The Shining (The Shining #1)(59)

He swallowed and the food went down his throat in a lump that was dry and hard. "Maybe I will," he said, turning to the radio and fiddling with it.

"And all those neat hedge animals," she said, taking his empty plate. "Your father's got to get out and trim them pretty soon."

"Yeah," he said.

(Just nasty things... once it had to do with those damn hedges clipped to look like animals...)

"If you see your father before I do, tell him I'm lying down."

"Sure, Mom."

She put the dirty dishes in the sink and came back over to him. "Are you happy here, Danny?"

He looked at her guilelessly, a milk mustache on his lip. "Uh-huh."

"No more bad dreams?"

"No." Tony had come to him once, one night while he was lying in bed, calling his name faintly and from far away. Danny had squeezed his eyes tightly shut until Tony had gone.

"You sure?"

"Yes, Mom."

She seemed satisfied. "How's your hand?"

He flexed it for her. "All better."

She nodded. Jack had taken the nest under the Pyrex bowl, full of frozen wasps, out to the incinerator in back of the equipment shed and burned it. They had seen no more wasps since. He had written to a lawyer in Boulder, enclosing the snaps of Danny's hand, and the lawyer had called back two days ago-that had put Jack in a foul temper all afternoon. The lawyer doubted if the company that had manufactured the bug bomb could be sued successfully because there was only Jack to testify that he had followed directions printed on the package. Jack had asked the lawyer if they couldn't purchase some others and test them for the same defect. Yes, the lawyer said, but the results were highly doubtful even if all the test bombs malfunctioned. He told Jack of a case that involved an extension ladder company and a man who had broken his back. Wendy had commiserated with Jack, but privately she had just been glad that Danny had gotten off as cheaply as he had. It was best to leave lawsuits to people who understood them, and that did not include the Torrances. And they had seen no more wasps since.

"Go and play, doc. Have fun."

But he hadn't had fun. He had wandered aimlessly around the hotel, poking into the maids' closets and the janitor's rooms, looking for something interesting, not finding it, a small boy padding along a dark blue carpet woven with twisting black lines. He had tried a room door from time to time, but of course they were all locked. The passkey was hanging down in the office, he knew where, but Daddy had told him he shouldn't touch that. And he didn't want to. Did be?

(Why are you here?)

There was nothing aimless about it after all. He had been drawn to Room 217 by a morbid kind of curiosity. He remembered a story Daddy had read to him once when he was drunk. That had been a long time ago, but the story was just as vivid now as when Daddy had read it to him. Mommy had scolded Daddy and asked what he was doing, reading a three-year-old baby something so horrible. The name of the story was Bluebeard. That was clear in his mind too, because he had thought at first Daddy was saying Bluebird, and there were no bluebirds in the story, or birds of any kind for that matter. Actually the story was about Bluebeard's wife, a pretty lady that had corn-colored hair like Mommy. After Bluebeard married her, they lived in a big and ominous castle that was not unlike the Overlook. And every day Bluebeard went off to work and every day he would tell his pretty little wife not to look in a certain room, although the key to that room was hanging right on a hook, just like the passkey was hanging on the office wall downstairs. Bluebeard's wife had gotten more and more curious about the locked room. She tried to peep through the keyhole the way Danny had tried to look through Room 217's peephole with similar unsatisfying results. There was even a picture of her getting down on her knees and trying to look under the door, but the crack wasn't wide enough. The door swung wide and...

The old fairy tale book had depicted her discovery in ghastly, loving detail. The image was burned on Danny's mind. The severed heads of Bluebeard's seven previous wives were in the room, each one on its own pedestal, the eyes turned up to whites, the mouths unhinged and gaping in silent screams. They were somehow balanced on necks ragged from the broadsword's decapitating swing, and there was blood running down the pedestals.

Terrified, she had turned to flee from the room and the castle, only to discover Bluebeard standing in the doorway, his terrible eyes blazing. "I told you not to enter this room," Bluebeard said, unsheathing his sword. "Alas, in your curiosity you are like the other seven, and though I loved you best of all your ending shall be as was theirs. Prepare to die, wretched woman!"

It seemed vaguely to Danny that the story had bad a happy ending, but that had paled to insignificance beside the two dominant images: the taunting, maddening locked door with some great secret behind it, and the grisly secret itself, repeated more than half a dozen times. The locked door and behind it the heads, the severed beads.

His hand reached out and stroked the room's doorknob, almost furtively. He had no idea how long be had been here, standing hypnotized before the bland gray locked door.

(And maybe three times I've thought I've seen things... nasty things...)

But Mr. Hallorann-Dick-had also said he didn't think those things could hurt you. They were like scary pictures in a book, that was all. And maybe he wouldn't see anything. On the other hand...