The boiler pressure gauge stood at two hundred and ten pounds per square inch.
He fancied he could almost see the sides of the old patched and welded boiler heaving out with the lethal strain.
(She creeps... I"d be scared to come down and stand next to her at a hundred and eighty...) Suddenly a cold and tempting inner voice spoke to him.
(Let it go. Go get Wendy and Danny and get the f.u.c.k out of here. Let it blow sky-high.) He could visualize the explosion. A double thunderclap that would first rip the heart from this place, then the soul. The boiler would go with an orange- violet flash that would rain hot and burning shrapnel all over the cellar. In his mind he could see the redhot trinkets of metal careening from floor to walls to ceiling like strange billiard b.a.l.l.s, whistling jagged death through the air.
Some of them, surely, would whizz right through that stone arch, light on the old papers on the other side, and they would burn merry h.e.l.l. Destroy the secrets, burn the clues, it"s a mystery no living hand will ever solve. Then the gas explosion, a great rumbling crackle of flame, a giant pilot light that would turn the whole center of the hotel into a broiler. Stairs and hallways and ceilings and rooms aflame like the castle in the last reel of a Frankenstein movie. The flame spreading into the wings, hurrying up the black-and-blue-twined carpets like eager guests. The silk wallpaper charring and curling. There were no sprinklers, only those outmoded hoses and no one to use them. And there wasn"t a fire engine in the world that could get here before late March. Burn, baby, burn. In twelve hours there would be nothing left but the bare bones.
The needle on the gauge had moved up to two-twelve. The boiler was creaking and groaning like an old woman trying to get out of bed. Hissing jets of steam had begun to play around the edges of old patches; beads of solder had begun to sizzle.
He didn"t see, he didn"t hear. Frozen with his hand on the valve that would dump off the pressure and damp the fire, Jack"s eyes glittered from their sockets like sapphires.
(It"s my last chance.) The only thing not cashed in now was the life-insurance policy he had taken out jointly with Wendy in the summer between his first and second years at Stovington. Forty-thousand-dollar death benefit, double indemnity if he or she died in a train crash, a plane crash, or a fire. Seven-come-eleven, die the secret death and win a hundred dollars.
(A fire... eighty thousand dollars.) They would have time to get out. Even if they were sleeping, they would have time to get out. He believed that. And he didn"t think the hedges or anything else would try to hold them back if the Overlook was going up in flames.
(Flames.) The needle inside the greasy, almost opaque dial had danced up to two hundred and fifteen pounds per square inch.
Another memory occurred to him, a childhood memory. There had been a wasps" nest in the lower branches of their apple tree behind the house. One of his older brothers-he couldn"t remember which one now-had been stung while swinging in the old tire Daddy had hung from one of the tree"s lower branches.
It had been late summer, when wasps tend to be at their ugliest.
Their father, just home from work, dressed in his whites, the smell of beer hanging around his face in a fine mist, had gathered all three boys, Brett, Mike, and little Jacky, and told them he was going to get rid of the wasps.
"Now watch," he had said, smiling and staggering a little (he hadn"t been using the cane then, the collision with the milk truck was years in the future).
"Maybe you"ll learn something. My father showed me this." He had raked a big pile of rain-dampened leaves under the branch where the wasps" nest rested, a deadlier fruit than the shrunken but tasty apples their tree usually produced in late September, which was then still half a month away.
He lit the leaves. The day was clear and windless. The leaves smoldered but didn"t really burn, and they made a smell-a fragrance that had echoed back to him each fall when men in Sat.u.r.day pants and light Windbreakers raked leaves together and burned them. A sweet smell with a bitter undertone, rich and evocative. The smoldering leaves produced great rafts of smoke that drifted up to obscure the nest.
Their father had let the leaves smolder all that afternoon, drinking beer on the porch and dropping the empty Black Label cans into his wife"s plastic floorbucket while his two older sons flanked him and little Jacky sat on the steps at his feet, playing with his Bolo Bouncer and singing monotonously over and over: "Your cheating heart... will make you weep... your cheating heart... is gonna tell on you." At quarter of six, just before supper, Daddy had gone out to the apple tree with his sons grouped carefully behind him. In one hand he had a garden hoe. He knocked the leaves apart, leaving little clots spread around to smolder and die.
Then he reached the hoe handle up, weaving and blinking, and after two or three tries he knocked the nest to the ground.
The boys fled for the safety of the porch, but Daddy only stood over the nest, swaying and blinking down at it. Jacky crept back to see. A few wasps were crawling sluggishly over the paper terrain of their property, but they were not trying to fly. From the inside of the nest, the black and alien place, came a never-to-be-forgotten sound: a low, somnolent buzz, like the sound of high- tension wires.
