She dreamed on the long nights when Jack was out, and her dreams were always of her mother"s face and of her own wedding.
(Who giveth this woman? Her father standing in his best suit which was none too good-he was a traveling salesman for a line of canned goods that even then was going broke-and his tired face, how old he looked, how pale: I do.) Even after the accident-if you could call it an accident-she had not been able to bring it all the way out, to admit that her marriage was a lopsided defeat. She had waited, dumbly hoping that a miracle would occur and Jack would see what was happening, not only to him but to her. But there had been no slowdown. A drink before going off to the Academy. Two or three beers with lunch at the Stovington House. Three or four martinis before dinner. Five or six more while grading papers. The weekends were worse. The nights out with Al Shockley were worse still. She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time. How much of it was her fault? That question haunted her. She felt like her mother. Like her father. Sometimes, when she felt like herself she wondered what it would be like for Danny, and she dreaded the day when he grew old enough to lay blame. And she wondered where they would go. She had no doubt her mother would take her in, and no doubt that after a year of watching her diapers remade, Danny"s meals recooked and/or redistributed, of coming home to find his clothes changed or his hair cut or the books her mother found unsuitable spirited away to some limbo in the attic... after half a year of that, she would have a complete nervous breakdown. And her mother would pat her hand and say comfortingly, Although it"s not your fault, it"s all your own fault. You were never ready. You showed your true colors when you came between your father and me.
My father, Danny"s father. Mine, his.
(Who giveth this woman? I do. Dead of a heart attack six months later.) The night before that morning she had lain awake almost until he came in, thinking, coming to her decision.
The divorce was necessary, she told herself. Her mother and father didn"t belong in the decision. Neither did her feelings of guilt over their marriage nor her feelings of inadequacy over her own. It was necessary for her son"s sake, and for herself, if she was to salvage anything at all from her early adulthood. The handwriting on the wall was brutal but clear. Her husband was a lush. He had a bad temper, one he could no longer keep wholly under control now that he was drinking so heavily and his writing was going so badly. Accidentally or not accidentally, he had broken Danny"s arm. He was going to lose his job, if not this year then the year after. Already she had noticed the sympathetic looks from the other faculty wives. She told herself that she had stuck with the messy job of her marriage for as long as she could. Now she would have to leave it.
Jack could have full visitation rights, and she would want support from him only until she could find something and get on her feet-and that would have to be fairly rapidly because she didn"t know how long Jack would be able to pay support money. She would do it with as little bitterness as possible. But it had to end.
So thinking, she had fallen off into her own thin and unrestful sleep, haunted by the faces of her own mother and father. You"re nothing but a home-wrecker, her mother said. Who giveth this, woman? the minister said. I do, her father said. But in the bright and sunny morning she felt the same. Her back to him, her hands plunged in warm dishwater up to the wrists, she had commenced with the unpleasantness.
"I want to talk to you about something that might be best for Danny and I. For you too, maybe. We should have talked about it before, I guess." And then he had said an odd thing. She had expected to discover his anger, to provoke the bitterness, the recriminations. She had expected a mad dash for the liquor cabinet. But not this soft, almost toneless reply that was so unlike him.
It was almost as though the Jack she had lived with for six years had never come back last night-as if he had been replaced by some unearthly doppelganger that she would never know or be quite sure of.
"Would you do something for me? A favor?"
"What?" She had to discipline her voice strictly to keep it from trembling.
"Let"s talk about it in a week. If you still want to" And she had agreed. It remained unspoken between them. During that week he had seen Al Shockley more than ever, but he came home early and there was no liquor on his breath. She imagined she smelled it, but knew it wasn"t so. Another week.
And another.
Divorce went back to committee, unvoted on.
What had happened? She still wondered and still had not the slightest idea.
The subject was taboo between them. He was like a man who had leaned around a corner and had seen an unexpected monster lying in wait, crouching among the dried bones of its old kills. The liquor remained in the cabinet, but he didn"t touch it. She had considered throwing them out a dozen times but in the end always backed away from the idea, as if some unknown charm would be broken by the act.
And there was Danny"s part in it to consider.
If she felt she didn"t know her husband, then she was in awe of her child-awe in the strict meaning of that word: a kind of undefined superst.i.tious dread.
Dozing lightly, the image of the instant of his birth was presented to her.
She was again lying on the delivery table, bathed in sweat, her hair in strings, her feet splayed out in the stirrups (and a little high from the gas they kept giving her whiffs of; at one point she had muttered that she felt like an advertis.e.m.e.nt for gang rape, and the nurse, an old bird who had a.s.sisted at the births of enough children to populate a high school, found that extremely funny) the doctor between her legs, the nurse off to one side, arranging instruments and humming. The sharp, gla.s.sy pains had been coming at steadily shortening intervals, and several times she had screamed in spite of her shame.
