(next it leaps over and gobbles you up like something in an evil nursery fable) It was like that game they had played when they were kids, red light. One person was "it," and while he turned his back and counted to ten, the other players crept forward. When "it" got to ten, he whirled around and if he caught anyone moving, they were out of the game. The others remained frozen in statue postures until "it" turned his back and counted again. They got closer and closer, and at last, somewhere between five and ten, you would feel a hand on your back...
Gravel rattled on the path.
He jerked his head around to look at the dog and it was halfway down the pathway, just behind the lions now, its mouth wide and yawning. Before, it had only been a hedge clipped in the general shape of a dog, something that lost all definition when you got up close to it. But now Jack could see that it had been clipped to look like a German shepherd, and shepherds could be mean. You could train shepherds to kill.
A low rustling sound.
The lion on the left had advanced all the way to the fence now; its muzzle was touching the boards. It seemed to be grinning at him. Jack backed up another two steps. His head was thudding crazily and he could feel the dry rasp of his breath in his throat. Now the buffalo had moved, circling to the right, behind and around the rabbit. The head was lowered, the green hedge horns pointing at him. The thing was, you couldn"t watch all of them. Not all at once.
He began to make a whining sound, unaware in his locked concentration that he was making any sound at all. His eyes darted from one hedge creature to the next, trying to see them move. The wind gusted, making a hungry rattling sound in the close-matted branches. What kind of sound would there be if they got him?
But of course he knew. A snapping, rending, breaking sound. It would be- (no no NO NO I WILL NOT BELIEVE THIS NOT AT ALL!) He clapped his hands over his eyes, clutching at his hair, his forehead, his throbbing temples. And he stood like that for a long time, dread building until he could stand it no longer and he pulled his hands away with a cry.
By the putting green the dog was sitting up, as if begging for a sc.r.a.p. The buffalo was gazing with disinterest back toward the roque court, as it had been when Jack had come down with the clippers. The rabbit stood on its hind legs, ears up to catch the faintest sound, freshly clipped belly exposed. The lions, rooted into place, stood beside the path.
He stood frozen for a long time, the harsh breath in his throat finally slowing. He reached for his cigarettes and shook four of them out onto the gravel. He stooped down and picked them up, groped for them, never taking his eyes from the topiary for fear the animals would begin to move again. He picked them up, stuffed three carelessly back into the pack, and lit the fourth. After two deep drags he dropped it and crushed it out. He went to the hedge-clipper and picked it up.
"I"m very tired," he said, and now it seemed okay to talk out loud. It didn"t seem crazy at all. "I"ve been under a strain. The wasps... the play... Al calling me like that. But it"s all right." He began to trudge back up to the hotel. Part of his mind tugged fretfully at him, tried to make him detour around the hedge animals, but he went directly up the gravel path, through them. A faint breeze rattled through them, that was all. He had imagined the whole thing. He had had a bad scare but it was over now.
In the Overlook"s kitchen he paused to take two Excedrin and then went downstairs and looked at papers until he heard the dim sound of the hotel truck rattling into the driveway. He went up to meet them. He felt all right. He saw no need to mention his hallucination. He"d had a bad scare but it was over now.
24 - Snow
It was dusk.
They stood on the porch in the fading light, Jack in the middle, his left arm around Danny"s shoulders and his right arm around Wendy"s waist. Together they watched as the decision was taken out of their hands.
The sky had been completely clouded over by two-thirty and it had begun to snow an hour later, and this time you didn"t need a weatherman to tell you it was serious snow, no flurry that was going to melt or blow away when the evening wind started to whoop. At first it had fallen in perfectly straight lines, building up a snowcover that coated everything evenly, but now, an hour after it had started, the wind had begun to blow from the northwest and the snow had begun to drift against the porch and the sides of the Overlook"s driveway.
Beyond the grounds the highway had disappeared under an even blanket of white.
