9
Mrs. Massey returned a week later. She was in the bathroom again, this time in the tub. Danny wasn’t surprised. A tub was where she had died, after all. This time he didn’t run. This time he went inside and closed the door. She beckoned him forward, smiling. Danny came, also smiling. In the other room, he could hear the television. His mother was watching Three’s Company.
“Hello, Mrs. Massey,” Danny said. “I brought you something.”
At the last moment she understood and began to scream.
10
Moments later, his mom was knocking at the bathroom door. “Danny? Are you all right?”
“Fine, Mom.” The tub was empty. There was some goo in it, but Danny thought he could clean that up. A little water would send it right down the drain. “Do you have to go? I’ll be out pretty soon.”
“No. I just . . . I thought I heard you call.”
Danny grabbed his toothbrush and opened the door. “I’m a hundred percent cool. See?” He gave her a big smile. It wasn’t hard, now that Mrs. Massey was gone.
The troubled look left her face. “Good. Make sure you brush the back ones. That’s where the food goes to hide.”
“I will, Mom.”
From inside his head, far inside, where the twin of his special lockbox was stored on a special shelf, Danny could hear muffled screaming. He didn’t mind. He thought it would stop soon enough, and he was right.
11
Two years later, on the day before the Thanksgiving break, halfway up a deserted stairwell in Alafia Elementary, Horace Derwent appeared to Danny Torrance. There was confetti on the shoulders of his suit. A little black mask hung from one decaying hand. He reeked of the grave. “Great party, isn’t it?” he asked.
Danny turned and walked away, very quickly.
When school was over, he called Dick long-distance at the restaurant where Dick worked in Key West. “Another one of the Overlook People found me. How many boxes can I have, Dick? In my head, I mean.”
Dick chuckled. “As many as you need, honey. That’s the beauty of the shining. You think my Black Grampa’s the only one I ever had to lock away?”
“Do they die in there?”
This time there was no chuckle. This time there was a coldness in Dick’s voice the boy had never heard before. “Do you care?”
Danny didn’t.
When the onetime owner of the Overlook showed up again shortly after New Year’s—this time in Danny’s bedroom closet—Danny was ready. He went into the closet and closed the door. Shortly afterward, a second mental lockbox went up on the high mental shelf beside the one that held Mrs. Massey. There was more pounding, and some inventive cursing that Danny saved for his own later use. Pretty soon it stopped. There was silence from the Derwent lockbox as well as the Massey lockbox. Whether or not they were alive (in their undead fashion) no longer mattered.
What mattered was they were never getting out. He was safe.
That was what he thought then. Of course, he also thought he would never take a drink, not after seeing what it had done to his father.
Sometimes we just get it wrong.