I see bad times today.
Don"t go "round tonight,
It"s bound to take your life,
There"s a bad moon on the rise.
Someone had added a very old Buick car radio under the hotel truck"s dashboard, and now, tinny and choked with static, the distinctive sound of John Fogerty"s 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 Jack"s orange library card over and over in his hands and seemed cheerful enough, but Wendy thought he looked drawn and tired, as if he hadn"t been sleeping enough and was going on nervous energy alone.
The song ended and the disc jockey came on. "Yeah, that"s 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 we"ve enjoyed for the last couple-three days. The KMTX Fearless Forecaster says high pressure will give way by one o"clock this afternoon to a widespread low-pressure 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 metro-Denver area, can expect a mixture of sleet and snow, perhaps freezing on some roads, and nothin but snow up here, cuz. We"re lookin at one to three inches below seven thousand and possible acc.u.mulations of six to ten inches in Central Colorado and on the Slope. The Highway Advisory Board says that if you"re plannin to tour the mountains in your car this afternoon or tonight, you should remember that the chain law will be in effect. And don"t go nowhere unless you have to. Remember," the announcer added jocularly, "that"s how the Donners got into trouble. They just weren"t as close to the nearest Seven-Eleven as they thought." A Clairol commercial came on, and Wendy reached down and snapped the radio off. "You mind?"
"Huh-uh, that"s okay." He glanced out at the sky, which was bright blue.
"Guess Daddy picked just the right day to trim those hedge animals, didn"t he?"
"I guess he did," Wendy said.
"Sure doesn"t 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 you"re 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 didn"t stay the winter?" Danny looked down at his hands. "I guess so," he said. "Yeah. But it"s Daddy"s job."
"Sometimes," she said carefully, "I get the idea that Daddy might be happier away from the Overlook, too." They pa.s.sed 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 don"t think so."
"Why not?"
"Because he"s 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 self-doubt, by self-image, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didn"t 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 we"ll be lonely. And then he thinks that he likes it here and it"s a good place for us. He loves us and doesn"t 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."
"He"s worried that if we left he couldn"t get another job. That we"d have to beg, or something."
"Is that all?"
"No, but the rest is all mixed up. Because he"s different now."
"Yes," she said, almost sighing. The grade eased a little and she shifted cautiously back to third gear.
"I"m not making this up, Mommy. Honest to G.o.d."
"I know that," she said, and smiled. "Did Tony tell you?"
"No," he said. "I just know. That doctor didn"t believe in Tony, did he?"
"Never mind that doctor," she said. "I believe in Tony. I don"t know what he is or who he is, if he"s a part of you that"s 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 couldn"t afford a motel. It would have to be at my mother"s." The hope in Danny"s 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 don"t say that. This talk is something we should have had weeks ago, I think. So please. What is it you know? I won"t be mad. I can"t 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. It"s like she wasn"t your mommy at all. Like she wanted to eat you." He looked at her, frightened. "And I don"t like it there. She"s always thinking about how she would be better for me than you. And how she could get me away from you. Mommy, I don"t want to go there. I"d rather be at the Overlook than there." Wendy was shaken. Was it that bad between her and her mother? G.o.d, what h.e.l.l 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."
"You"re mad at me," he said in a small, near-to-tears voice.
"No, I"m not. Really I"m not. I"m just sort of shook up." They were pa.s.sing 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 Danny"s jeans-clad leg and squeezed it. "Your daddy has tried very hard," she said softly. "Because he loves us. And we love him, don"t we?" He nodded gravely.
Speaking almost to herself she went on: "He"s not a perfect man, but he has tried... Danny, he"s tried so hard! When he... stopped... he went through a kind of h.e.l.l. He"s still going through it. I think if it hadn"t been for us, he would have just let go. I want to do what"s right. And I don"t know. Should we go? Stay? It"s 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 we"re safe at the Overlook."
"I already tried," Danny said slowly. "This morning."
"What happened?" Wendy asked. "What did he say?"
"He didn"t come," Danny said. "Tony didn"t come." And he suddenly burst into tears.
"Danny," she said, alarmed. "Honey, don"t do that. Please-" The truck swerved across the double yellow line and she pulled it back, scared.
"Don"t take me to Gramma"s," Danny said through his tears. "Please, Mommy, I don"t want to go there, I want to stay with Daddy-"
"All right," she said softly. "All right, that"s what we"ll do." She took a Kleenex out of the pocket of her Western-style shirt and handed it to him.
"We"ll stay. And everything will be fine. Just fine."
23 - 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 battery-powered hedge-clipper. He tugged a fresh handkerchief out of his back pocket with his right hand, wiped 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 hedge-clipper over to the other hand. It wouldn"t be a long job, he thought; a little touch-up would do it. The cold nights had surely stunted their growth. The rabbit"s ears looked a little fuzzy, and two of the dog"s 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 b.u.t.ton on the handle of the clippers. It hummed into quiet life.
"Hi, Br"er 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 didn"t 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 wasn"t. 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 weren"t hired to philosophize, Torrance.) Ah, that was true. So true. He clipped along the rabbit"s ears, brushing a small litter of sticks and twigs off onto the gra.s.s. The hedge-clipper hummed in that low and rather disgustingly metallic way that all battery-powered appliances seem to have. The sun was brilliant but it held no warmth, and now it wasn"t 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 rabbit"s "face" (up this close it didn"t 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 viewer"s 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, "I"d cut the whole d.a.m.n bunch of you down." He would, too. Just cut them down and resod the lawn where they"d been and put in half a dozen small metal tables with gaily colored umbrellas. People could have c.o.c.ktails on the Overlook"s 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 didn"t 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 Danny"s height when he was standing up. Jack hunkered down and looked in the third-floor windows.
"The giant has come to eat you all up in your beds," he said hollowly. "Kiss your Triple A rating goodbye." But that wasn"t funny, either. You could open the house simply by pulling it apart-it 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 hedge-clipper down, and after a glance back at the driveway to make sure Wendy and Danny hadn"t 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 a.s.s. How long had it been since he had been on a slide? Twenty years? It didn"t seem possible it could be that long, it didn"t 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 Danny"s age, and he had done the whole bit-slide, swings, teeter-totters, everything. He and the old man would have a hotdog 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.
"G.o.ddam scavenger birds," his dad would say, "don"t 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 didn"t 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 a.s.s was just too big. His adult feet thumped into the slight dip where thousands of children"s feet had landed before him. He stood up, brushed at the seat of his pants, and looked at the hedge-clipper. 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. You"re not a kid anymore. You don"t need this place to prove it.
But he went on to the cement rings-they were too small for him and he pa.s.sed them up-and 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 shadow-lines 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, embarra.s.sed, 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 topiary-the lions gathered protectively around the path, the rabbit bent over as if to crop gra.s.s, 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 Overlook"s 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 they"re 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 d.a.m.n hedges trimmed. It was part of the agreement. Besides, they wouldn"t dare (Who wouldn"t? What wouldn"t? Dare do what?) He began to walk back toward the hedge-clipper 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es had begun to creep too, and his b.u.t.tocks felt hard and heavy, like stone.
(Jesus, what is this?) He stopped by the hedge-clipper, 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 wasn"t picking it up. Come on, he scolded himself, you just trimmed the f.u.c.king rabbit, so what"s the (that"s it) His breath stopped in his throat.
The rabbit was down on all fours, cropping gra.s.s. 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, uh-uh, 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 didn"t 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 DTs-good 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. They"re 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 G.o.d, what next?