"What's that, doc?" Wendy asked.
He shook his head. "I don't know."
"Rum, like yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum?" Jack asked.
Danny shook his head again. "I don't know. Then we got here, and Mr. Hallorann talked to me in his car. Because he has the shine, too."
"Shine?"
"It's . . ." Danny made a sweeping, all-encompassing gesture with his hands.
"It's being able to understand things. To know things. Sometimes you see things.
Like me knowing Uncle Al called. And Mr. Hallorann knowing you call me doc. Mr.
Hallorann, he was peeling potatoes in the Army when he knew his brother got killed in a train crash. And when he called home it was true."
"Holy God," Jack whispered. "You're not making this up, are you, Dan?" Danny shook his head violently. "No, I swear to God." Then, with a touch of pride he added: "Mr. Hallorann said I had the best shine of anyone he ever met.
We could talk back and forth to each other without hardly opening our mouths." His parents looked at each other again, frankly stunned.
"Mr. Hallorann got me alone because he was worried," Danny went on. "He said this was a bad place for people who shine. He said he'd seen things. I saw something, too; Right after I talked to him. When Mr. Ullman was taking us around."
"What was it?" Jack asked.
"In the Presidential Sweet. On the wall by the door going into the bedroom. A whole lot of blood and some other stuff. Gushy stuff. I think . . . that the gushy stuff must have been brains."
"Oh my God," Jack said.
Wendy was now very pale, her lips nearly gray.
"This place," Jack said. "Some pretty bad types owned it awhile back.
Organization people from Las Vegas."
"Crooks?" Danny asked.
"Yeah, crooks." He looked at Wendy. "In 1966 a big-time hood named Vito Gienelli got killed up there, along with his two bodyguards. There was a picture in the newspaper. Danny just described the picture."
"Mr. Hallorann said he saw some other stuff," Danny told them. "Once about the playground. And once it was something bad in that room. 217. A maid saw it and lost her job because she talked about it. So Mr. Hallorann went up and he saw it too. But he didn't talk about it because he didn't want to lose his job. Except he told me never to go in there. But I did. Because I believed him when he said the things you saw here couldn't hurt you." This last was nearly whispered in a low, husky voice, and Danny touched the puffed circle of bruises on his neck.
"What about the playground?" Jack asked in a strange, casual voice.
"I don't know. The playground, he said. And the hedge animals." Jack jumped a little, and Wendy looked at him curiously.
"Have you seen anything down there, Jack?"
"No," he said. "Nothing." Danny was looking at him.
"Nothing," he said again, more calmly. And that was true. He had been the victim of an hallucination. And that was all.
"Danny, we have to hear about the woman," Wendy said gently.
So Danny told them, but his words came in cyclic bursts, sometimes almost verging on incomprehensible garble in his hurry to spit it out and be free of it. He pushed tighter and tighter against his mother's breasts as he talked.
"I went in," he said. "I stole the passkey and went in. It was like I couldn't help myself. I had to know. And she . . . the lady . . . was in the tub. She was dead. All swelled up. She was nuh-nuh . . . didn't have no clothes on." He looked miserably at his mother. "And she started to get up and she wanted me. I know she did because I could feel it. She wasn't even thinking, not the way you and Daddy think. It was black . . . it was hurt-think . . . like . . . like the wasps that night in my room! Only wanting to hurt. Like the wasps." He swallowed and there was silence for a moment, all quiet while the image of the wasps sank into them.
"So I ran," Danny said. "I ran but the door was closed. I left it open but it was closed. I didn't think about just opening it again and running out. I was scared. So I just . . . I leaned against the door and closed my eyes and thought of how Mr. Hallorann said the things here were just like pictures in a book and if I .. . . kept saying to myself . . . you're not there, go away, you're not there . . . she would go away. But it didn't work." His voice began to rise hysterically.
"She grabbed me . . . turned me around . . . I could see her eyes . . . how her eyes were . . . and she started to choke me . . . I could smell her . . . I could smell how dead she was. . s"
"Stop now, shhh," Wendy said, alarmed. "Stop, Danny. It's all right. It—" She was getting ready to go into her croon again. The Wendy Torrance All- purpose Croon. Pat. Pending.
