ears?
He fumbled at the passkey. It seemed sludgy, unwilling to
turn in the lock. He attacked the passkey. The tumblers
suddenly fell and he stepped back against the corridor's far
wall, a little groan of relief escaping him. He closed his
eyes and all the old phrases began to parade through his mind,
it seemed there must be hundreds of them,
(cracking up not playing with a full deck lostya marbles guy
just went loony tunes he went up and over the high side went
bananas lost his football crackers nuts half a seabag)
all meaning the same thing: losing your mind.
"No," he whimpered, hardly aware that he had been reduced to
this, whimpering with his eyes shut like a child. "Oh no, God.
Please, God, no."
But below the tumble of his chaotic thoughts, below the
triphammer beat of his heart, he could hear the soft and
futile sound of the doorknob being turned to and fro as
something locked in tried helplessly to get out, something
that wanted to meet him, something that would like to be
introduced to his family as the storm shrieked around them and
white daylight became black night. If he opened his eyes and
saw that doorknob moving he would go mad. So he kept them
shut, and after an unknowable time, there was stillness.
Jack forced himself to open his eyes, half-convinced that
when he did, she would be standing before him. But the hall
was empty.
He felt watched just the same.
He looked at the peephole in the center of the door and
wondered what would happen if he approached it, stared into
ft. What would he be eyeball to eyeball with?
His feet were moving
(feets don't fail me now)
before he realized it. He turned them away from the door and
walked down to the main hall, his feet whispering on the blue-
black jungle carpet. He stopped halfway to the stairs and
looked at the fire extinguisher. He thought that the folds of
canvas were arranged in a slightly different manner. And he
was quite sure that the brass nozzle had been pointing toward
the elevator when he came up the hall. Now it was pointing the
other way.
"I didn't see that at all," Jack Torrance said quite clearly.
His face was white and haggard and his mouth kept trying to
grin.
But he didn't take the elevator back down. It was too much
like an open mouth. Too much by half. He took the stairs.
THE VERDICT
He stepped into the kitchen and looked at them, bouncing the
passkey a few inches up off his left hand, making the chain on
the white metal tongue jingle, then catching it again. Danny
was pallid and worn out. Wendy had been crying, he saw; her
eyes were red and darkly circled. He felt a sudden burst of
gladness at this. He wasn't suffering alone, that was sure.
They looked at him without speaking.
"Nothing there," he said, astounded by the heartiness of his
voice. "Not a thing."
He bounced the passkey up and down, up and down, smiling
reassuringly at them, watching the relief spread over their
faces, and thought he had never in his life wanted a drink so
badly as he did right now.
THE BEDROOM
Late that afternoon Jack got a cot from the first-floor
storage room and put it in the corner of their bedroom. Wendy
had expected that the boy would be half the night getting to
sleep, but Danny was nodding before "The Waltons" was half
over, and fifteen minutes after they had tucked biro in he was
far down in sleep, moveless, one band tucked under his cheek.
Wendy sat watching him, holding her place in a fat paperback
copy of Cashelmara with one finger. Jack sat at his desk,
looking at his play.
"Oh shit," Jack said.
Wendy looked up from her contemplation of Danny. "What?"
"Nothing."
He looked down at the play with smoldering ill-temper. How
could he have thought it was good? It was puerile. It had been
done a thousand times. Worse, he had no idea how to finish it.
Once it had seemed simple enough. Denker, in a fit of rage,
seizes the poker from beside the fireplace and beats saintly
Gary to death. Then, standing spread-legged over the body, the
bloody poker in one hand, he screams at the audience: "It's
here somewhere and I will find it!" Then, as the lights dim
and the curtain is slowly drawn, the audience sees Gary's body
face down on the forestage as Denker strides to the upstage
bookcase and feverishly begins pulling books from the shelves,
looking at them, throwing them aside. He bad thought it was
something old enough to be new, a play whose novelty alone
might be enough to see it through a successful Broadway run: a
tragedy in five acts.