The hedge animals were also gone, but when Wendy and Danny had gotten home, she had commended him on the good job he had done. Do you think so? he had asked, and said no more. Now the hedges were buried under amorphous white cloaks.
Curiously, all of them were thinking different thoughts but feeling the same emotion: relief. The bridge had been crossed.
"Will it ever be spring?" Wendy murmured.
Jack squeezed her tighter. "Before you know it. What do you say we go in and have some supper? It"s cold out here." She smiled. All afternoon Jack had seemed distant and... well, odd. Now he sounded more like his normal self. "Fine by me. How about you, Danny?"
"Sure." So they went in together, leaving the wind to build to the low-pitched scream that would go on all night-a sound they would get to know well. Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact that it was now cut off from the world. Or possibly it was pleased with the prospect. Inside its sh.e.l.l the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.
25 - Inside 217
A week and a half later two feet of snow lay white and crisp and even on the grounds of the Overlook Hotel. The hedge menagerie was buried up to its haunches; the rabbit, frozen on its hind legs, seemed to be rising from a white pool. Some of the drifts were over five feet deep. The wind was constantly changing them, sculpting them into sinuous, dunelike shapes. Twice Jack had snowshoed clumsily around to the equipment shed for his shovel to clear the porch, the third time he shrugged, simply cleared a path through the towering drift lying against the door, and let Danny amuse himself by sledding to the right and left of the path. The truly heroic drifts lay against the Overlook"s west side; some of them towered to a height of twenty feet, and beyond them the ground was scoured bare to the gra.s.s by the constant windflow. The first-floor windows were covered, and the view from the dining room which Jack had so admired on closing day was now no more exciting than a view of a blank movie screen. Their phone had been out for the last eight days, and the CB radio in Ullman"s office was now their only communications link with the outside world.
It snowed every day now, sometimes only brief flurries that powdered the glittering snow crust, sometimes for real, the low whistle of the wind cranking up to a womanish shriek that made the old hotel rock and groan alarmingly even in its deep cradle of snow. Night temperatures had not gotten above 10, and although the thermometer by the kitchen service entrance sometimes got as high as 25 in the early afternoons, the steady knife edge of the wind made it uncomfortable to go out without a ski mask. But they all did go out on the days when the sun shone, usually wearing two sets of clothing and mittens on over their gloves. Getting out was almost a compulsive thing; the hotel was circled with the double track of Danny"s Flexible Flyer. The permutations were nearly endless: Danny riding while his parents pulled; Daddy riding and laughing while Wendy and Danny tried to pull (it was just possible for them to pull him on the icy crust, and flatly impossible when powder covered it); Danny and Mommy riding; Wendy riding by herself while her menfolk pulled and puffed white vapor like drayhorses, pretending she was heavier than she was. They laughed a great deal on these sled excursions around the house, but the whooping and impersonal voice of the wind, so huge and hollowly sincere, made their laughter seem tinny and forced.
They had seen caribou tracks in the snow and once the caribou themselves, a group of five standing motionlessly below the security fence. They had all taken turns with Jack"s Zeiss-Ikon binoculars to see them better, and looking at them had given Wendy a weird, unreal feeling: they were standing leg-deep in the snow that covered the highway, and it came to her that between now and the spring thaw, the road belonged more to the caribou than it did to them. Now the things that men had made up here were neutralized. The caribou understood that, she believed. She had put the binoculars down and had said something about starting lunch and in the kitchen she had cried a little, trying to rid herself of the awful pent-up feeling that sometimes fell on her like a large, pressing hand over her heart. She thought of the caribou. She thought of the wasps Jack had put out on the service entrance platform, under the Pyrex bowl, to freeze.
