by Stephen King
Mike escaped three years later when Jack was twelve--he went to UNH on a hefty Merit Scholarship. A year after that their father died of a sudden, massive stroke which occurred while he was prepping a patient for surgery. He had collapsed in his flapping and untucked hospital whites, dead possibly even before he hit the industrial black-and-red hospital tiles, and three days later the man who had dominated Jacky's life, the irrational white ghost-god, was underground.
The stone read Mark Anthony Torrance, Loving Father. To that Jack would have added one line: He Knew How to Play Elevator.
There had been a great lot of insurance money. There are people who collect insurance as compulsively as others collect coins and stamps, and Mark Torrance had been that type. The insurance money came in at the same time the monthly policy payments and liquor bills stopped. For five years they had been rich. Nearly rich ...
In his shallow, uneasy sleep his face rose before him as if in a glass, his face but not his face, the wide eyes and innocent bowed mouth of a boy sitting in the hall with his trucks, waiting for his daddy, waiting for the white ghost-god, waiting for the elevator to rise up with dizzying, exhilarating speed through the salt-and-sawdust mist of exhaled taverns, waiting perhaps for it to go crashing down, spilling old clocksprings out of his ears while his daddy roared with laughter, and it
(transformed into Danny's face, so much like his own had been, his eyes had been light blue while Danny's were cloudy gray, but the lips still made a bow and the complexion was fair; Danny in his study, wearing training pants, all his papers soggy and the fine misty smell of beer rising ... a dreadful batter all in ferment, rising on the wings of yeast, the breath of taverns ... snap of bone ... his own voice, mewling drunkenly, Danny, you okay, doc? ... Oh God oh God, your poor sweet arm ... and that face transformed into)
(momma's dazed face rising up from below the table, punched and bleeding, and momma was saying)
("--from your father. I repeat, an enormously important announcement from your father. Please stay tuned or tune immediately to the Happy Jack frequency. Repeat, tune immediately to the Happy Hour frequency. I repeat--")
A slow dissolve. Disembodied voices echoing up to him as if along an endless, cloudy hallway.
(Things keep getting in the way, dear Tommy ...)
(Medoc, are you here? I've been sleepwalking again, my dear. It's the inhuman monsters that I fear ...)
("Excuse me, Mr. Ullman, but isn't this the ...")
... office, with its file cabinets, Ullman's big desk, a blank reservations book for next year already in place--never misses a trick, that Ullman--all the keys hanging neatly on their hooks
(except for one, which one, which key, passkey--passkey, passkey, who's got the passkey? if we went upstairs perhaps we'd see)
and the big two-way radio on its shelf.
He snapped it on. CB transmissions coming in short, crackly bursts. He switched the band and dialed across bursts of music, news, a preacher haranguing a softly moaning congregation, a weather report. And another voice which he dialed back to. It was his father's voice.
"--kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they'll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. Right this minute that boy of yours is in where he shouldn't be. Trespassing. That's what he's doing. He's a goddam little pup. Cane him for it, Jacky, cane him within an inch of his life. Have a drink, Jacky my boy, and we'll play the elevator game. Then I'll go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it, of course you can. You must kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man--"
His father's voice, going up higher and higher, becoming something maddening, not human at all, something squealing and petulant and maddening, the voice of the Ghost-God, the Pig-God, coming dead at him out of the radio and
"No!" he screamed back. "You're dead, you're in your grave, you're not in me at all!" Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back, creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died.
He raised the radio up and brought it down, and it smashed on the floor, spilling old clocksprings and tubes like the result of some crazy elevator game gone awry, making his father's voice gone, leaving only his voice, Jack's voice, Jacky's voice, chanting in the cold reality of the office:
"--dead, you're dead, you're dead!"
And the startled sound of Wendy's feet hitting the floor over his head, and Wendy's startled, frightened voice: "Jack? Jack!"
He stood, blinking down at the shattered radio. Now there was only the snowmobile in the equipment shed to link them to the outside world.
He put his hands over his eyes and clutched at his temples. He was getting a headache.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CATATONIC
Wendy ran down the hall in her stocking feet and ran down the main stairs to the lobby two at a time. She didn't look up at the carpeted flight that led to the second floor, but if she had, she would have seen Danny standing at the top of them, still and silent, his unfocused eyes directed out into indifferent space, his thumb in his mouth, the collar and shoulders of his shirt damp. There were puffy bruises on his neck and just below his chin.
