"You happy, babe?" She looked up at him solemnly. "This is the happiest I've been since we were married."

"Is that the truth?"

"G.o.d's honest." He squeezed her tightly. "I love you." She squeezed him back, touched. Those had never been cheap words with John Torrance; she could count the number of times he had said them to her, both before and after marriage, on both her hands.

"I love you too."

"Mommy! Mommy!" Danny was on the porch now, shrill and excited. "Come and see! Wow! It's neat!"

"What is it?" Wendy asked him as they walked up from the parking lot, hand in hand.

"Forgot," Jack said.

"Oh, you'll get yours," she said, and elbowed him. "See if you don't."

"I was hoping I'd get it tonight," he remarked, and she laughed. A moment later he asked, "Is Danny happy, do you think?"

"You ought to know. You're the one who has a long talk with him every night before bed."

"That's usually about what he wants to be when he grows up or if Santa Claus is really real. That's getting to be a big thing with him. I think his old buddy Scott let some pennies drop on that one. No, he hasn't said much of anything about the Overlook to me."

"Me either," she said. They were climbing the porch steps now. "But he's very quiet a lot of the time. And I think he's lost weight, Jack, I really do."

"He's just getting tall." Danny's back was to them. He was examining something on the table by Jack's chair, but Wendy couldn't see what it was.

"He's not eating as well, either. He used to be the original steam shovel. Remember last year?"

"They taper off," he said vaguely. "I think I read that in Spock. He'll be using two forks again by the time he's seven." They had stopped on the top step.

"He's pushing awfully hard on those readers, too," she said. "I know he wants to learn how, to please us... to please you," she added reluctantly.

"To please himself most of all," Jack said. "I haven't been pushing him on that at all. In fact, I do wish he wouldn't go quite so hard."

"Would you think I was foolish if I made an appointment for him to have a physical? There's a G.P. in Sidewinder, a young man from what the checker in the market said-"

"You're a little nervous about the snow coming, aren't you?" She shrugged. "I suppose. If you think it's foolish-"

"I don't. In fact, you can make appointments for all three of us. We'll get our clean bills of health and then we can sleep easy at night."

"I'll make the appointments this afternoon," she said.

"Mom! Look, Mommy!" He came running to her with a large gray thing in his hands, and for one comic-horrible moment Wendy thought it was a brain. She saw what it really was and recoiled instinctively.

Jack put an arm around her. "It's all right. The tenants who didn't fly away have been shaken out. I used the bug bomb." She looked at the large wasps' nest her son was holding but would not touch it. "Are you sure it's safe?"

"Positive. I had one in my room when I was a kid. My dad gave it to me. Want to put it in your room, Danny?"

"Yeah! Right now!" He turned around and raced through the double doors. They could hear his m.u.f.fled, running feet on the main stairs.

"There were wasps up there," she said. "Did you get stung?"

"Where's my purple heart?" he asked, and displayed his finger. The swelling had already begun to go down, but she ooohed over it satisfyingly and gave it a small, gentle kiss.

"Did you pull the stinger out?"

"Wasps don't leave them in. That's bees. They have barbed stingers. Wasp stingers are smooth. That's what makes them so dangerous. They can sting again and again."

"Jack, are you sure that's safe for him to have?"

"I followed the directions on the bomb. The stuff is guaranteed to kill every single bug in two hours' time and then dissipate with no residue."

"I hate them," she said.

"What... wasps?"

"Anything that stings," she said. Her hands went to her elbows and cupped them, her arms crossed over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"I do too," he said, and hugged her.

16 - Danny

Down the hall, in the bedroom, Wendy could hear the typewriter Jack had carried up from downstairs burst into life for thirty seconds, fall silent for a minute or two, and then rattle briefly again. It was like listening to machine- gun fire from an isolated pillbox. The sound was music to her ears; Jack had not been writing so steadily since the second year of their marriage, when he wrote the story that Esquire had purchased. He said he thought the play would be done by the end of the year, for better or worse, and he would be moving on to something new. He said he didn't care if The Little School stirred any excitement when Phyllis showed it around, didn't care if it sank without a trace, and Wendy believed that, too. The actual act of his writing made her immensely hopeful, not because she expected great things from the play but because her husband seemed to be slowly closing a huge door on a roomful of monsters. He had had his shoulder to that door for a long time now, but at last it was swinging shut.

Every key typed closed it a little more.

