The Collective Page 2

  forward. Somehow she had run all the way to the back of the hotel;

  he was standing out there on the fire escape landing. Now there

  was heat baking into her back through the thin, filmy stuff of her

  nightgown. The place must be in flames behind her, she thought.

  Perhaps it had been the boiler. You had to keep an. eye on the

  boiler, because if you didn't, she would creep on you. Lottie

  started forward and suddenly something wrapped around her arm

  like a python, holding her back. It was one of the fire hoses she had

  seen along the corridor walls, white canvas hose in a bright red

  frame. It had come alive somehow, and it writhed and coiled

  around her, now securing a leg, now her other arm. She was held

  fast and it was getting hotter, hotter. She could hear the angry

  crackle of the flames now only feet behind her. The wallpaper was

  peeling and blistering. Bill was gone from the fire-escape landing.

  And then she had been-

  She had been awake in the big double bed, no smell of smoke, with

  Bill Pillsbury sleeping the sleep of the justly stupid beside her. She

  was running sweat, and if it, weren't so late she would get up to

  shower. It was quarter past three in the morning.

  Dr. Verecker had offered to give her a sleeping medicine, but

  Lottie had refused. She distrusted any concoction you put in your

  body to knock out your mind. It was like giving up command of

  your ship voluntarily, and she had sworn to herself that she would

  never do that.

  But what would she do for the next four clays? Well, Verecker

  played shuffleboard in the mornings with his nickeleyed wife.

  Perhaps she would look him up and get the prescription after all.

  Lottie looked up at the white ceiling high above her, glimmering

  ghostlike, and admitted again that the Overlook had been a very

  bad mistake. None of the ads for the Overlook in the New Yorker

  or The American Mercury mentioned that the place's real specialty

  seemed to be giving people the whimwhams. Four more days, and

  that was plenty. It had been a mistake, all right, but a mistake she

  would never admit, or have to admit. In fact, she was sure she

  could.

  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

  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 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."

  AND NOW THIS WORD FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE

  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 lawn-mowered 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..."

  "Get out of that tree!" his father screamed.

  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 OVERLOOK HOTEL, THIRD FLOOR, 1958

  The murderers came up the stairs in their stocking feet.

  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