The Shining Part 14

"I doubt if you've ever had to in order to make yourself understood." Edmonds paused, fiddling with a pen. "He went into a trance while I was with him. At my request. Exactly as you described him in the bathroom last night. All his muscles went lax, his body slumped, his eyeb.a.l.l.s rotated outward. Textbook auto- hypnosis. I was amazed. I still am." The Torrances sat forward. "What happened?" Wendy asked tensely, and Edmonds carefully related Danny's trance, the muttered phrase from which Edmonds had only been able to pluck the word "monsters," the "dark," the "pounding." The aftermath of tears, near-hysteria, and nervous stomach.

"Tony again," Jack said.

"What does it mean?" Wendy asked. "Have you any idea?"

"A few. You might not like them."

"Go ahead anyway," Jack told him.

"From what Danny told me, his 'invisible friend' was truly a friend until you folks moved out here from New England. Tony has only become a threatening figure since that move. The pleasant interludes have become nightmarish, even more frightening to your son because he can't remember exactly what the nightmares are about. That's common enough. We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones. There seems to be a buffer somewhere between the conscious and the subconscious, and one h.e.l.l of a bluenose lives in there. This censor only lets through a small amount, and often what does come through is only symbolic. That's oversimplified Freud, but it does pretty much describe what we know of the mind's interaction with itself."

"You think moving has upset Danny that badly?" Wendy asked.

"It may have, if the move took place under traumatic circ.u.mstances," Edmonds said. "Did it?" Wendy and Jack exchanged a glance.

"I was teaching at a prep school," Jack said slowly. "I lost my job."

"I see," Edmonds said. He put the pen he had been playing with firmly back in its holder. "There's more here, I'm afraid. It may be painful to you. Your son seems to believe you two have seriously contemplated divorce. He spoke of it in an offhand way, but only because he believes you are no longer considering it." Jack's mouth dropped open, and Wendy recoiled as if slapped. The blood drained from her face.

"We never even discussed it!" she said. "Not in front of him, not even in front of each other! We-"

"I think it's best if you understand everything, Doctor," Jack said. "Shortly after Danny was born, I became an alcoholic. I'd had a drinking problem all the way through college, it subsided a little after Wendy and I met, cropped up worse than ever after Danny was born and the writing I consider to be my real work was going badly. When Danny was three and a half, he spilled some beer on a bunch of papers I was working on... papers I was shuffling around, anyway... and I... well... oh s.h.i.t." His voice broke, but his eyes remained dry and unflinching. "It sounds so G.o.ddam beastly said out loud. I broke his arm turning him around to spank him. Three months later I gave up drinking. I haven't touched it since."

"I see," Edmonds said neutrally. "I knew the arm had been broken, of course.

It was set well." He pushed back from his desk a little and crossed his legs.

"If I may be frank, it's obvious that he's been in no way abused since then. Other than the stings, there's nothing on him but the normal bruises and scabs that any kid has in abundance."

"Of course not," Wendy said hotly. "Jack didn't mean-"

"No, Wendy," Jack said. "I meant to do it. I guess someplace inside I really did mean to do that to him. Or something even worse." He looked back at Edmonds again. "You know something, Doctor? This is the first time the word divorce has been mentioned between us. And alcoholism. And child-beating. Three firsts in five minutes."

"That may be at the root of the problem," Edmonds said. "I am not a psychiatrist. If you want Danny to see a child psychiatrist, I can recommend a good one who works out of the Mission Ridge Medical Center in Boulder. But I am fairly confident of my diagnosis. Danny is an intelligent, imaginative, perceptive boy. I don't believe he would have been as upset by your marital problems as you believed. Small children are great accepters. They don't understand shame, or the need to hide things." Jack was studying his hands. Wendy took one of them and squeezed it.

"But he sensed the things that were wrong. Chief among them from his point of view was not the broken arm but the broken-or breaking-link between you two. He mentioned divorce to me, but not the broken arm. When my nurse mentioned the set to him, he simply shrugged it off. It was no pressure thing. 'It happened a long time ago' is what I think he said."

"That kid," Jack muttered. His jaws were clamped together, the muscles in the cheeks standing out. "We don't deserve him."

"You have him, all the same," Edmonds said dryly. "At any rate, he retires into a fantasy world from time to time. Nothing unusual about that; lots of kids do. As I recall, I had my own invisible friend when I was Danny's age, a talking rooster named Chug-Chug. Of course no one could see Chug-Chug but me. I had two older brothers who often left me behind, and in such a situation Chug-Chug came in mighty handy. And of course you two must understand why Danny's invisible friend is named Tony instead of Mike or Hal or Dutch."

