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
supply hot water. But creep? Would a boiler creep?
You had to keep an, eye on, the boiler.
It was like one of those crazy riddles:
Why is a mouse when it runs, when is a raven like a writing desk,
what is a creeping boiler? Was it, like the hedges, maybe? She'd
had a dream where the hedges crept. And the fire hose that had
what - what? - slithered?
A chill touched her. It was not good to think much about the
dreams in the night, in the dark. You could ... well, you could
bother yourself. It was better to think about the things you would
be doing when you got back to New York, about how you were
going to convince Bill that a baby was a bad idea for a while, until
he got firmly settled in the vice presidency his father had awarded
him as a wedding present-
She'll creep on you.
- and how you were going to encourage him to bring his work
home so he would get used to the idea that she was going to be
involved with it, very much involved.
Or did the whole hotel, creep? Was that the answer?
I'll make him a good wife, Lottie thought frantically. We'll work at
it the same way we always worked at being bridge partners. He
knows the rules of the game and he knows enough to let me run
him. It will be just like the bridge, just like that, and if we've been
off our game up here that, doesn't mean anything, it's just the hotel,
the dreams-
An affirming voice: That's it. The whole place. It... creeps.
"Oh, shit," Lottie Kilgallon whispered in the dark. It was
dismaying for her to realize just how badly her nerves were shot.
As on the other nights, there would be no more sleep for her now.
She would lie here in bed until the sun started to come up and then
she would get an uneasy hour or so.
Smoking in bed was a bad habit, a terrible habit., but she had
begun to leave her cigarettes in an ashtray on the floor by the bed
in case of the dreams. Sometimes it calmed her. She reached down
to get the ashtray and the thought burst on her like a revelation:
It does creep, the whole place - like it's alive!
And that was when the hand reached out unseen from under the
bed and gripped her wrist firmly ... almost lecherously. A
fingerlike canvas scratched suggestively against her palm and
something was under there, something had been under there the
whole time, and Lottie began to scream. She screamed until her
throat was raw and hoarse and her eyes were bulging from her face
and Bill was awake and pallid with terror beside her.
When he put on the lamp she leaped from the bed, retreated into
the farthest corner of the room and curled up with her thumb in her
mouth.
Both Bill and Dr. Verecker tried to find out what was wrong; she
told them but she was still sucking her thumb, so it was some time
before they realized she was saying, "It crept under the bed. It
crept under the bed."
And even though they flipped up the coverlet and Bill actually
lifted up the whole bed by its foot off the floor to show her there
was nothing under there, not even a litter of dust kitties, she would
not come out of the corner. When the sun came up, she did at last
come out of the corner. She took her thumb out of her mouth. She
stayed away from the bed. She stared at, Bill Pillsbury from her
clown-white face.
"We're going back to New York," she said. "This morning."
"Of course," Bill muttered. "Of course, dear."
Bill Pillsbury's father died of a heart attack two weeks after the
stock-market crash. Bill and Lottie could not keep the company's
head above water. Things went from bad to worse. In the years that
followed she thought often of their honeymoon at the Overlook
Hotel, and the dreams, and the canvas hand that had crept out from
under the bed to squeeze her own. She thought about those things
more and more. She committed suicide in a Yonkers motel room in
1949, a woman who was prematurely gray and prematurely lined.
It had been 20 years and the hand that had gripped her wrist when
she reached down to get her cigarettes had never really let go. She
left a one-sentence suicide note written on Holiday Inn stationery.
The note said: "I wish we had gone to Rome."
AND NOW THIS WORD FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE
In that long, hot summer of 1953, the summer Jacky Torrance
turned 6, his father came home one night from the hospital and
broke Jacky's arm. He almost killed the boy. He was drunk.
Jacky was sitting on the front porch reading a Combat Casey
comic book when his father came down the street, listing to one
side, torpedoed by beer somewhere down the line. As he always
did, the boy felt a mixture of love-hate-fear rise in his chest at the
sight of the old man, who looked like a giant, malevolent ghost in
his hospital whites. Jacky's father was an orderly at the Berlin
Community Hospital. He was like God, like Nature-sometimes
lovable, sometimes terrible. You never knew which it would be.
