This time they both shook their heads.
"Doesn't matter, I guess," Edmonds said. He opened the door into the waiting room. "Anybody here named Danny Torrance that would like to go home?"
"Hi, Daddy! Hi, Mommy!" He stood up from the small table where he had been leafing slowly through a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and muttering the words he knew aloud.
He ran to Jack, who scooped him up. Wendy ruffled his hair.
Edmonds peered at him. "If you don't love your mommy and daddy, you can stay with good old Bill."
"No, sir!" Danny said emphatically. He slung one arm around Jack's neck, one arm around Wendy's, and looked radiantly happy.
"Okay," Edmonds said, smiling. He looked at Wendy. "You call if you have any problems."
"Yes."
"I don't think you will," Edmonds said, smiling.
Chapter 18. The Scrapbook
Jack found the scrapbook on the first of November, while his wife and son were hiking up the rutted old road that ran from behind the roque court to a deserted sawmill two miles further up. The fine weather still held, and all three of them had acquired improbable autumn suntans.
He had gone down in the basement to knock the press down on the boiler and then, on impulse, he had taken the flashlight from the shelf where the plumbing schematics were and decided to look at some of the old papers. He was also looking for good places to set his traps, although he didn't plan to do that for another month-I want them all to be home from vacation, he had told Wendy.
Shining the flashlight ahead of him, he stepped past the elevator shaft (at Wendy's insistence they hadn't used the elevator since they moved in) and through the small stone arch. His nose wrinkled at the smell of rotting paper. Behind him the boiler kicked on with a thundering whoosh, making him jump.
He flickered the light around, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. There was a scale-model Andes range down here: dozens of boxes and crates stuffed with papers, most of them white and shapeless with age and damp. Others had broken open and spilled yellowed sheaves of paper onto the stone floor. There were bales of newspaper tied up with hayrope. Some boxes contained what looked like ledgers, and others contained invoices bound with rubber bands. Jack pulled one out and put the flashlight beam on it.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN EXPRESS, INC.
To: OVERLOOK HOTEL
From: SIDEY'S WAREHOUSE, 1210 16th Street, Denver, CO.
Via: CANDIAN PACIFIC RR
Contents: 400 CASES DELSEY TOILET TISSUE, 1 GROSS/CASE
Signed D E F
Date August 24, 1954
Smiling, Jack let the paper drop back into the box.
He flashed the light above it and it speared a hanging lightbulb, almost buried in cobwebs. There was no chain pull.
He stood on tiptoe and tried screwing the bulb in. It lit weakly. He picked up the toilet-paper invoice again and used it to wipe off some of the cobwebs. The glow didn't brighten much.
Still using the flashlight, he wandered through the boxes and bales of paper, looking for rat spoor. They had been here, but not for quite a long time... maybe years. He found some droppings that were powdery with age, and several nests of neatly shredded paper that were old and unused.
Jack pulled a newspaper from one of the bundles and glanced down at the headline.
JOHNSON PROMISES ORDERLY TRANSITION
Says Work Begun by JFK Will Go Forward
in Coming Year
The paper was the Rocky Mountain News, dated December 19, 1963. He dropped it back onto its pile.
He supposed he was fascinated by that commonplace sense of history that anyone can feel glancing through the fresh news of ten or twenty years ago. He found gaps in the piled newspapers and records; nothing from 1937 to 1945, from 1957 to 1960, from 1962 to 1963. Periods when the hotel had been closed, he guessed. When it had been between suckers grabbing for the brass ring.