The Shining by Stephen King, 1977 18 страница

(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 brass 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 prick. 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 brass, 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 glass buttons 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 passkey 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-glass 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

glass. 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, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was

grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her

breasts 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 breasts 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 knob 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 Dick 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 balls. His

shoulders hunched with the effort of his concentration:

(Nothing there nothing there not there at all NOTHING

THERE THERE IS NOTHING!)

Time passed. 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

Snowbound

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 longterm

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 damned close to some kind of

breakdown, and he was convinced that it was his mind in revolt

against Al's high-goddam-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

association 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 title 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 bloody), 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 flattopped

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 passing 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 knob 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. Goddam 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: "Damn little puppy.

Damn little whelp. Give me my cane, you damn 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

glasses 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 bloody

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, massive 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-god, 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 glass, 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 ghostgod,

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 God oh God 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, passkey-passkey,

passkey, who's got the passkey? 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.

Trespassing. That's what he's doing. He's a goddam 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-God, the Pig-

God, 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.

He raised the radio up and brought it down, and it smashed on

the floor spilling old clocksprings and tubes like the result

of some crazy elevator game gone awry, making his father's

voice gone, leaving only his voice, Jack's voice, Jacky's

voice, chanting in the cold reality of the office:

"-dead, you're dead, you're dead!"

And the startled sound of Wendy's feet hitting the floor over

his head, and Wendy's startled, frightened voice: "Jack?

Jack!"

He stood, blinking down at the shattered radio. Now there was

only the snowmobile in the equipment shed to link them to the

outside world.

He put his hands over his eyes and clutched at his temples.

He was getting a headache.

CATATONIC

Wendy ran down the hall in her stocking feet and ran down the

main stairs to the lobby two at a time. She didn't look up at

the carpeted flight that led to the second floor, but if she

had, she would have seen Danny standing at the top of them,

still and silent, his unfocused eyes directed out into

indifferent space, his thumb in his mouth, the collar and

shoulders of his shirt damp. There were puffy bruises on his

neck and just below his chin.

Jack's cries had ceased, but that did nothing to ease her

fear. Ripped out of her sleep by his voice, raised in that old

hectoring pitch she remembered so well, she still felt that

she was dreaming-but another part knew she was awake, and that

terrified her more. She half-expected to burst into the office

and find him standing over Danny's sprawled-out body, drunk

and confused.

She pushed through the door and Jack was standing there,

rubbing at his temples with his fingers. His face was

ghostwhite. The two-way CB radio lay at his feet in a

sprinkling of broken glass.

"Wendy?" he asked uncertainly. "Wendy-?"

The bewilderment seemed to grow and for a moment she saw his

true face, the one he ordinarily kept so well hidden, and it

was a face of desperate unhappiness, the face of an animal

caught in a snare beyond its ability to decipher and render

harmless. Then the muscles began to work, began to writhe

under the skin, the mouth began to tremble infirmly, the

Adam's apple began to rise and fall.

Her own bewilderment and surprise were overlaid by shock: he

was going to cry. She had seen him cry before, but never since

he stopped drinking... and never in those days unless he was

very drunk and pathetically remorseful. He was a tight man,

drum-tight, and his loss of control frightened her all over

again.

He came toward her, the tears brimming over his lower lids

now, his head shaking involuntarily as if in a fruitless

effort to ward off this emotional storm, and his chest drew in

a convulsive gasp that was expelled in a huge, racking sob.

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