There were plenty of snowshoes hung from nails in the equipment shed, and Jack found a pair to fit each of them, although Danny"s pair was quite a bit outsized. Jack did well with them. Although he had not snowshoed since his boyhood in Berlin, New Hampshire, he retaught himself quickly. Wendy didn"t care much for it-even fifteen minutes of tramping around on the outsized laced paddles made her legs and ankles ache outrageously-but Danny was intrigued and working hard to pick up the knack. He still fell often, but lack was pleased with his progress. He said that by February Danny would be skipping circles around both of them.
This day was overcast, and by noon the sky had already begun to spit snow. The radio was promising another eight to twelve inches and chanting hosannas to Precipitation, that great G.o.d of Colorado skiers. Wendy, sitting in the bedroom and knitting a scarf, thought to herself that she knew exactly what the skiers could do with all that snow. She knew exactly where they could put it.
Jack was in the cellar. He had gone down to check the furnace and boiler-such checks had become a ritual with him since the snow had closed them in-and after satisfying himself that everything was going well he had wandered through the arch, screwed the lightbulb on, and had seated himself in an old and cobwebby camp chair he had found. He was leafing through the old records and papers, constantly wiping his mouth with his handkerchief as he did so. Confinement had leached his skin of its autumn tan, and as he sat hunched over the yellowed, crackling sheets, his reddish-blond hair tumbling untidily over his forehead, he looked slightly lunatic. He had found some odd things tucked in among the invoices, bills of lading, receipts. Disquieting things. A b.l.o.o.d.y strip of sheeting. A dismembered teddy bear that seemed to have been slashed to pieces. A crumpled sheet of violet ladies" stationery, a ghost of perfume still clinging to it beneath the musk of age, a note begun and left unfinished in faded blue ink: "Dearest Tommy, I can"t think so well up here as I"d hoped, about us I mean, of course, who else? Ha. Ha. Things keep getting in the way. I"ve had strange dreams about things going b.u.mp in the night, can you believe that and" That was all. The note was dated June 27, 1934. He found a hand puppet that seemed to be either a witch or a warlock... something with long teeth and a pointy hat, at any rate. It had been improbably tucked between a bundle of natural-gas receipts and a bundle of receipts for Vichy water. And something that seemed to be a poem, scribbled on the back of a menu in dark pencil: "Medoc/are you here?/I"ve been sleepwalking again, my dear./The plants are moving under the rug." No date on the menu, and no name on the poem, if it was a poem. Elusive, but fascinating. It seemed to him that these things were like pieces in a jigsaw, things that would eventually fit together if he could find the right linking pieces. And so he kept looking, jumping and wiping his lips every time the furnace roared into life behind him.
Danny was standing outside Room 217 again.
The pa.s.skey was in his pocket. He was staring at the door with a kind of drugged avidity, and his upper body seemed to twitch and jiggle beneath his flannel shirt. He was humming softly and tunelessly.
He hadn"t wanted to come here, not after the fire hose. He was scared to come here. He was scared that he had taken the pa.s.skey again, disobeying his father.
He had wanted to come here. Curiosity (killed the cat; satisfaction brought him back) was like a constant fishhook in his brain, a kind of nagging siren song that would not be appeased. And hadn"t Mr. Hallorann said, "I don"t think there"s anything here that can hurt you"?
(You promised.) (Promises were made to be broken.) He jumped at that. It was as if that thought had come from outside, insectile, buzzing, softly cajoling.
(Promises were made to be broken my dear redrum, to be broken. splintered. shattered. hammered apart. FORE!) His nervous humming broke into low, atonal song: "Lou, Lou, skip to m" Lou, skip to m" Lou my daaarlin..." Hadn"t Mr. Hallorann been right? Hadn"t that been, in the end, the reason why he had kept silent and allowed the snow to close them in?
Just close your eyes and it will be gone.
What he had seen in the Presidential Sweet had gone away. And the snake had only been a fire hose that had fallen onto the rug. Yes, even the blood in the Presidential Sweet had been harmless, something old, something that had happened long before he was born or even thought of, something that was done with. Like a movie that only he could see. There was nothing, really nothing, in this hotel that could hurt him, and if he had to prove that to himself by going into this room, shouldn"t he do so?