But, in addition to his sudden diversion of interest to the
Overlooks history, something else had happened. He had
developed opposing feelings about his characters. This was
something quite new. Ordinarily he liked all of his
characters, the good and the bad. He was glad he did. It
allowed him to try to see all of their sides and understand
their motivations more clearly. His favorite story, sold to a
small southern Maine magazine called Contraband for copies,
had been a piece called "The Monkey Is Here, Paul DeLong." It
had been about a child molester about to commit suicide in his
furnished room. The child molester's name had been Paul
DeLong, Monkey to his friends. Jack had liked Monkey very
much. He sympathized with Monkey's bizarre needs. knowing that
Monkey was not the only one to blame for the three rape-
murders in his past. There had been bad parents, the father a
beater as his own father had been, the mother a limp and
silent dishrag as his mother had been. A homosexual experience
in grammar school. Public humiliation. Worse experiences in
high school and college. He had been arrested and sent to an
institution after exposing himself to a pair of little girls
getting off a school bus. Worst of all, he had been dismissed
from the institution, let back out onto the streets, because
the man in charge had decided he was all right. This man's
name had been Grimmer. Grimmer had known that Monkey DeLong
was exhibiting deviant symptoms, but he had written the good,
hopeful report and had let him go anyway. Jack liked and
sympathized with Grimmer, too. Grimmer had to run an
understaffed and underfunded institution and try to keep the
whole thing together with spit, baling wire, and nickle-and-
dime appropriations from a state legislature who had to go
back and face the voters. Grimmer knew that Monkey could
interact with other people, that he did not soil his pants or
try to stab his fellow inmates with the scissors. He did not
think he was Napoleon. The staff psychiatrist in charge of
Monkey's case thought there was a better-than-even chance that
Monkey could make it on the street, and they both knew that
the longer a man is in an institution the more he comes to
need that closed environment, like a junkie with his smack.
And meanwhile, people were knocking down the doors. Paranoids,
schizoids, cycloids, semicatatonics, men who claimed to have
gone to heaven in flying saucers, women who had burned their
children's sex organs off with Bic lighters, alcoholics,
pyromaniacs, kleptomaniacs, manic-depressives, suicidals.
Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly,
you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.
Jack could sympathize with Grimmer's problem. He could
sympathize with the parents of the murder victims. With the
murdered children themselves, of course. And with Monkey
DeLong. Let the reader lay blame. In those days he hadn't
wanted to judge. The cloak of the moralist sat badly on his
shoulders.
He had started The Little School in the same optimistic vein.
But lately he had begun to choose up sides, and worse still,
he had come to loathe his hero, Gary Benson. Originally
conceived as a bright boy more cursed with money than blessed
with it, a boy who wanted more than anything to compile a good
record so he could go to a good university because he had
earned admission and not because his father had pulled
strings, he had become to Jack a kind of simpering Goody Two-
shoes, a postulant before the altar of knowledge rather than a
sincere acolyte, an outward paragon of Boy Scout virtues,
inwardly cynical, filled not with real brilliance (as he had
first been conceived) but only with sly animal cunning. All
through the play he unfailingly addressed Denker as "sir,"
just as Jack had taught his own son to address those older and
those in authority as "sir." He thought that Danny used the
word quite sincerely, and Gary Benson as originally conceived
had too, but as he had begun Act V, it had come more and more
strongly to him that Gary was using the word satirically,
outwardly straight-faced while the Gary Benson inside was
mugging and leering at Denker. Denker, who had never had any
of the things Gary had. Denker, who had had to work all his
life just to become head of a single little school. Who was
now faced with ruin over this handsome, innocent-seeming rich
boy who had cheated on his Final Composition and had then
cunningly covered his tracks. Jack had seen Denker the teacher
as not much different from the strutting South American little
Caesars in their banana kingdoms, standing dissidents up
against the wall of the handiest squash or handball court, a
super-zealot in a comparatively small puddle, a man whose
every whim becomes a crusade. In the beginning he had wanted
to use his play as a microcosm to say something about the
abuse of power. Now he tended more and more to see Denker as a
Mr. Chips figure, and the tragedy was not the intellectual
racking of Gary Benson but rather the destruction of a kindly
old teacher and headmaster unable to see through the cynical
wiles of this monster masquerading as a boy.
He hadn't been able to finish the play.
Now he sat looking down at it, scowling, wondering if there
was any way he could salvage the situation. He didn't really
think there was. He bad begun with one play and it had somehow
turned into another, presto-chango. Well, what the hell.
Either way it had been done before. Either way it was a load
of shit. And why was he driving himself crazy about it tonight
anyway? After the day just gone by it was no wonder he
couldn't think straight.
"-get him down?"
He looked up, trying to blink the cobwebs away. "Huh?"
"I said, how are we going to get him down? We've got to get
him out of here, Jack."