Jacky's mother feared and served him. Jacky's brothers hated him.
Only Jacky, of all of them, still loved him in spite of the fear and
the hate, and sometimes the volatile mixture of emotions made him
want to cry out at the sight of his father coming, to simply cry out:
"I love you, Daddy! Go away! Hug me! I'll kill you! I'm so afraid
of you! I need you!" And his father seemed to sense in his stupid
way-he was a stupid man, and selfish - that all of them had gone
beyond him but Jacky, the youngest, knew that the only way he
could touch the others was to bludgeon them to attention. But with
Jacky there was still love, and there had been times when he had
cuffed the boy's mouth into running blood and then hugged him
with a frightful force, the killing force just, barely held back by
some other thing, and Jackie would let himself be hugged deep into
the atmosphere of malt and hops that hung around his old man
forever, quailing, loving, fearing.
He leaped off the step and ran halfway down the path before
something stopped him.
"Daddy?" he said. "Where's the car?"
Torrance came toward him, and Jacky saw how very drunk he was.
"Wrecked it up," he said thickly.
"Oh..." Careful now. Careful what you say. For your life, be
careful. "That's too bad"
His father stopped and regarded Jacky from his stupid pig eyes.
Jacky held his breath. Somewhere behind his father's brow, under
the lawn-mowered brush of his crew cut, the scales were turning.
The hot, afternoon stood still while Jacky waited, staring up
anxiously into his father's face to see if his father would throw a
rough bear arm around his shoulder, grinding Jacky's cheek against
the rough, cracked leather of the belt that held up his white pants
and say, "Walk with me into the house, big boy." in the hard and
contemptuous way that was the only way he could even approach
love without destroying himself - or if it would be something else.
Tonight it was something else.
The thunderheads appeared on his father's brow. "What do you
mean, 'That's too bad'? What kind of shit is that?"
"Just...too bad, Daddy. That's all I meant. it's-"
Torrance's hand swept out at the end of his arm, huge hand,
hamhock arm, but speedy, yes, very speedy, and Jacky went down
with church bells in his head and a split lip.
"Shutup" his father said, giving it a broad A.
Jacky said nothing. Nothing would do any good now. The balance
had swung the wrong way.
"You ain't gonna sass me," said Torrance. "You won't sass your
daddy. Get up here and take your medicine."
There was something in his face this time, some dark and blazing
thing. And Jacky suddenly knew that this time there might be no
hug at the end of the blows, and if there was he might, be
unconscious and unknowing ... maybe even dead.
He ran.
Behind him, his father let out a bellow of rage and chased him., a
flapping specter in hospital whites, a juggernaut of doom following
his son from the front yard to the back.
Jacky ran for his life. The tree house, he was thinking. He can't get
up there; the ladder nailed to the tree won't hold him. I'll get up
there, talk to him; maybe he'll go to sleep - Oh, God, please let him
go to sleep - he was weeping in terror as he ran.
"Come back here, goddammit!" His father was roaring behind him.
"Come back here and take your medicine! Take it like a man!"
Jacky flashed past the back steps. His mother, that thin and
defeated woman, scrawny in a faded housedress, had come out
through the screen door from the kitchen, just as Jacky ran past
with his father in pursuit. She opened her mouth as if to speak or
cry out, but her hand came up in a fist and stopped whatever she
might have said, kept it safely behind her teeth. She was afraid for
her son, but more afraid that her husband would turn on her.
"No, you don't! Come back here!"
Jacky reached the large elm in the backyard, the elm where last
year his father had smoke-drugged a colony of wasps then burned
their nest with gasoline. The boy went up the haphazardly hung
nailed-on rungs like greased lightning, and still he was nearly not
fast enough. His father's clutching, enraged hand grasped the boy's
ankle in a grip like flexed steel, then slipped a little and succeeded
only in pulling off Jacky's loafer. Jacky went up the last, three
rungs and crouched on the floor of the tree house, 12 feet above the
ground, panting and crying on his hands and knees.
