The Shining, Page 32

  (but i'm safe now i'm safe i'll just go back because now i'm)

  Something thumped softly behind him.

  He turned around, toward the hotel, and looked. But even before he looked

  (Can you see the Indians in this picture?)

  he knew what he would see, because he knew what that soft thumping sound had been. It was the sound of a large clump of snow falling, the way it sounded when it slid off the roof of the hotel and fell to the ground.

  (Can you see--?)

  Yes. He could. The snow had fallen off the hedge dog. When he came down it had only been a harmless lump of snow outside the playground. Now it stood revealed, an incongruous splash of green in all the eye-watering whiteness. It was sitting up, as if to beg a sweet or a scrap.

  But this time he wouldn't go crazy, he wouldn't blow his cool. Because at least he wasn't trapped in some dark old hole. He was in the sunlight. And it was just a dog. It's pretty warm out today, he thought hopefully. Maybe the sun just melted enough snow off that old dog so the rest fell off in a bunch. Maybe that's all it is.

  (Don't go near that place ... steer right clear.)

  His snowshoe bindings were as tight as they were ever going to be. He stood up and stared back at the concrete ring, almost completely submerged in the snow, and what he saw at the end he had exited from froze his heart. There was a circular patch of darkness at the end of it, a fold of shadow that marked the hole he'd dug to get down inside. Now, in spite of the snow-dazzle, he thought he could see something there. Something moving. A hand. The waving hand of some desperately unhappy child, waving hand, pleading hand, drowning hand.

  (Save me O please save me If you can't save me at least come play with me ... Forever. And Forever. And Forever.)

  "No," Danny whispered huskily. The word fell dry and bare from his mouth, which was stripped of moisture. He could feel his mind wavering now, trying to go away the way it had when the woman in the room had ... no, better not think of that.

  He grasped at the strings of reality and held them tightly. He had to get out of here. Concentrate on that. Be cool. Be like the Secret Agent Man. Would Patrick McGoohan be crying and peeing in his pants like a little baby?

  Would his daddy?

  That calmed him somewhat.

  From behind him, that soft flump sound of falling snow came again. He turned around and the head of one of the hedge lions was sticking out of the snow now, snarling at him. It was closer than it should have been, almost up to the gate of the playground.

  Terror tried to rise up and he quelled it. He was the Secret Agent Man, and he would escape.

  He began to walk out of the playground, taking the same roundabout course his father had taken on the day that the snow flew. He concentrated on operating the snowshoes. Slow, flat strides. Don't lift your foot too high or you'll lose your balance. Twist your ankle and spill the snow off the crisscrossed lacings. It seemed so slow. He reached the corner of the playground. The snow was drifted high here and he was able to step over the fence. He got halfway over and then almost fell flat when the snowshoe on his behind foot caught on one of the fence posts. He leaned on the outside edge of gravity, pinwheeling his arms, remembering how hard it was to get up once you fell down.

  From his right, that soft sound again, falling clumps of snow. He looked over and saw the other two lions, clear of snow now down to their forepaws, side by side, about sixty paces away. The green indentations that were their eyes were fixed on him. The dog had turned its head.

  (It only happens when you're not looking.)

  "Oh! Hey--"

  His snowshoes had crossed and he plunged forward into the snow, arms waving uselessly. More snow got inside his hood and down his neck and into the tops of his boots. He struggled out of the snow and tried to get the snowshoes under him, heart hammering crazily now

  (Secret Agent Man remember you're the Secret Agent)

  and overbalanced backward. For a moment he lay there looking at the sky, thinking it would be simpler to just give up.

  Then he thought of the thing in the concrete tunnel and knew he could not. He gained his feet and stared over at the topiary. All three lions were bunched together now, not forty feet away. The dog had ranged off to their left, as if to block Danny's retreat. They were bare of snow except for powdery ruffs around their necks and muzzles. They were all staring at him.

  His breath was racing now, and the panic was like a rat behind his forehead, twisting and gnawing. He fought the panic and he fought the snowshoes.