Then the doctor told her quite sternly that she must PUSH, and she did, and then she felt something being taken from her. It was a clear and distinct feeling, one she would never forget-the thing taken. Then the doctor held her son up by the legs-she had seen his tiny s.e.x and known he was a boy immediately- and as the doctor groped for the airmask, she had seen something else, something so horrible that she found the strength to scream again after she had thought all screams were used up: He has no face!
But of course there had been a face, Danny"s own sweet face, and the caul that had covered it at birth now resided in a small jar which she had kept, almost shamefully. She did not hold with old superst.i.tion, but she had kept the caul nevertheless. She did not hold with wives" tales, but the boy had been unusual from the first. She did not believe in second sight but- Did Daddy have an accident? I dreamed Daddy had an accident.
Something had changed him. She didn"t believe it was just her getting ready to ask for a divorce that had done it. Something had happened before that morning.
Something that had happened while she slept uneasily. Al Shockley said that nothing had happened, nothing at all, but he had averted his eyes when he said it, and if you believed faculty gossip, Al had also climbed aboard the fabled wagon.
Did Daddy have an accident?
Maybe a chance collision with fate, surely nothing much more concrete. She had read that day"s paper and the next day"s with a closer eye than usual, but she saw nothing she could connect with Jack. G.o.d help her, she had been looking for a hit-and-run accident or a barroom brawl that had resulted in serious injuries or... who knew? Who wanted to? But no policeman came to call, either to ask questions or with a warrant empowering him to take paint sc.r.a.pings from the WV"s b.u.mpers. Nothing. Only her husband"s one hundred and eighty degree change and her son"s sleepy question on waking: Did Daddy have an accident? I dreamed...
She had stuck with Jack more for Danny"s sake than she would admit in her waking hours, but now, sleeping lightly, she could admit it: Danny had been Jack"s for the asking, almost from the first. Just as she had been her father"s, almost from the first. She couldn"t remember Danny ever spitting a bottle back on Jack"s shirt. Jack could get him to eat after she had given up in disgust, even when Danny was teething and it gave him visible pain to chew. When Danny had a stomachache, she would rock him for an hour before he began to quiet; Jack had only to pick him up, walk twice around the room with him, and Danny would be asleep on lack"s shoulder, his thumb securely corked in his mouth.
He hadn"t minded changing diapers, even those he called the special deliveries. He sat with Danny for hours on end, bouncing him on his lap, playing finger games with him, making faces at him while Danny poked at his nose and then collapsed with the giggles. He made formulas and administered them faultlessly, getting up every last burp afterward. He would take Danny with him in the car to get the paper or a bottle of milk or nails at the hardware store even when their son was still an infant. He had taken Danny to a Stovington- Keene soccer match when Danny was only six months old, and Danny had sat motionlessly on his father"s lap through the whole game, wrapped in a blanket, a small Stovington pennant clutched in one chubby fist.
He loved his mother but he was his father"s boy.
And hadn"t she felt, time and time again, her son"s wordless opposition to the whole idea of divorce? She would be thinking about it in the kitchen, turning it over in her mind as she turned the potatoes for supper over in her hands for the peeler"s blade. And she would turn around to see him sitting cross-legged in a kitchen chair, looking at her with eyes that seemed both frightened and accusatory. Walking with him in the park, he would suddenly seize both her hands and say-almost demand: "Do you love me? Do you love daddy?" And, confused, she would nod or say, "Of course I do, honey." Then he would run to the duck pond, sending them squawking and scared to the other end, flapping their wings in a panic before the small ferocity of his charge, leaving her to stare after him and wonder.
There were even times when it seemed that her determination to at least discuss the matter with Jack dissolved, not out of her own weakness, but under the determination of her son"s will.
I don"t believe such things.
But in sleep she did believe them, and in sleep, with her husband"s seed still drying on her thighs, she felt that the three of them had been permanently welded together-that if their three/oneness was to be destroyed, it would not be destroyed by any of them but from outside.
Most of what she believed centered around her love for Jack. She had never stopped loving him, except maybe for that dark period immediately following Danny"s "accident." And she loved her son. Most of all she loved them together, walking or riding or only sitting, Jack"s large head and Danny"s small one poised alertly over the fans of old maid hands, sharing a bottle of c.o.ke, looking at the funnies. She loved having them with her, and she hoped to dear G.o.d that this hotel caretaking job Al had gotten for Jack would be the beginning of good times again.
And the wind gonna rise up, baby, and blow my blues away...
Soft and sweet and mellow, the song came back and lingered, following her down into a deeper sleep where thought ceased and the faces that came in dreams went unremembered.
7 - In Another Bedroom
Danny awoke with the booming still loud in his ears, and the drunk, savagely pettish voice crying hoa.r.s.ely: Come out here and take your medicine! I"ll find you! I"ll find you! But now the booming was only his racing heart, and the only voice in the night was the faraway sound of a police siren.