For a moment his wits were so scattered that he wasn't even
sure what she was talking about. Then he realized and uttered
a short, barking laugh.
"You say that as if it were so easy."
"I didn't mean-"
"No problem, Wendy. I'll just change clothes in that
telephone booth down in the lobby and fly him to Denver on my
back. Superman Jack Torrance, they called me in my salad
days."
Her face registered slow hurt.
"I understand the problem, Jack. The radio is broken. The
snow... but you have to understand Danny's problem. My God,
don't you? He was nearly catatonic, Jack! What if he hadn't
come out of that?"
"But he did," Jack said, a trifle shortly. He had been
frightened at Danny's blank-eyed, slack-faced state too, of
course he had. At first. But the more he thought about it, the
more he wondered if it hadn't been a piece of play-acting put
on to escape his punishment. He had, after all, been
trespassing.
"All the same," she said. She came to him and sat on the end
of the bed by his desk. Her face was both surprised and
worried. "Jack, the bruises on his neck! Something got at him!
And I want him away from it!"
"Don't shout," he said. "My head aches, Wendy. I'm as worried
about this as you are, so please... don't... shout."
"All right," she said, lowering her voice. "I won't shout.
But I don't understand you, Jack. Someone is in here with us.
And not a very nice someone, either. We have to get down to
Sidewinder, not just Danny but all of us. Quickly. And you...
you're sitting there reading your play!"
" 'We have to get down, we have to get down,' you keep saying
that. You must think I really am Superman."
"I think you're my husband," she said softly, and looked down
at her hands.
His temper flared. He slammed the playscript down, knocking
the edges of the pile out of true again and crumpling the
sheets on the bottom.
"It's time you got some of the home truths into you, Wendy.
You don't seem to have internalized them, as the sociologists
say. They're knocking around up in your head like a bunch of
loose cueballs. You need to shoot them into the pockets. You
need to understand that we are snowed in."
Danny had suddenly become active in his bed. Still sleeping,
he had begun to twist and turn. The way he always did when we
fought, Wendy thought dismally. And we're doing it again.
"Don't wake him up, Jack. Please."
He glanced over at Danny and some of the flush went out of
his cheeks. "Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I sounded mad, Wendy.
It's not really for you. But I broke the radio. If it's
anybody's fault it's mine. That was our big link to the
outside. Olly-oily-in-for-free. Please come get us, Mister
Ranger. We can't stay out this late."
"Don't," she said, and put a hand on his shoulder. He leaned
his head against it. She brushed his hair with her other hand.
"I guess you've got a right, after what I accused you of.
Sometimes I am like my mother. I can be a bitch. But you have
to understand that some things... are hard to get over. You
have to understand that."
"Do you mean his arm?" His lips had thinned.
"Yes," Wendy said, and then she rushed on: "But it's not just
you. I worry when he goes out to play. I worry about him
wanting a two-wheeler next year, even one with training
wheels. I worry about his teeth and his eyesight and about
this thing, what he calls his shine. I worry. Because he's
little and he seems very fragile and because... because
something in this hotel seems to want him. And it will go
through us to get him if it has to. That's why we must get him
out, Jack. I know that! I feel that! We must get him out!"
Her hand had tightened painfully on his shoulder in her
agitation, but he didn't move away. One hand found the firm
weight of her left breast and he began to stroke it through
her shirt.
"Wendy," he said, and stopped. She waited for him to
rearrange whatever he had to say. His strong hand on her
breast felt good, soothing. "I could maybe snowshoe him down.
He could walk part of the way himself, but I would mostly have
to carry him. It would mean camping out one, two, maybe three
nights. That would mean building a travois to carry supplies
and bedrolls on. We have the AM/FM radio, so we could pick a
day when the weather forecast called for a three-day spell of
good weather. But if the forecast was wrong," he finished, his
voice soft and measured, "I think we might die."
Her face had paled. It looked shiny, almost ghostly. He
continued to stroke her breast, rubbing the ball of his thumb
gently over the nipple.
She made a soft sound-from his words or in reaction to his
gentle pressure on her breast, he couldn't tell. He raised his
hand slightly and undid the top button of her shirt. Wendy
shifted her legs slightly. All at once her jeans seemed too
tight, slightly irritating in a pleasant sort of way.
"It would mean leaving you alone because you can't snowshoe
worth beans. It would be maybe three days of not knowing.