Jack's cries had ceased, but that did nothing to ease her fear. Ripped out of her sleep by his voice, raised in that old hectoring pitch she remembered so well, she still felt that she was dreaming--but another part knew she was awake, and that terrified her more. She half-expected to burst into the office and find him standing over Danny's sprawled-out body, drunk and confused.
She pushed through the door and Jack was standing there, rubbing at his temples with his fingers. His face was ghost-white. The two-way CB radio lay at his feet in a sprinkling of broken glass.
"Wendy?" he asked uncertainly. "Wendy--?"
The bewilderment seemed to grow and for a moment she saw his true face, the one he ordinarily kept so well hidden, and it was a face of desperate unhappiness, the face of an animal caught in a snare beyond its ability to decipher and render harmless. Then the muscles began to work, began to writhe under the skin, the mouth began to tremble infirmly, the Adam's apple began to rise and fall.
Her own bewilderment and surprise were overlaid by shock: he was going to cry. She had seen him cry before but never since he stopped drinking ... and never in those days unless he was very drunk and pathetically remorseful. He was a tight man, drum-tight, and his loss of control frightened her all over again.
He came toward her, the tears brimming over his lower lids now, his head shaking involuntarily as if in a fruitless effort to ward off this emotional storm, and his chest drew in a convulsive gasp that was expelled in a huge, racking sob. His feet, clad in Hush Puppies, stumbled over the wreck of the radio and he almost fell into her arms, making her stagger back with his weight. His breath blew into her face and there was no smell of liquor on it. Of course not; there was no liquor up here.
"What's wrong?" She held him as best she could. "Jack, what is it?"
But he could do nothing at first but sob, clinging to her, almost crushing the wind from her, his head turning on her shoulder in that helpless, shaking, warding-off gesture. His sobs were heavy and fierce. He was shuddering all over, his muscles jerking beneath his plaid shirt and jeans.
"Jack? What? Tell me what's wrong!"
At last the sobs began to change themselves into words, most of them incoherent at first, but coming clearer as his tears began to spend themselves.
"... dream, I guess it was a dream, but it was so real, I ... it was my mother saying that Daddy was going to be on the radio and I ... he was ... he was telling me to ... I don't know, he was yelling at me ... and so I broke the radio ... to shut him up. To shut him up. He's dead. I don't even want to dream about him. He's dead. My God, Wendy, my God. I never had a nightmare
like that. I never want to have another one. Christ! It was awful."
"You just fell asleep in the office?"
"No ... not here. Downstairs." He was straightening a little now, his weight coming off her, and the steady back-and-forth motion of his head first slowed and then stopped.
"I was looking through those old papers. Sitting on a chair I set up down there. Milk receipts. Dull stuff. And I guess I just drowsed off. That's when I started to dream. I must have sleepwalked up here." He essayed a shaky little laugh against her neck. "Another first."
"Where is Danny, Jack?"
"I don't know. Isn't he with you?"
"He wasn't ... downstairs with you?"
He looked over his shoulder and his face tightened at what he saw on her face.
"Never going to let me forget that, are you, Wendy?"
"Jack--"
"When I'm on my deathbed you'll lean over and say, 'It serves you right, remember the time you broke Danny's arm?' "
"Jack!"
"Jack what?" he asked hotly, and jumped to his feet. "Are you denying that's what you're thinking? That I hurt him? That I hurt him once before and I could hurt him again?"
"I want to know where he is, that's all!"
"Go ahead, yell your fucking head off, that'll make everything okay, won't it?"
She turned and walked out the door.
He watched her go, frozen for a moment, a blotter covered with fragments of broken glass in one hand. Then he dropped it into the wastebasket, went after her, and caught her by the lobby desk. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. Her face was carefully set.
"Wendy, I'm sorry. It was the dream. I'm upset. Forgive?"
"Of course," she said, her face not changing expression. Her wooden shoulders slipped out of his hands. She walked to the middle of the lobby and called: "Hey, doc! Where are you?"
Silence came back. She walked toward the double lobby doors, opened one of them, and stepped out onto the path Jack had shoveled. It was more like a trench; the packed and drifted snow through which the path was cut came to her shoulders. She called him again, her breath coming out in a white plume. When she came back in she had begun to look scared.
Controlling his irritation with her, he said reasonably: "Are you sure he's not sleeping in his room?"
"I told you, he was playing somewhere when I was knitting. I could hear him downstairs."
"Did you fall asleep?"
"What's that got to do with it? Yes. Danny?"
