“Now,” Jack whispered. “Now, by Christ.” Where was Danny? He had business with his trespassing son.
Three minutes later the elevator door banged open on the shadowed third floor. Jack Torrance was in it alone. The car had stopped only halfway into the doorway and he had to boost himself up onto the hall floor, wriggling painfully like a crippled thing. He dragged the splintered roque mallet after him. Outside the eaves, the wind howled and roared. Jack’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. There was blood and confetti in his hair.
His Son was up here, up here somewhere. He could feel it. Left to his own devices, he might do anything : scribble on the expensive silk wallpaper with his crayons, deface the furnishings, break the windows. He was A Liar and A Cheat and he would have to be chastised … harshly.
Jack Torrance struggled to his feet.
“Danny?” he called. “Danny, come here a minute, will you? You’ve done something wrong and I want you to come and take your medicine like A Man. Danny? Danny!”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
TONY
(Danny …)
(Dannneee …)
Darkness and hallways. He was wandering through darkness and hallways that were like those which lay within the body of the hotel but were somehow different. The silk-papered walls stretched up and up, and even when he craned his neck, Danny could not see the ceiling. It was lost in dimness. All the doors were locked, and they also rose up to dimness. Below the peepholes (in these giant doors they were the size of gunsights), tiny skulls and crossbones had been bolted to each door instead of room numbers.
And somewhere, Tony was calling him.
(Dannneee …)
There was a pounding noise, one he knew well, and hoarse shouts, faint with distance. He could not make out word for word, but he knew the text well enough by now. He had heard it before, in dreams and awake.
He paused, a little boy not yet three years out of diapers, and tried to decide where he was, where he might be. There was fear, but it was a fear he could live with. He had been afraid every day for two months now, to a degree that ranged from dull disquiet to outright, mind-bending terror. This he could live with. But he wanted to know why Tony had come, why he was making the sound of his name in this hall that was neither a part of real things nor of the dreamland where Tony sometimes showed him things. Why, where—
“Danny.”
Far down the giant hallway, almost as tiny as Danny himself, was a dark figure. Tony.
“Where am I?” he called softly to Tony.
“Sleeping,” Tony said. “Sleeping in your mommy and daddy’s bedroom.” There was sadness in Tony’s voice.
“Danny,” Tony said. “Your Mother is going to be badly hurt. Perhaps killed. Mr. Hallorann, too.”
“No!”
He cried it out in a distant grief, a terror that seemed damped by these dreamy, dreary surroundings.
Nonetheless, death images came to him: dead frog plastered to the turnpike like a grisly stamp; Daddy’s broken watch lying on top of a box of junk to be thrown out; gravestones with a dead person under every one; dead jay by the telephone pole; the cold junk Mommy scraped off the plates and down the dark maw of the garbage disposal.
Yet he could not equate these simple symbols with the shifting complex reality of his mother; she satisfied his childish definition of eternity. She had been when he was not. She would continue to be when he was not again. He could accept the possibility of his own death, he had dealt with that since the encounter in Room 217.
But not hers.
Not Daddy’s.
Not ever.
He began to struggle, and the darkness and the hallway began to waver. Tony’s form became chimerical, indistinct.
“Don’t!” Tony called. “Don’t, Danny, don’t do that!”
“She’s not going to be dead! She’s not!”
“Then you have to help her. Danny … you’re in a place deep down in your own mind. The place where I am. I’m a part of you, Danny.”
“You’re Tony. You’re not Me. I want my mommy … I want my mommy …”
“I didn’t bring you here, Danny. You brought yourself. Because you knew.”
“No—”
“You’ve always known,” Tony continued, and he began to walk closer. For the first time, Tony began to walk closer. “You’re deep down in yourself in a place where nothing comes through. We’re alone here for a little while, Danny. This is an Overlook where no one can ever come. No clocks work here. None of the keys fit them and they can never be wound up. The Doors have never been opened and no one has ever stayed in the rooms. But you can’t stay long. Because it’s coming.”
“It …” Danny whispered fearfully, and as he did so the irregular pounding noise seemed to grow closer, louder. His terror, cool and distant a moment ago, became a more immediate thing. Now the words could be made out. Hoarse, huckstering; they were uttered in a coarse imitation of his father’s voice, but it wasn’t Daddy. He knew that now. He knew
(You brought yourself. Because you knew.)
“Oh Tony, is it My Daddy?” Danny screamed. “Is it my daddy that’s coming to get me?”
Tony didn’t answer. But Danny didn’t need an answer. He knew. A long and nightmarish masquerade party went on here, and had gone on for years. Little by little a force had accrued, as secret and silent as interest in a bank account. Force, presence, shape, they were all only words and none of them mattered. It wore many masks, but it was all one. Now, somewhere, it was coming for him. It was hiding behind Daddy’s face, it was imitating Daddy’s voice, it was wearing Daddy’s clothes.
But it was not his daddy.
It was not his daddy.
“I’ve got to help them!” he cried.
And now Tony stood directly in front of him, and looking at Tony was like looking into a magic mirror and seeing himself in ten years, the eyes widely spaced and very dark, the chin firm, the mouth handsomely molded. The hair was light blond like his mother’s, and yet the stamp on his features was that of his father, as if Tony—as if the Daniel Anthony Torrance that would someday be—was a halfling caught between Father and Son, a ghost of both, a fusion.