"Lou, Lou, skip to m"Lou..." (Curiosity killed the cat my dear redrum, redrum my dear, satisfaction brought him back safe and sound, from toes to crown; from head to ground he was safe and sound. He knew that those things) (are like scary pictures, they can"t hurt you, but oh my G.o.d) (what big teeth you have grandma and is that a wolf in a BLUEBEARD suit or a BLUEBEARD in a wolf suit and i"m so) (glad you asked because curiosity killed that cat and it was the HOPE of satisfaction that brought him) up the hall, treading softly over the blue and twisting jungle carpet. He had stopped by the fire extinguisher, had put the bra.s.s nozzle back in the frame, and then had poked it repeatedly with his finger, heart thumping, whispering: "Come on and hurt me. Come on and hurt me, you cheap p.r.i.c.k. Can"t do it, can you? Huh? You"re nothing but a cheap fire hose. Can"t do nothin but lie there.
Come on, come on!" He had felt insane with bravado. And nothing had happened. It was only a hose after all, only canvas and bra.s.s, you could hack it to pieces and it would never complain, never twist and jerk and bleed green slime all over the blue carpet, because it was only a hose, not a nose and not a rose, not gla.s.s b.u.t.tons or satin bows, not a snake in a sleepy doze... and he had hurried on, had hurried on because he was ("late, I"m late," said the white rabbit.) the white rabbit. Yes. Now there was a white rabbit out by the playground, once it had been green but now it was white, as if something had shocked it repeatedly on the snowy, windy nights and turned it old...
Danny took the pa.s.skey from his pocket and slid it into the lock.
"Lou, Lou..." (the white rabbit had been on its way to a croquet party to the Red Queen"s croquet party storks for mallets hedgehogs for halls) He touched the key, let his fingers wander over it. His head felt dry and sick. He turned the key and the tumblers thumped back smoothly.
(OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD!) (this game isn"t croquet though the mallets are too short this game is) (WHACK-BOOM! Straight through the wicket.) (OFF WITH HIS HEEEEEAAAAAAAD-) Danny pushed the door open. It swung smoothly, without a creak. He was standing just outside a large combination bedsitting room, and although the snow had not reached up this far-the highest drifts were still a foot below the second-floor windows-the room was dark because Daddy had closed all the shutters on the western exposure two weeks ago.
He stood in the doorway, fumbled to his right, and found the switch plate. Two bulbs in an overhead cut-gla.s.s fixture came on. Danny stepped further in and looked around. The rug was deep and soft, a quiet rose color. Soothing. A double bed with a white coverlet. A writing desk (Pray tell me: Why is a raven like a writing desk?) by the large shuttered window. During the season the Constant Writer (having a wonderful time, wish you were fear) would have a pretty view of the mountains to describe to the folks back home.
He stepped further in. Nothing here, nothing at all. Only an empty room, cold because Daddy was heating the east wing today. A bureau. A closet, its door open to reveal a clutch of hotel hangers, the kind you can"t steal. A Gideon Bible on an endtable. To his left was the bathroom door, a full-length mirror on it reflecting his own white-faced image. That door was ajar and- He watched his double nod slowly.
Yes, that"s where it was, whatever it was. In there. In the bathroom. His double walked forward, as if to escape the gla.s.s. It put its hand out, pressed it against his own. Then it fell away at an angle as the bathroom door swung open. He looked in.
A long room, old-fashioned, like a Pullman car. Tiny white hexagonal tiles on the floor. At the far end, a toilet with the lid up. At the right, a washbasin and another mirror above it, the kind that hides a medicine cabinet. To the left, a huge white tub on claw feet, the shower curtain pulled closed. Danny stepped into the bathroom and walked toward the tub dreamily, as if propelled from outside himself, as if this whole thing were one of the dreams Tony had brought him, that he would perhaps see something nice when he pulled the shower curtain back, something Daddy had forgotten or Mommy had lost, something that would make them both happy- So he pulled the shower curtain back.