  (Daddy's voice: No, don't fight them, doc. Walk on them like they were your own feet. Walk with them.)

  (Yes, Daddy.)

  He began to walk again, trying to regain the easy rhythm he had practiced with his daddy. Little by little it began to come, but with the rhythm came an awareness of just how tired he was, how much his fear had exhausted him. The tendons of his thighs and calves and ankles were hot and trembly. Ahead he could see the Overlook, mockingly distant, seeming to stare at him with its many windows, as if this were some sort of contest in which it was mildly interested.

  Danny looked back over his shoulder and his hurried breathing caught for a moment and then hurried on even faster. The nearest lion was now only twenty feet behind, breasting through the snow like a dog paddling in a pond. The two others were to its right and left, pacing it. They were like an Army platoon on patrol, the dog, still off to their left, the scout. The closest lion had its head down. The shoulders bunched powerfully above its neck. The tail was up, as if in the instant before he had turned to look it had been swishing back and forth, back and forth. He thought it looked like a great big house cat that was having a good time playing with a mouse before killing it.

  (--falling--)

  No, if he fell he was dead. They would never let him get up. They would pounce. He pinwheeled his arms madly and lunged ahead, his center of gravity dancing just beyond his nose. He caught it and hurried on, snapping glances back over his shoulder. The air whistled in and out of his dry throat like hot glass.

  The world closed down to the dazzling snow, the green hedges, and the whispery sound of his snowshoes. And something else. A soft, muffled padding sound. He tried to hurry faster and couldn't. He was walking over the buried driveway now, a small boy with his face almost buried in the shadow of his parka hood. The afternoon was still and bright.

  When he looked back again, the point lion was only five feet behind. It was grinning. Its mouth was open, its haunches tensed down like a clockspring. Behind it and the others he could see the rabbit, its head now sticking out of the snow, bright green, as if it had turned its horrid blank face to watch the end of the stalk.

  Now, on the Overlook's front lawn between the circular drive and the porch, he let the panic loose and began to run clumsily in the snowshoes, not daring to look back now, tilting farther and farther forward, his arms out ahead of him like a blind man feeling for obstacles. His hood fell back, revealing his complexion, paste-white giving way to hectic red blotches on his cheeks, his eyes bulging with terror. The porch was very close now.

  Behind him he heard the sudden hard crunch of snow as something leaped.

  He fell on the porch steps, screaming without sound, and scrambled up them on his hands and knees, snowshoes clattering and askew behind him.

  There was a slashing sound in the air and sudden pain in his leg. The ripping sound of cloth. Something else that might have--must have--been in his mind.

  Bellowing, angry roar.

  Smell of blood and evergreen.

  He fell full-length on the porch, sobbing hoarsely, the rich, metallic taste of copper in his mouth. His heart was thundering in his chest. There was a small trickle of blood coming from his nose.

  He had no idea how long he lay there before the lobby doors flew open and Jack ran out, wearing just his jeans and a pair of slippers. Wendy was behind him.

  "Danny!" she screamed.

  "Doc! Danny, for Christ's sake! What's wrong? What happened?"r />
  Daddy was helping him up. Below the knee his snowpants were ripped open. Inside, his woollen ski sock had been ripped open and his calf had been shallowly scratched ... as if he had tried to push his way through a closely grown evergreen hedge and the branches had clawed him.

  He looked over his shoulder. Far down the lawn, past the putting green, were a number of vague, snowcowled humps. The hedge animals. Between them and the playground. Between them and the road.

  His legs gave way. Jack caught him. He began to cry.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  THE LOBBY

  He had told them everything except what had happened to him when the snow had blocked the end of the concrete ring. He couldn't bring himself to repeat that. And he didn't know the right words to express the creeping, lassitudinous sense of terror he had felt when he heard the dead aspen leaves begin to crackle furtively down there in the cold darkness. But he told them about the soft sound of snow falling in clumps. About the lion with its head and its bunched shoulders working its way up and out of the snow to chase him. He even told them about how the rabbit had turned its head to watch near the end.

