The Shining - Page 12/56

"What were you talking about, hon?" Wendy asked him as they went back inside.

"Oh, nothing much."

"For nothing much it sure was a long talk."

He shrugged and Wendy saw Danny's paternity in the gesture; Jack could hardly have done it better himself. She would get no more out of Danny. She felt strong exasperation mixed with an even stronger love: the love was helpless, the exasperation came from a feeling that she was deliberately being excluded. With the two of them around she sometimes felt like an outsider, a bit player who had accidentally wandered back onstage while the main action was taking place. Well, they wouldn't be able to exclude her this winter, her two exasperating males; quarters were going to be a little too close for that. She suddenly realized she was feeling jealous of the closeness between her husband and her son, and felt ashamed. That was too close to the way her own mother might have felt... too close for comfort.

The lobby was now empty except for Ullman and the head desk clerk (they were at the register, cashing up), a couple of maids who had changed to warm slacks and sweaters, standing by the front door and looking out with their luggage pooled around them, and Watson, the maintenance man. He caught her looking at him and gave her a wink... a decidedly lecherous one. She looked away hurriedly. Jack was over by the window just outside the restaurant, studying the view. He looked rapt and dreamy.

The cash register apparently checked out, because now Ullman ran it shut with an authoritative snap. He initialed the tape and put it in a small zipper case. Wendy silently applauded the head clerk, who looked greatly relieved. Ullman looked like the type of man who might take any shortage out of the head clerk's hide... without ever spilling a drop of blood. Wendy didn't much care for Ullman or his officious, ostentatiously bustling manner. He was like every boss she'd ever had, male or female. He would be saccharin sweet with the guests, a petty tyrant when he was backstage with the help. But now school was out and the head clerk's pleasure was written large on his face. It was out for everyone but she and Jack and Danny, anyway.

"Mr. Torrance," Ullman called peremptorily. "Would you come over here, please? "

Jack walked over, nodding to Wendy and Danny that they were to come too.

The clerk, who had gone into the back, now came out again wearing an overcoat. "Have a pleasant winter, Mr. Ullman."

"I doubt it," Ullman said distantly. "May twelfth, Braddock. Not a day earlier. Not a day later."

"Yes, sir."

Braddock walked around the desk, his face sober and dignified, as befitted his position, but when his back was entirely to Ullman, he grinned like a schoolboy. He spoke briefly to the two girls still waiting by the door for their ride, and he was followed out by a brief burst of stifled laughter.

Now Wendy began to notice the silence of the place. It had fallen over the hotel like a heavy blanket muting everything but the faint pulse of the afternoon wind outside. From where she stood she could look through the inner office, now neat to the point of sterility with its two bare desks and two sets of gray filing cabinets. Beyond that she could see Hallorann's spotless kitchen, the big portholed double doors propped open by rubber wedges.

"I thought I would take a few extra minutes and show you through the Hotel," Ullman said, and Wendy reflected that you could always hear that capital H in Ullman's voice. You were supposed to hear it. "I'm sure your husband will get to know the ins and outs of the Overlook quite well, Mrs. Torrance, but you and your son will doubtless keep more to the lobby level and the first floor, where your quarters are."

"Doubtless," Wendy murmured demurely, and Jack shot her a private glance.

"It's a beautiful place," Ullman said expansively. "I rather enjoy showing it off."

I'll bet you do, Wendy thought.

"Let's go up to third and work our way down," Ullman said. He sounded positively enthused.

"If we're keeping you-" Jack began.

"Not at all," Ullman said: "The shop is shut. Tout fins, for this season, at least. And I plan to overnight in Boulder-at the Boulderado, of course. Only decent hotel this side of Denver... except for the Overlook itself, of course. This way."

They stepped into the elevator together. It was ornately scrolled in copper and brass, but it settled appreciably before Ullman pulled the gate across. Danny stirred a little uneasily, and Ullman smiled down at him. Danny tried to smile back without notable success.

"Don't you worry, little man," Ullman said. "Safe as houses."

"So was the Titanic," Jack said, looking up at the cut-glass globe in the center of the elevator ceiling. Wendy bit the inside of her cheek to keep the smile away.

Ullman was not amused. He slid the inner gate across with a rattle and a bang. "The Titanic made only one voyage, Mr. Torrance. This elevator has made thousands of them since it was installed in 1926."

"That's reassuring," Jack said. He ruffed Danny's hair. "The plane ain't gonna crash, doc."

