by Stephen King
The thought made her cold all over.
"I wish Daddy was all better," Danny said, and the tears began to flow again.
"Me too," she said, and hugged Danny tightly. "And honey, that's why you've got to help me put your daddy somewhere. Somewhere that the hotel can't make him hurt us and where he can't hurt himself. Then ... if your friend Dick comes, or a park ranger, we can take him away. And I think he might be all right again. All of us might be all right. I think there's still a chance for that, if we're strong and brave, like you were when you jumped on his back. Do you understand?" She looked at him pleadingly and thought how strange it was; she had never seen him when he looked so much like Jack.
"Yes," he said, and nodded. "I think ... if we can get away from here ... everything will be like it was. Where could we put him?"
"The pantry. There's food in there, and a good strong bolt on the outside. It's warm. And we can eat up the things from the refrigerator and the freezer. There will be plenty for all three of us until help comes."
"Do we do it now?"
"Yes, right now. Before he wakes up."
Danny put the bar gate up while she folded Jack's hands on his chest and listened to his breathing for a moment. It was slow but regular. From the smell of him she thought he must have drunk a great deal ... and he was out of the habit. She thought it might be liquor as much as the crack on the head with the bottle that had put him out.
She picked up his legs and began to drag him along the floor. She had been married to him for nearly seven years, he had lain on top of her countless times--in the thousands--but she had never realized how heavy he was. Her breath whistled painfully in and out of her hurt throat. Nevertheless, she felt better than she had in days. She was alive. Having just brushed so close to death, that was precious. And Jack was alive, too. By blind luck rather than plan, they had perhaps found the only way that would bring them all safely out.
Panting harshly, she paused a moment, holding Jack's feet against her hips. The surroundings reminded her of the old seafaring captain's cry in Treasure Island after old blind Pew had passed him the Black Spot: We'll do em yet!
And then she remembered, uncomfortably, that the old seadog had dropped dead mere seconds later.
"Are you all right, Mommy? Is he ... is he too heavy?"
"I'll manage." She began to drag him again. Danny was beside Jack. One of his hands had fallen off his chest, and Danny replaced it gently, with love.
"Are you sure, Mommy?"
"Yes. It's the best thing, Danny."
"It's like putting him in jail."
"Only for a while."
"Okay, then. Are you sure you can do it?"
"Yes."
But it was a near thing, at that. Danny had been cradling his father's head when they went over the door-sills, but his hands slipped in Jack's greasy hair as they went into the kitchen. The back of his head struck the tiles, and Jack began to moan and stir.
"You got to use smoke," Jack muttered quickly. "Now run and get me that gascan."
Wendy and Danny exchanged tight, fearful glances.
"Help me," she said in a low voice.
For a moment Danny stood as if paralyzed by his father's face, and then he moved jerkily to her side and helped her hold the left leg. They dragged him across the kitchen floor in a nightmare kind of slow motion, the only sounds the faint, insectile buzz of the fluorescent lights and their own labored breathing.
When they reached the pantry, Wendy put Jack's feet down and turned to fumble with the bolt. Danny looked down at Jack, who was lying limp and relaxed again. The shirttail had pulled out of the back of his pants as they dragged him and Danny wondered if Daddy was too drunk to be cold. It seemed wrong to lock him in the pantry like a wild animal, but he had seen what he tried to do to Mommy. Even upstairs he had known Daddy was going to do that. He had heard them arguing in his head.
(If only we could all be out of here. Or if it was a dream I was having, back in Stovington. If only.)
The bolt was stuck.
Wendy pulled at it as hard as she could, but it wouldn't move. She couldn't retract the goddam bolt. It was stupid and unfair ... she had opened it with no trouble at all when she had gone in to get the can of soup. Now it wouldn't move, and what was she going to do? They couldn't put him in the walk-in refrigerator; he would freeze or smother to death. But if they left him out and he woke up ...
Jack stirred again on the floor.
"I'll take care of it," he muttered. "I understand."
"He's waking up, Mommy!" Danny warned.
Sobbing now, she yanked at the bolt with both hands.
"Danny?" There was something softly menacing, if still blurry, in Jack's voice. "That you, ole doc?"
"Just go to sleep, Daddy," Danny said nervously. "It's bedtime, you know."
He looked up at his mother, still struggling with the bolt, and saw what was wrong immediately. She had forgotten to rotate the bolt before trying to withdraw it. The little catch was stuck in its notch.
"Here," he said low, and brushed her trembling hands aside; his own were shaking almost as badly. He knocked the catch loose with the heel of his hand and the bolt drew back easily.
"Quick," he said. He looked down. Jack's eyes had fluttered open again and this time Daddy was looking directly at him, his gaze strangely flat and speculative.
"You copied it," Daddy told him. "I know you did. But it's here somewhere. And I'll find it. That I promise you. I'll find it ..." His words slurred off again.
Wendy pushed the pantry door open with her knee, hardly noticing the pungent odor of dried fruit that wafted out. She picked up Jack's feet again and dragged him in. She was gasping harshly now, at the limit of her strength. As she yanked the chain pull that turned on the light, Jack's eyes fluttered open again.
