and friendly. Their horrid hedge features were bent on her as they
moved slowly toward the playground on their hedge paws, green
and silent and deadly under the black thunderheads.
In the one she had just awakened from, the hotel had been on fire.
She had awakened in their room to find Bill gone and smoke
drifting slowly through the apartment. She fled in her nightgown
but lost her direction in the narrow halls, which were obscured by
smoke. All the numbers seemed to be gone from the doors, and
there was no way to tell if you were running toward the stairwell
and elevator or away from them. She rounded a corner and saw
Bill standing outside the window at the end, motioning her
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