Ullman threw the lever over, and for a moment there was nothing but a shuddering beneath their feet and the tortured whine of the motor below them. Wendy had a vision of the four of them being trapped between floors like flies in a bottle and found in the spring... with little bits and pieces gone... like the Donner Party...

(Stop it!)

The elevator began to rise, with some vibration and clashing and banging from below at first. Then the ride smoothed out. At the third floor Ullman brought them to a bumpy stop, retracted the gate, and opened the door. The elevator car was still six inches below floor level. Danny gazed at the difference in height between the third-floor hall and the elevator floor as if he had just sensed the universe was not as sane as he had been told. Ullman cleared his throat and raised the car a little, brought it to a stop with a jerk (still two inches low), and they all climbed out. With their weight gone the car rebounded almost to floor level, something Wendy did not find reassuring at all. Safe as houses or not, she resolved to take the stairs when she had to go up or down in this place. And under no conditions would she allow the three of them to get into the rickety thing together.

"What are you looking at, doc?" Jack inquired humorously. "See any spots there?"

"Of course not," Ullman said, nettled. "All the rugs were shampooed just two days ago."

Wendy glanced down at the hall runner herself. Pretty, but definitely not anything she would choose for her own home, if the day ever came when she had one. Deep blue pile, it was entwined with what seemed to be a surrealistic jungle scene full of ropes and vines and trees filled with exotic birds. It was hard to tell just what sort of birds, because all the interweaving was done in unshaded black, giving only silhouettes.

"Do you like the rug?" Wendy asked Danny.

"Yes, Mom," he said colorlessly.

They walked down the hall, which was comfortably wide. The wallpaper was silk, a lighter blue to go against the rug. Electric flambeaux stood at ten-foot intervals at a height of about seven feet. Fashioned to look like London gas lamps, the bulbs were masked behind cloudy, cream-hued glass that was bound with crisscrossing iron strips.

"I like those very much," she said.

Ullman nodded, pleased. "Mr. Derwent bad those installed throughout the Hotel after the war-number Two, I mean. In fact most-although not all-of the thirdfloor decorating scheme was his idea. This is 300, the Presidential Suite."

He twisted his key in the lock of the mahogany double doors and swung them wide. The sitting room's wide western exposure made them all gasp, which had probably been Ullman's intention. He smiled. "Quite a view, isn't it?"

"It sure is," Jack said.

The window ran nearly the length of the sitting room, and beyond it the sun was poised directly between two sawtoothed peaks, casting golden light across the rock faces and the sugared snow on the high tips. The clouds around and behind this picture-postcard view were also tinted gold, and a sunbeam glinted duskily down into the darkly pooled firs below the timberline.

Jack and Wendy were so absorbed in the view that they didn't look down at Danny, who was staring not out the window but at the red-and-white-striped silk wallpaper to the left, where a door opened into an interior bedroom. And his gasp, which had been mingled with theirs, had nothing to do with beauty.

Great splashes of dried blood, flecked with tiny bits of grayish-white tissue, clotted the wallpaper. It made Danny feel sick. It was like a crazy picture drawn in blood, a surrealistic etching of a man's face drawn back in terror and pain, the mouth yawning and half the head pulverized-

(So if you should see something... just look the other way and when you look back, it'll be gone. Are you diggin me?)

He deliberately looked out the window, being careful to show no expression on his face, and when his mommy's hand closed over his own he took it, being careful not to squeeze it or give her a signal of any kind.

The manager was saying something to his daddy about making sure to shutter that big window so a strong wind wouldn't blow it in. Jack was nodding. Danny looked cautiously back at the wall. The big dried bloodstain was gone. Those little gray-white flecks that had been scattered all through it, they were gone, too.

Then Ullman was leading them out. Mommy asked him if he thought the mountains were pretty. Danny said he did, although he didn't really care for the mountains, one way or the other. As Ullman was closing the door behind them, Danny looked back over his shoulder. The bloodstain had returned, only now it was fresh. It was running. Ullman, looking directly at it, went on with his running commentary about the famous men who had stayed here. Danny discovered that he had bitten his lip hard enough to make it bleed, and he had never even felt it. As they walked on down the corridor, he fell a little bit behind the others and wiped the blood away with the back of his hand and thought about

(blood)

(Did Mr. Hallorann see blood or was it something worse?)

(I don't think those things can hurt you.)

There was an iron scream behind his lips, but he would not let it out. His mommy and daddy could not see such things; they never had. He would keep quiet. His mommy and daddy were loving each other, and that was a real thing. The other things were just like pictures in a book. Some pictures were scary, but they couldn't hurt you. They... couldn't... hurt you.