"What are you doing? Wendy? What are you doing?"
She stepped over him.
He was quick; amazingly quick. One hand lashed out and she had to sidestep and nearly fall out the door to avoid his grasp. Still, he had caught a handful of her bathrobe and there was a heavy purring noise as it ripped. He was up on his hands and knees now, his hair hanging in his eyes, like some heavy animal. A large dog ... or a lion.
"Damn you both. I know what you want. But you're not going to get it. This hotel ... it's mine. It's me they want. Me! Me!"
"The door, Danny!" she screamed. "Shut the door!"
He pushed the heavy wooden door shut with a slam, just as Jack leaped. The door latched and Jack thudded uselessly against it.
Danny's small hands groped at the bolt. Wendy was too far away to help; the issue of whether he would be locked in or free was going to be decided in two seconds. Danny missed his grip, found it again, and shot the bolt across just as the latch began to jiggle madly up and down below it. Then it stayed up and there was a series of thuds as Jack slammed his shoulder against the door. The bolt, a quarter inch of steel in diameter, showed no signs of loosening. Wendy let her breath out slowly.
"Let me out of here!" Jack raged. "Let me out! Danny, doggone it, this is your father and I want to get out! Now do what I tell you!"
Danny's hand moved automatically toward the bolt. Wendy caught it and pressed it between her breasts.
"You mind your daddy, Danny! You do what I say! You do it or I'll give you a hiding you'll never forget. Open this door or I'll bash your fucking brains in!"
Danny looked at her, pale as window glass.
They could hear his breath tearing in and out behind the half inch of solid oak.
"Wendy, you let me out! Let me out right now! You cheap nickel-plated cold-cunt bitch! You let me out! I mean it! Let me out of here and I'll let it go! If you don't, I'll mess you up! I mean it! I'll mess you up so bad your own mother would pass you on the street! Now open this door!"
Danny moaned. Wendy looked at him and saw he was going to faint in a moment.
"Come on, doc," she said, surprised at the calmness of her own voice. "It's not
your daddy talking, remember. It's the hotel."
"Come back here and let me out right NOW!" Jack screamed. There was a scraping, breaking sound as he attacked the inside of the door with his fingernails.
"It's the hotel," Danny said. "It's the hotel. I remember." But he looked back over his shoulder and his face was crumpled and terrified.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
DANNY
It was three in the afternoon of a long, long day.
They were sitting on the big bed in their quarters. Danny was turning the purple VW model with the monster sticking out of the sunroof over and over in his hands, compulsively.
They had heard Daddy's batterings at the door all the way across the lobby, the batterings and his voice, hoarse and petulantly angry in a weak-king sort of a way, vomiting promises of punishment, vomiting profanity, promising both of them that they would live to regret betraying him after he had slaved his guts out for them over the years.
Danny thought they would no longer be able to hear it upstairs, but the sounds of his rage carried perfectly up the dumbwaiter shaft. Mommy's face was pale, and there were horrible brownish bruises on her neck where Daddy had tried to ...
He turned the model over and over in his hands, Daddy's prize for having learned his reading lessons.
(... where Daddy had tried to hug her too tight.)
Mommy put some of her music on the little record player, scratchy and full of horns and flutes. She smiled at him tiredly. He tried to smile back and failed. Even with the volume turned up loud he thought he could still hear Daddy screaming at them and battering the pantry door like an animal in a zoo cage. What if Daddy had to go to the bathroom? What would he do then?
Danny began to cry.
Wendy turned the volume down on the record player at once, held him, rocked him on her lap.
"Danny, love, it will be all right. It will. If Mr. Hallorann didn't get your message, someone else will. As soon as the storm is over. No one could get up here until then anyway. Mr. Hallorann or anyone else. But when the storm is over, everything will be fine again. We'll leave here. And do you know what we'll do next spring? The three of us?"
Danny shook his head against her breasts. He didn't know. It seemed there could never be spring again.
"We'll go fishing. We'll rent a boat and go fishing, just like we did last year on Chatterton Lake. You and me and your daddy. And maybe you'll catch a bass for our supper. And maybe we won't catch anything, but we're sure to have a good time."
"I love you, Mommy," he said, and hugged her.
"Oh, Danny, I love you, too."
Outside, the wind whooped and screamed.
Around four-thirty, just as the daylight began to fail, the screams ceased.
They had both been dozing uneasily, Wendy still holding Danny in her arms, and she didn't wake. But Danny did. Somehow the silence was worse, more ominous than the screams and the blows against the strong pantry door. Was Daddy asleep again? Or dead? Or what?
(Did he get out?)
Fifteen minutes later the silence was broken by a hard, grating, metallic rattle. There was a heavy grinding, then a mechanical humming. Wendy came awake with a cry.
The elevator was running again.
They listened to it, wide-eyed, hugging each other. It went from floor to floor, the grate rattling back, the brass door slamming open. There was laughter, drunken shouts, occasional screams, and the sounds of breakage.
