The Shining

  "Try, Danny. I'll be right here."

  Danny looked at Edmonds doubtfully. Edmonds nodded encouragement.

  Danny let out a long, sighing breath and nodded. "But I don't know if it will work. I never did it with anyone looking at me before. And Tony doesn't always come, anyway."

  "If he doesn't, he doesn't," Edmonds said. "I just want you to try."

  "Okay."

  He dropped his gaze to Edmonds's slowly swinging loafers and cast his mind outward toward his mommy and daddy. They were here someplace ... right beyond that wall with the picture on it, as a matter of fact. In the waiting room where they had come in. Sitting side by side but not talking. Leafing through magazines. Worried. About him.

  He concentrated harder, his brow furrowing, trying to get into the feeling of his mommy's thoughts. It was always harder when they weren't right there in the room with him. Then he began to get it. Mommy was thinking about a sister. Her sister. The sister was dead. His mommy was thinking that was the main thing that turned her mommy into such a (bitch?)

  into such an old biddy. Because her sister had died. As a little girl she was (hit by a car oh god i could never stand anything like that again like aileen but what if he's sick really sick cancer spinal meningitis leukemia brain tumor like john gunther's son or muscular dystrophy oh jeez kids his age get leukemia all the time radium treatments chemotherapy we couldn't afford anything like that but of course they just can't turn you out to die on the street can they and anyway he's all right all right all right you really shouldn't let yourself think)

  (Danny--)

  (about aileen and)

  (Dannee--)

  (that car)

  (Dannee--)

  But Tony wasn't there. Only his voice. And as it faded, Danny followed it down into darkness, falling and tumbling down some magic hole between Dr. Bill's swinging loafers, past a loud knocking sound, further, a bathtub cruised silently by in the darkness with some horrible thing lolling in it, past a sound like sweetly chiming church bells, past a clock under a dome of glass.

  Then the dark was pierced feebly by a single light festooned with cobwebs. The weak glow disclosed a stone floor that looked damp and unpleasant. Somewhere not far distant was a steady mechanical roaring sound, but muted, not frightening. Soporific. It was the thing that would be forgotten, Danny thought with dreamy surprise.

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he could see Tony just ahead of him, a silhouette. Tony was looking at something and Danny strained his eyes to see what it was.

  (Your daddy. See your daddy?)

  Of course he did. How could he have missed him, even in the basement light's feeble glow? Daddy was kneeling on the floor, casting the beam of a flashlight over old cardboard boxes and wooden crates. The cardboard boxes were mushy and old; some of them had split open and spilled drifts of paper onto the floor. Newspapers, books, printed pieces of paper that looked like bills. His daddy was examining them with great interest. And then Daddy looked up and shone his flashlight in another direction. Its beam of light impaled another book, a large white one bound with gold string. The cover looked like white leather. It was a scrapbook. Danny suddenly needed to cry out to his daddy, to tell him to leave that book alone, that some books should not be opened. But his daddy was climbing toward it.

  The mechanical roaring sound, which he now recognized as the boiler at the Overlook which Daddy checked three or four times every day, had developed an ominous, rhythmic hitching. It began to sound like ... like pounding. And the smell of mildew and wet, rotting paper was changing to something else--the high, junipery smell of the Bad Stuff. It hung around his daddy like a vapor as he reached for the book ... and grasped it.

  Tony was somewhere in the darkness

  (This inhuman place makes human monsters. This inhuman place)

  repeating the same incomprehensible thing over and over.

  (makes human monsters.)

  Falling through darkness again, now accompanied by the heavy, pounding thunder that was no longer the boiler but the sound of a whistling mallet striking silk-papered walls, knocking out whiffs of plaster dust. Crouching helplessly on the blue-black woven jungle rug.

  (Come out)

  (This inhuman place)

  (and take your medicine!)

  (makes human monsters.)

  With a gasp that echoed in his own head he jerked himself out of the darkness. Hands were on him and at first he shrank back, thinking that the dark thing in the Overlook of Tony's world had somehow followed him back into the world of real things--and then Dr. Edmonds was saying: "You're all right, Danny. You're all right. Everything is fine."

  Danny recognized the doctor, then his surroundings in the office. He began to shudder helplessly. Edmonds held him.

  When the reaction began to subside, Edmonds asked, "You said something about monsters, Danny--what was it?"

  "This inhuman place," he said gutturally. "Tony told me ... this inhuman place ... makes ... makes ..." He shook his head. "Can't remember."

  "Try!"

  "I can't."

  "Did Tony come?"

  "Yes."

  "What did he show you?"

  "Dark. Pounding. I don't remember."

  "Where were you?"

  "Leave me alone! I don't remember! Leave me alone!" He began to sob helplessly in fear and frustration. It was all gone, dissolved into a sticky mess like a wet bundle of paper, the memory unreadable.