“You have to try to help,” Tony said. “But Your Father … he’s with The Hotel now, Danny. It’s where he wants to be. It wants you too, because it’s very greedy.”
Tony walked past him, into the shadows.
“Wait!” Danny cried. “What can I—”
“He’s close now,” Tony said, still walking away. “You’ll have to run … hide … keep away from him. Keep away.”
“Tony, I can’t!”
“But you’ve already started,” Tony said. “You will remember what Your Father forgot.”
He was gone.
And from somewhere near his father’s voice came, coldly wheedling: “Danny? You can come out, doc. Just a little spanking, that’s all. Take it like a man and it will be all over. We don’t need her, doc. Just You and Me, right? When we get this little … spanking … behind us, it will be just you and me.”
Danny ran.
Behind him the thing’s temper broke through the shambling charade of normality.
“Come here, you little shit! Right now!”
Down a long hall, panting and gasping. Around a corner. Up a flight of stairs. And as he went, the walls that had been so high and remote began to come down; the rug which had only been a blur beneath his feet took on the familiar black-and-blue pattern, sinuously woven together; the doors became numbered again and behind them the parties that were all one went on and on, populated by generations of guests. The air seemed to be shimmering around him, the blows of the mallet against the walls echoing and re-echoing. He seemed to be bursting through some thin placental womb from sleep to
the rug outside the Presidential Suite on the third floor; lying near him in a bloody heap were the bodies of two men dressed in suits and narrow ties. They had been taken out by shotgun blasts and now they began to stir in front of him and get up.
He drew in breath to scream but didn’t.
(!! FALSE FACES !! NOT REAL !!)
They faded before his gaze like old photographs and were gone.
But below him, the faint sound of the mallet against the walls went on and on, drifting up through the elevator shaft and the stairwell. The controlling force of the Overlook, in the shape of his father, blundering around on the first floor.
A door opened with a thin screeing sound behind him.
A decayed woman in a rotten silk gown pranced out, her yellowed and splitting fingers dressed with verdigris-caked rings. Heavy-bodied wasps crawled sluggishly over her face.
“Come in,” she whispered to him, grinning with black lips. “Come in and we will daance the taaaango …”
“False face!!” he hissed. “Not real!” She drew back from him in alarm, and in the act of drawing back she faded and was gone.
“Where are you?” it screamed, but the voice was still only in his head. He could still hear the thing that was wearing Jack’s face down on the first floor … and something else.
The high, whining sound of an approaching motor.
Danny’s breath stopped in his throat with a little gasp. Was it just another face of the hotel, another illusion? Or was it Dick? He wanted—wanted desperately—to believe it was Dick, but he didn’t dare take the chance.
He retreated down the main corridor, and then took one of the offshoots, his feet whispering on the nap of the carpet. Locked doors frowned down at him as they had done in the dreams, the visions, only now he was in the world of real things, where the game was played for keeps.
He turned to the right and came to a halt, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. Heat was blowing around his ankles. From the registers, of course. This must have been Daddy’s day to heat the west wing and
(You will remember what Your Father forgot.)
What was it? He almost knew. Something that might save him and Mommy? But Tony had said he would have to do it himself. What was it?
He sank down against the wall, trying desperately to think. It was so hard … the hotel kept trying to get into his head … the image of that dark and slumped form swinging the mallet from side to side, gouging the wallpaper … sending out puffs of plaster dust.
“Help me,” he muttered. “Tony, help me.”
And suddenly he became aware that the hotel had grown deathly silent. The whining sound of the motor had stopped.
(must not have been real)
and the sounds of the party had stopped and there was only the wind, howling and whooping endlessly.
The elevator whirred into sudden life.
It was coming up.
And Danny knew who—what—was in it.
He bolted to his feet, eyes staring wildly. Panic clutched around his heart. Why had Tony sent him to the third floor? He was trapped up here. All the doors were locked.
The attic!
There was an attic, he knew. He had come up here with Daddy the day he had salted the rattraps around up there. He hadn’t allowed Danny to come up with him because of the rats. He was afraid Danny might be bitten. But the trapdoor which led to the attic was set into the ceiling of the last short corridor in this wing. There was a pole leaning against the wall. Daddy had pushed the trapdoor open with the pole, there had been a ratcheting whir of counterweights as the door went up and a ladder had swung down. If he could get up there and pull the ladder after him …
Somewhere in the maze of corridors behind him, the elevator came to a stop. There was a metallic, rattling crash as the gate was thrown back. And then a voice—not in his head now but terribly real—called out: “Danny? Danny, come here a minute, will you? You’ve done something wrong and I want you to come and take your medicine like a man. Danny? Danny!”
Obedience was so strongly ingrained in him that he actually took two automatic steps toward the sound of that voice before stopping. His hands curled into fists at his sides.
(Not real! False face! I know what you are! Take off your mask!)
“Danny!” it roared. “Come here, you pup! Come here and take it like a man!” A loud, hollow boom as the mallet struck the wall. When the voice roared out his name again it had changed location. It had come closer.
In the world of real things, the hunt was beginning.