The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny"s, gla.s.sy and huge, like marbles.
She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s lolled.
Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws.
Danny shrieked. But the sound never escaped his lips; turning inward and inward, it fell down in his darkness like a stone in a well. He took a single blundering step backward, bearing his heels clack on the white hexagonal tiles, and at the same moment his urine broke, spilling effortlessly out of him.
The woman was sitting up.
Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There was the minute sound of breaking ice shards. She was not breathing. She was a corpse, and dead long years.
Danny turned and ran. Bolting through the bathroom door, his eyes starting from their sockets, his hair on end like the hair of a hedgehog about to be turned into a sacrificial (croquet? or rogue?) ball, his mouth open and soundless. He ran full-tilt into the outside door of 217, which was now closed. He began hammering on it, far beyond realizing that it was unlocked, and he had only to turn the k.n.o.b to let himself out. His mouth pealed forth deafening screams that were beyond human auditory range. He could only hammer on the door and hear the dead woman coming for him, bloated belly, dry hair, outstretched hands-something that had lain slain in that tub for perhaps years, embalmed there in magic.
The door would not open, would not, would not, would not.
And then the voice of d.i.c.k Hallorann came to him, so sudden and unexpected, so calm, that his locked vocal cords opened and he began to cry weakly-not with fear but with blessed relief.
(I don"t think they can hurt you... they"re like pictures in a book... close your eyes and they"ll he gone.) His eyelids snapped down. His hands curled into b.a.l.l.s. His shoulders hunched with the effort of his concentration: (Nothing there nothing there not there at all NOTHING THERE THERE IS NOTHING!) Time pa.s.sed. And he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realize that the door must be unlocked and he could go, when the years-damp, bloated, fish-smelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face.
PART FOUR:
s...o...b..und
26 - Dreamland
Knitting made her sleepy. Today even Bartok would have made her sleepy, and it wasn"t Bartok on the little phonograph, it was Bach. Her hands grew slower and slower, and at the time her son was making the acquaintance of Room 217"s long- term resident, Wendy was asleep with her knitting on her lap. The yarn and needles rose in the slow time of her breathing. Her sleep was deep and she did not dream.
Jack Torrance had fallen asleep too, but his sleep was light and uneasy, populated by dreams that seemed too vivid to be mere dreams-they were certainly more vivid than any dreams he had ever had before.
His eyes had begun to get heavy as he leafed through packets of milk bills, a hundred to a packet, seemingly tens of thousands all together. Yet he gave each one a cursory glance, afraid that by not being thorough he might miss exactly the piece of Overlookiana he needed to make the mystic connection that he was sure must be here somewhere. He felt like a man with a power cord in one hand, groping around a dark and unfamiliar room for a socket. If he could find it he would be rewarded with a view of wonders.
He had come to grips with Al Shockley"s phone call and his request; his strange experience in the playground had helped him to do that. That had been too d.a.m.ned close to some kind of breakdown, and he was convinced that it was his mind in revolt against Al"s high-G.o.ddam-handed request that he chuck his book project. It had maybe been a signal that his own sense of self-respect could only be pushed so far before disintegrating entirely. He would write the book.
If it meant the end of his a.s.sociation with Al Shockley, that would have to be.
He would write the hotel"s biography, write it straight from the shoulder, and the introduction would be his hallucination that the topiary animals had moved.
The t.i.tle would be uninspired but workable: Strange Resort, The Story of the Overlook Hotel. Straight from the shoulder, yes, but it would not be written vindictively, in any effort to get back at Al or Stuart Ullman or George Hatfield or his father (miserable, bullying drunk that he had been) or anyone else, for that matter. He would write it because the Overlook had enchanted him-could any other explanation be so simple or so true? He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Five hundred gals whole milk. One hundred gals skim milk. Pd. Billed to acc"t.