  The three of them were in the lobby. Jack had built a roaring blaze in the fireplace. Danny was bundled up in a blanket on the small sofa where once, a millon years ago, three nuns had sat laughing like girls while they waited for the line at the desk to thin out. He was sipping hot noodle soup from a mug. Wendy sat beside him, stroking his hair. Jack had sat on the floor, his face seeming to grow more and more still, more and more set as Danny told his story. Twice he pulled his handkerchief out of his back pocket and rubbed his sore-looking lips with it.

  "Then they chased me," he finished. Jack got up and went over to the window, his back to them. He looked at his mommy. "They chased me all the way up to the porch." He was struggling to keep his voice calm, because if he stayed calm maybe they would believe him. Mr. Stenger hadn't stayed calm. He had started to cry and hadn't been able to stop so THE MEN IN THE WHITE COATS had come to take him away because if you couldn't stop crying it meant you had LOST YOUR MARBLES and when would you be back? NO ONE KNOWS. His parka and snowpants and the clotted snowshoes lay on the rug just inside the big double doors.

  (I won't cry I won't let myself cry)

  And he thought he could do that, but he couldn't stop shaking. He looked into the fire and waited for Daddy to say something. High yellow flames danced on the dark stone hearth. A pine knot exploded with a bang and sparks rushed up the flue.

  "Danny, come over here." Jack turned around. His face still had that pinched, deathly look. Danny didn't like to look at it.

  "Jack--"

  "I just want the boy over here for a minute."

  Danny slipped off the sofa and came over beside his daddy.

  "Good boy. Now what do you see?"

  Danny had known what he would see even before he got to the window. Below the clutter of boot tracks, sled tracks, and snowshoe tracks that marked their usual exercise area, the snowfield that covered the Overlook's lawns sloped down to the topiary and the playground beyond. It was marred by two sets of tracks, one of them in a straight line from the porch to the playground, the other a long, looping line coming back up.

  "Only my tracks, Daddy. But--"

  "What about the hedges, Danny?"

  Danny's lips began to tremble. He was going to cry. What if he couldn't stop?

  (i won't cry I Won't Cry Won't Won't WON'T)

  "All covered with snow," he whispered. "But, Daddy--"

  "What? I couldn't hear you!"

  "Jack, you're cross-examining him! Can't you see he's upset, he's--"

  "Shut up! Well, Danny?"

  "They scratched me, Daddy. My leg--"

  "You must have cut your leg on the crust of the snow."

  Then Wendy was between them, her face pale and angry. "What are you trying to make him do?" she asked him. "Confess to murder? What's wrong with you?"

  The strangeness in his eyes seemed to break then. "I'm trying to help him find the difference between something real and something that was only a hallucination, that's all." He squatted by Danny so they were on an eye-to-eye level, and then hugged him tight. "Danny, it didn't really happen. Okay? It was like one of those trances you have sometimes. That's all."

  "Daddy?"

  "What, Dan?"

  "I didn't cut my leg on the crust. There isn't any crust. It's all powdery snow. It won't even stick together to make snowballs. Remember we tried to have a snowball fight and couldn't?"

  He felt his father stiffen against him. "The porch step, then."

  Danny pulled away. Suddenly he had it. It had flashed into his mind all at once, the way things sometimes did, the way it had about the woman wanting to be in that gray man's pants. He stared at his father with widening eyes.

  "You know I'm telling the truth," he whispered, shocked.

  "Danny--" Jack's face, tightening.

  "You know because you saw--"

  The sound of Jack's open palm striking Danny's face was flat, not dramatic at all. The boy's head rocked back, the palm print reddening on his cheek like a brand.

  Wendy made a moaning noise.

  For a moment they were still, the three of them, and then Jack grabbed for his son and said, "Danny, I'm sorry, you okay, doc?"

  "You hit him, you bastard!" Wendy cried. "You dirty bastard!"