Danny ran. Feet silent on the heavy carpet, he ran past the closed doors, past the silk figured wallpaper, past the fire extinguisher bolted to the corner of the wall. He hesitated, and then plunged down the final corridor. Nothing at the end but a bolted door, and nowhere left to run.
But the pole was still there, still leaning against the wall where Daddy had left it.
Danny snatched it up. He craned his neck to stare up at the trapdoor. There was a hook on the end of the pole and you had to catch it on a ring set into the trapdoor. You had to—
There was a brand-new Yale padlock dangling from the trapdoor. The lock Jack Torrance had clipped around the hasp after laying his traps, just in case his son should take the notion into his head to go exploring up there someday.
Locked. Terror swept him.
Behind him it was coming, blundering and staggering past the Presidential Suite, the mallet whistling viciously through the air.
Danny backed up against the last closed door and waited for it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
THAT WHICH WAS FORGOTTEN
Wendy came to a little at a time, the grayness draining away, pain replacing it: her back, her leg, her side … she didn’t think she would be able to move. Even her fingers hurt, and at first she didn’t know why.
(The razor blade, that’s why.)
Her blond hair, now dank and matted, hung in her eyes. She brushed it away and her ribs stabbed inside, making her groan. Now she saw a field of blue and white mattress, spotted with blood. Her blood, or maybe Jack’s. Either way it was still fresh. She hadn’t been out long. And that was important because—
(?Why?)
Because—
It was the insectile, buzzing sound of the motor that she remembered first. For a moment she fixed stupidly on the memory, and then in a single vertiginous and nauseating swoop, her mind seemed to pan back, showing her everything at once.
Hallorann. It must have been Hallorann. Why else would Jack have left so suddenly, without finishing it … without finishing her?
Because he was no longer at leisure. He had to find Danny quickly and … and do it before Hallorann could put a stop to it.
Or had it happened already?
She could hear the whine of the elevator rising up the shaft.
(No God please no the blood the blood’s still fresh don’t let it have happened already)
Somehow she was able to find her feet and stagger through the bedroom and across the ruins of the living room to the shattered front door. She pushed it open and made it out into the hall.
“Danny!” she cried, wincing at the pain in her chest. “Mr. Hallorann! Is anybody there? Anybody?”
The elevator had been running again and now it came to a stop. She heard the metallic crash of the gate being thrown back and then thought she heard a speaking voice. It might have been her imagination. The wind was too loud to really be able to tell.
Leaning against the wall, she made her way up to the corner of the short hallway. She was about to turn the corner when the scream froze her, floating down the stairwell and the elevator shaft:
“Danny! Come here, you pup! Come here and take it like a man!”
Jack. On the second or third floor. Looking for Danny.
She got around the corner, stumbled, almost fell. Her breath caught in her throat. Something
(someone?)
huddled against the wall about a quarter of the way down from the stairwell. She began to hurry faster, wincing every time her weight came down on her hurt leg. It was a man, she saw, and as she drew closer, she understood the meaning of that buzzing motor.
It was Mr. Hallorann. He had come after all.
She eased to her knees beside him, offering up an incoherent prayer that he was not dead. His nose was bleeding, and a terrible gout of blood had spilled out of his mouth. The side of his face was a puffed purple bruise. But he was breathing, thank God for that. It was coming in long, harsh draws that shook his whole frame.
Looking at him more closely, Wendy’s eyes widened. One arm of the parka he was wearing was blackened and singed. One side of it had been ripped open. There was blood in his hair and a shallow but ugly scratch down the back of his neck.
(My God, what’s happened to him?)
“Danny!” the hoarse, petulant voice roared from above them. “Get out here, goddammit!”
There was no time to wonder about it now. She began to shake him, her face twisting at the flare of agony in her ribs. Her side felt hot and massive and swollen.
(What if they’re poking my lung whenever I move?)
There was no help for that, either. If Jack found Danny, he would kill him, beat him to death with that mallet as he had tried to do to her.
So she shook Hallorann, and then began to slap the unbruised side of his face lightly.
“Wake up,” she said. “Mr. Hallorann, you’ve got to wake up. Please … please …”
From overhead, the restless booming sounds of the mallet as Jack Torrance looked for his son.
Danny stood with his back against the door, looking at the right angle where the hallways joined. The steady, irregular booming sound of the mallet against the walls grew louder. The thing that was after him screamed and howled and cursed. Dream and reality had joined together without a seam.
It came around the corner.
In a way, what Danny felt was relief. It was not His Father. The mask of face and body had been ripped and shredded and made into a bad joke. It was not His Daddy, not this Saturday Night Shock Show horror with its rolling eyes and hunched and hulking shoulders and blood-drenched shirt. It was not His Daddy.
“Now, by God,” it breathed. It wiped its lips with a shaking hand. “Now you’ll find out who is The Boss around here. You’ll see. It’s not you they want. It’s me. Me. Me!”
It slashed out with the scarred hammer, its double head now shapeless and splintered with countless impacts. It struck the wall, cutting a circle in the silk paper. Plaster dust puffed out. It began to grin.
“Let’s see you pull any of your fancy tricks now,” it muttered. “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. Didn’t just fall off the hay truck, by God. I’m going to do my fatherly duty by you, boy.”
Danny said: “You’re not My Daddy.”
It stopped. For a moment it actually looked uncertain, as if not sure who or what it was. Then it began to walk again. The hammer whistled out, struck a door panel and made it boom hollowly.