Three hundred pts orange juice. Pd.
He slipped down further in his chair, still holding a clutch of the receipts, but his eyes no longer looking at what was printed there. They had come unfocused. His lids were slow and heavy. His mind had slipped from the Overlook to his father, who had been a male nurse at the Berlin Community Hospital. Big man. A fat man who had towered to six feet two inches, he had been taller than Jack even when Jack got his full growth of six feet even-not that the old man had still been around then. "Runt of the litter," he would say, and then cuff Jack lovingly and laugh. There had been two other brothers, both taller than their father, and Becky, who at five-ten had only been two inches shorter than Jack and taller than he for most of their childhood.
His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside. Until he had been seven he had loved the tall, big-bellied man uncritically and strongly in spite of the spankings, the black-and-blues, the occasional black eye.
He could remember velvet summer nights, the house quiet, oldest brother Brett out with his girl, middle brother Mike studying something, Becky and their mother in the living room, watching something on the balky old TV; and he would sit in the hall dressed in a pajama singlet and nothing else, ostensibly playing with his trucks, actually waiting for the moment when the silence would be broken by the door swinging open with a large bang, the bellow of his father"s welcome when he saw Jacky was waiting, his own happy squeal in answer as this big man came down the hall, his pink scalp glowing beneath his crewcut in the glow of the hall light. In that light he always looked like some soft and flapping oversized ghost in his hospital whites, the shirt always untucked (and sometimes b.l.o.o.d.y), the pants cuffs drooping down over the black shoes.
His father would sweep him into his arms and Jacky would be propelled deliriously upward, so fast it seemed he could feel air pressure settling against his skull like a cap made out of lead, up and up, both of them crying: "Elevator! Elevator!"; and there had been nights when his father in his drunkenness had not stopped the upward lift of his slabmuscled arms soon enough and Jacky had gone right over his father"s flat-topped head like a human projectile to crash-land on the hall floor behind his dad. But on other nights his father would only sweep him into a giggling ecstasy, through the zone of air where beer hung around his father"s face like a mist of raindrops, to be twisted and turned and shaken like a laughing rag, and finally to be set down on his feet, hiccupping with reaction.
The receipts slipped from his relaxing hand and seesawed down through the air to land lazily on the floor; his eyelids, which had settled shut with his father"s image tattooed on their backs like stereopticon images, opened a little bit and then slipped back down again. He twitched a little. Consciousness, like the receipts, like autumn aspen leaves, seesawed lazily downward.
That had been the first phase of his relationship with his father, and as it was drawing to its end he had become aware that Becky and his brothers, all of them older, hated the father and that their mother, a nondescript woman who rarely spoke above a mutter, only suffered him because her Catholic upbringing said that she must. In those days it had not seemed strange to Jack that the father won all his arguments with his children by use of his fists, and it had not seemed strange that his own love should go hand-in-hand with his fear: fear of the elevator game which might end in a splintering crash on any given night; fear that his father"s bearish good humor on his day off might suddenly change to boarish bellowing and the smack of his "good right hand"; and sometimes, he remembered, he had even been afraid that his father"s shadow might fall over him while he was at play. It was near the end of this phase that he began to notice that Brett never brought his dates home, or Mike and Becky their chums.
Love began to curdle at nine, when his father put his mother into the hospital with his cane. He had begun to carry the cane a year earlier, when a car accident had left him lame. After that he was never without it, long and black and thick and gold-headed. Now, dozing, Jack"s body twitched in a remembered cringe at the sound it made in the air, a murderous swish, and its heavy crack against the wall... or against flesh. He had beaten their mother for no good reason at all, suddenly and without warning. They had been at the supper table.
