A Bedroom in the Wee Hours of t (2 page)

She’ll creep on you.

— and how you were going to encourage him to bring his work home so he would get used to the idea that she was going to be involved with it, very much involved.

Or did the whole hotel creep? Was that the answer?

I’ll make him a good wife, Lottie thought frantically. We’ll work it the same way we always worked being bridge partners. He knows the rules of the game, and he knows enough to let me run him. It will be just like the bridge, just like that, and if we’ve been off our game up here that doesn’t mean anything, it’s just the hotel, the dreamsAn

affirming voice: That’s it. The whole place. It

creeps.

“Oh shit,” Lottie Kilgallon whispered in the dark. It was dismaying for her to realize just how badly her nerves were shot. Like the other nights, there would be no more sleep for her now. She would lie here in bed until the sun started to come up and then she would get an uneasy hour or so.

Smoking in bed was a bad habit, a terrible habit, but she had begun to leave her cigarettes in an ashtray on the floor by the bed in case of the dreams. Sometimes it calmed her. She reached down to get the ashtray and the thought burst on her like a revelation: It does creep, the whole place— like it was alive!

And that was when the hand reached out unseen from under the bed and gripped her wrist firmly

almost lecherously. A finger—like canvas scratched suggestively against her palm and something was under there, something had been under there all the time, and Lottie began to scream. She screamed until her throat was raw and hoarse and her eyes were bulging from her face and Bill was awake and pallid with terror beside her.

When he put on the lamp she leaped from the bed, retreated into the farthest corner of the room and curled up with her thumb in her mouth.

Both Bill and Dr. Verecker tried to find out what was wrong; she told them, but it was past her thumb, and it was some time before the realized she was saying, “It crept under the bed. It crept under the bed.”

And even though they flipped up the coverlet and Bill had actually lifted the whole bed by its foot off the floor to show her there was nothing under there, not even a litter of dust kitties, she would not come out of the corner. When the sun came up, she did at last come out of the corner. She took her thumb out of her mouth. She stayed away from the bed. She stared at Bill Pillsbury from her clown—white face.

“We’re going back to New York,” she said. “This morning.”

“Of course,” Bill muttered. “Of course, dear.”

Bill Pillsbury’s father died of a heart attack two weeks after the stock market crash. Bill and Lottie could not keep the company’s head above water. Things went from bad to worse. in the years that followed she thought often of their honeymoon at the Overlook Hotel, and the dreams, and the canvas hand that had crept out from under the bed to squeeze her own. She thought about these things more and more. She committed suicide in a Yonkers motel room in the year 1949, a woman who was prematurely gray and prematurely lined. It had been twenty years and a the hand that had gripped her wrist when she reached down to get her had never really let go. She left a one—sentence suicide note written on Holiday Inn stationery. The note said: I wish we had gone to Rome.