“No, Daddy, it won’t hold you,” Jacky whispered.
But his father came on relentlessly, like fate, like death, like doom. Up and up, closer to the tree house. One rung snapped off under his hands and he almost fell but caught the next one with a grunt and a lunge. Another one of the rungs twisted around from the horizontal to the perpendicular under his weight with a rasping scream of pulling nails, but it did not give way, and then the working, congested face was visible over the edge of the tree-house floor, and for that one moment of his childhood Jack Torrance had his father at bay; if he could have kicked that face with the foot that still wore its loafer, kicked it where the nose terminated between the piggy eyes, he could have driven his father backward off the ladder, perhaps killed him (If he had killed him, would anyone have said anything but Thanks, Jacky”?) But it was love that stopped him, and love that, let him just his face in his hands and give up as first one of his father’s pudgy, short-fingered hands appeared on the boards and then the other.
“Now, by God,” his father breathed. He stood above his huddled son like a giant.
“Oh, Daddy,” Jacky mourned for both of them. And for a moment his father paused, his face sagged into lines of uncertainty, and Jacky felt a thread of hope.
Then the face drew up. Jacky could smell the beer, and his father said, “I’ll teach you to sass me,” and all hope was gone as the foot swung out, burying itself in Jacky’s belly, driving the wind from his belly in a whoosh. as he flew from the tree-house platform and fell to the ground, turning over once and landing on the point of his left elbow, which snapped with a greenstick crack. He didn’t even have breath enough to scream. The last thing he saw before he blacked out was his father’s face, which seemed to be at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It, seemed to be filling with surprise, the way a vessel may fill with some pale liquid.
He’s just starting to know what he did, Jacky thought incoherently.
And on the heels of that, a thought with no meaning at all, coherent or otherwise, a thought, that chased him into the blackness as he fell back on the chewed and tattered grass of the back lawn in a faint:
What you see is what you’ll be, what YOU see is what you’ll be, what you-
The break in his arm was cleanly healed in six months. The nightmares went, on much longer. In a way, they never stopped.
THE OVERLOOK HOTEL, THIRD FLOOR, 1958
The murderers came up the stairs in their stocking feet.
The two men posted outside the door of the Presidential Suite never heard them. They were young, dressed in Ivy League suits with the cut of the jackets a little wider than the fashion of the day decreed. You couldn’t wear a .357 Magnum concealed in a shoulder holster and be quite in fashion. They were discussing whether or not the Yankees could take yet another pennant. It was lacking two days of September, and as usual, the pinstripers looked formidable. Just talking about the Yankees made them feel a little better. They were New York boys, on loan from Walt Abruzzi, and they were a long way from home.
The man inside was a big wheel in the Organization. That was all they knew all they wanted to know. “You do your job, we all get well,” Abruzzi had told them. “What’s to know?”
They had heard things,, of course. That there was a place in Colorado that was completely neutral ground. A place where even a crazy little West Coast hood like Tony Giorgio could sit down and have a fancy brandy in a balloon glass with the Gray Old Men who saw him as some sort of homicidal stinging insect to be crushed. A place where guys from Boston who had been used to putting each other in the trunks of cars behind bowling alleys in Malden or into garbage cans in Roxbury could get together and play gin and tell jokes about the Polacks. A place where hatchets could be buried or unearthed, pacts made, plans laid. A place where warm people could sometimes cool off.