The cane had been standing by his chair. It was a Sunday night, the end of a three-day weekend for Daddy, a weekend which he had boozed away in his usual inimitable style. Roast chicken. Peas. Mashed potatoes. Daddy at the head of the table, his plate heaped high, snoozing or nearly snoozing. His mother pa.s.sing plates. And suddenly Daddy had been wide awake, his eyes set deeply into their fat eyesockets, glittering with a kind of stupid, evil petulance. They flickered from one member of the family to the next, and the vein in the center of his forehead was standing out prominently, always a bad sign. One of his large freckled hands had dropped to the gold k.n.o.b of his cane, caressing it. He said something about coffee-to this day Jack was sure it had been "coffee" that his father said. Momma had opened her mouth to answer and then the cane was whickering through the air, smashing against her face. Blood spurted from her nose. Becky screamed. Momma"s spectacles dropped into her gravy. The cane had been drawn back, had come down again, this time on top of her head, splitting the scalp. Momma had dropped to the floor. He had been out of his chair and around to where she lay dazed on the carpet, brandishing the cane, moving with a fat man"s grotesque speed and agility, little eyes flashing, jowls quivering as he spoke to her just as he had always spoken to his children during such outbursts.
"Now. Now by Christ. I guess you"ll take your medicine now. G.o.ddam puppy. Whelp. Come on and take your medicine." The cane had gone up and down on her seven more times before Brett and Mike got hold of him, dragged him away, wrestled the cane out of his hand. Jack (little Jacky now he was little Jacky now dozing and mumbling on a cobwebby camp chair while the furnace roared into hollow life behind him) knew exactly how many blows it had been because each soft whump against his mother"s body had been engraved on his memory like the irrational swipe of a chisel on stone.
Seven whumps. No more, no less.
He and Becky crying, unbelieving, looking at their mother"s spectacles lying in her mashed potatoes, one cracked lens smeared with gravy. Brett shouting at Daddy from the back hall, telling him he"d kill him if he moved. And Daddy saying over and over: "d.a.m.n little puppy. d.a.m.n little whelp. Give me my cane, you d.a.m.n little pup. Give it to me." Brett brandishing it hysterically, saying yes, yes, I"ll give it to you, just you move a little bit and I"ll give you all you want and two extra. I"ll give you plenty. Momma getting slowly to her feet, dazed, her face already puffed and swelling like an old tire with too much air in it, bleeding in four or five different places, and she had said a terrible thing, perhaps the only thing Momma had ever said which Jacky could recall word for word: "Who"s got the newspaper? Your daddy wants the funnies. Is it raining yet?" And then she sank to her knees again, her hair hanging in her puffed and bleeding face. Mike calling the doctor, babbling into the phone. Could he come right away? It was their mother. No, he couldn"t say what the trouble was, not over the phone, not over a party line he couldn"t. Just come.
The doctor came and took Momma away to the hospital where Daddy had worked all of his adult life. Daddy, sobered up some (or perhaps only with the stupid cunning of any hardpressed animal), told the doctor she had fallen downstairs. There was blood on the tablecloth because he had tried to wipe her dear face with it. Had her gla.s.ses flown all the way through the living room and into the dining room to land in her mashed potatoes and gravy? the doctor asked with a kind of horrid, grinning sarcasm. Is that what happened, Mark? I have heard of folks who can get a radio station on their gold fillings and I have seen a man get shot between the eyes and live to tell about it, but that is a new one on me. Daddy had merely shook his head and said he didn"t know; they must have fallen off her face when he brought her through the dining room. The four children had been stunned to silence by the calm stupendousness of the lie.
Four days later Brett quit his job in the mill and joined the Army. Jack had always felt it was not just the sudden and irrational beating his father had administered at the dinner table but the fact that, in the hospital, their mother had corroborated their father"s story while holding the hand of the parish priest. Revolted, Brett had left them to whatever might come. He had been killed in Dong Ho province in 1965, the year when Jack Torrance, undergraduate, had joined the active college agitation to end the war.