“You’re a liar,” it said. “Who else would I be? I have the two birthmarks, I have the cupped navel, even the pecker, My Boy. Ask Your Mother.”
“You’re A Mask,” Danny said. “Just a false face. The only reason The Hotel needs to use you is that you aren’t as dead as the others. But when it’s done with you, you won’t be anything at all. You don’t scare me.”
“I’ll scare you!” it howled. The mallet whistled fiercely down, smashing into the rug between Danny’s feet. Danny didn’t flinch. “You lied about me! You connived with her! You plotted against me! And you cheated! You copied that final exam!” The eyes glared out at him from beneath the furred brows. There was an expression of lunatic cunning in them. “I’ll find it, too. It’s down in the basement somewhere. I’ll find it. They promised me I could look all I want.” It raised the mallet again.
“Yes, They promise,” Danny said, “but They lie.”
The mallet hesitated at the top of its swing.
Hallorann had begun to come around, but Wendy had stopped patting his cheeks. A moment ago the words You cheated! You copied that final exam! had floated down through the elevator shaft, dim, barely audible over the wind. From somewhere deep in the west wing. She was nearly convinced they were on the third floor and that Jack—whatever had taken possession of Jack—had found Danny. There was nothing she or Hallorann could do now.
“Oh Doc,” she murmured. Tears blurred her eyes.
“Son of a bitch broke my jaw,” Hallorann muttered thickly, “and my head …” He worked to sit up. His right eye was purpling rapidly and swelling shut. Still, he saw Wendy.
“Missus Torrance—”
“Shhhh,” she said.
“Where is The Boy, Missus Torrance?”
“On the third floor,” she said. “With His Father.”
“They lie,” Danny said again. Something had gone through his mind, flashing like a meteor, too quick, too bright to catch and hold. Only the tail of the thought remained.
(it’s down in the basement somewhere)
(you will remember what Your Father forgot)
“You … you shouldn’t speak that way to Your Father,” it said hoarsely. The mallet trembled, came down. “You’ll only make things worse for yourself. Your … your punishment. Worse.” It staggered drunkenly and stared at him with maudlin self-pity that began to turn to hate. The mallet began to rise again.
“You’re not My Daddy,” Danny told it again. “And if there’s a little bit of My Daddy left inside You, he knows They lie here. Everything is a lie and a cheat. Like the loaded dice My Daddy got for my Christmas stocking last Christmas, like the presents they put in the store windows and My Daddy says there’s nothing in them, no presents, they’re just empty boxes. Just for show, My Daddy says. You’re it, not My Daddy. You’re The Hotel. And when you get what you want, you won’t give My Daddy anything because You’re Selfish. And My Daddy knows that. You had to make him drink the Bad Stuff. That’s the only way you could get him, you lying false face.”
“Liar! Liar!” The words came in a thin shriek. The mallet wavered wildly in the air.
“Go on and Hit Me. But you’ll never get what you want from me.”
The face in front of him changed. It was hard to say how; there was no melting or merging of the features. The body trembled slightly, and then the bloody hands opened like broken claws. The mallet fell from them and thumped to the rug. That was all. But suddenly His Daddy was there, looking at him in mortal agony, and a sorrow so great that Danny’s heart flamed within his chest. The mouth drew down in a quivering bow.
“Doc,” Jack Torrance said. “Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you.”
“No,” Danny said.
“Oh Danny, for God’s sake—”
“No,” Danny said. He took one of His Father’s bloody hands and kissed it. “It’s almost over.”
Hallorann got to his feet by propping his back against the wall and pushing himself up. He and Wendy stared at each other like nightmare survivors from a bombed hospital.
“We got to get up there,” he said. “We have to help him.”
Her haunted eyes stared into his from her chalk-pale face. “It’s too late,” Wendy said. “Now he can only help himself.”
A minute passed, then two. Three. And they heard it above them, screaming, not in anger or triumph now, but in mortal terror.
“Dear God,” Hallorann whispered. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Has it killed him?”
“I don’t know.”
The elevator clashed into life and began to descend with the screaming, raving thing penned up inside.
Danny stood without moving. There was no place he could run where The Overlook was not. He recognized it suddenly, fully, painlessly. For the first time in his life he had an adult thought, an adult feeling, the essence of his experience in this bad place—a sorrowful distillation:
(Mommy and Daddy can’t help me and I’m alone.)
“Go away,” he said to the bloody stranger in front of him. “Go on. Get out of here.”
It bent over, exposing the knife handle in its back. Its hands closed around the mallet again, but instead of aiming at Danny, it reversed the handle, aiming the hard side of the roque mallet at its own face.
Understanding rushed through Danny.
Then the mallet began to rise and descend, destroying the last of Jack Torrance’s image. The thing in the hall danced an eerie, shuffling polka, the beat counterpointed by the hideous sound of the mallet head striking again and again. Blood splattered across the wallpaper. Shards of bone leaped into the air like broken piano keys. It was impossible to say just how long it went on. But when it turned its attention back to Danny, His Father was gone forever. What remained of the face became a strange, shifting composite, many faces mixed imperfectly into one. Danny saw the woman in 217; the dogman; the hungry boy-thing that had been in the concrete ring.
