In the one she had just awakened from, the hotel had been on fire.
She had awakened in their room to find Bill gone and smoke
drifting slowly through the apartment. She fled in her nightgown
but lost her direction in the narrow halls, which were obscured by
smoke. All the numbers seemed to be gone from the doors, and
there was no way to tell if you were running toward the stairwell
and elevator or away from them. She rounded a corner and saw
Bill standing outside the window at the end, motioning her
forward. Somehow she had run all the way to the back of the hotel;
he was standing out there on the fire escape landing. Now there
was heat baking into her back through the thin, filmy stuff of her
nightgown. The place must be in flames behind her, she thought.
Perhaps it had been the boiler. You had to keep an. eye on the
boiler, because if you didn't, she would creep on you. Lottie
started forward and suddenly something wrapped around her arm
like a python, holding her back. It was one of the fire hoses she had
seen along the corridor walls, white canvas hose in a bright red
frame. It had come alive somehow, and it writhed and coiled
around her, now securing a leg, now her other arm. She was held
fast and it was getting hotter, hotter. She could hear the angry
crackle of the flames now only feet behind her. The wallpaper was
peeling and blistering. Bill was gone from the fire-escape landing.
And then she had been-
She had been awake in the big double bed, no smell of smoke, with
Bill Pillsbury sleeping the sleep of the justly stupid beside her. She
was running sweat, and if it, weren't so late she would get up to
shower. It was quarter past three in the morning.
Dr. Verecker had offered to give her a sleeping medicine, but
Lottie had refused. She distrusted any concoction you put in your
body to knock out your mind. It was like giving up command of
your ship voluntarily, and she had sworn to herself that she would
never do that.
But what would she do for the next four clays? Well, Verecker
played shuffleboard in the mornings with his nickeleyed wife.
Perhaps she would look him up and get the prescription after all.
Lottie looked up at the white ceiling high above her, glimmering
ghostlike, and admitted again that the Overlook had been a very
bad mistake. None of the ads for the Overlook in the New Yorker
or The American Mercury mentioned that the place's real specialty
seemed to be giving people the whimwhams. Four more days, and
that was plenty. It had been a mistake, all right, but a mistake she
would never admit, or have to admit. In fact, she was sure she
could.
You had to keep an eye on the boiler, because if you didn't., she
would creep up on you. What did that mean, anyway? Or was it
just one of those nonsensical things that sometimes came to you in
dreams, so much gibberish? Of course, there was undoubtedly a
boiler in the basement or somewhere to heat the place; even
summer resorts had to have heat, sometimes, didn't they? If only to