  She grabbed his other arm and for a moment Danny was pulled between them.

  "Oh please stop pulling me!" he screamed at them, and there was such agony in his voice that they both let go of him, and then the tears had to come and he collapsed, weeping, between the sofa and the window, his parents staring at him helplessly, the way children might stare at a toy broken in a furious tussle over to whom it belonged. In the fireplace another pine knot exploded like a hand grenade, making them all jump.

  Wendy gave him baby aspirin and Jack slipped him, unprotesting, between the sheets of his cot. He was asleep in no time with his thumb in his mouth.

  "I don't like that," she said. "It's a regression."

  Jack didn't reply.

  She looked at him softly, without anger, without a smile, either. "You want me to apologize for calling you a bastard? All right, I apologize. I'm sorry. You still shouldn't have hit him."

  "I know," he muttered. "I know that. I don't know what the hell came over me."

  "You promised you'd never hit him again."

  He looked at her furiously, and then the fury collapsed. Suddenly, with pity and horror, she saw what Jack would look like as an old man. She had never seen him look that way before.

  (?what way?)

  Defeated, she answered herself. He looks beaten.

  He said: "I always thought I could keep my promises."

  She went to him and put her hands on his arm. "All right, it's over. And when the ranger comes to check us, we'll tell him we all want to go down. All right?"

  "All right," Jack said, and at that moment, at least, he meant it. The same way he had always meant it on those mornings after, looking at his pale and haggard face in the bathroom mirror. I'm going to stop, going to cut it off flat. But morning gave way to afternoon, and in the afternoons he felt a little better. And afternoon gave way to night. As some great twentieth-century thinker had said, night must fall.

  He found himself wishing that Wendy would ask him about the hedges, would ask him what Danny meant when he said You know because you saw--If she did, he would tell her everything. Everything. The hedges, the woman in the room, even about the fire hose that seemed to have switched positions. But where did confession stop? Could he tell her he'd thrown the magneto away, that they could all be down in Sidewinder right now if he hadn't done that?

  What she said was, "Do you want tea?"

  "Yes. A cup of tea would be good."

  She went to the door and paused there, rubbing her forearms through her sweater. "It's my fault as much as yours," she said. "What were we doing while he was going through that ... dream,
or whatever it was?"

  "Wendy--"

  "We were sleeping," she said. "Sleeping like a couple of teenage kids with their itch nicely scratched."

  "Stop it," he said. "It's over."

  "No," Wendy answered, and gave him a strange, restless smile. "It's not over."

  She went out to make tea, leaving him to keep watch over their son.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE ELEVATOR

  Jack awoke from a thin and uneasy sleep where huge and ill-defined shapes chased him through endless snowfields to what he first thought was another dream: darkness, and in it, a sudden mechanical jumble of noises--clicks and clanks, hummings, rattlings, snaps and whooshes.

  Then Wendy sat up beside him and he knew it was no dream.

  "What's that?" Her hand, cold marble, gripped his wrist. He restrained an urge to shake it off--how in the hell was he supposed to know what it was? The illuminated clock on his nightstand said it was five minutes to twelve.

  The humming sound again. Loud and steady, varying the slightest bit. Followed by a clank as the humming ceased. A rattling bang. A thump. Then the humming resumed.

  It was the elevator.

  Danny was sitting up. "Daddy? Daddy?" His voice was sleepy and scared.

  "Right here, doc," Jack said. "Come on over and jump in. Your mom's awake, too."

  The bedclothes rustled as Danny got on the bed between them. "It's the elevator," he whispered.

  "That's right," Jack said. "Just the elevator."

  "What do you mean, just?" Wendy demanded. There was an ice-skim of hysteria on her voice. "It's the middle of the night. Who's running it?"

  Hummmmmmm. Click/clank. Above them now. The rattle of the gate accordioning back, the bump of the doors opening and closing. Then the hum of the motor and the cables again.

  Danny began to whimper.

  Jack swung his feet out of bed and onto the floor. "It's probably a short. I'll check."