He lay in bed motionlessly, looking up at the wind-stirred shadows of the leaves on his bedroom ceiling. They twined sinuously together, making shapes like the vines and creepers in a jungle, like patterns woven into the nap of a thick carpet. He was clad in Doctor Denton pajamas, but between the pajama suit and his skin he had grown a more closely fitting singlet of perspiration.
"Tony?" he whispered. "You there?" No answer.
He slipped out of bed and padded silently across to the window and looked out on Arapahoe Street, now still and silent. It was two in the morning. There was nothing out there but empty sidewalks drifted with fallen leaves, parked cars, and the long-necked streetlight on the corner across from the Cliff Brice gas station. With its hooded top and motionless stance, the streetlight looked like a monster in a s.p.a.ce show.
He looked up the street both ways, straining his eyes for Tony"s slight, beckoning form, but there was no one there.
The wind sighed through the trees, and the fallen leaves rattled up the deserted walks and around the hubcaps of parked cars. It was a faint and sorrowful sound, and the boy thought that he might be the only one in Boulder awake enough to hear it. The only human being, at least. There was no way of knowing what else might be out in the night, slinking hungrily through the shadows, watching and scenting the breeze.
I"ll find you! I"ll find you!
"Tony?" he whispered again, but without much hope.
Only the wind spoke back, gusting more strongly this time, scattering leaves across the sloping roof below his window. Some of them slipped into the raingutter and came to rest there like tired dancers.
Danny... Danneee...
He started at the sound of that familiar voice and craned out the window, his small hands on the sill. With the sound of Tony"s voice the whole night seemed to have come silently and secretly alive, whispering even when the wind quieted again and the leaves were still and the shadows had stopped moving. He thought he saw a darker shadow standing by the bus stop a block down, but it was hard to tell if it was a real thing or an eye-trick.
Don"t go, Danny..
Then the wind gusted again, making him squint, and the shadow by the bus stop was gone... if it had ever been there at all. He stood by his window for (a minute? an hour?) some time longer, but there was no more. At last he crept back into his bed and pulled the blankets up and watched the shadows thrown by the alien streetlight turn into a sinuous jungle filled with flesh-eating plants that wanted only to slip around him, squeeze the life out of him, and drag him down into a blackness where one sinister word flashed in red: REDRUM.
PART TWO:
Closing Day
8 - A View of the Overlook
Mommy was worried.
She was afraid the bug wouldn"t make it up and down all these mountains and that they would get stranded by the side of the road where somebody might come ripping along and hit them. Danny himself was more sanguine; if Daddy thought the bug would make this one last trip, then probably it would.
"We"re just about there," Jack said.
Wendy brushed her hair back from her temples. "Thank G.o.d." She was sitting in the right-hand bucket, a Victoria Holt paperback open but face down in her lap. She was wearing her blue dress, the one Danny thought was her prettiest. It had a sailor collar and made her look very young, like a girl just getting ready to graduate from high school. Daddy kept putting his hand high up on her leg and she kept laughing and brushing it off, saying Get away, fly.
Danny was impressed with the mountains. One day Daddy had taken them up in the ones near Boulder, the ones they called the Flatirons, but these were much bigger, and on the tallest of them you could see a fine dusting of snow, which Daddy said was often there year-round.
And they were actually in the mountains, no goofing around. Sheer rock faces rose all around them, so high you could barely see their tops even by craning your neck out the window. When they left Boulder, the temperature had been in the high seventies. Now, just after noon, the air up here felt crisp and cold like November back in Vermont and Daddy had the heater going... not that it worked all that well. They had pa.s.sed several signs that said FALLING ROCK ZONE (Mommy read each one to him), and although Danny had waited anxiously to see some rock fall, none had. At least not yet.
Half an hour ago they had pa.s.sed another sign that Daddy said was very important. This sign said ENTERING SIDEWINDER Pa.s.s, and Daddy said that sign was as far as the snowplows went in the wintertime. After that the road got too steep. In the winter the road was closed from the little town of Sidewinder, which they had gone through just before they got to that sign, all the way to Buckland, Utah.
Now they were pa.s.sing another sign.
"What"s that one, Mom?"
"That one says SLOWER VEHICLES USE RIGHT LANE. That means us."
"The bug will make it," Danny said.
"Please, G.o.d," Mommy said, and crossed her fingers. Danny looked down at her open-toed sandals and saw that she had crossed her toes as well. He giggled. She smiled back, but he knew that she was still worried.
The road wound up and up in a series of slow S curves, and Jack dropped the bug"s stick shift from fourth gear to third, then into second. The bug wheezed and protested, and Wendy"s eye fixed on the speedometer needle, which sank from forty to thirty to twenty, where it hovered reluctantly.
