The Shining (The Shining #1)(122)
The number ended. There was a spatter of applause and then the band swung into "Mood Indigo" with scarcely a pause.
Jack looked over her bare shoulder and saw Derwent standing by the refreshment table. The girl in the sarong was with him. There were bottles of champagne in ice buckets ranged along the white lawn covering the table, and Derwent held a foaming bottle in his hand. A knot of people had gathered, laughing. In front of Derwent and the girl in the sarong, Roger capered grotesquely on all fours, his tail dragging limply behind him. He was barking.
"Speak, boy, speak!" Harry Derwent cried.
"Rowf! Rowf!" Roger responded. Everyone clapped; a few of the men whistled.
"Now sit up. Sit up, doggy!"
Roger clambered up on his haunches. The muzzle of his mask was frozen in its eternal snarl. Inside the eyeholes, Roger's eyes rolled with frantic, sweaty hilarity. He held his arms out, dangling the paws.
"Rowf! Rowf!"
Derwent upended the bottle of champagne and it fell in a foamy Niagara onto the upturned mask. Roger made frantic slurping sounds, and everyone applauded again. Some of the women screamed with laughter.
"Isn't Harry a card?" his partner asked him, pressing close again. "Everyone says so. He's AC/DC, you know. Poor Roger's only DC. He spent a weekend with Harry in Cuba once... oh, months ago. Now he follows Harry everywhere, wagging his little tail behind him."
She giggled. The shy scent of lilies drifted up.
"But of course Harry never goes back for seconds... not on his DC side, anyway... and Roger is just wild. Harry told him if he came to the masked ball as a doggy, a cute little doggy, he might reconsider, and Roger is such a silly that he..."
The number ended. There was more applause. The band members were filing down for a break.
"Excuse me, sweetness," she said. "There's someone I just roust... Darla! Darla, you dear girl, where have you been?"
She wove her way into the eating, drinking throng and he gazed after her stupidly, wondering how they had happened to be dancing together in the first place. He didn't remember. Incidents seemed to have occurred with no connections. First here, then there, then everywhere. His head was spinning. He smelled lilies and juniper berries. Up by the refreshment table Derwent was now holding a tiny triangular sandwich over Roger's head and urging him, to the general merriment of the onlookers, to do a somersault. The dogmask was turned upward. The silver sides of the dog costume bellowsed in and out. Roger suddenly leaped, tucking his head under, and tried to roll in mid-air. His leap was too low and too exhausted; he landed awkwardly on his back, rapping his head smartly on the tiles. A hollow groan drifted out of the dogmask.
Derwent led the applause. "Try again, doggy! Try again!" The onlookers took up the chant-try again, try again- and Jack staggered off the other way, feeling vaguely ill.
He almost fell over the drinks cart that was being wheeled along by a lowbrowed man in a white mess jacket. His foot rapped the lower chromed shelf of the cart; the bottles and siphons on top chattered together musically.
"Sorry," Jack said thickly. He suddenly felt closed in and claustrophobic; he wanted to get out. He wanted the Overlook back the way it had been... free of these unwanted guests. His place was not honored, as the true opener of the way; he was only another of the ten thousand cheering extras, a doggy rolling over and sitting up on command.
"Quite all right," the man in the white mess jacket said. The polite, clipped English coming from that thug's face was surreal. "A drink?"
"Martini."
From behind him, another comber of laughter broke; Roger was howling to the tune of "Home on the Range." Someone was picking out accompaniment on the Steinway baby grand.
"Here you are."
The frosty cold glass was pressed into his hand. Jack drank gratefully, feeling the gin hit and crumble away the first inroads of sobriety.
"Is it all right, sir?"
"Fine."
"Thank you, sir." The cart began to roll again.
Jack suddenly reached out and touched the man's shoulder.
"Yes, sir?"
"Pardon me, but... what's your name?"
The other showed no surprise. "Grady, sir. Delbert Grady."
"But you... I mean that..."
The bartender was looking at him politely. Jack tried again, although his mouth was mushed by gin and unreality; each word felt as large as an ice cube.
"Weren't you once the caretaker here? When you..., when..." But he couldn't finish. He couldn't say it.
"Why no, sir. I don't believe so."
"But your wife... your daughters...
"My wife is helping in the kitchen, sir. The girls are asleep, of course. It's much too late for them."
"You were the caretaker. You-" Oh say it! "You killed them."
Grady's face remained blankly polite. "I don't have any recollection of that at all, sir." His glass was empty. Grady plucked it from Jack's unresisting fingers and set about making another drink for him. There was a small white plastic bucket on his cart that was filled with olives. For soave reason
they reminded Jack of tiny severed heads. Grady speared one deftly, dropped it into the glass, and handed it to him.
"But you-"
"You're the caretaker, sir," Grady said mildly. "You've always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I've always been here. The same manager hired us both, at the same time. Is it all right, sir?"