“Masks off, then,” it whispered. “No more interruptions.”
The mallet rose for the final time. A ticking sound filled Danny’s ears.
“Anything else to say?” it inquired. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to run? A game of tag, perhaps? All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. After all we’re missing The Party.”
It grinned with broken-toothed greed.
And it came to him. What His Father had forgotten.
Sudden triumph filled his face; the thing saw it and hesitated, puzzled.
“The boiler!” Danny screamed. “It hasn’t been dumped since this morning! It’s going up! It’s going to explode!”
An expression of grotesque terror and dawning realization swept across the broken features of the thing in front of him. The mallet dropped from its fisted hands and bounced harmlessly on the black-and-blue rug.
“The boiler!” it cried. “Oh no! That can’t be allowed! Certainly not! No! You goddamned little pup! Certainly not! Oh, oh, oh—”
“It is!” Danny cried back at it fiercely. He began to shuffle and shake his fists at the ruined thing before him. “Any minute now! I know it! The boiler, Daddy forgot the boiler! And you forgot it, too!”
“No, oh no, it musn’t, it can’t, you dirty little boy, I’ll make you take your medicine, I’ll make you take every drop, oh no, oh no—”
It suddenly turned tail and began to shamble away. For a moment its shadow bobbed on the wall, waxing and waning. It trailed cries behind itself like worn-out party streamers.
Moments later the elevator crashed into life.
Suddenly The Shining was on him.
(mommy mr. hallorann dick to my friends together alive they’re alive got to get out it’s going to blow going to blow sky-high)
like a fierce and glaring sunrise and he ran. One foot kicked the bloody, misshapen roque mallet aside. He didn’t notice.
Crying, he ran for the stairs.
They had to get out.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
THE EXPLOSION
Hallorann could never be sure of the progression of things after that. He remembered that the elevator had gone down and past them without stopping, and something had been inside. But he made no attempt to try to see in through the small diamond-shaped window, because what was in there did not sound human. A moment later there were running footsteps on the stairs. Wendy Torrance at first shrank back against him and then began to stumble down the main corridor to the stairs as fast as she could.
“Danny! Danny! Oh, thank God! Thank God!”
She swept him into a hug, groaning with joy as well as her pain.
(Danny.)
Danny looked at him from his mother’s arms, and Hallorann saw how the boy had changed. His face was pale and pinched, his eyes dark and fathomless. He looked as if he had lost weight. Looking at the two of them together, Hallorann thought it was the mother who looked younger, in spite of the terrible beating she had taken.
(Dick—we have to go—run—the place—it’s going to)
Picture of the Overlook, flames leaping out of its roof. Bricks raining down on the snow. Clang of firebells … not that any fire truck would be able to get up here much before the end of March. Most of all what came through in Danny’s thought was a sense of urgent immediacy, a feeling that it was going to happen at any time.
“All right,” Hallorann said. He began to move toward the two of them and at first it was like swimming through deep water. His sense of balance was screwed, and the eye on the right side of his face didn’t want to focus. His jaw was sending giant throbbing bursts of pain up to his temple and down his neck, and his cheek felt as large as a cabbage. But the boy’s urgency had gotten him going, and it got a little easier.
“All right?” Wendy asked. She looked from Hallorann to her son and back to Hallorann. “What do you mean, all right?”
“We have to go,” Hallorann said.
“I’m not dressed … my clothes …”
Danny darted out of her arms then and raced down the corridor. She looked after him and, as he vanished around the corner, back at Hallorann. “What if he comes back?”
“Your husband?”
“He’s not Jack,” she muttered. “Jack’s dead. This place killed him. This damned place.” She struck at the wall with her fist and cried out at the pain in her cut fingers. “It’s the boiler, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am. Danny says it’s going to explode.”
“Good.” The word was uttered with dead finality. “I don’t know if I can get down those stairs again. My ribs … he broke my ribs. And something in my back. It hurts.”
“You’ll make it,” Hallorann said. “We’ll all make it.” But suddenly he remembered the hedge animals and wondered what they would do if they were guarding the way out.
Then Danny was coming back. He had Wendy’s boots and coat and gloves, also his own coat and gloves.
“Danny,” she said. “Your boots.”
“It’s too late,” he said. His eyes stared at them with a desperate kind of madness. He looked at Dick and suddenly Hallorann’s mind was fixed with an image of a clock under a glass dome, the clock in the ballroom that had been donated by a Swiss diplomat in 1949. The hands of the clock were standing at a minute to midnight.
“Oh my God,” Hallorann said. “Oh my dear God.”
He clapped an arm around Wendy and picked her up. He clapped his other arm around Danny. He ran for the stairs.
Wendy shrieked in pain as he squeezed the bad ribs, as something in her back ground together, but Hallorann did not slow. He plunged down the stairs with them in his arms. One eye wide and desperate, the other puffed shut to a slit. He looked like a one-eyed pirate abducting hostages to be ransomed later.
Suddenly the shine was on him, and he understood what Danny had meant when he said it was too late. He could feel the explosion getting ready to rumble up from the basement and tear the guts out of this horrid place.
He ran faster, bolting headlong across the lobby toward the double doors.
It hurried across the basement and into the feeble yellow glow of the furnace room’s only light. It was slobbering with fear. It had been so close, so close to having the boy and the boy’s remarkable power. It could not lose now. It must not happen. It would dump the boiler and then chastise the boy harshly.