"Why don"t they try to sting you, Daddy?" he had asked.
"The smoke makes em drunk, Jacky. Go get my gas can." He ran to fetch it. Daddy doused the nest with amber gasoline.
"Now step away, Jacky, unless you want to lose your eyebrows." He had stepped away. From somewhere in the voluminous folds of his white overblouse, Daddy had produced a wooden kitchen match. He lit it with his thumbnail and flung it onto the nest. There had been a white-orange explosion, almost soundless in its ferocity. Daddy had stepped away, cackling wildly. The wasps" nest had gone up in no time.
"Fire," Daddy had said, turning to Jacky with a smile. "Fire will kill anything." After supper the boys had come out in the day"s waning light to stand solemnly around the charred and blackened nest. From the hot interior had come the sound of wasp bodies popping like corn.
The pressure gauge stood at two-twenty. A low iron wailing sound was building up in the guts of the thing. Jets of steam stood out erect in a hundred places like porcupine quills.
(Fire will kill anything.) Jack suddenly started. He had been dozing off... and he had almost dozed himself right into kingdom cone. What in G.o.d"s name had he been thinking of?
Protecting the hotel was his job. He was the caretaker.
A sweat of terror sprang to his hands so quickly that at first he missed his grip on the large valve. Then he curled his fingers around its spokes. He whirled it one turn, two, three. There was a giant hiss of steam, dragon"s breath. A warm tropical mist rose from beneath the boiler and veiled him. For a moment he could no longer see the dial but thought he must have waited too long; the groaning, clanking sound inside the boiler increased, followed by a series of heavy rattling sounds and the wrenching screech of metal.
When some of the steam blew away he saw that the pressure gauge had dropped back to two hundred and was still sinking. The jets of steam escaping around the soldered patches began to lose their force. The wrenching, grinding sounds began to diminish.
One-ninety... one-eighty... one seventy-five...
(He was going downhill, going ninety miles an hour, when the whistle broke into a scream-) But he didn"t think it would blow now. The press was down to one-sixty.
(-they found him in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, he was scalded to death by the steam.) He stepped away from the boiler, breathing hard, trembling. He looked at his hands and saw that blisters were already rising on his palms. h.e.l.l with the blisters, he thought, and laughed shakily. He had almost died with his hand on the throttle, like Casey the engineer in "The Wreck of the Old 97." Worse still, he would have killed the Overlook. The final crashing failure. He had failed as a teacher, a writer, a husband, and a father. He had even failed as a drunk. But you couldn"t do much better in the old failure category than to blow up the building you were supposed to be taking care of. And this was no ordinary building.
By no means.
Christ, but he needed a drink.
The press had dropped down to eighty psi. Cautiously, wincing a little at the pain in his hands, he closed the dump valve again. But from now on the boiler would have to be watched more closely than ever. It might have been seriously weakened. He wouldn"t trust it at more than one hundred psi for the rest of the winter. And if they were a little chilly, they would just have to grin and bear it.
He had broken two of the blisters. His hands throbbed like rotten teeth.
A drink. A drink would fix him up, and there wasn"t a thing in the G.o.dd.a.m.n house besides cooking sherry. At this point a drink would be medicinal. That was just it, by G.o.d. An anesthetic. He had done his duty and now he could use a little anesthetic-something stronger than Excedrin. But there was nothing.
He remembered bottles glittering in the shadows.
He had saved the hotel. The hotel would want to reward him. He felt sure of it. He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and went to the stairs. He rubbed at his mouth. Just a little drink. Just one. To ease the pain.
He had served the Overlook, and now the Overlook would serve him. He was sure of it. His feet on the stair risers were quick and eager, the hurrying steps of a man who has come home from a long and bitter war. It was 5:20 A.M., MST.
41 - Daylight
Danny awoke with a m.u.f.fled gasp from a terrible dream. There had been an explosion. A fire. The Overlook was burning up. He and his mommy were watching it from the front lawn.
Mommy had said: "Look, Danny, look at the hedges." He looked at them and they were all dead. Their leaves had turned a suffocant brown. The tightly packed branches showed through like the skeletons of half- dismembered corpses. And then his daddy had burst out of the Overlooks big double doors, and he was burning like a torch. His clothes were in flames, his skin had acquired a dark and sinister tan that was growing darker by the moment, his hair was a burning bush.