Mr. Ullman showed them some other rooms on the third floor, leading them through corridors that twisted and turned like a maze. They were all sweets up here, Mr. Ullman said, although Danny didn't see any candy. He showed them some rooms where a lady named Marilyn Monroe once stayed when she was married to a man named Arthur Miller (Danny got a vague understanding that Marilyn and Arthur had gotten a DIVORCE not long after they were in the Overlook Hotel).

"Mommy?"

"What, honey?"

"If they were married, why did they have different names? You and Daddy have the same names."

"Yes, but we're not famous, Danny," Jack said. "Famous women keep their same names even after they get married because their names are their bread and butter."

"Bread and butter," Danny said, completely mystified.

"What Daddy means is that people used to like to go to the movies and see Marilyn Monroe," Wendy said, "but they might not like to go to see Marilyn Miller."

"Why not? She'd still be the same lady. Wouldn't everyone know that?"

"Yes, but-" She looked at Jack helplessly.

"Truman Capote once stayed in this room," Ullman interrupted impatiently. He opened the door. "That was in my time. An awfully nice man. Continental manners."

There was nothing remarkable in any of these rooms (except for the absence of sweets, which Mr. Ullman kept calling them), nothing that Danny was afraid of. In fact, there was only one other thing on the third floor that bothered Danny, and he could not have said why. It was the fire extinguisher on the wall just before they turned the corner and went back to the elevator, which stood open and waiting like a mouthful of gold teeth.

It was an old-fashioned extinguisher, a flat hose folded back a dozen times upon itself, one end attached to a large red valve, the other ending in a brass nozzle. The folds of the hose were secured with a red steel slat on a hinge. In case of a fire you could knock the steel slat up and out of the way with one hard push and the hose was yours. Danny could see that much; he was good at seeing how things worked. By the time he was two and a half he had been unlocking the protective gate his father had installed at the top of the stairs in the Stovington house. He had seen how the lock worked. His daddy said it was a NACK. Some people had the NACK and some people didn't.

This fire extinguisher was a little older than others he had seen-the one in the nursery school, for instance-but that was not so unusual. Nonetheless it filled him with faint unease, curled up there against the light blue wallpaper like a sleeping snake. And he was glad when it was out of sight around the corner.

"Of course all the windows have to be shuttered," Mr. Ullman said as they stepped back into the elevator. Once again the car sank queasily beneath their feet. "But I'm particularly concerned about the one in the Presidential Suite. The original bill on that window was four hundred and twenty dollars, and that was over thirty years ago. It would cost eight times that to replace today."

"I'll shutter it," Jack said.

They went down to the second floor where there were more rooms and even more twists and turns in the corridor. The light from the windows had begun to fade appreciably now as the sun went behind the mountains. Mr. Ullman showed them one or two rooms and that was all. He walked past 217, the one Dick Hallorann had warned him about, without slowing. Danny looked at the bland number-plate on the door with uneasy fascination.

Then down to the first floor. Mr. Ullman didn't show them into any rooms here until they had almost reached the thickly carpeted staircase that led down into the lobby again. "Here are your quarters," he said. "I think you'll find them adequate."

They went in. Danny was braced for whatever might be there. There was nothing.

Wendy Torrance felt a strong surge of relief. The Presidential Suite, with its cold elegance, had made her feel awkward and clumsy-it was all very well to visit some restored historical building with a bedroom plaque that announced Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt had slept there, but another thing entirely to imagine you and your husband lying beneath acreages of linen and perhaps making love where the greatest men in the world had once lain (the most powerful, anyway, she amended). But this apartment was simpler, homier, almost inviting. She thought she could abide this place for a season with no great difficulty.

"It's very pleasant," she said to Ullman, and heard the gratitude in her voice.

Ullman nodded. "Simple but adequate. During the season, this suite quarters the cook and his wife, or the cook and his apprentice."

"Mr. Hallorann lived here?" Danny broke in.

Mr. Ullman inclined his head to Danny condescendingly. "Quite so. He and Mr. Nevers." He turned back to Jack and Wendy. "This is the sitting room."

There were several chairs that looked comfortable but not expensive, a coffee table that had once been expensive but now had a long chip gone from the side, two bookcases (stuffed full of Reader's Digest Condensed Books and Detective Book Club trilogies from the forties, Wendy saw with some amusement), and an anonymous hotel TV that looked much less elegant than the buffed wood consoles in the rooms.