"Yes," Wendy said.

"Have you ever pointed it out to him?"

"No," Jack said. "Should we?"

"Why bother? Let him realize it in his own time, by his own logic. You see, Danny's fantasies were considerably deeper than those that grow around the ordinary invisible friend syndrome, but he felt he needed Tony that much more. Tony would come and show him pleasant things. Sometimes amazing things. Always good things. Once Tony showed him where Daddy's lost trunk was... under the stairs. Another time Tony showed him that Mommy and Daddy were going to take him to an amus.e.m.e.nt park for his birthday-"

"At Great Barrington!" Wendy cried. "But how could he know those things? It's eerie, the things he comes out with sometimes. Almost as if-"

"He had second sight?" Edmonds asked, smiling.

"He was born with a caul," Wendy said weakly.

Edmonds's smile became a good, hearty laugh. Jack and Wendy exchanged a glance and then also smiled, both of them amazed at how easy it was. Danny's occasional "lucky guesses" about things was something else they had not discussed much.

"Next you'll be telling me he can levitate," Edmonds said, still smiling. "No, no, no, I'm afraid not. It's not extrasensory but good old human perception, which in Danny's case is unusually keen. Mr. Torrance, he knew your trunk was under the stairs because you had looked everywhere else. Process of elimination, what? It's so simple Ellery Queen would laugh at it. Sooner or later you would have thought of it yourself.

"As for the amus.e.m.e.nt park at Great Barrington, whose idea was that originally? Yours or his?"

"His, of course," Wendy said. "They advertised on all the morning children's programs. He was wild to go. But the thing is, Doctor, we couldn't afford to take him. And we had told him so."

"Then a men's magazine I'd sold a story to back in 1971 sent a check for fifty dollars," Jack said. "They were reprinting the story in an annual, or something. So we decided to spend it on Danny."

Edmonds shrugged. "Wish fulfillment plus a lucky coincidence."

"G.o.ddammit, I bet that's just right," Jack said.

Edmonds smiled a little. "And Danny himself told me that Tony often showed him things that never occurred. Visions based on faulty perception, that's all.

Danny is doing subconsciously what these so-called mystics and mind readers do quite consciously and cynically. I admire him for it. If life doesn't cause him to retract his antennae, I think he'll be quite a man." Wendy nodded-of course she thought Danny would be quite a man-but the doctor's explanation struck her as glib. It tasted more like margarine than b.u.t.ter. Edmonds had not lived with them. He had not been there when Danny found lost b.u.t.tons, told her that maybe the TV Guide was under the bed, that he thought he better wear his rubbers to nursery school even though the sun was out... and later that day they had walked home under her umbrella through the pouring rain. Edmonds couldn't know of the curious way Danny had of preguessing them both. She would decide to have an unusual evening cup of tea, go out in the kitchen and find her cup out with a tea bag in it. She would remember that the books were due at the library and find them all neatly piled up on the hall table, her library card on top. Or Jack would take it into his head to wax the Volkswagen and find Danny already out there, listening to tinny top-forty music on his crystal radio as he sat on the curb to watch.

Aloud she said, "Then why the nightmares now? Why did Tony tell him to lock the bathroom door?"

"I believe it's because Tony has outlived his usefulness," Edmonds said. "He was born-Tony, not Danny-at a time when you and your husband were straining to keep your marriage together. Your husband was drinking too much. There was the incident of the broken arm. The ominous quiet between you." Ominous quiet, yes, that phrase was the real thing, anyway. The stiff, tense meals where the only conversation had been please pa.s.s the b.u.t.ter or Danny, eat the rest of your carrots or may I be excused, please. The nights when Jack was gone and she had lain down, dry-eyed, on the couch while Danny watched TV. The mornings when she and Jack had stalked around each other like two angry cats with a quivering, frightened mouse between them. It all rang true; (dear G.o.d, do old scars ever stop hurting?) horribly, horribly true.

Edmonds resumed, "But things have changed. You know, schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics. They have invisible friends. They may go and sit in the closet when they're depressed, withdrawing from the world.

They attach talismanic importance to a special blanket, or a teddy bear, or a stuffed tiger. They suck their thumbs. When an adult sees things that aren't there, we consider him ready for the rubber room. When a child says he's seen a troll in his bedroom or a vampire outside the window, we simply smile indulgently. We have a one-sentence explanation that explains the whole range of such phenomena in children-"

"He'll grow out of it," Jack said.