That was when he woke up, his throat tight with fear, his hands clutching at the sheet and blankets. Had he screamed? He looked over at his mother. Wendy lay on her side, the blankets up to her chin, a sheaf of straw-colored hair lying against her cheek. She looked like a child herself. No, he hadn"t screamed.
Lying in bed, looking upward, the nightmare began to drain away. He had a curious feeling that some great tragedy (fire? explosion?) had been averted by inches. He let his mind drift out, searching for his daddy, and found him standing somewhere below. In the lobby. Danny pushed a little harder, trying to get inside his father. It was not good. Because Daddy was thinking about the Bad Thing. He was thinking how (good just one or two would be i don"t care sun"s over the yardarm somewhere in the world remember how we used to say that al? gin and tonic bourbon with just a dash of bitters scotch and soda rum and c.o.ke tweedledum and tweedledee a drink for me and a drink for thee the martians have landed somewhere in the world princeton or houston or stokely on carmichael some f.u.c.king place after all tis the season and none of us are) (GET OUT OF HIS MIND, YOU LITTLE s.h.i.t!) He recoiled in terror from that mental voice, his eyes widening, his hands tightening into claws on the counterpane. It hadn"t been the voice of his father but a clever mimic. A voice he knew. Hoa.r.s.e, brutal, yet underpointed with a vacuous sort of humor.
Was it so near, then?
He threw the covers back and swung his feet out onto the floor. He kicked his slippers out from under the bed and put them on. He went to the door and pulled it open and hurried up to the main corridor, his slippered feet whispering on the nap of the carpet runner. He turned the corner.
There was a man on all fours halfway down the corridor, between him and the stairs.
Danny froze.
The man looked up at him. His eyes were tiny and red. He was dressed in some sort of silvery, spangled costume. A dog costume, Danny realized. Protruding from the rump of this strange creation was a long and floppy tail with a puff on the end. A zipper ran up the back of the costume to the neck. To the left of him was a dog"s or wolf"s head, blank eyesockets above the muzzle, the mouth open in a meaningless snarl that showed the rug"s black and blue pattern between fangs that appeared to be papier-mache.
The man"s mouth and chin and cheeks were smeared with blood.
He began to growl at Danny. He was grinning, but the growl was real. It was deep in his throat, a chilling primitive sound. Then he began to bark. His teeth were also stained red. He began to crawl toward Danny, dragging his boneless tail behind him. The costume dog"s head lay unheeded on the carpet, glaring vacantly over Danny"s shoulder.
"Let me by," Danny said.
"I"m going to eat you, little boy," the dogman answered, and suddenly a fusillade of barks came from his grinning mouth. They were human imitations, but the savagery in them was real. The man"s hair was dark, greased with sweat from his confining costume. There was a mixture of scotch and champagne on his breath.
Danny flinched back but didn"t run. "Let me by."
"Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin," the dogman replied. His small red eyes were fixed attentively on Danny"s face. He continued to grin. "I"m going to eat you up, little boy. And I think I"ll start with your plump little c.o.c.k." He began to prance skittishly forward, making little leaps and snarling.
Danny"s nerve broke. He fled back into the short hallway that led to their quarters, looking back over his shoulder. There was a series of mixed howls and barks and growls, broken by slurred mutterings and giggles.
Danny stood in the hallway, trembling.
"Get it up!" the drunken dogman cried out from around the corner. His voice was both violent and despairing. "Get it up, Harry you b.i.t.c.h-b.a.s.t.a.r.d! I don"t care how many casinos and airlines and movie companies you own! I know what you like in the privacy of your own h-home! Get it up! I"ll huff... and I"ll puff... until Harry Derwent"s all bloowwwwn down!" He ended with a long, chilling howl that seemed to turn into a scream of rage and pain just before it dwindled off.
Danny turned apprehensively to the closed bedroom door at the end of the hallway and walked quietly down to it. He opened it and poked his head through.
His mommy was sleeping in exactly the same position. No one was hearing this but him.
He closed the door softly and went back up to the intersection of their corridor and the main hall, hoping the dogman would be gone, the way the blood on the walls of the Presidential Suite had been gone. He peeked around the corner carefully.
The man in the dog costume was still there. He had put his head back on and was now prancing on all fours by the stairwell, chasing his tail. He occasionally leaped off the rug and came down making dog grunts in his throat.
"Woof! Woof! Bowwowwow! Grrrrrr!" These sounds came hollowly out of the mask"s stylized snarling mouth, and among them were sounds that might have been sobs or laughter.
