The Shining

broadened, but his eyes were socketed in shadow and his skin was horribly white, like the skin of a corpse. “Later he expects to see to your son’s well-being himself. He is very interested in your son. Danny is a talented boy.”
The juniper fumes of the gin were pleasantly maddening, but they also seemed to be blurring his reason. Danny? What was all of this about Danny? And what was he doing in a bar with a drink in his hand?
He had TAKEN THE PLEDGE. He had GONE ON THE WAGON. He had SWORN OFF.
What could they want with his son? What could they want with Danny? Wendy and Danny weren’t in it. He tried to see into Lloyd’s shadowed eyes, but it was too dark, too dark, it was like trying to read emotion into the empty orbs of a skull.
(It’s me they must want… isn’t it? I am the one. Not Danny, not Wendy. I’m the one who loves it here. They wanted to leave. I’m the one who took care of the snowmobile… went through the old records… dumped the press on the boiler… lied… practically sold my soul… what can they want with ham?)
“Where is the manager?” He tried to ask it casually but his words seemed to come out between lips already numbed by the first drink, like words from a nightmare rather than those in a sweet dream.
Lloyd only smiled.
“What do you want with my son? Danny’s not in this.,. is he?” He heard the naked plea in his own voice.
Lloyd’s face seemed to be running, changing, becoming something pestilent. The white skin becoming a hepatitic yellow, cracking. Red sores erupting on the skin, bleeding foul smelling liquid. Droplets of blood sprang out on Lloyd’s forehead like sweat and somewhere a silver chime was striking the quarter-hour.
(Unmask, unmask!)
“Drink your drink, Mr. Torrance,” Lloyd said softly. “It isn’t a matter that concerns you. Not at this point.”
He picked his drink up again, raised it to his lips, and hesitated. He heard the hard, horrible snap as Danny’s arm broke. He saw the bicycle flying brokenly up over the hood of Al’s car, starring the windshield. He saw a single wheel lying in the road, twisted spokes pointing into the sky like jags of piano wire.
He became aware that all conversation had stopped.
He looked back over his shoulder. They were all looking at him expectantly, silently. The man beside the woman in the sarong had removed his foxhead and Jack saw that it was Horace Derwent, his pallid blond hair spilling across his forehead. Everyone at the bar was watching, too. The woman beside him was looking at him closely, as if trying to focus. Her dress had slipped off one shoulder and looking down he could see a loosely puckered nipple capping one sagging breast. Looking back at her face he began to think that this might be the woman from 217, the one who had tried to strangle Danny. On his other hand, the man in the sharp blue suit had removed a small pearl-handled. 32 from his jacket pocket and was idly spinning it on the bar, like a man with Russian roulette on his mind.
(I want-)
He realized the words were not passing through his frozen vocal cords and tried again.
“I want to see the manager. I… I don’t think he understands. My son is not a part of this. He… ”
“Mr. Torrance,” Lloyd said, his voice coming with hideous gentleness from inside his plague-raddled face, “you will meet the manager in due time. He has, in fact, decided to make you his agent in this matter. Now drink your drink.”
“Drink your drink,” they all echoed.
He picked it up with a badly trembling hand. It was raw gin. He looked into it, and looking was like drowning.
The woman beside him began to sing in a flat, dead voice: “Roll… out… the barrel… and we’ll have,… a barrel… of fun…”
Lloyd picked it up. Then the man in the blue suit. The dog-man joined in, thumping one paw against the table
“Now’s the time to roll the barrel-”
Derwent added his voice to the rest. A cigarette was cocked in one corner of his mouth at a jaunty angle. His right arm was around the shoulders of the woman in the sarong, and his right band was gently and absently stroking her right breast. He was looking at the dog-man with amused contempt as he sang.
“-because the gang’s… all… here!”
Jack brought the drink to his mouth and downed it in three long gulps, the gin highballing down his throat like a moving van in a tunnel, exploding in his stomach, rebounding up to his brain in one leap where it seized hold of him with a final convulsing fit of the shakes.
When that passed off, he felt fine.
“Do it again, please,” he said, and pushed the empty glass toward Lloyd.
“Yes, sir,” Lloyd said, taking the glass. Lloyd looked perfectly normal again. The olive-skinned man had put his. 32 away. The woman on his right was staring into her singapore sling again.