“How do I know it? At the worst, you're planning to smear my hotel by digging up bodies that were decently buried years ago. At the best, you call up my temperamental but extremely competent hotel manager and work him into a frenzy as part of some… some stupid kid's game.”

“It was more than a game, Al. It's easier for you. You don't have to take some rich friend's charity. You don't need a friend in court because you are the court. The fact that you were one step from a brown-bag lush goes pretty much unmentioned, doesn't it?”

“I suppose it does,” Al said. His voice had dropped a notch and he sounded tired of the whole thing. “But Jack, Jack… I can't help that. I can't change that.”

“I know,” Jack said emptily. “Am I fired? I guess you better tell me if I am.”

“Not if you'll do two things for me.”

“All right.”

“Hadn't you better hear the conditions before you accept them?”

“No. Give me your deal and I'll take it. There's Wendy and Danny to think about. If you want my balls, I'll send them airmail.”

“Are you sure selfpity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?”

He had closed his eyes and slid an Excedrin between his dry lips. “At this point I feel it's the only one I can afford. Fire away… no pun intended.”

Al was silent for a moment. Then he said: “First, no more calls to Ullman. Not even if the place burns down. If that happens, call the maintenance man, that guy who swears all the time, you know who I mean…”

“Watson.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Done.”

“Second, you promise me, Jack. Word of honor. No book about a famous Colorado mountain hotel with a history.”

For a moment his rage was so great that be literally could not speak. The blood beat loudly in his ears. It was like getting a call from some twentiethcentury Medici prince… no portraits of my family with their warts showing, please, or back to the rabble you'll go. I subsidize no pictures but pretty pictures. When you paint the daughter of my good friend and business partner, please omit birthmark or back to the rabble you'll go. Of course we're friends… we are both civilized men aren't we? We've shared bed and board and bottle. We'll always be friends, and the dog collar I have on you will always be ignored by mutual consent, and I'll take good and benevolent care of you. All I ask in return is your soul. Small item. We can even ignore the fact that you've handed it over, the way we ignore the dog collar. Remember, my talented friend, there are Michelangelos begging everywhere in the streets of Rome…

“Jack? You there?”

He made a strangled noise that was intended to be the word yes.

Al's voice was firm and very sure of itself. “I really don't think I'm asking so much, Jack. And there will be other books. You just can't expect me to subsidize you while you…”

“All right, agreed.”

“I don't want you to think I'm trying to control your artistic life, Jack. You know me better than that. It's just that-”

“What?”

“Is Derwent still involved with the Overlook? Somehow?”

“I don't see how that can possibly be any concern of yours, Jack.”

“No,” he said distantly. “I suppose it isn't. Listen, Al, I think I hear Wendy calling me for something. I'll get back to you.”

“Sure thing, Jacky-boy. We'll have a good talk. How are things? Dry?”

YOU'VE GOT YOUR POUND OF FLESH BLOOD AND ALL NOW CAN'T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE?)

“As a bone.”

“Here too. I'm actually beginning to enjoy sobriety. If-”

“I'll get back, Al. Wendy-”

“Sure. Okay.”

And so he had hung up and that was when the cramps had come, hitting him like lightning bolts, making him curl up in front of the telephone like a penitent, hands over his belly, head throbbing like a monstrous bladder.

The moving wasp, having stung moves on…

It had passed a little when Wendy came upstairs and asked him who had been on the phone.

“Al,” he said. “He called to ask how things were going. I said they were fine.”

“Jack, you look terrible. Are you sick?”

“Headache's back. I'm going to bed early. No sense trying to write.”

“Can I get you some warm milk?”

He smiled wanly. “That would be nice.”

And now he lay beside her, feeling her warm and sleeping thigh against his own. Thinking of the conversation with Al, how he had groveled, still made him hot and cold by turns. Someday there would be a reckoning. Someday there would be a book, not the soft and thoughtful thing he had first considered, but a gemhard work of research, photo section and all, and he would pull apart the entire Overlook history, nasty, incestuous ownership deals and all. He would spread it all out for the reader like a dissected crayfish. And if Al Shockley had connections with the Derwent empire, then God help him.

Strung up like piano wire, he lay staring into the dark, knowing it might be hours yet before he could sleep.

Wendy Torrance lay on her back, eyes closed, listening to the sound of her husband's slumber-the long inhale, the brief hold, the slightly guttural exhale. Where did he go when he slept, she wondered. To some amusement park, a Great Barrington of dreams where all the rides were free and there was no wifemother along to tell them they'd had enough hotdogs or that they'd better be going if they wanted to get home by dark? Or was it some fathoms-deep bar where the drinking never stopped and the batwings were always propped open and all the old companions were gathered around the electronic hockey game, glasses in hand, Al Shockley prominent among them with his tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone? A place where both she and Danny were excluded and the boogie went on endlessly?

Wendy was worried about him, the old, helpless worry that she had hoped was behind her forever in Vermont, as if worry could somehow not cross state lines. She didn't like what the Overlook seemed to be doing to Jack and Danny.

The most frightening thing, vaporous and unmentioned, perhaps unmentionable, was that all of Jack's drinking symptoms had come back, one by one… all but the drink itself. The constant wiping of the lips with hand or handkerchief, as if to rid them of excess moisture. Long pauses at the typewriter, more balls of paper in the wastebasket. There had been a bottle of Excedrin on the telephone table tonight after Al had called him, but no water glass. He had been chewing them again. He got irritated over little things. He would unconsciously start snapping his fingers in a nervous rhythm when things got too quiet. Increased profanity. She had begun to worry about his temper, too. It would almost come as a relief if he would lose it, blow off steam, in much the same way that he went down to the basement first thing in the morning and last thing at night to dump the press on the boiler. It would almost be good to see him curse and kick a chair across the room or slam a door. But those things, always an integral part of his temperament, had almost wholly ceased. Yet she had the feeling that Jack was more and more often angry with her or Danny, but was refusing to let it out. The boiler had a pressure gauge: old, cracked, clotted with grease, but still workable. Jack had none. She had never been able to read him very well. Danny could, but Danny wasn't talking.

And the call from Al. At about the same time it had come, Danny had lost all interest in the story they had been reading. He left her to sit by the fire and crossed to the main desk where Jack had constructed a roadway for his matchbox cars and trucks. The Violent Violet Volkswagen was there and Danny had begun to push it rapidly back and forth. Pretending to read her own book but actually looking at Danny over the top of it, she had seen an odd amalgam of the ways she and Jack expressed anxiety. The wiping of the lips. Running both hands nervously through his hair, as she had done while waiting for Jack to come home from his round of the bars. She couldn't believe Al had called just to “ask how things were going.” If you wanted to shoot the bull, you called Al. When Al called you, that was business.