"Look, d.i.c.k, look." Danny was hunched over the first of the five battered primers Jack had dug up by culling mercilessly through Boulder's myriad secondhand bookshops. They would take Danny right up to the second-grade reading level, a program she had told Jack she thought was much too ambitious. Their son was intelligent, they knew that, but it would be a mistake to push him too far too fast. Jack had agreed.

There would be no pushing involved. But if the kid caught on fast, they would be prepared. And now she wondered if Jack hadn't been right about that, too.

Danny, prepared by four years of "Sesame Street" and three years of "Electric Company," seemed to be catching on with almost scary speed. It bothered her. He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read. His small face was more tense and paler than she liked in the close and cozy glow of the goosenecked lamp they had put in his room. He was taking it very seriously, both the reading and the workbook pages his father made up for him every afternoon.

Picture of an apple and a peach. The word apple written beneath in Jack's large, neatly made printing. Circle the right picture, the one that went with the word.

And their son would stare from the word to the pictures, his lips moving, sounding out, actually sweating it out, And with his double-sized red pencil curled into his pudgy right fist, he could now write about three dozen words on his own.

His finger traced slowly under the words in the reader. Above them was a picture Wendy half-remembered from her own grammar school days, nineteen years before. A laughing boy with brown curly hair. A girl in a short dress, her hair in blond ringlets one hand holding a jump rope. A prancing dog running after a large red rubber ball. The first-grade trinity. d.i.c.k, Jane, and Jip.

"See Jip run," Danny read slowly. "Run, Jip, run. Run, run, run." He paused, dropping his finger down a line. "See the..." He bent closer, his nose almost touching the page now. "See the..."

"Not so close, doc," Wendy said quietly. "You'll hurt your eyes. It's-"

"Don't tell me!" he said, sitting up with a jerk. His voice was alarmed.

"Don't tell me, Mommy, I can get it!"

"All right, honey," she said. "But it's not a big thing. Really it's not." Unheeding, Danny bent forward again. On his face was an expression that might be more commonly seen hovering over a graduate record exam in a college gym somewhere. She liked it less and less.

"See the... buh. Aw. El. El. See the buhaw-el-el? See the buhawl. Ball!" Suddenly triumphant. Fierce. The fierceness in his voice scared her. "See the ball!"

"That's right," she said. "Honey, I think that's enough for tonight."

"A couple more pages, Mommy? Please?"

"No, doc." She closed the red-bound book firmly. "It's bedtime."

"Please?"

"Don't tease me about it, Danny. Mommy's tired."

"Okay." But he looked longingly at the primer.

"Go kiss your father and then wash up. Don't forget to brush."

"Yeah." He slouched out, a small boy in pajama bottoms with feet and a large flannel top with a football on the front and NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS written on the back.

Jack's typewriter stopped, and she heard Danny's hearty smack. "Night, Daddy."

"Goodnight, doc. How'd you do?"

"Okay, I guess. Mommy made me stop."

"Mommy was right. It's past eight-thirty. Going to the bathroom?"

"Yeah."

"Good. There's potatoes growing out of your ears. And onions and carrots and chives and-" Danny's giggle, fading, then cut off by the firm click of the bathroom door.

He was private about his bathroom functions, while both she and Jack were pretty much catch-as-catch-can. Another sign-and they were multiplying all the time- that there was another human being in the place, not just a carbon copy of one of them or a combination of both. It made her a little sad. Someday her child would be a stranger to her, and she would be strange to him... but not as strange as her own mother had become to her. Please don't let it be that way, G.o.d. Let him grow up and still love his mother.

Jack's typewriter began its irregular bursts again.

Still sitting in the chair beside Danny's reading table, she let her eyes wander around her son's room. The glider's wing had been neatly mended. His desk was piled high with picture books, coloring books, old Spiderman comic books with the covers half torn off, Crayolas, and an untidy pile of Lincoln Logs. The VW model was neatly placed above these lesser things, its shrink-wrap still undisturbed. He and his father would be putting it together tomorrow night or the night after if Danny went on at this rate, and never mind the end of the week. His pictures of Pooh and Eyore and Christopher Robin were tacked neatly to the wall, soon enough to be replaced with pin-ups and photographs of dope- smoking rock singers, she supposed. Innocence to experience. Human nature, baby.

