The Shining (The Shining #1)(58)

Wendy.

He started, almost guiltily, as if he had been drinking secretly and she would smell the fumes on him. Ridiculous. He scrubbed his lips with his hand and called back, "Yeah, babe. Lookin for rats."

She was coming down. He heard her on the stairs, then crossing the boiler room. Quickly, without thinking why he might be doing it, be stuffed the scrapbook under a pile of bills and invoices. He stood up as she came through the arch.

"What in the world have you been doing down here? It's almost three o'clock!"

He smiled. "Is it that late? I got rooting around through all this stuff. Trying to find out where the bodies are buried, I guess."

The words clanged back viciously in his mind.

She came closer, looking at him, and he unconsciously retreated a step, unable to help himself. He knew what she was doing. She was trying to smell liquor on him. Probably she wasn't even aware of it herself, but he was, and it made him feel both guilty and angry.

"Your mouth is bleeding," she said in a curiously flat tone.

"Huh?" He put his hand to his lips and winced at the thin stinging. His index finger came away bloody. His guilt increased.

"You've been rubbing your mouth again," she said.

He looked down and shrugged. "Yeah, I guess I have."

"It's been hell for you, hasn't it?"

"No, not so bad."

"Has it gotten any easier?"

He looked up at her and made his feet start moving. Once they were actually in motion it was easier. He crossed to his wife and slipped an arm around her waist. He brushed aside a sheaf of her blond hair and kissed her neck. "Yes," he said. "Where's Danny?"

"Oh, he's around somewhere. It's started to cloud up outside. Hungry?"

He slipped a hand over her taut, jeans-clad bottom with counterfeit lechery. "Like ze bear, madame."

"Watch out, slugger. Don't start something you can't finish."

"Fig-fig, madame?" he asked, still rubbing. "Dirty peeotures? Unnatural positions?" As they went through the arch, he threw one glance back at the box where the scrapbook

(whose?)

was hidden. With the light out it was only a shadow. He was relieved that he had gotten Wendy away. His lust became less acted, more natural, as they approached the stairs.

"Maybe," she said. "After we get you a sandwich-yeek!" She twisted away from him, giggling. "That tickles!"

"It teekles nozzing like Jock Torrance would like to teekle you, madame."

"Lay off, Jock. How about a ham and cheese... for the first course?"

They went up the stairs together, and Jack didn't look over his shoulder again. But he thought of Watson's words:

Every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go...

Then Wendy shut the basement door behind them, closing it into darkness.

Chapter 19. Outside 217

Danny was remembering the words of someone else who had worked at the Overlook during the season:

Her saying she'd seen something in one of the rooms where... a bad thing happened. That was in Room 217 and I want you to promise me you won't go in there, Danny... steer right clear...

It was a perfectly ordinary door, no different from any other door on the first two floors of the hotel. It was dark gray, halfway down a corridor that ran at right angles to the main second-floor hallway. The numbers on the door looked no different from the house numbers on the Boulder apartment building they had lived in. A 2, a 1, and a 7. Big deal. Just below them was a tiny glass circle, a peephole. Danny had tried several of them. From the inside you got a wide, fish-eye view of the corridor. From outside you could screw up your eye seven ways to Sunday and still not see a thing. A dirty gyp:

(Why are you here?)

After the walk behind the Overlook, he and Mommy had come back and she had fixed him his favorite lunch, a cheese and bologna sandwich plus Campbell's Bean Soup. They ate in Dick's kitchen and talked. The radio was on, getting thin and crackly music from the Estes Park station. The kitchen was his favorite place in the hotel, and he guessed that Mommy and Daddy must feel the same way, because after trying their meals in the dining room for three days or so, they had begun eating in the kitchen by mutual consent, setting up chairs around Dick Hallorann's butcher block, which was almost as big as their dining room table back in Stovington, anyway. The dining room had been too depressing, even with the lights on and the music playing from the tape cassette system in the ofce. You were still just one of three people sitting at a table surrounded by dozens of other tables, all empty, all covered with those transparent plastic dustcloths. Mommy said it was like having dinner in the middle of a Horace Walpole novel, and Daddy had laughed and agreed. Danny had no idea who Horace Walpole was, but he did know that Mommy's cooking had begun to taste better as soon as they began to eat it in the kitchen. He kept discovering little flashes of Dick Hallorann's personality lying around, and they reassured him like a warm touch.

Mommy bad eaten half a sandwich, no soup. She said Daddy must have gone out for a walk of his own since both the VW and the hotel truck were in the parking lot. She said she was tired and might lie down for an hour or so, if he thought he could amuse himself and not get into trouble. Danny told her around a mouthful of cheese and bologna that he thought he could.

"Why don't you go out into the playground?" she asked him. "I thought you'd love that place, with a sandbox for your trucks and all."