"No kitchen, of course," Ullman said, "but there is a dumb-waiter. This apartment is directly over the kitchen." He slid aside a square of paneling and disclosed a wide, squarer tray. He gave it a push and it disappeared, trailing rope behind it.

"It's a secret passage!" Danny said excitedly to his mother, momentarily forgetting all fears in favor of that intoxicating shaft behind the wall. "Just like in Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters!"

Mr. Ullman frowned but Wendy smiled indulgently. Danny ran over to the dumbwaiter and peered down the shaft.,

"This way, please."

He opened the door on the far side of the living room. It gave on the bedroom, which was spacious and airy. There were twin beds. Wendy looked at her husband, smiled, shrugged.

"No problem," Jack said. "We'll push them together."

Mr. Ullman looked over his shoulder, honestly puzzled. "Beg pardon?"

"The beds," Jack said pleasantly. "We can push them together."

"Oh, quite," Ullman said, momentarily confused. Then his face cleared and a red flush began to creep up from the collar of his shirt. "Whatever you like."

He led them back into the sitting room, where a second door opened on a second bedroom, this one equipped with bunk beds. A radiator clanked in one corner, and the rug on the floor was a hideous embroidery of western sage and cactus-Danny bad already fallen in love with it, Wendy saw. The walls of this smaller room were paneled in real pine.

"Think you can stand it in here, doc?" Jack asked.

"Sure I can. I'm going to sleep in the top bunk. Okay?"

"If that's what you want."

"I like the rug, too. Mr. Ullman, why don't you have all the rugs like that?"

Mr. Ullman looked for a moment as if he had sunk his teeth into a lemon. Then he smiled and patted Danny's head. "Those are your quarters," he said, "except for the bath, which opens off the main bedroom. It's not a huge apartment, but of course you'll have the rest of the hotel to spread out in. The lobby fireplace is in good working order, or so Watson tells me, and you must feel free to eat in the dining room if the spirit moves you to do so." He spoke in the tone of a man conferring a great favor.

"All right," Jack said.

"Shall we go down?" Mr. Ullman asked.

"Fine," Wendy said.

They went downstairs in the elevator, and now the lobby was wholly deserted except for Watson, who was leaning against the main doors in a rawhide jacket, a toothpick between his lips.

"I would have thought you'd be miles from here by now," Mr. Ullman said, his voice slightly chill.

"Just stuck around to remind Mr. Torrance here about the boiler," Watson said, straightening up. "Keep your good weather eye on her, fella, and she'll be fine. Knock the press down a couple of times a day. She creeps."

She creeps, Danny thought, and the words echoed down a long and silent corridor in his mind, a corridor lined with mirrors where people seldom looked.

"I will," his daddy said.

"You'll be fine," Watson said, and offered Jack his hand. Jack shook it. Watson turned to Wendy and inclined his head. "Ma'am," he said.

"I'm pleased," Wendy said, and thought it would sound absurd. It didn't. She had come out here from New England, where she had spent her life, and it seemed to her that in a few short sentences this man Watson, with his fluffy fringe of hair, had epitomized what the West was supposed to be all about. And never mind the lecherous wink earlier.

"Young master Torrance," Watson said gravely, and put out his hand. Danny, who had known all about handshaking for almost a year now, put his own hand out gingerly and felt it swallowed up. "You take good care of em, Dan."

"Yes, sir."

Watson let go of Danny's hand and straightened up fully. He looked at Ullman. "Until next year, I guess," he said, and held his hand out.

Ullman touched it bloodlessly. His pinky ring caught the lobby's electric lights in a baleful sort of wink.

"May twelfth, Watson," he said. "Not a day earlier or later."

"Yes, sir," Watson said, and Jack could almost read the codicil in Watson's mind:... you fucking little faggot.

"Have a good winter, Mr. Ullman."

"Oh, I doubt it," Ullman said remotely.

Watson opened one of the two big main doors; the wind whined louder and began to flutter the collar of his jacket. "You folks take care now," he said.

It was Danny who answered. "Yes, sir, we will."

Watson, whose not-so-distant ancestor had owned this place, slipped humbly through the door. It closed behind him, muffling the wind. Together they watched him clop down the porch's broad front steps in his battered black cowboy boots. Brittle yellow aspen leaves tumbled around his heels as he crossed the lot to his International Harvester pickup and climbed in. Blue smoke jetted from the rusted exhaust pipe as he started it up. The spell of silence held among them as he backed, then pulled out of the parking lot. His truck disappeared over the brow of the hill and then reappeared, smaller, on the main road, heading west.

For a moment Danny felt more lonely than he ever had in his life.