"Did you look in his room when you came downstairs just now?"
"I--" She stopped.
He nodded. "I didn't really think so."
He started up the stairs without waiting for her. She followed him, half-running, but he was taking the risers two at a time. She almost crashed into his back when he came to a dead stop on the first-floor landing. He was rooted there, looking up, his eyes wide.
"What--?" she began, and followed his gaze.
Danny still stood there, his eyes blank, sucking his thumb. The marks on his throat were cruelly visible in the light of the hall's electric flambeaux.
"Danny!" she shrieked.
It broke Jack's paralysis and they rushed up the stairs together to where he stood. Wendy fell on her knees beside him and swept the boy into her arms. Danny came pliantly enough, but he did not hug her back. It was like hugging a padded stick, and the sweet taste of horror flooded her mouth. He only sucked his thumb and stared with indifferent blankness out into the stairwell beyond both of them.
"Danny, what happened?" Jack asked. He put out his hand to touch the puffy side of Danny's neck. "Who did this to y--"
"Don't you touch him!" Wendy hissed. She clutched Danny in her arms, lifted him, and had retreated halfway down the stairs before Jack could do more than stand up, confused.
"What? Wendy, what the hell are you t--"
"Don't you touch him! I'll kill you if you lay your hands on him again!"
"Wendy--"
"You bastard!"
She turned and ran down the rest of the stairs to the first floor. Danny's head jounced mildly up and down as she ran. His thumb was lodged securely in his mouth. His eyes were soaped windows. She turned right at the foot of the stairs, and Jack heard her feet retreat to the end of it. Their bedroom door slammed. The bolt was run home. The lock turned. Brief silence. Then the soft, muttered sounds of comforting.
He stood for an unknown length of time, literally paralyzed by all that had happened in such a short space of time. His dream was still with him, painting everything a slightly unreal shade. It was as if he had taken a very mild mescaline hit. Had he maybe hurt Danny as Wendy thought? Tried to strangle his son at his dead father's request? No. He would never hurt Danny.
(He fell down the stairs, Doctor.)
He would never hurt Danny now.
(How could I know the bug bomb was defective?)
Never in his life had he been willfully vicious when he was sober.
(Except when you almost killed George Hatfield.)
"No!" he cried into the darkness. He brought both fists crashing down on his legs, again and again and again.
Wendy sat in the overstuffed chair by the window with Danny on her lap, holding him, crooning the old meaningless words, the ones you never remember afterward no matter how a thing turns out. He had folded onto her lap with neither protest nor gladness, like a paper cutout of himself, and his eyes didn't even shift toward the door when Jack cried out "No!" somewhere in the hallway.
The confusion had receded a little bit in her mind, but she now discovered something even worse behind it. Panic.
Jack had done this, she had no doubt of it. His denials meant nothing to her. She thought it was perfectly possible that Jack had tried to throttle Danny in his sleep just as he had smashed the CB radio in his sleep. He was having a breakdown of some kind. But what was she going to do about it? She couldn't stay locked in here forever. They would have to eat.
There was really only one question, and it was asked in a mental voice of utter coldness and pragmatism, the voice of her maternity, a cold and passionless voice once it was directed away from the closed circle of mother and child and out toward Jack. It was a voice that spoke of self-preservation only after son-preservation and its question was:
(Exactly how dangerous is he?)
He had denied doing it. He had been horrified at the bruises, at Danny's soft and implacable disconnection. If he had done it, a separate section of himself had been responsible. The fact that he had done it when he was asleep was--in a terrible, twisted way--encouraging. Wasn't it possible that he could be trusted to get them out of here? To get them down and away. And after that ...
But she could see no further than she and Danny arriving safe at Dr. Edmonds's office in Sidewinder. She had no particular need to see further. The present crisis was more than enough to keep her occupied.
She crooned to Danny, rocking him on her breasts. Her fingers, on his shoulder, had noticed that his T-shirt was damp, but they had not bothered reporting the information to her brain in more than a cursory way. If it had been reported, she might have remembered that Jack's hands, as he had hugged her in the office and sobbed against her neck, had been dry. It might have given her pause. But her mind was still on other things. The decision had to be made--to approach Jack or not?
Actually it was not much of a decision. There was nothing she could do alone, not even carry Danny down to the office and call for help on the CB radio. He had suffered a great shock. He ought to be taken out quickly before any permanent damage could be done. She refused to let herself believe that permanent damage might already have been done.
