“No,” she said. “I couldn't have listened in if I'd wanted to, and you'd know that if you were thinking straight. Danny and I were downstairs that night. The switchboard is shut down. Our phone upstairs was the only one in the hotel that was working, because it's patched directly into the outside line. You told me so yourself.”
“Then how could you know what Al told me?”
“Danny told me. Danny knew. The same way he sometimes knows when things are misplaced, or when people are thinking about divorce.”
“The doctor said-”
She shook her head impatiently. “The doctor was full of shit and we both know it. We've known it all the time. Remember when Danny said he wanted to see the firetrucks? That was no hunch. He was just a baby. He knows things. And now I'm afraid…” She looked at the bruises on Danny's neck.
“Did you really know Uncle Al had called me, Danny?”
Danny nodded. “He was really mad, Daddy. Because you called Mr. Ullman and Mr. Ullman called him. Uncle AI didn't want you to write anything about the hotel.”
“Jesus,” Jack said again. “The bruises, Danny. Who tried to strangle you?”
Danny's face went dark. “Her,” he said. “The woman in that room. In 217. The dead lady.” His lips began to tremble again, and he seized the teacup and drank.
Jack and Wendy exchanged a scared look over his bowed head.
“Do you know anything about this?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Not about this, no.”
“Danny?” He raised the boy's frightened face. “Try, son. We're right here.”
“I knew it was bad here,” Danny said in a low voice. “Ever since we were in Boulder. Because Tony gave me dreams about it.”
“What dreams?”
“I can't remember everything. He showed me the Overlook at night, with a skull and crossbones on the front. And there was pounding. Something… I don't remember what… chasing after me. A monster. Tony showed me about redrum.”
“What's that, doc?” Wendy asked.
He shook his head. “I don't know.”
“Rum, like yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum?” Jack asked.
Danny shook his head again. “I don't know. Then we got here, and Mr. Hallorann talked to me in his car. Because he has the shine, too.”
“Shine?”
“It's…” Danny made a sweeping, all-encompassing gesture with his hands. “It's being able to understand things. To know things. Sometimes you see things. Like me knowing Uncle Al called. And Mr. Hallorann knowing you call me doc. Mr. Hallorann, he was peeling potatoes in the Army when he knew his brother got killed in a train crash. And when he called home it was true.”
“Holy God,” Jack whispered. “You're not making this up, are you, Dan?”
Danny shook his head violently. “No, I swear to God.” Then, with a touch of pride he added: “Mr. Hallorann said I had the best shine of anyone he ever met. We could talk back and forth to each other without hardly opening our mouths.”
His parents looked at each other again, frankly stunned.
“Mr. Hallorann got me alone because he was worried,” Danny went on. “He said this was a bad place for people who shine. He said he'd seen things. I saw something, too; Right after I talked to him. When Mr. Ullman was taking us around.”
“What was it?” Jack asked.
“In the Presidential Sweet. On the wall by the door going into the bedroom. A whole lot of blood and some other stuff. Gushy stuff. I think… that the gushy stuff must have been brains.”
“Oh my God,” Jack said.
Wendy was now very pale, her lips nearly gray.
“This place,” Jack said. “Some pretty bad types owned it awhile back. Organization people from Las Vegas.”
“Crooks?” Danny asked.
“Yeah, crooks.” He looked at Wendy. “In 1966 a big-time hood named Vito Gienelli got killed up there, along with his two bodyguards. There was a picture in the newspaper. Danny just described the picture.”
“Mr. Hallorann said he saw some other stuff,” Danny told them. “Once about the playground. And once it was something bad in that room. 217. A maid saw it and lost her job because she talked about it. So Mr. Hallorann went up and he saw it too. But he didn't talk about it because he didn't want to lose his job. Except he told me never to go in there. But I did. Because I believed him when he said the things you saw here couldn't hurt you.” This last was nearly whispered in a low, husky voice, and Danny touched the puffed circle of bruises on his neck.
“What about the playground?” Jack asked in a strange, casual voice.
“I don't know. The playground, he said. And the hedge animals.”
Jack jumped a little, and Wendy looked at him curiously.
“Have you seen anything down there, Jack?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing.”
Danny was looking at him.
“Nothing,” he said again, more calmly. And that was true. He had been the victim of an hallucination. And that was all.
“Danny, we have to hear about the woman,” Wendy said gently.
So Danny told them, but his words came in cyclic bursts, sometimes almost verging on incomprehensible garble in his hurry to spit it out and be free of it. He pushed tighter and tighter against his mother's breasts as he talked.