“Mustn’t happen!” it cried. “Oh no, mustn’t happen!”
It stumbled across the floor to the boiler, which glowed a dull red halfway up its long tubular body. It was huffing and rattling and hissing off plumes of steam in a hundred directions, like a monster calliope. The pressure needle stood at the far end of the dial.
“No, it won’t be allowed!” the manager/caretaker cried.
It laid its Jack Torrance hands on the valve, unmindful of the burning smell which arose or the searing of the flesh as the red-hot wheel sank in, as if into a mudrut.
The wheel gave, and with a triumphant scream, the thing spun it wide open. A giant roar of escaping steam bellowed out of the boiler, a dozen dragons hissing in concert. But before the steam obscured the pressure needle entirely, the needle had visibly begun to swing back.
“I WIN!” it cried. It capered obscenely in the hot, rising mist, waving its flaming hands over its head. “NOT TOO LATE! I WIN! NOT TOO LATE! NOT TOO LATE! NOT—”
Words turned into a shriek of triumph, and the shriek was swallowed in a shattering roar as the Overlook’s boiler exploded.
Hallorann burst out through the double doors and carried the two of them through the trench in the big snowdrift on the porch. He saw the hedge animals clearly, more clearly than before, and even as he realized his worst fears were true, that they were between the porch and the snowmobile, the hotel exploded. It seemed to him that it happened all at once, although later he knew that couldn’t have been the way it happened.
There was a flat explosion, a sound that seemed to exist on one low all-pervasive note
(WHUMMMMMMMMM—)
and then there was a blast of warm air at their backs that seemed to push gently at them. They were thrown from the porch on its breath, the three of them, and a confused thought
(this is what superman must feel like)
slipped through Hallorann’s mind as they flew through the air. He lost his hold on them and then he struck the snow in a soft billow. It was down his shirt and up his nose and he was dimly aware that it felt good on his hurt cheek.
Then he struggled to the top of it, for that moment not thinking about the hedge animals, or Wendy Torrance, or even the boy. He rolled over on his back so he could watch it die.
The Overlook’s windows shattered. In the ballroom, the dome over the mantelpiece clock cracked, split in two pieces, and fell to the floor. The clock stopped ticking: cogs and gears and balance wheel all became motionless. There was a whispered, sighing noise, and a great billow of dust. In 217 the bathtub suddenly split in two, letting out a small flood of greenish, noxious-smelling water. In the Presidential Suite the wallpaper suddenly burst into flames. The batwing doors of the Colorado Lounge suddenly snapped their hinges and fell to the dining room floor. Beyond the basement arch, the great piles and stacks of old papers caught fire and went up with a blowtorch hiss. Boiling water rolled over the flames but did not quench them. Like burning autumn leaves below a wasps’ nest, they whirled and blackened. The furnace exploded, shattering the basement’s roofbeams, sending them crashing down like the bones of a dinosaur. The gasjet which had fed the furnace, unstoppered now, rose up in a bellowing pylon of flame through the riven floor of the lobby. The carpeting on the stair risers caught, racing up to the first-floor level as if to tell dreadful good news. A fusillade of explosions ripped the place. The chandelier in the dining room, a two-hundred-pound crystal bomb, fell with a splintering crash, knocking tables every which way. Flame belched out of the Overlook’s five chimneys at the breaking clouds.
(No! Mustn’t! Mustn’t! MUSTNT!)
It shrieked; it shrieked but now it was voiceless and it was only screaming panic and doom and damnation in its own ear, dissolving, losing thought and will, the webbing falling apart, searching, not finding, going out, going out to, fleeing, going out to emptiness, notness, crumbling.
The party was over.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
EXIT
The roar shook the whole façade of the hotel. Glass belched out onto the snow and twinkled there like jagged diamonds. The hedge dog, which had been approaching Danny and his mother, recoiled away from it, its green and shadow-marbled ears flattening, its tail coming down between its legs as its haunches flattened abjectly. In his head, Hallorann heard it whine fearfully, and mixed with that sound was the fearful, confused yowling of the big cats. He struggled to his feet to go to the other two and help them, and as he did so he saw something more nightmarish than all the rest: the hedge rabbit, still coated with snow, was battering itself crazily at the chain-link fence at the far end of the playground, and the steel mesh was jingling with a kind of nightmare music, like a spectral zither. Even from here he could hear the sounds of the close-set twigs and branches which made up its body cracking and crunching like breaking bones.
“Dick! Dick!” Danny cried out. He was trying to support his mother, help her over to the snowmobile. The clothes he had carried out for the two of them were scattered between where they had fallen and where they now stood. Hallorann was suddenly aware that the woman was in her nightclothes, Danny jacketless, and it was no more than ten above zero.
(my god she’s in her bare feet)
He struggled back through the snow, picking up her coat, her boots, Danny’s coat, odd gloves. Then he ran back to them, plunging hip-deep in the snow from time to time, having to flounder his way out.
Wendy was horribly pale, the side of her neck coated with blood, blood that was now freezing,
“I can’t,” she muttered. She was no more than semiconscious. “No, I … can’t. Sorry.”
Danny looked up at Hallorann pleadingly.