Would you want that?" His hand dropped to the second button,
slipped it, and the beginning of her cleavage was exposed.
"No," she said in a voice that was slightly thick. She
glanced over at Danny. He had stopped twisting and turning.
His thumb had crept back into his mouth. So that was all
right. But Jack was leaving something out of the picture. It
was too bleak. There was something else... what?
"If we stay put," Jack said, unbuttoning the third and fourth
buttons with that same deliberate slowness, "a ranger from the
park or a game warden is going to poke in here just to find
out how we're doing. At that point we simply tell him we want
down. He'll see to it." He slipped her naked breasts into the
wide V of the open shirt, bent, and molded his lips around the
stem of a nipple. It was hard and erect. He slipped his tongue
slowly back and forth across it in a way he knew she liked.
Wendy moaned a little and arched her back.
(?Something I've forgotten?)
"Honey?" she asked. On their own her hands sought the back of
his head so that when he answered his voice was muffled
against her flesh.
"How would the ranger take us out?"
He raised his head slightly to answer and then settled his
mouth against the other nipple.
"If the helicopter was spoken for I guess it would have to be
by snowmobile."
(!!!)
"But we have one of those! Ullman said so!"
His mouth froze against her breast for a moment, and then he
sat up. Her own face was slightly flushed, her eyes
overbright. Jack's on the other hand, was calm, as if he had
been reading a rather dull book instead of engaging in
foreplay with his wife.
"If there's a snowmobile there's no problem," she said
excitedly. "We can all three go down together."
"Wendy, I've never driven a snowmobile in my life."
"It can't be that hard to learn. Back in Vermont you see ten-
year-olds driving them in the fields... although what their
parents can be thinking of I don't know. And you had a
motorcycle when we met." He had, a Honda 350cc. He had traded
it in on a Saab shortly after he and Wendy took up residence
together.
"I suppose I could," he said slowly. "But I wonder how well
it's been maintained. Ullman and Watson... they run this place
from May to October. They have summertime minds. I know it
won't have gas in it. There may not be plugs or a battery,
either. I don't want you to get your hopes up over your head,
Wendy."
She was totally excited now, leaning over him, her breasts
tumbling out of her shirt. He had a sudden impulse to seize
one and twist it until she shrieked. Maybe that would teach
her to shut up.
"The gas is no problem," she said. "The VW` and the hotel
truck are both full. There's gas for the emergency generator
downstairs, too. And there must be a gascan out in that shed
so you could carry extra."
"Yes," he said. "There is" Actually there were three of them,
two five-gallons and a two-gallon.
"I'll bet the sparkplugs and the battery are out there too.
Nobody would store their snowmobile in one place and the plugs
and battery someplace else, would they?"
"Doesn't seem likely, does it?" He got up and walked over to
where Danny lay sleeping. A spill of hair had fallen across
his forehead and Jack brushed it away gently. Danny didn't
stir.
"And if you can get it running you'll take us out?" she asked
from behind him. "On the first day the radio says good
weather?"
For a moment he didn't answer. He stood looking down at his
son, and his mixed feelings dissolved in a wave of love. He
was the way she had said, vulnerable, fragile. The marks on
his neck were very prominent.
"Yes," he said. "I'll get it running and we'll get out as
quick as we can."
"Thank God!"
He turned around. She had taken off her shirt and lay on the
bed, her belly flat, her breasts aimed perkily at the ceiling.
She was playing with them lazily, flicking at the nipples.
"Hurry up, gentlemen," she said softly, "time."
* * *
After, with no light burning in the room but the night light
that Danny had brought with him from his room, she lay in the
crook of his arm, feeling deliciously at peace. She found it
hard to believe they could be sharing the Overlook with a
murderous stowaway.
"Jack?"
"Hmmmm?"
"What got at him?"
He didn't answer her directly. "He does have something. Some
talent the rest of us are missing. The most of us, beg pardon.
And maybe the Overlook has something, too."
"Ghosts?"
"I don't know. Not in the Algernon Blackwood sense, that's
for sure. More like the residues of the feelings of the people
who have stayed here. Good things and bad things. In that
sense, I suppose that every big hotel has got its ghosts.
Especially the old ones."
"But a dead woman in the tub... Jack, he's not losing his
mind, is he?"
