"Of course not," Wendy said hotly. "Jack didn't mean—"
"No, Wendy," Jack said. "I meant to do it. I guess someplace inside I really did mean to do that to him. Or something even worse." He looked back at Edmonds again. "You know something, Doctor? This is the first time the word divorce has been mentioned between us. And alcoholism. And child-beating. Three firsts in five minutes."
"That may be at the root of the problem," Edmonds said. "I am not a psychiatrist. If you want Danny to see a child psychiatrist, I can recommend a good one who works out of the Mission Ridge Medical Center in Boulder. But I am fairly confident of my diagnosis. Danny is an intelligent, imaginative, perceptive boy. I don't believe he would have been as upset by your marital problems as you believed. Small children are great accepters. They don't understand shame, or the need to hide things." Jack was studying his hands. Wendy took one of them and squeezed it.
"But he sensed the things that were wrong. Chief among them from his point of view was not the broken arm but the broken—or breaking—link between you two.
He mentioned divorce to me, but not the broken arm. When my nurse mentioned the set to him, he simply shrugged if off. It was no pressure thing. `It happened a long time ago' is what I think he said."
"That kid," Jack muttered. His jaws were clamped together, the muscles in the cheeks standing out. "We don't deserve him."
"You have him, all the same," Edmonds said dryly. "At any rate, he retires into a fantasy world from time to time. Nothing unusual about that; lots of kids do. As I recall, I had my own invisible friend when I was Danny's age, a talking rooster named Chug-Chug. Of course no one could see Chug-Chug but me. I had two older brothers who often left me behind, and in such a situation Chug-Chug came in mighty handy. And of course you two must understand why Danny's invisible friend is named Tony instead of Mike or Hal or Dutch."
"Yes," Wendy said.
"Have you ever pointed it out to him?"
"No," Jack said. "Should we?"
"Why bother? Let him realize it in his own time, by his own logic. You see, Danny's fantasies were considerably deeper than those that grow around the ordinary invisible friend syndrome, but he felt he needed Tony that much more.
Tony would come and show him pleasant things. Sometimes amazing things. Always good things. Once Tony showed him where Daddy's lost trunk was . . . under the stairs. Another time Tony showed him that Mommy and Daddy were going to take him to an amusement park for his birthday—"
"At Great Barrington!" Wendy cried. "But how could he know those things? It's eerie, the things he comes out with sometimes. Almost as if—"
"He had second sight?" Edmonds asked, smiling.
"He was born with a caul," Wendy said weakly.
Edmonds's smile became a good, hearty laugh. Jack and Wendy exchanged a glance and then also smiled, both of them amazed at how easy it was. Danny's occasional
"lucky guesses" about things was something else they had not discussed much.
"Next you'll be telling me he can levitate," Edmonds said, still smiling. "No, no, no, I'm afraid not. It's not extrasensory but good old human perception, which in Danny's case is unusually keen. Mr. Torrance, he knew your trunk was under the stairs because you had looked everywhere else. Process of elimination, what? It's so simple Ellery Queen would laugh at it. Sooner or later you would have thought of it yourself.
"As for the amusement park at Great Barrington, whose idea was that originally? Yours or his?"
"His, of course," Wendy said. "They advertised on all the morning children's programs. He was wild to go. But the thing is, Doctor, we couldn't afford to take him. And we had told him so."
"Then a men's magazine I'd sold a story to back in 1971 sent a check for fifty dollars," Jack said. "They were reprinting the story in an annual, or something.
So we decided to spend it on Danny." Edmonds shrugged. "Wish fulfillment plus a lucky coincidence."
"Goddammit, I bet that's just right," Jack said.
Edmonds smiled a little. "And Danny himself told me that Tony often showed him things that never occurred. Visions based on faulty perception, that's all.
