turned around, toward the hotel, and looked. But even before he looked (Can you see the Indians in this picture?) he knew what he would see, because he knew what that soft thumping sound had been. It was the sound of a large clump of snow falling, the way it sounded when it slid off the roof of the hotel and fell to the ground.
(Can you see-?) Yes. He could. The snow had fallen off the hedge dog. When he came down it had only been a harmless lump of snow outside the playground. Now it stood revealed, an incongruous splash of green in all the eye-watering whiteness. It was sitting up, as if to beg a sweet or a sc.r.a.p.
But this time he wouldn"t go crazy, he wouldn"t blow his cool. Because at least he wasn"t trapped in some dark old hole. He was in the sunlight. And it was just a dog. It"s pretty warm out today, he thought hopefully. Maybe the sun just melted enough snow off that old dog so the rest fell off in a bunch. Maybe that"s all it is.
(Don"t go near that place... steer right clear.) His snowshoe bindings were as tight as they were ever going to be. He stood up and stared back at the concrete ring, almost completely submerged in the snow, and what he saw at the end he had exited from froze his heart. There was a circular patch of darkness at the end of it, a fold of shadow that marked the hole he"d dug to get down inside. Now, in spite of the snow-dazzle, he thought he could see something there. Something moving. A hand. The waving hand of some desperately unhappy child, waving hand, pleading band, drowning hand.
(Save me O please save me If you can"t save me at least come play with me... Forever. And Forever. And Forever.) "No," Danny whispered huskily. The word fell dry and bare from his mouth, which was stripped of moisture. He could feel his mind wavering now, trying to go away the way it had when the woman in the room had... no, better not think of that.
He grasped at the strings of reality and held them tightly. He had to get out of here. Concentrate on that. Be cool. Be like the Secret Agent Man. Would Patrick McGoohan be crying and peeing in his pants like a little baby?
Would his daddy?
That calmed him somewhat.
From behind him, that soft Hump sound of falling snow came again. He turned around and the head of one of the hedge lions was sticking out of the snow now, snarling at him. It was closer than it should have been, almost up to the gate of the playground.
Terror tried to rise up and he quelled it. He was the Secret Agent Man, and he would escape.
He began to walk out of the playground, taking the same roundabout course his father had taken on the day that the snow flew. He concentrated on operating the snowshoes. Slow, flat strides. Don"t lift your foot too high or you"ll lose your balance. Twist your ankle and spill the snow off the crisscrossed lacings. It seemed so slow. He reached the corner of the playground. The snow was drifted high here and he was able to step over the fence. He got halfway over and then almost fell flat when the snowshoe on his behind foot caught on one of the fence posts. He leaned on the outside edge of gravity, pinwheeling his arms, remembering how hard it was to get up once you fell down.
From his right, that soft sound again, falling clumps of snow. He looked over and saw the other two lions, clear of snow now down to their forepaws, side by side, about sixty paces away. The green indentations that were their eyes were fixed on him. The dog had turned its head.
(It only happens when you"re not looking.) "Oh! Hey-" His snowshoes had crossed and he plunged forward into the snow, arms waving uselessly. More snow got inside his hood and down his neck and into the tops of his boots. He struggled out of the snow and tried to get the snowshoes under him, heart hammering crazily now (Secret Agent Man remember you"re the Secret Agent) and overbalanced backward. For a moment he lay there looking at the sky, thinking it would be simpler to just give up.
Then he thought of the thing in the concrete tunnel and knew he could not. He gained his feet and stared over at the topiary. All three lions were bunched together now, not forty feet away. The dog had ranged off to their left, as if to block Danny"s retreat. They were bare of snow except for powdery ruffs around their necks and muzzles. They were all staring at him.
His breath was racing now, and the panic was like a rat behind his forehead, twisting and gnawing. He fought the panic and he fought the snowshoes.
(Daddy"s voice: No, don"t fight them, doc. Walk on them like they were your own feet. Walk with them.) (Yes, Daddy.) He began to walk again, trying to regain the easy rhythm he had practiced with his daddy. Little by little it began to come, but with the rhythm came an awareness of just how tired he was, how much his fear had exhausted him. The tendons of his thighs and calves and ankles were hot and trembly. Ahead he could see the Overlook, mockingly distant, seeming to stare at him with its many windows, as if this were some sort of contest in which it was mildly interested.
Danny looked back over his shoulder and his hurried breathing caught for a moment and then hurried on even faster. The nearest lion was now only twenty feet behind, breasting through the snow like a dog paddling in a pond. The two others were to its right and left, pacing it. They were like an army platoon on patrol, the dog, still off to their left, the scout. The closest lion had its head down. The shoulders bunched powerfully above its neck. The tail was up, as if in the instant before he had turned to look it had been swishing back and forth, back and forth. He thought it looked like a great big housecat that was having a good time playing with a mouse before killing it.
