Uncollected Stories 2003 (18 page)

You had to keep an eye on the boiler, because if you didn't, she would
creep up on you.
What did that mean, anyway? Or was it just one of
those nonsensical things that sometimes came to you in dreams, so
much gibberish? Of course, there was undoubtedly a boiler in the
basement or somewhere to heat the place; even summer resorts had to
have heat, sometimes, didn't they? If only to supply hot water. But
creep? Would a boiler creep?

You had to keep an, eye on, the boiler.
It was like one of those crazy riddles:
Why is a mouse when it runs, when is a raven like a writing desk, what

is a creeping boiler?
Was it, like the hedges, maybe? She'd had a dream
where the hedges crept. And the fire hose that had what – what? –
slithered?

A chill touched her. It was not good to think much about the dreams in
the night, in the dark. You could ... well, you could bother yourself. It
was better to think about the things you would be doing when you got
back to New York, about how you were going to convince Bill that a
baby was a bad idea for a while, until he got firmly settled in the vice
presidency his father had awarded him as a wedding present –

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 at it
the same way we always worked at 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 dreams-
An 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.
As on 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's alive!
And that was when the hand reached out unseen from under the bed
and gripped her wrist firmly ... almost lecherously. A fingerlike canvas
scratched suggestively against her palm and something was under there,
something had been under there the whole 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 she was still sucking her thumb, so it was some time before
they realized she was saying, "It crept under the bed. It crept under the
bed."
And even though they flipped up the coverlet and Bill actually lifted
up 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
stockmarket 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 those things more and more. She
committed suicide in a Yonkers motel room in 1949, a woman who was
prematurely gray and prematurely lined. It had been 20 years and the
hand that had gripped her wrist when she reached down to get her
cigarettes 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."

In that long, hot summer of 1953, the summer Jacky Torrance turned 6,
his father came home one night from the hospital and broke Jacky's arm.
He almost killed the boy. He was drunk. Jacky was sitting on the front
porch reading a Combat Casey comic book when his father came down
the street, listing to one side, torpedoed by beer somewhere down the
line. As he always did, the boy felt a mixture of love-hate-fear rise in his
chest at the sight of the old man, who looked like a giant, malevolent
ghost in his hospital whites. Jacky's father was an orderly at the Berlin
Community Hospital. He was like God, like Nature-sometimes lovable,
sometimes terrible. You never knew which it would be. Jacky's mother
feared and served him. Jacky's brothers hated him. Only Jacky, of all of
them, still loved him in spite of the fear and the hate, and sometimes the
volatile mixture of emotions made him want to cry out at the sight of his
father coming, to simply cry out: "I love you, Daddy! Go away! Hug
me! I'll kill you! I'm so afraid of you! I need you!" And his father
seemed to sense in his stupid way – he was a stupid man, and selfish –
that all of them had gone beyond him but Jacky, the youngest, knew that
the only way he could touch the others was to bludgeon them to
attention. But with Jacky there was still love, and there had been times
when he had cuffed the boy's mouth into running blood and then hugged
him with a frightful force, the killing force just, barely held back by
some other thing, and Jackie would let himself be hugged deep into the
atmosphere of malt and hops that hung around his old man forever,
quailing, loving, fearing.

He leaped off the step and ran halfway down the path before
something stopped him.
"Daddy?" he said. "Where's the car?"
Torrance came toward him, and Jacky saw how very drunk he was.
"Wrecked it up," he said thickly.
"Oh..."
Careful now. Careful what you say. For your life, be careful.
"That's too bad."
His father stopped and regarded Jacky from his stupid pig eyes. Jacky
held his breath. Somewhere behind his father's brow, under the
lawnmowered brush of his crew cut, the scales were turning. The hot,
afternoon stood still while Jacky waited, staring up anxiously into his
father's face to see if his father would throw a rough bear arm around
his shoulder, grinding Jacky's cheek against the rough, cracked leather
of the belt that held up his white pants and say, "Walk with me into
the house, big boy." in the hard and contemptuous way that was the only
way he could even approach love without destroying himself – or if it
would be something else.
Tonight it was something else.
The thunderheads appeared on his father's brow. "What do you mean,
'That's too bad'? What kind of shit is that?"
"Just...too bad, Daddy. That's all I meant. it's – "
Torrance's hand swept out at the end of his arm, huge hand, hamhock
arm, but speedy, yes, very speedy, and Jacky went down with church
bells in his head and a split lip. "Shutup" his father said, giving it a
broad A.
Jacky said nothing. Nothing would do any good now. The balance had
swung the wrong way.
"You ain't gonna sass me," said Torrance. "You won't sass your
daddy. Get up here and take your medicine."
There was something in his face this time, some dark and blazing
thing. And Jacky suddenly knew that this time there might be no hug at
the end of the blows, and if there was he might, be unconscious and
unknowing...maybe even dead.
He ran.
Behind him, his father let out a bellow of rage and chased him, a
flapping specter in hospital whites, a juggernaut of doom following his
son from the front yard to the back.
Jacky ran for his life. The tree house, he was thinking.
He can't get up
there; the ladder nailed to the tree won't hold him. I'll get up there, talk
to him; maybe he'll go to sleep – Oh, God, please let him go to sleep
–
he was weeping in terror as he ran.
"Come back here, goddammit!" His father was roaring behind him.
"Come back here and take your medicine! Take it like a man!"
Jacky flashed past the back steps. His mother, that thin and defeated
woman, scrawny in a faded housedress, had come out through the
screen door from the kitchen, just as Jacky ran past with his father in
pursuit. She opened her mouth as if to speak or cry out, but her hand
came up in a fist and stopped whatever she might have said, kept it
safely behind her teeth. She was afraid for her son, but more afraid that
her husband would turn on her.
"No, you don't! Come back here!"
Jacky reached the large elm in the backyard, the elm where last year
his father had smoke-drugged a colony of wasps then burned their nest
with gasoline. The boy went up the haphazardly hung nailed-on rungs
like greased lightning, and still he was nearly not fast enough. His
father's clutching, enraged hand grasped the boy's ankle in a grip like
flexed steel, then slipped a little and succeeded only in pulling off
Jacky's loafer. Jacky went up the last, three rungs and crouched on the
floor of the tree house, 12 feet above the ground, panting and crying on
his hands and knees.
His father seemed to go crazy. He danced around the tree like an
Indian, Bellowing his rage. He slammed his fists into the tree, making
bark fly and bringing lattices of blood to his knuckles. He kicked it. His
huge moon face was white with frustration and red with anger.
"Please, Daddy," Jacky moaned. "Whatever I said ... I'm sorry I said
it..."
"Come down! You come
down out of there take your fucking
medicine, you little cur! Right now!"
"I will...I will if you promise not to...to hit me too hard...not hurt me...
just spank me but not hurt me..."

