CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
DANNY
It was three in the afternoon of a long, long day.
They were sitting on the big bed in their quarters. Danny was turning the purple VW model with the monster sticking out of the sunroof over and over in his hands, compulsively.
They had heard Daddy’s batterings at the door all the way across the lobby, the batterings and his voice, hoarse and petulantly angry in a weak-king sort of a way, vomiting promises of punishment, vomiting profanity, promising both of them that they would live to regret betraying him after he had slaved his guts out for them over the years.
Danny thought they would no longer be able to hear it upstairs, but the sounds of his rage carried perfectly up the dumbwaiter shaft. Mommy’s face was pale, and there were horrible brownish bruises on her neck where Daddy had tried to …
He turned the model over and over in his hands, Daddy’s prize for having learned his reading lessons.
(… where Daddy had tried to hug her too tight.)
Mommy put some of her music on the little record player, scratchy and full of horns and flutes. She smiled at him tiredly. He tried to smile back and failed. Even with the volume turned up loud he thought he could still hear Daddy screaming at them and battering the pantry door like an animal in a zoo cage. What if Daddy had to go to the bathroom? What would he do then?
Danny began to cry.
Wendy turned the volume down on the record player at once, held him, rocked him on her lap.
“Danny, love, it will be all right. It will. If Mr. Hallorann didn’t get your message, someone else will. As soon as the storm is over. No one could get up here until then anyway. Mr. Hallorann or anyone else. But when the storm is over, everything will be fine again. We’ll leave here. And do you know what we’ll do next spring? The three of us?”
Danny shook his head against her breasts. He didn’t know. It seemed there could never be spring again.
“We’ll go fishing. We’ll rent a boat and go fishing, just like we did last year on Chatterton Lake. You and me and your daddy. And maybe you’ll catch a bass for our supper. And maybe we won’t catch anything, but we’re sure to have a good time.”
“I love you, Mommy,” he said, and hugged her.
“Oh, Danny, I love you, too.”
Outside, the wind whooped and screamed.
Around four-thirty, just as the daylight began to fail, the screams ceased.
They had both been dozing uneasily, Wendy still holding Danny in her arms, and she didn’t wake. But Danny did. Somehow the silence was worse, more ominous than the screams and the blows against the strong pantry door. Was Daddy asleep again? Or dead? Or what?
(Did he get out?)
Fifteen minutes later the silence was broken by a hard, grating, metallic rattle. There was a heavy grinding, then a mechanical humming. Wendy came awake with a cry.
The elevator was running again.
They listened to it, wide-eyed, hugging each other. It went from floor to floor, the grate rattling back, the brass door slamming open. There was laughter, drunken shouts, occasional screams, and the sounds of breakage.
The Overlook was coming to life around them.