"The fuel pump... " she began timidly.
"The fuel pump will go another three miles," Jack said shortly.
The rock wall fell away on their right, disclosing a slash valley that seemed to go down forever, lined a dark green with Rocky Mountain pine and spruce. The pines fell away to gray cliffs of rock that dropped for hundreds of feet before smoothing out. She saw a waterfall spilling over one of them, the early afternoon sun sparkling in it like a golden fish snared in a blue net. They were beautiful mountains but they were hard. She did not think they would forgive many mistakes. An unhappy foreboding rose in her throat. Further west in the Sierra Nevada the Donner Party had become s...o...b..und and had resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. The mountains did not forgive many mistakes.
With a punch of the clutch and a jerk, Jack shifted down to first gear and they labored upward, the bug"s engine thumping gamely.
"You know," she said, "I don"t think we"ve seen five cars since we came through Sidewinder. And one of them was the hotel limousine." Jack nodded. "It goes right to Stapleton Airport in Denver. There"s already some icy patches up beyond the hotel, Watson says, and they"re forecasting more snow for tomorrow up higher. Anybody going through the mountains now wants to be on one of the main roads, just in case. That G.o.ddam Ullman better still be up there. I guess he will be."
"You"re sure the larder is fully stocked?" she asked, still thinking of the Donners.
"He said so. He wanted Hallorann to go over it with you. Hallorann"s the cook."
"Oh," she said faintly, looking at the speedometer. It had dropped from fifteen to ten miles an hour.
"There"s the top," Jack said, pointing three hundred yards ahead. "There"s a scenic turnout and you can see the Overlook from there. I"m going to pull off the road and give the bug a chance to rest." He craned over his shoulder at Danny, who was sitting on a pile of blankets. "What do you think, doc? We might see some deer. Or caribou."
"Sure, Dad." The VW labored up and up. The speedometer dropped to just above the five-mile- an-hour hashmark and was beginning to hitch when Jack pulled off the road ("What"s that sign, Mommy?" "SCENIC TURNOUT," she read dutifully) and stepped on the emergency brake and let the VW run in neutral.
"Come on," he said, and got out.
They walked to the guardrail together.
"That"s it," Jack said, and pointed at eleven o"clock.
For Wendy, it was discovering truth in a cliche: her breath was taken away.
For a moment she was unable to breathe at all; the view had knocked the wind from her. They were standing near the top of one peak. Across from them-who knew how far?-an even taller mountain reared into the sky, its jagged tip only a silhouette that was now nimbused by the sun, which was beginning its decline.
The whole valley floor was spread out below them, the slopes that they had climbed in the laboring bug falling away with such dizzying suddenness that she knew to look down there for too long would bring on nausea and eventual vomiting. The imagination seemed to spring to full life in the clear air, beyond the rein of reason, and to look was to helplessly see one"s self plunging down and down and down, sky and slopes changing places in slow cartwheels, the scream drifting from your mouth like a lazy balloon as your hair and your dress billowed out...
She jerked her gaze away from the drop almost by force and followed Jack"s finger. She could see the highway clinging to the side of this cathedral spire, switching back on itself but always tending northwest, still climbing but at a more gentle angle. Further up, seemingly set directly into the slope itself, she saw the grimly clinging pines give way to a wide square of green lawn and standing in the middle of it, overlooking all this, the hotel. The Overlook.
Seeing it, she found breath and voice again.
"Oh, Jack, it"s gorgeous!"
"Yes, it is," he said. "Unman says he thinks it"s the single most beautiful location in America. I don"t care much for him, but I think he might be...
Danny! Danny, are you all right?" She looked around for him and her sudden fear for him blotted out everything else, stupendous or not. She darted toward him. He was holding onto the guardrail and looking up at the hotel, his face a pasty gray color. His eyes had the blank look of someone on the verge of fainting.
She knelt beside him and put steadying hands on his shoulders. "Danny, what"s-" Jack was beside her. "You okay, doc?" He gave Danny a brisk little shake and his eyes cleared.
"I"m okay, Daddy. I"m fine."
"What was it, Danny?" she asked. "Were you dizzy, honey?"
"No, I was just... thinking. I"m sorry. I didn"t mean to scare you." He looked at his parents, kneeling in front of him, and offered them a small puzzled smile. "Maybe it was the sun. The sun got in my eyes."
"We"ll get you up to the hotel and give you a drink of water," Daddy said.
"Okay." And in the bug, which moved upward more surely on the gentler grade, he kept looking out between them as the road unwound, affording occasional glimpses of the Overlook Hotel, its ma.s.sive bank of westward-looking windows reflecting back the sun. It was the place he had seen in the midst of the blizzard, the dark and booming place where some hideously familiar figure sought him down long corridors carpeted with jungle. The place Tony had warned him against. It was here. It was here. Whatever Redrum was, it was here.