(-falling-) No, if he fell he was dead. They would never let him get up. They would pounce. He pinwheeled his arms madly and lunged ahead, his center of gravity dancing just beyond his nose. He caught it and hurried on, snapping glances back over his shoulder. The air whistled in and out of his dry throat like hot gla.s.s.
The world closed down to the dazzling snow, the green hedges, and the whispery sound of his snowshoes. And something else. A soft, m.u.f.fled padding sound. He tried to hurry faster and couldn"t. He was walking over the buried driveway now, a small boy with his face almost buried in the shadow of his parka hood. The afternoon was still and bright.
When he looked back again, the point lion was only five feet behind. It was grinning. Its mouth was open, its haunches tensed down like a clockspring.
Behind it and the others he could see the rabbit, its head now sticking out of the snow, bright green, as if it had turned its horrid blank face to watch the end of the stalk.
Now, on the Overlook"s front lawn between the circular drive and the porch, he let the panic loose and began to run clumsily in the snowshoes, not daring to look back now, tilting further and further forward, his arms out ahead of him like a blind man feeling for obstacles. His hood fell back, revealing his complexion, paste white giving way to hectic red blotches on his cheeks, his eyes bulging with terror. The porch was very close now.
Behind him he heard the sudden hard crunch of snow as something leaped.
He fell on the porch steps, screaming without sound, and scrambled up them on his hands and knees, snowshoes clattering and askew behind him.
There was a slashing sound in the air and sudden pain in his leg. The ripping sound of cloth. Something else that might have-must have-been in his mind.
Bellowing, angry roar.
Smell of blood and evergreen.
He fell full-length on the porch, sobbing hoa.r.s.ely, the rich, metallic taste of copper in his mouth. His heart was thundering in his chest. There was a small trickle of blood coming from his nose.
He had no idea how long he lay there before the lobby doors flew open and Jack ran out, wearing just his jeans and a pair of slippers. Wendy was behind him.
"Danny!" she screamed.
"Doc! Danny, for Christ"s sake! What"s wrong? What happened?" Daddy was helping him up. Below the knee his snowpants were ripped open.
Inside, his woollen ski sock had been ripped open and his calf had been shallowly scratched... as if he had tried to push his way through a closely grown evergreen hedge and the branches had clawed him.
He looked over his shoulder. Far down the lawn, past the putting green, were a number of vague, snow-cowled humps. The hedge animals. Between them and the playground. Between them and the road.
His legs gave way. Jack caught him. He began to cry.
35 - The Lobby
He had told them everything except what had happened to him when the snow had blocked the end of the concrete ring. He couldn"t bring himself to repeat that.
And he didn"t know the right words to express the creeping, la.s.situdinous sense of terror he had felt when he heard the dead aspen leaves begin to crackle furtively down there in the cold darkness. But he told them about the soft sound of snow falling in clumps. About the lion with its head and its bunched shoulders working its way up and out of the snow to chase him. He even told them about how the rabbit had turned its head to watch near the end.
The three of them were in the lobby. Jack had built a roaring blaze in the fireplace. Danny was bundled up in a blanket on the small sofa where once, a million years ago, three nuns had sat laughing like girls while they waited for the line at the desk to thin out. He was sipping hot noodle soup from a mug.
Wendy sat beside him, stroking his hair. Jack had sat on the floor, his face seeming to grow more and more still, more and more set as Danny told his story.
Twice he pulled his handkerchief out of his back pocket and rubbed his sorelooking lips with it.
"Then they chased me," he finished. Jack got up and went over to the window, his back to them. He looked at his mommy. "They chased me all the way up to the porch." He was struggling to keep his voice calm, because if he stayed calm maybe they would believe him. Mr. Stenger hadn"t stayed calm. He had started to cry and hadn"t been able to stop SO THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS had come to take him away because if you couldn"t stop crying it meant you had LOST YOUR MARBLES and when would you be back? NO ONE KNOWS. His parka and snowpants and the clotted snowshoes lay on the rug just inside the big double doors.
(I won"t cry I won"t let myself cry) And he thought he could do that, but he couldn"t stop shaking. He looked into the fire and waited for Daddy to say something. High yellow flames danced on the dark stone hearth. A pine-knot exploded with a bang and sparks rushed up the flue.
"Danny, come over here." Jack turned around. His face still had that pinched, deathly look. Danny didn"t like to look at it.
"Jack-"
"I just want the boy over here for a minute." Danny slipped off the sofa and came over beside his daddy.