"Let him finish," Jack said curtly.
"There isn't any more," Danny said. "I passed out. Either because she was choking me or just because I was scared. When I came to, I was dreaming you and Mommy were fighting over me and you wanted to do the Bad Thing again, Daddy.
Then I knew it wasn't a dream at all . . . and I was awake . . . and . . . I wet my pants. I wet my pants like a baby." His head fell back against Wendy's sweater and he began to cry with horrible weakness, his hands lying limp and spent in his lap.
Jack got up. "Take care of him."
"What are you going to do?" Her face was full of dread.
"I'm going up to that room, what did you think I was going to do? Have coffee?
"
"No! Don't, Jack, please don't!"
"Wendy, if there's someone else in the hotel, we have to know."
"Don't you dare leave us alone!" she shrieked at him. Spittle flew from her lips with the force of her cry.
Jack said: "Wendy, that's a remarkable imitation of your mom." She burst into tears then, unable to cover her face because Danny was on her lap.
"I'm sorry," Jack said. "But I have to, you know. I'm the goddam caretaker.
It's what I'm paid for." She only cried harder and he left her that way, going out of the kitchen, rubbing his mouth with his handkerchief as the door swung shut behind him.
"Don't worry, mommy," Danny said. "He'll be all right. He doesn't shine.
Nothing here can hurt him." Through her tears she said, "No, I don't believe that."
<< 30 >>
217 REVISITED
He took the elevator up and it was strange, because none of them had used the elevator since they moved in. He threw the brass handle over and it wheezed vibratoriously up the shaft, the brass grate rattling madly. Wendy had a true claustrophobe's horror of the elevator, he knew. She envisioned the three of them trapped in it between floors while the winter storms raged outside, she could see them growing thinner and weaker, starving to death. Or perhaps dining on each other, the way those Rugby players had. He remembered a bumper sticker he had seen in Boulder, RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR OWN DEAD. He could think of others. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. Or menu items. Welcome to the Overlook Dining Room, Pride of the Rockies. Eat in Splendor at the Roof of the World. Human Haunch Broiled Over Matches La Specialite de la Maison. The contemptuous smile flicked over his features again. As the number 2 rose on the shaft wall, he threw the brass handle back to the home position and the elevator car creaked to a stop. He took his Excedrin from his pocket, shook three of them into his hand, and opened the elevator door. Nothing in the Overlook frightened him. He felt that he and it were simpdtico.
He walked up the hall flipping his Excedrin into his mouth and chewing them one by one. He rounded the corner into the short corridor off the main hall. The door to Room 217 was ajar, and the passkey hung from the lock on its white paddle.
He frowned, feeling a wave of irritation and even real anger. Whatever had come of it, the boy had been trespassing. He had been told, and told bluntly, that certain areas of the hotel were off limits: the equipment shed, the basement, and all of the guest rooms. He would talk to Danny about that just as soon as the boy was over his fright. He would talk to him reasonably but sternly. There were plenty of fathers who would have done more than just talk.
They would have administered a good shaking, and perhaps that was what Danny needed. If the boy had gotten a scare, wasn't that at least his just deserts?
He walked down to the door, removed the passkey, dropped it into his pocket, and stepped inside. The overhead light was on. He glanced at the bed, saw it was not rumpled, and then walked directly across to the bathroom door. A curious certainty had grown in him. Although Watson had mentioned no names or room numbers, Jack felt sure that this was the room the lawyer's wife and her stud had shared, that this was the bathroom where she had been found dead, full of barbiturates and Colorado Lounge booze.
He pushed the mirror-backed bathroom door open and stepped through. The light in here was off. He turned it on and observed the long, Pullman-car room, furnished in the distinctive early nineteen-hundreds-remodeled-in-the-twenties style that seemed common to all Overlook bathrooms, except for the ones on the third floor-those were properly Byzantine, as befitted the royalty, politicians, movie stars, and capos who had stayed there over the years.
The shower curtain, a pallid pastel pink, was drawn protectively around the long claw-footed tub.