Danny is doing subconsciously what these so-called mystics and mind readers do quite consciously and cynically. I admire him for it. If life doesn't cause him to retract his antennae, I think he'll be quite a man." Wendy nodded—of course she thought Danny would be quite a man—but the doctor's explanation struck her as glib. It tasted more like margarine than butter. Edmonds had not lived with them. He had not been there when Danny found lost buttons, told her that maybe the TV Guide was under the bed, that he thought he better wear his rubbers to nursery school even though the sun was out . . . and later that day they had walked home under her umbrella through the pouringrain. Edmonds couldn't know of the curious way Danny had of preguessing them both. She would decide to have an unusual evening cup of tea, go out in the kitchen and find her cup out with a tea bag in it. She would remember that the books were due at the library and find them all neatly piled up on the hall table, her library card on top. Or Jack would take it into his head to wax the Volkswagen and find Danny already out there, listening to tinny top-forty music on his crystal radio as he sat on the curb to watch.
Aloud she said, "Then why the nightmares now? Why did Tony tell him to lock the bathroom door?"
"I believe it's because Tony has outlived his usefulness," Edmonds said. "He was born—Tony, not Danny—at a time when you and your husband were straining to keep your marriage together. Your husband was drinking too much. There was the incident of the broken arm. The ominous quiet between you." Ominous quiet, yes, that phrase was the real thing, anyway. The stiff, tense meals where the only conversation had been please pass the butter or Danny, eat the rest of your carrots or may I be excused, please. The nights when Jack was gone and she had lain down, dry-eyed, on the couch while Danny watched TV. The mornings when she and Jack had stalked around each other like two angry cats with a quivering, frightened mouse between them. It all rang true; (dear God, do old scars ever stop hurting?) horribly, horribly true.
Edmonds resumed, "But things have changed. You know, schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics. They have invisible friends. They may go and sit in the closet when they're depressed, withdrawing from the world.
They attach talismanic importance to a special blanket, or a teddy bear, or a stuffed tiger. They suck their thumbs. When an adult sees things that aren't there, we consider him ready for the rubber room. When a child says he's seen a troll in his bedroom or a vampire outside the window, we simply smile indulgently. We have a one-sentence explanation that explains the whole range of such phenomena in children—"
"He'll grow out of it," Jack said.
Edmonds blinked. "My very words," he said. "Yes. Now I would guess that Danny was in a pretty good position to develop a full-fledged psychosis. Unhappy home life, a big imagination, the invisible friend who was so real to him that he nearly became real to you. Instead of `growing out of' is childhood schizophrenia, he might well have grown into it."
"And become autistic?" Wendy asked. She had read about autism. The word itself frightened her; it sounded like dread and white silence.
"Possible but not necessarily. He might simply have entered Tony's world someday and never come back to what he calls `real things.' "
"God," Jack said.
"But now the basic situation has changed drastically. Mr. Torrance no longer drinks. You are in a new place where conditions have forced the three of you into a tighter family unit than ever before—-certainly tighter than my own, where my wife and kids may see me for only two or three hours a day. To my mind, he is in the perfect healing situation. And I think the very fact that he is able to differentiate so sharply between Tony's world and `real things' says a lot about the fundamentally healthy state of his mind. He says that you two are no longer considering divorce. Is he as right as I think he is?"
"Yes," Wendy said, and Jack squeezed her hand tightly, almost painfully. She squeezed back.
Edmonds nodded. "He really doesn't need Tony anymore. Danny is flushing him out of his system. Tony no longer brings pleasant visions but hostile nightmares that are too frightening for him to remember except fragmentarily. He internalized Tony during a difficult—desperate—life situation, and Tony is not leaving easily. But he is leaving. Your son is a little like a junkie kicking the habit." He stood up, and the Torrances stood also.
"As I said, I'm not a psychiatrist. If the nightmares are still continuing when your job at the Overlook ends next spring, Mr. Torrance, I would strongly urge you to take him to this man in Boulder."
"I will."
"Well, let's go out and tell him he can go home," Edmonds said.
"I want to thank you," Jack told him painfully. "I feel better about all this than I have in a very long time."
"So do I," Wendy said.
At the door, Edmonds paused and looked at Wendy. "Do you or did you have a sister, Mrs. Torrance? Named Aileen?" Wendy looked at him, surprised. "Yes, I did. She was killed outside our home in Somersworth, New Hampshire, when she was six and I was ten. She chased a ball into the street and was struck by a delivery van."