"Good boy. Now what do you see?" Danny had known what he would see even before he got to the window. Below the clutter of boot tracks, sled tracks, and snowshoe tracks that marked their usual exercise area, the snowfield that covered the Overlook"s lawns sloped down to the topiary and the playground beyond. It was marred by two sets of tracks, one of them in a straight line from the porch to the playground, the other a long, looping line coming back up.
"Only my tracks, Daddy. But-"
"What about the hedges, Danny?" Danny"s lips began to tremble. He was going to cry. What if he couldn"t stop?
(i won"t cry I Won"t Cry Won"t Won"t WON"T) "All covered with snow," he whispered. "But, Daddy-"
"What? I couldn"t hear you!"
"Jack, you"re cross-examining him! Can"t you see he"s upset, he"s-"
"Shut up! Well, Danny?"
"They scratched me, Daddy. My leg-"
"You must have cut your leg on the crust of the snow." Then Wendy was between them, her face pale and angry. "What are you trying to make him do?" she asked him. "Confess to murder? What"s wrong with you?" The strangeness in his eyes seemed to break then. "I"m trying to help him find the difference between something real and something that was only an hallucination, that"s all." He squatted by Danny so they were on an eye-to-eye level, and then hugged him tight. "Danny, it didn"t really happen. Okay? It was like one of those trances you have sometimes. That"s all."
"Daddy?"
"What, Dan?"
"I didn"t cut my leg on the crust. There isn"t any crust. It"s all powdery snow. It won"t even stick together to make s...o...b..a.l.l.s. Remember we tried to have a s...o...b..ll fight and couldn"t?" He felt his father stiffen against him. "The porch step, then." Danny pulled away. Suddenly he had it. It had flashed into his mind all at once, the way things sometimes did, the way it had about the woman wanting to be in that gray man"s pants. He stared at his father with widening eyes.
"You know I"m telling the truth," he whispered, shocked.
"Danny-"Jack"s face, tightening.
"You know because you saw-" The sound of Jack"s open palm striking Danny"s face was flat, not dramatic at all. The boy"s head rocked back, the palmprint reddening on his cheek like a brand.
Wendy made a moaning noise.
For a moment they were still, the three of them, and then Jack grabbed for his son and said, "Danny, I"m sorry, you okay, doc?"
"You hit him, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" Wendy cried. "You dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" She grabbed his other arm and for a moment Danny was pulled between them.
"Oh please stop pulling me!" he screamed at them, and there was such agony in his voice that they both let go of him, and then the tears had to come and he collapsed, weeping, between the sofa and the window, his parents staring at him helplessly, the way children might stare at a toy broken in a furious tussle over to whom it belonged. In the fireplace another pine-knot exploded like a hand grenade, making them all jump.
Wendy gave him baby aspirin and Jack slipped him, unprotesting, between the sheets of his cot. He was asleep in no time with his thumb in his mouth.
"I don"t like that," she said. "It"s a regression." Jack didn"t reply.
She looked at him softly, without anger, without a smile, either. "You want me to apologize for calling you a b.a.s.t.a.r.d? All right, I apologize. I"m sorry. You still shouldn"t have hit him.
"I know," he muttered. "I know that. I don"t know what the h.e.l.l came over me."
"You promised you"d never hit him again." He looked at her furiously, and then the fury collapsed. Suddenly, with pity and horror, she saw what Jack would look like as an old man. She had never seen him look that way before.
(?what way?) Defeated, she answered herself. He looks beaten.
He said: "I always thought I could keep my promises." She went to him and put her hands on his arm. "All right, it"s over. And when the ranger comes to check us, we"ll tell him we all want to go down. All right?"
"All right," Jack said, and at that moment, at least, he meant it. The same way he had always meant it on those mornings after, looking at his pale and haggard face in the bathroom mirror. I"m going to stop, going to cut it off flat. But morning gave way to afternoon, and in the afternoons he felt a little better. And afternoon gave way to night. As some great twentieth-century thinker had said, night must fall.
He found himself wishing that Wendy would ask him about the hedges, would ask him what Danny meant, when he said You know because you saw- If she did, he would tell her everything. Everything. The hedges, the woman in the room, even about the fire hose that seemed to have switched positions. But where did confession stop? Could he tell her he"d thrown the magneto away, that they could all be down in Sidewinder right now if he hadn"t done that?
What she said was, "Do you want tea?"
"Yes. A cup of tea would be good." She went to the door and paused there, rubbing her forearms through her sweater. "It"s my fault as much as yours," she said. "What were we doing while he was going through that... dream, or whatever it was?"
"Wendy-"
"We were sleeping," she said. "Sleeping like a couple of teenage kids with their itch nicely scratched."
"Stop it," he said. "It"s over."
"No," Wendy answered, and gave him a strange, restless smile. "It"s not over." She went out to make tea, leaving him to keep watch over their son.