The sky had scummed over with clouds. Billy looked up at them and sighed. “I hope to God it don’t snow n blow as hard as the radio says, but it probably will. I found you some boots. They don’t look like much, but at least they match.”
Dan took the boots with him when he walked across town to his new accommodations. By then the wind was picking up and the day was growing dark. That morning, Frazier had felt on the edge of summer. This evening the air held the face-freezing dampness of coming snow. The side streets were deserted and the houses buttoned up.
Dan turned the corner from Morehead Street onto Eliot and paused. Blowing down the sidewalk, attended by a skeletal scutter of last year’s autumn leaves, was a battered tophat, such as a magician might wear. Or maybe an actor in an old musical comedy, he thought. Looking at it made him feel cold in his bones, because it wasn’t there. Not really.
He closed his eyes, slow-counted to five with the strengthening wind flapping the legs of his jeans around his shins, then opened them again. The leaves were still there, but the tophat was gone. It had just been the shining, producing one of its vivid, unsettling, and usually senseless visions. It was always stronger when he’d been sober for a little while, but never as strong as it had been since coming to Frazier. It was as if the air here were different, somehow. More conducive to those strange transmissions from Planet Elsewhere. Special.
The way the Overlook was special.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t believe that.”
A few drinks and it all goes away, Danny. Do you believe that?
Unfortunately, he did.
9
Mrs. Robertson’s was a rambling old Colonial, and Dan’s third-floor room had a view of the mountains to the west. That was a panorama he could have done without. His recollections of the Overlook had faded to hazy gray over the years, but as he unpacked his few things, a memory surfaced . . . and it was a kind of surfacing, like some nasty organic artifact (the decayed body of a small animal, say) floating to the surface of a deep lake.
It was dusk when the first real snow came. We stood on the porch of that big old empty hotel, my dad in the middle, my mom on one side, me on the other. He had his arms around us. It was okay then. He wasn’t drinking then. At first the snow fell in perfectly straight lines, but then the wind picked up and it started to blow sideways, drifting against the sides of the porch and coating those—
He tried to block it off, but it got through.
—those hedge animals. The ones that sometimes moved around when you weren’t looking.
He turned away from the window, his arms rashed out in gooseflesh. He’d gotten a sandwich from the Red Apple store and had planned to eat it while he started the John Sandford paperback he’d also picked up at the Red Apple, but after a few bites he rewrapped the sandwich and put it on the windowsill, where it would stay cold. He might eat the rest later, although he didn’t think he’d be staying up much past nine tonight; if he got a hundred pages into the book, he’d be doing well.
Outside, the wind continued to rise. Every now and then it gave a bloodcurdling scream around the eaves that made him look up from his book. Around eight thirty, the snow began. It was heavy and wet, quickly coating his window and blocking his view of the mountains. In a way, that was worse. The snow had blocked the windows in the Overlook, too. First just on the first floor . . . then on the second . . . and finally on the third.
Then they had been entombed with the lively dead.
My father thought they’d make him the manager. All he had to do was show his loyalty. By giving them his son.
“His only begotten son,” Dan muttered, then looked around as if someone else had spoken . . . and indeed, he did not feel alone. Not quite alone. The wind shrieked down the side of the building again, and he shuddered.
Not too late to go back down to the Red Apple. Grab a bottle of something. Put all these unpleasant thoughts to bed.
No. He was going to read his book. Lucas Davenport was on the case, and he was going to read his book.
He closed it at quarter past nine and got into another rooming-house bed. I won’t sleep, he thought. Not with the wind screaming like that.
But he did.
10
He was sitting at the mouth of the stormdrain, looking down a scrubgrass slope at the Cape Fear River and the bridge that spanned it. The night was clear and the moon was full. There was no wind, no snow. And the Overlook was gone. Even if it hadn’t burned to the ground during the tenure of the Peanut Farmer President, it would have been over a thousand miles from here. So why was he so frightened?
Because he wasn’t alone, that was why. There was someone behind him.
“Want some advice, Honeybear?”
The voice was liquid, wavering. Dan felt a chill go rushing down his back. His legs were colder still, prickled out in starpoints of gooseflesh. He could see those white bumps because he was wearing shorts. Of course he was wearing shorts. His brain might be that of a grown man, but it was currently sitting on top of a five-year-old’s body.