  Edmonds went to the water cooler and got him a paper cup of water. Danny drank it and Edmonds got him another one.

  "Better?"

  "Yes."

  "Danny, I don't want to badger you ... tease you about this, I mean. But can you remember anything about before Tony came?"

  "My mommy," Danny said slowly. "She's worried about me."

  "Mothers always are, guy."

  "No ... she had a sister that died when she was a little girl. Aileen. She was thinking about how Aileen got hit by a car and that made her worried about me. I don't remember anything else."

  Edmonds was looking at him sharply. "Just now she was thinking that? Out in the waiting room?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Danny, how would you know that?"

  "I don't know," Danny said wanly. "The shining, I guess."

  "The what?"

  Danny shook his head very slowly. "I'm awful tired. Can't I go see my mommy and daddy? I don't want to answer any more questions. I'm tired. And my stomach hurts."

  "Are you going to throw up?"

  "No, sir. I just want to go see my mommy and daddy."

  "Okay, Dan." Edmonds stood up. "You go on out and see them for a minute, then send them in so I can talk to them. Okay?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "There are books out there to look at. You like books, don't you?"

  "Yes, sir," Danny said dutifully.

  "You're a good boy, Danny."

  Danny gave him a faint smile.

  "I can't find a thing wrong with him," Dr. Edmonds said to the Torrances. "Not physically. Mentally, he's bright and rather too imaginative. It happens. Children have to grow into their imaginations like a pair of oversized shoes. Danny's is still way too big for him. Ever had his IQ tested?"

  "I don't believe in them," Jack said. "They strait-jacket the expectations of both parents and teachers."

  Dr. Edmonds nodded. "That may be. But if you did test him, I think you'd find he's right off the scale for his age group. His verbal ability, for a boy who is five going on six, is amazing."

  "We don't talk down to him," Jack said with a trace of pride.

  "I doubt if you've ever had to in order to make yourself understood." Edmonds paused, fiddling with a pen. "He went into a trance while I was with him. At my request. Exactly as you described him in the bathroom last night. All his muscles went lax, his body slumped, his eyeballs rotated outward. Textbook auto-hypnosis. I was amazed. I still am."

  The Torrances sat forward. "What happened?" Wendy asked tensely, and Edmonds carefully rela
ted Danny's trance, the muttered phrase from which Edmonds had only been able to pluck the word "monsters," the "dark," the "pounding." The aftermath of tears, near-hysteria, and nervous stomach.

  "Tony again," Jack said.

  "What does it mean?" Wendy asked. "Have you any idea?"

  "A few. You might not like them."

  "Go ahead anyway," Jack told him.

  "From what Danny told me, his 'invisible friend' was truly a friend until you folks moved out here from New England. Tony has only become a threatening figure since that move. The pleasant interludes have become nightmarish, even more frightening to your son because he can't remember exactly what the nightmares are about. That's common enough. We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones. There seems to be a buffer somewhere between the conscious and the subconscious, and one hell of a bluenose lives in there. This censor only lets through a small amount, and often what does come through is only symbolic. That's oversimplified Freud, but it does pretty much describe what we know of the mind's interaction with itself."

  "You think moving has upset Danny that badly?" Wendy asked.

  "It may have, if the move took place under traumatic circumstances," Edmonds said. "Did it?"

  Wendy and Jack exchanged a glance.

  "I was teaching at a prep school," Jack said slowly. "I lost my job."

  "I see," Edmonds said. He put the pen he had been playing with firmly back in its holder. "There's more here, I'm afraid. It may be painful to you. Your son seems to believe you two have seriously contemplated divorce. He spoke of it in an offhand way, but only because he believes you are no longer considering it."

  Jack's mouth dropped open, and Wendy recoiled as if slapped. The blood drained from her face.

  "We never even discussed it!" she said. "Not in front of him, not even in front of each other! We--"

  "I think it's best if you understand everything, Doctor," Jack said. "Shortly after Danny was born, I became an alcoholic. I'd had a drinking problem all the way through college, it subsided a little after Wendy and I met, cropped up worse than ever after Danny was born and the writing I consider to be my real work was going badly. When Danny was three and a half, he spilled some beer on a bunch of papers I was working on ... papers I was shuffling around, anyway ... and I ... well ... oh shit." His voice broke, but his eyes remained dry and unflinching. "It sounds so goddam beastly said out loud. I broke his arm turning him around to spank him. Three months later I gave up drinking. I haven't touched it since."

  "I see," Edmonds said neutrally. "I knew the arm had been broken, of course. It was set well." He pushed back from his desk a little and crossed his legs. "If I may be frank, it's obvious that he's been in no way abused since then. Other than the stings, there's nothing on him but the normal bruises and scabs that any kid has in abundance."

  "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 it 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 pouring rain. Edmonds couldn't know of the curious way Danny had of pre-guessing them both. She would decide to have an unusual evening cup of tea, go 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' his 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?"