Jacky looked toward the house but that was hopeless. His mother had
retreated somewhere far away, to neutral ground.
"GET OUT RIGHT NOW!"
"Oh, Daddy, I don't dare!" Jacky cried out, and that was the truth.
Because now his father might kill him.
There was a period of stalemate. A minute, perhaps, or perhaps two.
His father circled the tree, puffing and blowing like a whale.
Jacky turned around and around on his hands and knees, following the
movements. They were like parts of a visible clock.
The second or third time he came back to the ladder nailed to the tree,
Torrance stopped. He looked speculatively at the ladder. And laid his
hands on the rung before his eyes. He began to climb.
"No, Daddy, it won't hold you," Jacky whispered.
But his father came on relentlessly, like fate, like death, like doom. Up
and up, closer to the tree house. One rung snapped off under his hands
and he almost fell but caught the next one with a grunt and a lunge.
Another one of the rungs twisted around from the horizontal to the
perpendicular under his weight with a rasping scream of pulling nails,
but it did not give way, and then the working, congested face was
visible over the edge of the tree-house floor, and for that one moment of
his childhood Jack Torrance had his father at bay; if he could have
kicked that face with the foot that still wore its loafer, kicked it where
the nose terminated between the piggy eyes, he could have driven his
father backward off the ladder, perhaps killed him (If he had killed him,
would anyone have said anything but Thanks, Jacky"?) But it was love
that stopped him, and love that, let him just his face in his hands and
give up as first one of his father's pudgy, short-fingered hands appeared
on the boards and then the other.
"Now, by God," his father breathed. He stood above his huddled son
like a giant.
"Oh, Daddy," Jacky mourned for both of them. And for a moment his
father paused, his face sagged into lines of uncertainty, and Jacky felt a
thread of hope.
Then the face drew up. Jacky could smell the beer, and his father said,
"I'll teach you to sass me," and all hope was gone as the foot swung out,
burying itself in Jacky's belly, driving the wind from his belly in a
whoosh. as he flew from the tree-house platform and fell to the ground,
turning over once and landing on the point of his left elbow, which
snapped with a greenstick crack. He didn't even have breath enough to
scream. The last thing he saw before he blacked out was his father's
face, which seemed to be at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It, seemed to
be filling with surprise, the way a vessel may fill with some pale liquid.

He's just starting to know what he did
, Jacky thought incoherently.
And on the heels of that, a thought with no meaning at all, coherent or
otherwise, a thought, that chased him into the blackness as he fell back
on the chewed and tattered grass of the back lawn in a faint:

What you see is what you'll be, what YOU see is what you'll be, what
you –
The break in his arm was cleanly healed in six months. The
nightmares went, on much longer. In a way, they never stopped.

The two men posted outside the door of the Presidential Suite never
heard them. They were young, dressed in Ivy League suits with the cut
of the jackets a little wider than the fashion of the day decreed. You
couldn't wear a .357 Magnum concealed in a shoulder holster and be
quite in fashion. They were discussing whether or not the Yankees
could take yet another pennant. It was lacking two days of September,
and as usual, the pinstripers looked formidable. Just talking about the
Yankees made them feel a little better. They were New York boys, on
loan from Walt Abruzzi, and they were a long way from home. The man
inside was a big wheel in the Organization. That was all they knew all
they wanted to know. "You do your job, we all get well," Abruzzi had
told them. "What's to know?"