“Every now and then somebody would ask, ‘Whatever happened to Danny fromThe Shining,?'”
author Stephen King, 65, says about his new novel,Doctor Sleep.
I wonder if he’s drinking like his father?’'
Like father, like son.'"
Lockbox
1.
The Overlook was declared a total loss.
After an investigation, the fire marshal of Jicarilla County ruled the cause had been a defective boiler.
The hotel was closed for the winter when the accident occurred, and only four people were present.
Both surviving adults were quite badly injured in the explosion.
Only the child was unhurt.
Physically, at least.
Wendy Torrance and her son received a settlement from the corporation that owned the Overlook.
But she, like the corporation, wanted only to put that disastrous winter in Colorado behind her.
Sometimes Dick Hallorann (he of the powerful hunches) came up from Key West to visit with them.
To visit with young Danny especially.
They shared a bond.
One early morning in March of 1981, Wendy called Dick and asked if he could come.
After that, he refused to talk at all.
He woke up needing to pee.
Outside, a strong wind was blowing.
It reminded him of the Overlook, where the defective boiler had been the very least of the dangers.
He and his mother lived in a cramped second-floor tenement apartment.
Danny left the little room next to his mother’s and crossed the hall.
The wind gusted and a dying palm tree beside the building clattered its leaves.
The sound was skeletal.
Tonight the door was closed.
Not because his mother was in there, however.
Well, she closed it by accident, that’s all.
Sometimes you had to see.
This was something he had found out at the Overlook, in a room on the second floor.
The woman from Room 217 was there, as he had known she would be.
She was sitting naked on the toilet with her legs spread and her pallid thighs bulging.
Her greenish breasts hung down like deflated balloons.
The patch of hair below her stomach was gray.
Her eyes were also gray, like steel mirrors.
She saw him, and her lips stretched back in a grin.
Close your eyes, Dick Hallorann had told him once upon a time.
But it hadn’t worked in Room 217 when he was five, and it wouldn’t work now.
He could smell her.
The flesh on her arms hung down, almost dripping.
She was smiling the way you do when you see an old friend.
Or, perhaps, something good to eat.