He gave her a brief squeeze. "We know he goes into... well,
trances, for want of a better word... from time to time. We
know that when he's in them he sometimes... sees?... things he
doesn't understand. If precognitive trances are possible,
they're probably functions of the subconscious mind. Freud
said that the subconscious never speaks to us in literal
language. Only in symbols. If you dream about being in a
bakery where no one speaks English, you may be worried about
your ability to support your family. Or maybe just that no one
understands you. I've read that the falling dream is a
standard outlet for feelings of insecurity. Games, little
games. Conscious on one side of the net, subconscious on the
other, serving some cockamamie image back and forth. Same with
mental illness, with hunches, all of that. Why should
precognition be any different? Maybe Danny really did see
blood all over the walls of the Presidential Suite. To a kid
his age, the image of blood and the concept of death are
nearly interchangeable. To kids, the image is always more
accessible than the concept, anyway. William Carlos Williams
knew that, he was a pediatrician. When we grow up, concepts
gradually get easier and we leave the images to the poets...
and I'm just rambling on."
"I like to hear you ramble."
"She said it, folks. She said it. You all heard it."
"The marks on his neck, Jack. Those are real."
"Yes."
There was nothing else for a long time. She had begun to
think he must have gone to sleep and she was slipping into a
drowse herself when he said:
"I can think of two explanations for those. And neither of
them involves a fourth party in the hotel."
"What?" She came up on one elbow.
"Stigmata, maybe," he said.
"Stigmata? Isn't that when people bleed on Good Friday or
something?"
"Yes. Sometimes people who believe deeply in Christ's
divinity exhibit bleeding marks on their hands and feet during
the Holy Week. It was more common in the Middle Ages than now.
In those days such people were considered blessed by God. I
don't think the Catholic Church proclaimed any of it as out-
and-out miracles, which was pretty smart of them. Stigmata
isn't much different from some of the things the yogis can do.
It's better understood now, that's all. The people who
understand the interaction between the mind and the body-study
it, I mean, no one understands it-believe we have a lot more
control over our involuntary functions than they used to
think. You can slow your heartbeat if you think about it
enough. Speed up your own metabolism. Make yourself sweat
more. Or make yourself bleed."
"You think Danny thought those bruises onto his neck? Jack, I
just can't believe that."
"I can believe it's possible, although it seems unlikely to
me, too. What's more likely is that he did it to himself."
"To himself?"
"He's gone into these 'trances' and hurt himself in the past.
Do you remember the time at the supper table? About two years
ago, I think. We were super-pissed at each other. Nobody
talking very much. Then, all at once, his eyes rolled up in
his head and he went face-first into his dinner. Then onto the
floor. Remember?"
"Yes," she said. "I sure do. I thought he was having a
convulsion."
"Another time we were in the park," he said. "Just Danny and
I. Saturday afternoon. He was sitting on a swing, coasting
back and forth. He collapsed onto the ground. It was like he'd
been shot. I ran over and picked him up and all of a sudden he
just came around. He sort of blinked at me and said, `I hurt
my tummy. Tell Mommy to close the bedroom windows if it rains.
' And that night it rained like hell."
"Yes, but-"
"And he's always coming in with cuts and scraped elbows. His
shins look like a battlefield in distress. And when you ask
him how he got this one or that one, he just says `Oh, I was
playing,' and that's the end of it."
"Jack, all kids get bumped and bruised up. With little boys
it's almost constant from the time they learn to walk until
they're twelve or thirteen."
"And I'm sure Danny gets his share," Jack responded. "He's an
active kid. But I remember that day in the park and that night
at the supper table. And I wonder if some of our kid's bumps
and bruises come from just keeling over. That Dr. Edmonds said
Danny did it right in his office, for Christ's sake!"
"All right. But those bruises were fingers. I'd swear to it.
He didn't get them falling down."
"He goes into a trance," Jack said. "Maybe he sees something
that happened in that room. An argument. Maybe a suicide.
Violent emotions. It isn't like watching a movie; he's in a
highly suggestible state. He's right in the damn thing. His
subconscious is maybe visualizing whatever happened in a
symbolic way... as a dead woman who's alive again, zombie,
undead, ghoul, you pick your term."
"You're giving me goose-bumps," she said thickly.
"I'm giving myself a few. I'm no psychiatrist, but it seems
to fit so well. The walking dead woman as a symbol for dead
emotions, dead lives, that just won't give up and go away...
but because she's a subconscious figure, she's also him. In
the trance state, the conscious Danny is submerged. The
subconscious figure is pulling the strings. So Danny put his
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