“Gonna be okay,” Hallorann said, and gripped her again. “Come on.”
The three of them made it to where the snowmobile had slewed around and stalled out. Hallorann sat the woman down on the passenger seat and put her coat on. He lifted her feet up—they were very cold but not frozen yet—and rubbed them briskly with Danny’s jacket before putting on her boots. Wendy’s face was alabaster pale, her eyes half-lidded and dazed, but she had begun to shiver. Hallorann thought that was a good sign.
Behind them, a series of three explosions rocked the hotel. Orange flashes lit the snow.
Danny put his mouth close to Hallorann’s ear and screamed something.
“What?”
“I said do you need that?”
The boy was pointing at the red gascan that leaned at an angle in the snow.
“I guess we do.”
He picked it up and sloshed it. Still gas in there, he couldn’t tell how much. He attached the can to the back of the snowmobile, fumbling the job several times before getting it right because his fingers were going numb. For the first time he became aware that he’d lost Howard Cottrell’s mittens.
(i get out of this i gonna have my sister knit you a dozen pair, howie)
“Get on!” Hallorann shouted at the boy.
Danny shrank back. “We’ll freeze!”
“We have to go around to the equipment shed! There’s stuff in there … blankets … stuff like that. Get on behind your mother!”
Danny got on, and Hallorann twisted his head so he could shout into Wendy’s face.
“Missus Torrance! Hold on to me! You understand? Hold on!”
She put her arms around him and rested her cheek against his back. Hallorann started the snowmobile and turned the throttle delicately so they would start up without a jerk. The woman had the weakest sort of grip on him, and if she shifted backward, her weight would tumble both her and the boy off.
They began to move. He brought the snowmobile around in a circle and then they were traveling west parallel to the hotel. Hallorann cut in more to circle around behind it to the equipment shed.
They had a momentarily clear view into the Overlook’s lobby. The gasflame coming up through the shattered floor was like a giant birthday candle, fierce yellow at its heart and blue around its flickering edges. In that moment it seemed only to be lighting, not destroying. They could see the registration desk with its silver bell, the credit card decals, the old-fashioned, scrolled cash register, the small figured throw rugs, the high-backed chairs, horsehair hassocks. Danny could see the small sofa by the fireplace where the three nuns had sat on the day they had come up—closing day. But this was the real closing day.
Then the drift on the porch blotted the view out. A moment later they were skirting the west side of the hotel. It was still light enough to see without the snowmobile’s headlight. Both upper stories were flaming now, and pennants of flame shot out the windows. The gleaming white paint had begun to blacken and peel. The shutters which had covered the Presidential Suite’s picture window—shutters Jack had carefully fastened as per instructions in mid-October—now hung in flaming brands, exposing the wide and shattered darkness behind them, like a toothless mouth yawing in a final, silent deathrattle.
Wendy had pressed her face against Hallorann’s back to cut out the wind, and Danny had likewise pressed his face against his mother’s back, and so it was only Hallorann who saw the final thing, and he never spoke of it. From the window of the Presidential Suite he thought he saw a huge dark shape issue, blotting out the snowfield behind it. For a moment it assumed the shape of a huge, obscene manta, and then the wind seemed to catch it, to tear it and shred it like old dark paper. It fragmented, was caught in a whirling eddy of smoke, and a moment later it was gone as if it had never been. But in those few seconds as it whirled blackly, dancing like negative motes of light, he remembered something from his childhood … fifty years ago, or more. He and his brother had come upon a huge nest of ground wasps just north of their farm. It had been tucked into a hollow between the earth and an old lightning-blasted tree. His brother had had a big old niggerchaser in the band of his hat, saved all the way from the Fourth of July. He had lighted it and tossed it at the nest. It had exploded with a loud bang, and an angry, rising hum—almost a low shriek—had risen from the blasted nest. They had run away as if demons had been at their heels. In a way, Hallorann supposed that demons had been. And looking back over his shoulder, as he was now, he had on that day seen a large dark cloud of hornets rising in the hot air, swirling together, breaking apart, looking for whatever enemy had done this to their home so that they—the single group intelligence—could sting it to death.
Then the thing in the sky was gone and it might only have been smoke or a great flapping swatch of wallpaper after all, and there was only the Overlook, a flaming pyre in the roaring throat of the night.
There was a key to the equipment shed’s padlock on his key ring, but Hallorann saw there would be no need to use it. The door was ajar, the padlock hanging open on its hasp.
“I can’t go in there,” Danny whispered.
“That’s okay. You stay with your mom. There used to be a pile of old horseblankets. Probably all moth-eaten by now, but better than freezin to death. Missus Torrance, you still with us?”
“I don’t know,” the wan voice answered. “I think so.”
“Good. I’ll be just a second.”
“Come back as quick as you can,” Danny whispered. “Please.”
Hallorann nodded. He had trained the headlamp on the door and now he floundered through the snow, casting a long shadow in front of himself. He pushed the equipment shed door open and stepped in. The horseblankets were still in the corner, by the roque set. He picked up four of them—they smelled musty and old and the moths certainly had been having a free lunch—and then he paused.
One of the roque mallets was gone.
(Was that what he hit me with?)