He had waved his brother"s b.l.o.o.d.y shirt at rallies that were increasingly well attended, but it was not Brett"s face that hung before his eyes when he spoke-it was the face of his mother, a dazed, uncomprehending face, his mother saying: "Who"s got the newspaper?" Mike escaped three years later when Jack was twelve-he went to UNH on a hefty Merit Scholarship. A year after that their father died of a sudden, ma.s.sive stroke which occurred while he was prepping a patient for surgery. He had collapsed in his flapping and untucked hospital whites, dead possibly even before he hit the industrial black-and-red hospital tiles, and three days later the man who had dominated Jacky"s life, the irrational white ghost-G.o.d, was under ground.
The stone read Mark Anthony Torrance, Loving Father. To that Jack would have added one line: He Knew How to Play Elevator.
There had been a great lot of insurance money. There are people who collect insurance as compulsively as others collect coins and stamps, and Mark Torrance had been that type. The insurance money came in at the same time the monthly policy payments and liquor bills stopped. For five years they had been rich.
Nearly rich...
In his shallow, uneasy sleep his face rose before him as if in a gla.s.s, his face but not his face, the wide eyes and innocent bowed mouth of a boy sitting in the ball with his trucks, waiting for his daddy, waiting for the white ghost- G.o.d, waiting for the elevator to rise up with dizzying, exhilarating speed through the salt-and-sawdust mist of exhaled taverns, waiting perhaps for it to go crashing down, spilling old clocksprings out of his ears while his daddy roared with laughter, and it (transformed into Danny"s face, so much like his own had been, his eyes had been light blue while Danny"s were cloudy gray, but the lips still made a bow and the complexion was fair; Danny in his study, wearing training pants, all his papers soggy and the fine misty smell of beer rising... a dreadful batter all in ferment, rising on the wings of yeast, the breath of taverns... snap of bone... his own voice, mewling drunkenly Danny, you okay doc?... Oh G.o.d oh G.o.d your poor sweet arm... and that face transformed into) (momma"s dazed face rising up from below the table, punched and bleeding, and momma was saying) ("-from your father. I repeat, an enormously important announcement from your father. Please stay tuned or tune immediately to the Happy Jack frequency.
Repeat, tune immediately to the Happy Hour frequency. I repeat-") A slow dissolve. Disembodied voices echoing up to him as if along an endless, cloudy hallway.
(Things keep getting in the way, dear Tommy...) (Medoc, are you here? I"ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. It"s the inhuman monsters that I fear...) ("Excuse me, Mr. Ullman, but isn"t this the...")... office, with its file cabinets, Ullman"s big desk, a blank reservations book for next year already in place-never misses a trick, that Ullman-all the keys hanging neatly on their hooks (except for one, which one, which key, pa.s.skey-pa.s.skey, pa.s.skey, who"s got the pa.s.skey? if we went upstairs perhaps we"d see) and the big two-way radio on its shelf.
He snapped it on. CB transmissions coming in short, crackly bursts. He switched the band and dialed across bursts of music, news, a preacher haranguing a softly moaning congregation, a weather report. And another voice which he dialed back to. It was his father"s voice.
"-kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they"ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. Right this minute that boy of yours is in where he shouldn"t be. Trespa.s.sing. That"s what he"s doing. He"s a G.o.ddam little pup. Cane him for it, Jacky, cane him within an inch of his life. Have a drink Jacky my boy, and we"ll play the elevator game.
Then I"ll go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it, of course you can. You must kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too.
Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man-" His father"s voice, going up higher and higher, becoming something maddening, not human at all, something squealing and petulant and maddening, the voice of the Ghost-G.o.d, the Pig-G.o.d, coming dead at him out of the radio and"No!" he screamed back. "You"re dead, you"re in your grave, you"re not in me at all!" Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died.