Edmonds blinked. "My very words," he said. "Yes. Now I would guess that Danny was in a pretty good position to develop a full-fledged psychosis. Unhappy home life, a big imagination, the invisible friend who was so real to him that he nearly became real to you. Instead of 'growing out of' is childhood schizophrenia, he might well have grown into it."

"And become autistic?" Wendy asked. She had read about autism. The word itself frightened her; it sounded like dread and white silence.

"Possible but not necessarily. He might simply have entered Tony's world someday and never come back to what he calls 'real things.' "

"G.o.d," Jack said.

"But now the basic situation has changed drastically. Mr. Torrance no longer drinks. You are in a new place where conditions have forced the three of you into a tighter family unit than ever before-certainly tighter than my own, where my wife and kids may see me for only two or three hours a day. To my mind, he is in the perfect healing situation. And I think the very fact that he is able to differentiate so sharply between Tony's world and 'real things' says a lot about the fundamentally healthy state of his mind. He says that you two are no longer considering divorce. Is he as right as I think he is?"

"Yes," Wendy said, and Jack squeezed her hand tightly, almost painfully. She squeezed back.

Edmonds nodded. "He really doesn't need Tony anymore. Danny is flushing him out of his system. Tony no longer brings pleasant visions but hostile nightmares that are too frightening for him to remember except fragmentarily. He internalized Tony during a difficult-desperate-life situation, and Tony is not leaving easily. But he is leaving. Your son is a little like a junkie kicking the habit." He stood up, and the Torrances stood also.

"As I said, I'm not a psychiatrist. If the nightmares are still continuing when your job at the Overlook ends next spring, Mr. Torrance, I would strongly urge you to take him to this man in Boulder."

"I will."

"Well, let's go out and tell him he can go home," Edmonds said.

"I want to thank you," Jack told him painfully. "I feel better about all this than I have in a very long time."

"So do I," Wendy said.

At the door, Edmonds paused and looked at Wendy. "Do you or did you have a sister, Mrs. Torrance? Named Aileen?" Wendy looked at him, surprised. "Yes, I did. She was killed outside our home in Somersworth, New Hampshire, when she was six and I was ten. She chased a ball into the street and was struck by a delivery van."

"Does Danny know that?"

"I don't know. I don't think so."

"He says you were thinking about her in the waiting room."

"I was," Wendy said slowly. "For the first time in... oh, I don't know how long."

"Does the word 'redrum' mean anything to either of you?" Wendy shook her head but Jack said, "He mentioned that word last night, just before he went to sleep. Red drum."

"No, rum," Edmonds corrected. "He was quite emphatic about that. Rum. As in the drink. The alcoholic drink."

"Oh," Jack said. "It fits in, doesn't it?" He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his lips with it.

"Does the phrase 'the shining' mean anything to you?" This time they both shook their heads.

"Doesn't matter, I guess," Edmonds said. He opened the door into the waiting room. "Anybody here named Danny Torrance that would like to go home?"

"Hi, Daddy! Hi, Mommy!" He stood up from the small table where he had been leafing slowly through a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and muttering the words he knew aloud.

He ran to Jack, who scooped him up. Wendy ruffled his hair.

Edmonds peered at him. "If you don't love your mommy and daddy, you can stay with good old Bill."

"No, sir!" Danny said emphatically. He slung one arm around Jack's neck, one arm around Wendy's, and looked radiantly happy.

"Okay," Edmonds said, smiling. He looked at Wendy. "You call if you have any problems."

"Yes."

"I don't think you will," Edmonds said, smiling.

18 - The Sc.r.a.pbook

Jack found the sc.r.a.pbook on the first of November, while his wife and son were hiking up the rutted old road that ran from behind the roque court to a deserted sawmill two miles further up. The fine weather still held, and all three of them had acquired improbable autumn suntans.

He had gone down in the bas.e.m.e.nt to knock the press down on the boiler and then, on impulse, he had taken the flashlight from the shelf where the plumbing schematics were and decided to look at some of the old papers. He was also looking for good places to set his traps, although he didn't plan to do that for another month-I want them all to be home from vacation, he had told Wendy.

Shining the flashlight ahead of him, he stepped past the elevator shaft (at Wendy's insistence they hadn't used the elevator since they moved in) and through the small stone arch. His nose wrinkled at the smell of rotting paper.

Behind him the boiler kicked on with a thundering whoosh, making him jump.