His father seemed to go crazy. He danced around the tree like an
Indian, Bellowing his rage. He slammed his fists into the tree,
making bark fly and bringing lattices of blood to his knuckles. He
kicked it. His huge moon face was white with frustration and red
with anger.
"Please, Daddy," Jacky moaned. "Whatever I said ... I'm sorry I
said it..."
"Come down! You come down out of there take your fucking
medicine, you little cur! Right now!"
"I Will ... I will If you promise not to ... to hit me too hard ... not
hurt me... just spank me but not hurt me..."
"Get out of that tree!" his father screamed.
Jacky looked toward the house but that was hopeless. His mother
had retreated somewhere far away, to neutral ground.
"GET OUT RIGHT NOW!"
"Oh, Daddy, I don't dare!" Jacky cried out, and that was the truth.
Because now his father might kill him.
There was a period of stalemate. A minute, perhaps, or perhaps
two. His father circled the tree, puffing and blowing like a whale.
Jacky turned around and around on his hands and knees, following
the movements. They were like parts of a visible clock.
The second or third time he came back to the ladder nailed to the
tree, Torrance stopped. He looked speculatively at the ladder. And
laid his hands on the rung before his eyes. He began to climb.
"No, Daddy, it won't hold you," Jacky whispered.
But his father came on relentlessly, like fate, like death, like doom.
Up and up, closer to the tree house. One rung snapped off under
his hands and he almost fell but caught the next one with a grunt
and a lunge. Another one of the rungs twisted around from the
horizontal to the perpendicular under his weight with a rasping
scream of pulling nails, but it did not give way, and then the
working, congested face was visible over the edge of the tree-
house floor, and for that one moment of his childhood Jack
Torrance had his
father at bay; if he could have kicked that face
with the foot that still wore its loafer, kicked it where the nose
terminated between the piggy eyes, he could have driven his father
backward off the ladder, perhaps killed him (If he had killed him,
would anyone have said anything but Thanks, Jacky"?) But it was
love that stopped him, and love that, let him just his face in his
hands and give up as first one of his father's pudgy, short-fingered
hands appeared on the boards and then the other.
"Now, by God," his father breathed. He stood above his huddled
son like a giant.
"Oh, Daddy," Jacky mourned for both of them. And for a moment
his father paused, his face sagged into lines of uncertainty, and
Jacky felt a thread of hope.
Then the face drew up. Jacky could smell the beer, and his father
said, "I'll teach you to sass me," and all hope was gone as the foot
swung out, burying itself in Jacky's belly, driving the wind from
his belly in a whoosh. as he flew from the tree-house platform and
fell to the ground, turning over once and landing on the point of his
left elbow, which snapped with a greenstick crack. He didn't even
have breath enough to scream. The last thing he saw before he
blacked out was his father's face, which seemed to be at the end of
a long, dark tunnel. It, seemed to be filling with surprise, the way a
vessel may fill with some pale liquid.
He's just starting to know what he did, Jacky thought incoherently.
And on the heels of that, a thought with no meaning at all, coherent
or otherwise, a thought, that chased him into the blackness as he
fell back on the chewed and tattered grass of the back lawn in a
faint:
What you see is what you'll be, what YOU see is what you'll be,
what you-
The break in his arm was cleanly healed in six months. The
nightmares went, on much longer. In a way, they never stopped.
THE OVERLOOK HOTEL, THIRD FLOOR, 1958
The murderers came up the stairs in their stocking feet.
The two men posted outside the door of the Presidential Suite
never heard them. They were young, dressed in Ivy League suits
with the cut of the jackets a little wider than the fashion of the day
decreed. You couldn't wear a .357 Magnum concealed in a
shoulder holster and be quite in fashion. They were discussing
whether or not the Yankees could take yet another pennant. It was
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