Grab it and growl. Still it made her sad. Next year he would be in school and she would lose at least half of him, maybe more, to his friends. She and Jack had tried to have another one for a while when things had seemed to be going well at Stovington, but she was on the pill again now. Things were too uncertain. G.o.d knew where they would be in nine months.

Her eyes fell on the wasps' nest.

It held the ultimate high place in Danny's room, resting on a large plastic plate on the table by his bed. She didn't like it, even if it was empty. She wondered vaguely if it might have germs, thought to ask Jack, then decided he would laugh at her. But she would ask the doctor tomorrow, if she could catch him with Jack out of the room. She didn't like the idea of that thing, constructed from the chewings and saliva of so many alien creatures, lying within a foot of her sleeping son's head.

The water in the bathroom was still running, and she got up and went into the big bedroom to make sure everything was okay. Jack didn't look up; he was lost in the world he was making, staring at the typewriter, a filter cigarette clamped in his teeth.

She knocked lightly on the closed bathroom room. "You okay, doc? You awake?" No answer.

"Danny?" No answer. She tried the door. It was locked.

"Danny?" She was worried now. The lack of any sound beneath the steadily running water made her uneasy. "Danny? Open the door, honey." No answer.

"Danny!"

"Jesus Christ, Wendy, I can't think if you're going to pound on the door all night."

"Danny's locked himself in the bathroom and he doesn't answer me!" Jack came around the desk, looking put out. He knocked on the door once, hard.

"Open up, Danny. No games." No answer.

Jack knocked harder. "Stop fooling, doc. Bedtime's bedtime. Spanking if you don't open up." He's losing his temper, she thought, and was more afraid. He had not touched Danny in anger since that evening two years ago, but at this moment he sounded angry enough to do it.

"Danny, honey-" she began.

No answer. Only running water.

"Danny, if you make me break this lock I can guarantee you you'll spend the night sleeping on your belly," Jack warned.

Nothing.

"Break it," she said, and suddenly it was hard to talk. "Quick." He raised one foot and brought it down hard against the door to the right of the k.n.o.b. The lock was a poor thing; it gave immediately and the door shuddered open, banging the tiled bathroom wall and rebounding halfway.

"Danny!" she screamed.

The water was running full force in the basin. Beside it, a tube of Crest with the cap off. Danny was sitting on the rim of the bathtub across the room, his toothbrush clasped limply in his left hand, a thin foam of toothpaste around his mouth. He was staring, trancelike, into the mirror on the front of the medicine cabinet above the washbasin. The expression on his face was one of drugged horror, and her first thought was that he was having some sort of epileptic seizure, that he might have swallowed his tongue.

"Danny!" Danny didn't answer. Guttural sounds came from his throat.

Then she was pushed aside so hard that she crashed into the towel rack, and Jack was kneeling in front of the boy.

"Danny," he said. "Danny, Danny!" He snapped his fingers in front of Danny's blank eyes.

"Ah-sure," Danny said. "Tournament play. Stroke. Nurrrrr..."

"Danny-"

"Roque!" Danny said, his voice suddenly deep, almost manlike. "Roque. Stroke. The roque mallet... has two sides. Gaaaaaa-"

"Oh Jack my G.o.d what's wrong with him?" Jack grabbed the boy's elbows and shook him hard. Danny's head rolled limply backward and then snapped forward like a balloon on a stick.

"Roque. Stroke. Redrum." Jack shook him again, and Danny's eyes suddenly cleared. His toothbrush fell out of his hand and onto the tiled floor with a small click.

"What?" he asked, looking around. He saw his father kneeling before him, Wendy standing by the wall. "What?" Danny asked again, with rising alarm. "W-W-Wuh- What's wr-r-r-"

"Don't stutter!" Jack suddenly screamed into his face. Danny cried out in shock, his body going tense, trying to draw away from his father, and then he collapsed into tears. Stricken, Jack pulled him close. "Oh, honey, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, doc. Please. Don't cry. I'm sorry. Everything's okay." The water ran ceaselessly in the basin, and Wendy felt that she had suddenly stepped into some grinding nightmare where time ran backward, backward to the time when her drunken husband had broken her son's arm and had then mewled over him in almost the exact same words.

(Oh honey. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, doc. Please. So sorry.) She ran to them both, pried Danny out of Jack's arms somehow (she saw the look of angry reproach on his face but filed it away for later consideration), and lifted him up. She walked him back into the small bedroom, Danny's arms clasped around her neck, Jack trailing them.