(nevertheless they did move) And for the first time he felt his new sense of sureness (almost cockiness) that had come over him when Danny ran to him shouting It was her! It was her!
deserting him. A chilled finger pressed gently against the base of his spine, cooling him off ten degrees. It was joined by others and they suddenly rippled all the way up his back to his medulla oblongata, playing his spine like a jungle instrument.
His anger at Danny evaporated, and as he stepped forward and pushed the shower curtain back his mouth was dry and he felt only sympathy for his son and terror for himself.
The tub was dry and empty.
Relief and irritation vented in a sudden "Pahl" sound that escaped his compressed lips like a very small explosive. The tub had been scrubbed clean at the end of the season; except for the rust stain under the twin faucets, it sparkled. There was a faint but definable smell of cleanser, the kind that can irritate your nose with the smell of its own righteousness for weeks, even months, after it has been used.
He bent down and ran his fingertips along the bottom of the tub. Dry as a bone. Not even a hint of moisture. The boy had been either hallucinating or outright lying. He felt angry again. That was when the bathmat on the floor caught his attention. He frowned down at it. What was a bathmat doing in here?
It should be down in the linen cupboard at the end of the wing with the rest of the sheets and towels and pillow slips. All the linen was supposed to be there.
Not even the beds were really made up in these guest rooms; the mattresses had been zipped into clear plastic and then covered with bedspreads. He supposed Danny might have gone down and gotten it—the passkey would open the linen cupboard—but why? He brushed the tips of his fingers back and forth across it.
The bathmat was bone dry.
He went back to the bathroom door and stood in it. Everything was all right.
The boy had been dreaming. There was not a thing out of place. It was a little puzzling about the bathmat, granted, but the logical explanation was that some chambermaid, hurrying like mad on the last day of the season, had just forgotten to pick it up. Other than that, everything was— His nostrils flared a little. Disinfectant, that self-righteous smell, cleaner-than-thou. And— Soap?
Surely not. But once the smell had been identified, it was too clear to dismiss. Soap. And not one of those postcard-size bars of Ivory they provide you with in hotels and motels, either. This scent was light and perfumed, a lady's soap. It had a pink sort of smell. Camay or Lowila, the brand that Wendy had always used in Stovington.
(It's nothing. It's your imagination.) (yes like the hedges nevertheless they did move) (They did not move!) He crossed jerkily to the door which gave on the hall, feeling the irregular thump of a headache beginning at his temples. Too much had happened today, too much by far. He wouldn't spank the boy or shake him, just talk to him, but by God, he wasn't going to add Room 217 to his problems. Not on the basis of a dry bathmat and a faint smell of Lowila soap. He— There was a sudden rattling, metallic sound behind him. It came just as his hand closed around the doorknob, and an observer might have thought the brushed steel of the knob carried an electric charge. He jerked convulsively, eyes widening, other facial features drawing in, grimacing.
Then he had control of himself, a little, anyway, and he let 90 of the doorknob and turned carefully around. His joints creaked. He began to walk back to the bathroom door, step by leaden step.
The shower curtain, which he had pushed back to look into the tub, was now drawn. The metallic rattle, which had sounded to him like a stir of bones in a crypt, had been the curtain rings on the overhead bar. Jack stared at the curtain. His face felt as if it had been heavily waxed, all dead skin on the outside, live, hot rivulets of fear on the inside. The way he had felt on the playground.
There was something behind the pink plastic shower curtain. There was something in the tub.
He could see it, ill defined and obscure through the plastic, a nearly amorphous shape. It could have been anything. A trick of the light. The shadow of the shower attachment. A woman long dead and reclining in her bath, a bar of Lowila in one stiffening hand as she waited patiently for whatever lover might come.
Jack told himself to step forward boldly and rake the shower curtain back. To expose whatever might be there. Instead he turned with jerky, marionette strides, his heart whamming frightfully in his chest, and went back into the bed/sitting room.
The door to the hall was shut.
He stared at it for a long, immobile second. He could taste his terror now. It was in the back of his throat like a taste of gone-over cherries.
He walked to the door with that same jerky stride and forced his fingers to curl around the knob.
(It won't open.) But it did.
