The Shining (The Shining #1)(79)

Mike escaped three years later when Jack was twelve-he went to UNH on a hefty Merit Scholarship. A year after that their father died of a sudden, massive stroke which occurred while he was prepping a patient for surgery. He had collapsed in his flapping and untucked hospital whites, dead possibly even before he hit the industrial black-and-red hospital tiles, and three days later the man who had dominated Jacky's life, the irrational white ghost-god, was under ground.

The stone read Mark Anthony Torrance, Loving Father. To that Jack would have added one line: He Knew How to Play Elevator.

There had been a great lot of insurance money. There are people who collect insurance as compulsively as others collect coins and stamps, and Mark Torrance had been that type. The insurance money came in at the same time the monthly policy payments and liquor bills stopped. For five years they had been rich. Nearly rich...

In his shallow, uneasy sleep his face rose before him as if in a glass, his face but not his face, the wide eyes and innocent bowed mouth of a boy sitting in the ball with his trucks, waiting for his daddy, waiting for the white ghostgod, waiting for the elevator to rise up with dizzying, exhilarating speed through the salt-and-sawdust mist of exhaled taverns, waiting perhaps for it to go crashing down, spilling old clocksprings out of his ears while his daddy roared with laughter, and it

(transformed into Danny's face, so much like his own had been, his eyes had been light blue while Danny's were cloudy gray, but the lips still made a bow and the complexion was fair; Danny in his study, wearing training pants, all his papers soggy and the fine misty smell of beer rising... a dreadful batter all in ferment, rising on the wings of yeast, the breath of taverns... snap of bone... his own voice, mewling drunkenly Danny, you okay doc?... Oh God oh God your poor sweet arm... and that face transformed into)

(momma's dazed face rising up from below the table, punched and bleeding, and momma was saying)

("-from your father. I repeat, an enormously important announcement from your father. Please stay tuned or tune immediately to the Happy Jack frequency. Repeat, tune immediately to the Happy Hour frequency. I repeat-")

A slow dissolve. Disembodied voices echoing up to him as if along an endless, cloudy hallway.

(Things keep getting in the way, dear Tommy...)

(Medoc, are you here? I've been sleepwalking again, my dear. It's the inhuman monsters that I fear...)

("Excuse me, Mr. Ullman, but isn't this the...")

... office, with its file cabinets, Ullman's big desk, a blank reservations book for next year already in place-never misses a trick, that Ullman-all the keys hanging neatly on their hooks

(except for one, which one, which key, passkey-passkey, passkey, who's got the passkey? if we went upstairs perhaps we'd see)

and the big two-way radio on its shelf.

He snapped it on. CB transmissions coming in short, crackly bursts. He switched the band and dialed across bursts of music, news, a preacher haranguing a softly moaning congregation, a weather report. And another voice which he dialed back to. It was his father's voice.

"-kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they'll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. Right this minute that boy of yours is in where he shouldn't be. Trespassing. That's what he's doing. He's a goddam little pup. Cane him for it, Jacky, cane him within an inch of his life. Have a drink Jacky my boy, and we'll play the elevator game. Then I'll go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it, of course you can. You must kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man-"

His father's voice, going up higher and higher, becoming something maddening, not human at all, something squealing and petulant and maddening, the voice of the Ghost-God, the Pig-God, coming dead at him out of the radio and

"No!" he screamed back. "You're dead, you're in your grave, you're not in me at all!" Because he had cut all the father out of him and it was not right that he should come back creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where his father had lived and died.

He raised the radio up and brought it down, and it smashed on the floor spilling old clocksprings and tubes like the result of some crazy elevator game gone awry, making his father's voice gone, leaving only his voice, Jack's voice, Jacky's voice, chanting in the cold reality of the office:

"-dead, you're dead, you're dead!"

And the startled sound of Wendy's feet hitting the floor over his head, and Wendy's startled, frightened voice: "Jack? Jack!"

He stood, blinking down at the shattered radio. Now there was only the snowmobile in the equipment shed to link them to the outside world.

He put his hands over his eyes and clutched at his temples. He was getting a headache.

Chapter 27. Catatonic

Wendy ran down the hall in her stocking feet and ran down the main stairs to the lobby two at a time. She didn't look up at the carpeted flight that led to the second floor, but if she had, she would have seen Danny standing at the top of them, still and silent, his unfocused eyes directed out into indifferent space, his thumb in his mouth, the collar and shoulders of his shirt damp. There were puffy bruises on his neck and just below his chin.

Jack's cries had ceased, but that did nothing to ease her fear. Ripped out of her sleep by his voice, raised in that old hectoring pitch she remembered so well, she still felt that she was dreaming-but another part knew she was awake, and that terrified her more. She half-expected to burst into the office and find him standing over Danny's sprawled-out body, drunk and confused.