The Overlook was coming to life around them.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
JACK
He sat on the floor of the pantry with his legs out in front of him, a box of Triscuit crackers between them, looking at the door. He was eating the crackers one by one, not tasting them, only eating them because he had to eat something. When he got out of here, he was going to need his strength. All of it.
At this precise instant, he thought he had never felt quite so miserable in his entire life. His mind and body together made up a large-writ scripture of pain. His head ached terribly, the sick throb of a hangover. The attendant symptoms were there, too: his mouth tasted like a manure rake had taken a swing through it, his ears rang, his heart had an extra-heavy, thudding beat, like a tomtom. In addition, both shoulders ached fiercely from throwing himself against the door and his throat felt raw and peeled from useless shouting. He had cut his right hand on the doorlatch.
And when he got out of here, he was going to kick some ass.
He munched the Triscuits one by one, refusing to give in to his wretched stomach, which wanted to vomit up everything. He thought of the Excedrin in his pocket and decided to wait until his stomach had quieted a bit. No sense swallowing a painkiller if you were going to throw it right back up. Have to use your brain. The celebrated Jack Torrance brain. Aren't you the fellow who once was going to live by his wits? Jack Torrance, bestselling author. Jack Torrance, acclaimed playwright and winner of the New York Critics Circle Award. John Torrance, man of letters, esteemed thinker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize at seventy for his trenchant book of memoirs, My Life in the Twentieth Century. All any of that shit boiled down to was living by your wits.
Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are.
He put another Triscuit into his mouth and crunched it up.
What it really came down to, he supposed, was their lack of trust in him. Their failure to believe that he knew what was best for them and how to get it. His wife had tried to usurp him, first by fair
(sort of)
means, then by foul. When her little hints and whining objections had been overturned by his own well-reasoned arguments, she had turned his boy against him, tried to kill him with a bottle, and then had locked him, of all places, in the goddamned fucking pantry.
Still, a small interior voice nagged him.
(Yes but where did the liquor come from? Isn't that really the central point? You know what happens when you drink, you know it from bitter experience. When you drink, you lose your wits.)
He hurled the box of Triscuits across the small room. They struck a shelf of canned goods and fell to the floor. He looked at the box, wiped his lips with his hand, and then looked at his watch. It was almost six-thirty. He had been in here for hours. His wife had locked him in here and he'd been here for fucking hours.
He could begin to sympathize with his father.
The thing he'd never asked himself, Jack realized now, was exactly what had driven his daddy to drink in the first place. And really ... when you came right down to what his old students had been pleased to call the nittygritty ... hadn't it been the woman he was married to? A milksop sponge of a woman, always dragging silently around the house with an expression of doomed martyrdom on her face? A ball and chain around Daddy's ankle? No, not ball and chain. She had never actively tried to make Daddy a prisoner, the way Wendy had done to him. For Jack's father it must have been more like the fate of McTeague the dentist at the end of Frank Norris's great novel: handcuffed to a dead man in the wasteland. Yes, that was better. Mentally and spiritually dead, his mother had been handcuffed to his father by matrimony. Still, Daddy had tried to do right as he dragged her rotting corpse through life. He had tried to bring the four children up to know right from wrong, to understand discipline, and above all, to respect their father.
Well, they had been ingrates, all of them, himself included. And now he was paying the price; his own son had turned out to be an ingrate, too. But there was hope. He would get out of here somehow. He would chastise them both, and harshly. He would set Danny an example, so that the day might come when Danny was grown, a day when Danny would know what to do better than he himself had known.
He remembered the Sunday dinner when his father had caned his mother at the table ... how horrified he and the others had been. Now he could see how necessary that had been, how his father had only been feigning drunkenness, how his wits had been sharp and alive underneath all along, watching for the slightest sign of disrespect.
Jack crawled af
ter the Triscuits and began to eat them again, sitting by the door she had so treacherously bolted. He wondered exactly what his father had seen and how he had caught her out by his playacting. Had she been sneering at him behind her hand? Sticking her tongue out? Making obscene finger gestures? Or only looking at him insolently and arrogantly, convinced that he was too stupidly drunk to see? Whatever it had been, he had caught her at it, and he had chastised her sharply. And now, twenty years later, he could finally appreciate Daddy's wisdom.
Of course you could say Daddy had been foolish to marry such a woman, to have handcuffed himself to that corpse in the first place ... and a disrespectful corpse at that. But when the young marry in haste they must repent in leisure, and perhaps Daddy's daddy had married the same type of woman, so that unconsciously Jack's daddy had also married one, as Jack himself had. Except that his wife, instead of being satisfied with the passive role of having wrecked one career and crippled another, had opted for the poisonously active task of trying to destroy his last and best chance: to become a member of the Overlook's staff, and possibly to rise ... all the way to the position of manager, in time. She was trying to deny him Danny, and Danny was his ticket of admission. That was foolish, of course--why would they want the son when they could have the father?--but employers often had foolish ideas and that was the condition that had been made.
He wasn't going to be able to reason with her, he could see that now. He had tried to reason with her in the Colorado Lounge, and she had refused to listen, had hit him over the head with a bottle for his pains. But there would be another time, and soon. He would get out of here.