He flickered the light around, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. There was a scale-model Andes range down here: dozens of boxes and crates stuffed with papers, most of them white and shapeless with age and damp. Others had broken open and spilled yellowed sheaves of paper onto the stone floor. There were bales of newspaper tied up with hayrope. Some boxes contained what looked like ledgers, and others contained invoices bound with rubber bands. Jack pulled one out and put the flashlight beam on it.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN EXPRESS, INC.

To: OVERLOOK HOTEL From: SIDEY'S WAREHOUSE, 1210 16th Street, Denver, CO.

Via: CANADIAN PACIFIC RR Contents: 400 CASES DELSEY TOILET TISSUE, 1 GROSS/CASE Signed D E F Date August 24, 1954 Smiling, Jack let the paper drop back into the box.

He flashed the light above it and it speared a hanging lightbulb, almost buried in cobwebs. There was no chain pull.

He stood on tiptoe and tried s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the bulb in. It lit weakly. He picked up the toilet-paper invoice again and used it to wipe off some of the cobwebs. The glow didn't brighten much.

Still using the flashlight, he wandered through the boxes and bales of paper, looking for rat spoor. They had been here, but not for quite a long time... maybe years. He found some droppings that were powdery with age, and several nests of neatly shredded paper that were old and unused.

Jack pulled a newspaper from one of the bundles and glanced down at the headline.

JOHNSON PROMISES ORDERLY TRANSITION.

Says Work Begun by JFK Will Go Forward in Coming Year The paper was the Rocky Mountain News, dated December 19, 1963. He dropped it back onto its pile.

He supposed he was fascinated by that commonplace sense of history that anyone can feel glancing through the fresh news of ten or twenty years ago. He found gaps in the piled newspapers and records; nothing from 1937 to 1945, from 1957 to 1960, from 1962 to 1963. Periods when the hotel had been closed, he guessed.

When it had been between suckers grabbing for the bra.s.s ring.

Ullman's explanations of the Overlook's checkered career still didn't ring quite true to him. It seemed that the Overlooks spectacular location alone should have guaranteed its continuing success. There had always been an American jetset, even before jets were invented, and it seemed to Jack that the Overlook should have been one of the bases they touched in their migrations. It even sounded right. The Waldorf in May, the Bar Harbor House in June and July, the Overlook in August and early September, before moving on to Bermuda, Havana, Rio, wherever. He found a pile of old desk registers and they bore him out.

Nelson Rockefeller in 1950. Henry Ford & Fam. in 1927. Jean Harlow in 1930.

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. In 1956 the whole top floor had been taken for a week by "Darryl F. Zanuck & Party." The money must have rolled down the corridors and into the cash registers like a twentieth-century Comstock Lode.

The management must have been spectacularly bad.

There was history here, all right, and not just in newspaper headlines. It was buried between the entries in these ledgers and account books and room-service chits where you couldn't quite see it. In 1922 Warren G. Harding had ordered a whole salmon at ten o'clock in the evening, and a case of Coors beer. But whom had he been eating and drinking with? Had it been a poker game? A strategy session? What?

Jack glanced at his watch and was surprised to see that forty-five minutes had somehow slipped by since he had come down here. His hands and arms were grimy, and he probably smelled bad. He decided to go up and take a shower before Wendy and Danny got back.

He walked slowly between the mountains of paper, his mind alive and ticking over possibilities in a speedy way that was exhilarating. He hadn't felt this way in years. It suddenly seemed that the book he had semi-jokingly promised himself might really happen. It might even be right here, buried in these untidy heaps of paper. It could be a work of fiction, or history, or both-a long book exploding out of this central place in a hundred directions.

He stood beneath the cobwebby light, took his handkerchief from his back pocket without thinking, and scrubbed at his lips with it. And that was when he saw the sc.r.a.pbook.

A pile of five boxes stood on his left like some tottering Pisa. The one on top was stuffed with more invoices and ledgers. Balanced on top of those, keeping its angle of repose for who knew how many years, was a thick sc.r.a.pbook with white leather covers, its pages bound with two hanks of gold string that had been tied along the binding in gaudy bows.

Curious, he went over and took it down. The top cover was thick with dust. He held it on a plane at lip level, blew the dust off in a cloud, and opened it. As he did so a card fluttered out and he grabbed it in mid-air before it could fall to the stone floor. It was rich and creamy, dominated by a raised engraving of the Overlook with every window alight. The lawn and playground were decorated with glowing j.a.panese lanterns. It looked almost as though you could step right into it, an Overlook Hotel that had existed thirty years ago.