Well, it didn’t matter what he’d been hit with, did it? Still, his fingers went to the side of his face and began to explore the huge lump there. Six hundred dollars’ worth of dental work undone at a single blow. And after all
(maybe he didn’t hit me with one of those. Maybe one got lost. Or stolen. Or took for a souvenier. After all)
it didn’t really matter. No one was going to be playing roque here next summer. Or any summer in the forseeable future.
No, it didn’t really matter, except that looking at the racked mallets with the single missing member had a kind of fascination. He found himself thinking of the hard wooden whack! of the mallet head striking the round wooden ball. A nice summery sound. Watching it skitter across the
(bone. blood.)
gravel. It conjured up images of
(bone. blood.)
iced tea, porch swings, ladies in white straw hats, the hum of mosquitoes, and
(bad little boys who don’t play by the rules.)
all that stuff. Sure. Nice game. Out of style now, but … nice.
“Dick?” The voice was thin, frantic, and, he thought, rather unpleasant. “Are you all right, Dick? Come out now. Please!”
(“Come on out now nigguh de massa callin youall.”)
His hand closed tightly around one of the mallet handles, liking its feel.
(Spare the rod, spoil the child.)
His eyes went blank in the flickering, fire-shot darkness. Really, it would be doing them both a favor. She was messed up … in pain … and most of it
(all of it)
was that damn boy’s fault. Sure. He had left his own daddy in there to burn. When you thought of it, it was damn close to murder. Patricide was what they called it. Pretty goddam low.
“Mr. Hallorann?” Her voice was low, weak, querulous. He didn’t much like the sound of it.
“Dick!” The boy was sobbing now, in terror.
Hallorann drew the mallet from the rack and turned toward the flood of white light from the snowmobile headlamp. His feet scratched unevenly over the boards of the equipment shed, like the feet of a clockwork toy that has been wound up and set in motion.
Suddenly he stopped, looked wonderingly at the mallet in his hands, and asked himself with rising horror what it was he had been thinking of doing. Murder? Had he been thinking of murder?
For a moment his entire mind seemed filled with an angry, weakly hectoring voice:
(Do it! Do it, you weak-kneed no-balls nigger! Kill them! KILL THEM BOTH!)
Then he flung the mallet behind him with a whispered, terrified cry. It clattered into the corner where the horseblankets had been, one of the two heads pointed toward him in an unspeakable invitation.
He fled.
Danny was sitting on the snowmobile seat and Wendy was holding him weakly. His face was shiny with tears, and he was shaking as if with ague. Between his clicking teeth he said: “Where were you? We were scared?”
“It’s a good place to be scared of,” Hallorann said slowly. “Even if that place burns flat to the foundation, you’ll never get me within a hundred miles of here again. Here, Missus Torrance, wrap these around you. I’ll help. You too, Danny. Get yourself looking like an Arab.”
He swirled two of the blankets around Wendy, fashioning one of them into a hood to cover her head, and helped Danny tie his so they wouldn’t fall off.
“Now hold on for dear life,” he said. “We got a long way to go, but the worst is behind us now.”
He circled the equipment shed and then pointed the snowmobile back along their trail. The Overlook was a torch now, flaming at the sky. Great holes had been eaten into its sides, and there was a red hell inside, waxing and waning. Snowmelt ran down the charred gutters in steaming waterfalls.
They purred down the front lawn, their way well lit. The snowdunes glowed scarlet.
“Look!” Danny shouted as Hallorann slowed for the front gate. He was pointing toward the playground.
The hedge creatures were all in their original positions, but they were denuded, blackened, seared. Their dead branches were a stark interlacing network in the fireglow, their small leaves scattered around their feet like fallen petals.
“They’re dead!” Danny screamed in hysterical triumph. “Dead! They’re dead!”
“Shhh,” Wendy said. “All right, honey. It’s all right.”
“Hey, Doc,” Hallorann said. “Let’s get to someplace warm. You ready?”
“Yes,” Danny whispered. “I’ve been ready for so long—”
Hallorann edged through the gap between gate and post. A moment later they were on the road, pointed back toward Sidewinder. The sound of the snowmobile’s engine dwindled until it was lost in the ceaseless roar of the wind. It rattled through the denuded branches of the hedge animals with a low, beating, desolate sound. The fire waxed and waned. Sometime after the sound of the snowmobile’s engine had disappeared, The Overlook’s roof caved in—first the west wing, then the east, and seconds later the central roof. A huge spiraling gout of sparks and flaming debris rushed up into the howling winter night.
A bundle of flaming shingles and a wad of hot flashing were wafted in through the open equipment shed door by the wind.
After a while the shed began to burn, too.
They were still twenty miles from Sidewinder when Hallorann stopped to pour the rest of the gas into the snowmobile’s tank. He was getting very worried about Wendy Torrance, who seemed to be drifting away from them. It was still so far to go.
“Dick!” Danny cried. He was standing up on the seat, pointing. “Dick, look! Look there!”
The snow had stopped and a silver-dollar moon had peeked out through the raftering clouds. Far down the road but coming toward them, coming upward through a series of S-shaped switchbacks, was a pearly chain of lights. The wind dropped for a moment and Hallorann heard the faraway buzzing snarl of snowmobile engines.
Hallorann and Danny and Wendy reached them fifteen minutes later. They had brought extra clothes and brandy and Dr. Edmonds.
And the long darkness was over.
