He was getting ready to go through all the clippings, more closely this time, when a voice called down the stairs: “Jack? Hon?”

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.

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.”

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?