The Shining, Page 47

  "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 clo
ck 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 facade 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.