“I went in,” he said. “I stole the passkey and went in. It was like I couldn't help myself. I had to know. And she… the lady… was in the tub. She was dead. All swelled up. She was nuh-nuh… didn't have no clothes on.” He looked miserably at his mother. “And she started to get up and she wanted me. I know she did because I could feel it. She wasn't even thinking, not the way you and Daddy think. It was black… it was hurt-think… like… like the wasps that night in my room! Only wanting to hurt. Like the wasps.”
He swallowed and there was silence for a moment, all quiet while the image of the wasps sank into them.
“So I ran,” Danny said. “I ran but the door was closed. I left it open but it was closed. I didn't think about just opening it again and running out. I was scared. So I just… I leaned against the door and closed my eyes and thought of how Mr. Hallorann said the things here were just like pictures in a book and if I… kept saying to myself… you're not there, go away, you're not there… she would go away. But it didn't work.”
His voice began to rise hysterically.
“She grabbed me… turned me around… I could see her eyes… how her eyes were… and she started to choke me… I could smell her… I could smell how dead she was… s”
“Stop now, shhh,” Wendy said, alarmed. “Stop, Danny. It's all right. It-”
She was getting ready to go into her croon again. The Wendy Torrance Allpurpose Croon. Pat. Pending.
“Let him finish,” Jack said curtly.
“There isn't any more,” Danny said. “I passed out. Either because she was choking me or just because I was scared. When I came to, I was dreaming you and Mommy were fighting over me and you wanted to do the Bad Thing again, Daddy. Then I knew it wasn't a dream at all… and I was awake… and… I wet my pants. I wet my pants like a baby.” His head fell back against Wendy's sweater and he began to cry with horrible weakness, his hands lying limp and spent in his lap.
Jack got up. “Take care of him.”
“What are you going to do?” Her face was full of dread.
“I'm going up to that room, what did you think I was going to do? Have coffee? “
“No! Don't, Jack, please don't!”
“Wendy, if there's someone else in the hotel, we have to know.”
“Don't you dare leave us alone!” she shrieked at him. Spittle flew from her lips with the force of her cry.
Jack said: “Wendy, that's a remarkable imitation of your mom.”
She burst into tears then, unable to cover her face because Danny was on her lap.
“I'm sorry,” Jack said. “But I have to, you know. I'm the goddam caretaker. It's what I'm paid for.”
She only cried harder and he left her that way, going out of the kitchen, rubbing his mouth with his handkerchief as the door swung shut behind him.
“Don't worry, mommy,” Danny said. “He'll be all right. He doesn't shine. Nothing here can hurt him.”
Through her tears she said, “No, I don't believe that.”
30. 217 Revisited
He took the elevator up and it was strange, because none of them had used the elevator since they moved in. He threw the brass handle over and it wheezed vibratoriously up the shaft, the brass grate rattling madly. Wendy had a true claustrophobe's horror of the elevator, he knew. She envisioned the three of them trapped in it between floors while the winter storms raged outside, she could see them growing thinner and weaker, starving to death. Or perhaps dining on each other, the way those Rugby players had. He remembered a bumper sticker he had seen in Boulder, RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR OWN DEAD. He could think of others. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. Or menu items. Welcome to the Overlook Dining Room, Pride of the Rockies. Eat in Splendor at the Roof of the World. Human Haunch Broiled Over Matches La Specialite de la Maison. The contemptuous smile flicked over his features again. As the number 2 rose on the shaft wall, he threw the brass handle back to the home position and the elevator car creaked to a stop. He took his Excedrin from his pocket, shook three of them into his hand, and opened the elevator door. Nothing in the Overlook frightened him. He felt that he and it were simpdtico.
He walked up the hall flipping his Excedrin into his mouth and chewing them one by one. He rounded the corner into the short corridor off the main hall. The door to Room 217 was ajar, and the passkey hung from the lock on its white paddle.
He frowned, feeling a wave of irritation and even real anger. Whatever had come of it, the boy had been trespassing. He had been told, and told bluntly, that certain areas of the hotel were off limits: the equipment shed, the basement, and all of the guest rooms. He would talk to Danny about that just as soon as the boy was over his fright. He would talk to him reasonably but sternly. There were plenty of fathers who would have done more than just talk. They would have administered a good shaking, and perhaps that was what Danny needed. If the boy had gotten a scare, wasn't that at least his just deserts?
He walked down to the door, removed the passkey, dropped it into his pocket, and stepped inside. The overhead light was on. He glanced at the bed, saw it was not rumpled, and then walked