"Does Danny know that?"
"I don't know. I don't think so."
"He says you were thinking about her in the waiting room."
"I was," Wendy said slowly. "For the first time in . . . oh, I don't know how long."
"Does the word 'redrum' mean anything to either of you?" Wendy shook her head but Jack said, "He mentioned that word last night, just before he went to sleep. Red drum."
"No, rum," Edmonds corrected. "He was quite emphatic about that. Rum. As in the drink. The alcoholic drink."
"Oh," Jack said. "It fits in, doesn't it?" He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his lips with it.
"Does the phrase `the shining' mean anything to you?" This time they both shook their heads.
"Doesn't matter, I guess," Edmonds said. He opened the door into the waiting room. "Anybody here named Danny Torrance that would like to go home?"
"Hi, Daddy! Hi, Mommy!" He stood up from the small table where he had been leafing slowly through a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and muttering the words he knew aloud.
He ran to Jack, who scooped him up. Wendy ruffled his hair.
Edmonds peered at him. "If you don't love your mommy and daddy, you can stay with good old Bill."
"No, sir!" Danny said emphatically. He slung one arm around Jack's neck, one arm around Wendy's, and looked radiantly happy.
"Okay," Edmonds said, smiling. He looked at Wendy. "You call if you have any problems."
"Yes."
"I don't think you will," Edmonds said, smiling.
<< 18 >>
THE SCRAPBOOK
Jack found the scrapbook on the first of November, while his wife and son were hiking up the rutted old road that ran from behind the roque court to a deserted sawmill two miles further up. The fine weather still held, and all three of them had acquired improbable autumn suntans.
He had gone down in the basement to knock the press down on the boiler and then, on impulse, he had taken the flashlight from the shelf where the plumbing schematics were and decided to look at some of the old papers. He was also looking for good places to set his traps, although he didn't plan to do that for another month-I want them all to be home from vacation, he had told Wendy.
Shining the flashlight ahead of him, he stepped past the elevator shaft (at Wendy's insistence they hadn't used the elevator since they moved in) and through the small stone arch. His nose wrinkled at the smell of rotting paper.
Behind him the boiler kicked on with a thundering whoosh, making him jump.
He flickered the light around, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. There was a scale-model Andes range down here: dozens of boxes and crates stuffed with papers, most of them white and shapeless with age and damp. Others had broken open and spilled yellowed sheaves of paper onto the stone floor. There were bales of newspaper tied up with hayrope. Some boxes contained what looked like ledgers, and others contained invoices bound with rubber bands. Jack pulled one out and put the flashlight beam on it.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN EXPRESS, INC.
To: OVERLOOK HOTEL From: SIDEY'S WAREHOUSE, 1210 16th Street, Denver, CO.
Via: CANDIAN PACIFIC RR Contents: 400 CASES DELSEY TOILET TISSUE, 1 GROSS/CASE Signed D E F Date August 24, 1954
Smiling, Jack let the paper drop back into the box.
He flashed the light above it and it speared a hanging lightbulb, almost buried in cobwebs. There was no chain pull.
He stood on tiptoe and tried screwing the bulb in. It lit weakly. He picked up the toilet-paper invoice again and used it to wipe off some of the cobwebs. The glow didn't brighten much.
Still using the flashlight, he wandered through the boxes and bales of paper, looking for rat spoor. They had been here, but not for quite a long time . . .
maybe years. He found some droppings that were powdery with age, and several nests of neatly shredded paper that were old and unused.
Jack pulled a newspaper from one of the bundles and glanced down at the headline.
JOHNSON PROMISES ORDERLY TRANSITION Says Work Begun by JFK Will Go Forward in Coming Year
The paper was the Rocky Mountain News, dated December 19, 1963. He dropped it back onto its pile.
He supposed he was fascinated by that commonplace sense of history that anyone can feel glancing through the fresh news of ten or twenty years ago. He found gaps in the piled newspapers and records; nothing from 1937 to 1945, from 1957 to 1960, from 1962 to 1963. Periods when the hotel had been closed, he guessed.