Danny went back to the bedroom and sat down on his cot, covering his eyes with his hands. The hotel was running things now. Maybe at first the things that had happened had only been accidents. Maybe at first the things he had seen really were like scary pictures that couldn"t hurt him. But now the hotel was controlling those things and they could hurt. The Overlook hadn"t wanted him to go to his father. That might spoil all the fun. So it had put the dogman in his way, just as it had put the hedge animals between them and the road.
But his daddy could come here. And sooner or later his daddy would.
He began to cry, the tears rolling silently down his cheeks. It was too late.
They were going to die, all three of them, and when the Overlook opened next late spring, they would be right here to greet the guests along with the rest of the spooks. The woman in the tub. The dogman. The horrible dark thing that had been in the cement tunnel. They would be- (Stop! Stop that now!) He knuckled the tears furiously from his eyes. He would try as hard as he could to keep that from happening. Not to himself, not to his daddy and mommy.
He would try as hard as he could.
He closed his eyes and sent his mind out in a high, hard crystal bolt.
(!!! d.i.c.k PLEASE COME QUICK WE"RE IN BAD TROUBLE d.i.c.k WE NEED) And suddenly, in the darkness behind his eyes the thing that chased him down the Overlook"s dark halls in his dreams was there, right there, a huge creature dressed in white, its prehistoric club raised over its head: "I"ll make you stop it! You G.o.ddam puppy! I"ll make you stop it because I am your FATHER!"
"No!" He jerked back to the reality of the bedroom, his eyes wide and staring, the screams tumbling helplessly from his mouth as his mother bolted awake, clutching the sheet to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
"No Daddy no no no-" And they both heard the vicious, descending swing of the invisible club, cutting the air somewhere very close, then fading away to silence as he ran to his mother and hugged her, trembling like a rabbit in a snare.
The Overlook was not going to let him call d.i.c.k. That might spoil the fun, too.
They were alone.
Outside the snow came harder, curtaining them off from the world.
42 - Mid-Air
d.i.c.k Hallorann"s flight was called at 6:45 A.M., EST, and the boarding clerk held him by Gate 31, shifting his flight bag nervously from hand to hand, until the last call at 6:55. They were both looking for a man named Carlton Vecker, the only pa.s.senger on TWA"s flight 196 from Miami to Denver who hadn"t checked in.
"Okay," the clerk said, and issued Hallorann a blue firstcla.s.s boarding pa.s.s.
"You lucked out. You can board, sir." Hallorann hurried up the enclosed boarding ramp and let the mechanically grinning stewardess tear his pa.s.s off and give him the stub.
"We"re serving breakfast on the flight," the stew said. "If you"d like-"
"Just coffee, babe," he said, and went down the aisle to a seat in the smoking section. He kept expecting the no-show Vecker to pop through the door like a jack-in-the-box at the last second. The woman in the seat by the window was reading You Can Be Your Own Best Friend with a sour, unbelieving expression on her face. Hallorann buckled his seat belt and then wrapped his large black hands around the seat"s armrests and promised the absent Carlton Vecker that it would take him and five strong TWA flight attendants to drag him out of his seat. He kept his eye on his watch. It dragged off the minutes to the 7:00 takeoff time with maddening slowness.
At 7:05 the stewardess informed them that there would be a slight delay while the ground crew rechecked one of the latches on the cargo door.
"s.h.i.t for brains," d.i.c.k Hallorann muttered.
The sharp-faced woman turned her sour, unbelieving expression on him and then went back to her book.
He had spent the night at the airport, going from counter to counter-United, American, TWA, Continental, Braniff-haunting the ticket clerks. Sometime after midnight, drinking his eighth or ninth cup of coffee in the canteen, he had decided he was being an a.s.shole to have taken this whole thing on his own shoulders. There were authorities. He had gone down to the nearest bank of telephones, and after talking to three different operators, he had gotten the emergency number of the Rocky Mountain National Park Authority.
The man who answered the telephone sounded utterly worn out. Hallorann had given a false name and said there was trouble at the Overlook Hotel, west of Sidewinder. Bad trouble.
He was put on hold.
The ranger (Hallorann a.s.sumed he was a ranger) came back on in about five minutes.
"They"ve got a CB," the ranger said.
"Sure they"ve got a CB," Hallorann said.
"We haven"t had a Mayday call from them."
"Man, that don"t matter. They-"
"Exactly what kind of trouble are they in, Mr. Hall?"
"Well, there"s a family. The caretaker and his family. I think maybe he"s gone a little nuts, you know. I think maybe he might hurt his wife and his little boy."
"May I ask how you"ve come by this information, sir?" Hallorann closed his eyes. "What"s your name, fellow?"
"Tom Staunton, sir."