"You... you shouldn't speak that way to your father," it said hoarsely. The mallet trembled, came down. "You'll only make things worse for yourself. Your... your punishment. Worse." It staggered drunkenly and stared at him with maudlin selfpity that began to turn to hate. The mallet began to rise again.
"You're not my daddy," Danny told it again. "And if there's a little bit of my daddy left inside you, he knows they lie here. Everything is a lie and a cheat. Like the loaded dice my daddy got for my Christmas stocking last Christmas, like the presents they put in the store windows and my daddy says there's nothing in them, no presents, they're just empty boxes. Just for show, my daddy says. You're it, not my daddy. You're the hotel. And when you get what you want, you won't give my daddy anything because you're selfish. And my daddy knows that. You had to make him drink the Bad Stuff. That's the only way you could get him, you lying false face."
"Liar! Liar!" The words came in a thin shriek. The mallet wavered wildly in the air.
"Go on and hit me. But you'll never get what you want from me."
The face in front of him changed. It was hard to say how; there was no melting or merging of the features. The body trembled slightly, and then the bloody hands opened like broken claws. The mallet fell from them and thumped to the rug. That was all. But suddenly his daddy was there, looking at him in mortal agony, and a sorrow so great that Danny's heart flamed within his chest. The mouth drew down in a quivering bow.
"Doc," Jack Torrance said. "Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you."
"No," Danny said.
"Oh Danny, for God's sake-"
"No," Danny said. He took one of his father's bloody hands and kissed it. "It's almost over."
Hallorann got to his feet by propping his back against the wall and pushing himself up. He and Wendy stared at each other like nightmare survivors from a bombed hospital.
"We got to get up there," he said. "We have to help him."
Her haunted eyes stared into his from her chalk-pale face., "It's too late," Wendy said. "Now he can only help himself."
A minute passed, then two. Three. And they heard it above them, screaming, not in anger or triumph now, but in mortal terror.
"Dear God," Hallorann whispered. "What's happening?"
"I don't know," she said.
"Has it killed him?"
"I don't know."
The elevator clashed into life and began to descend with the screaming, raving thing penned up inside.
Danny stood without moving. There was no place he could run where the Overlook was not. He recognized it suddenly, fully, painlessly. For the first time in his life he had an adult thought, an adult feeling, the essence of his experience in this bad place-a sorrowful distillation:
(Mommy and Daddy can't help me and I'm alone.)
"Go away," he said to the bloody stranger in front of him. "Go on. Get out of here."
It bent over, exposing the knife handle in its back. Its hands closed around the mallet again, but instead of aiming at Danny, it reversed the handle, aiming the hard side of the roque mallet at its own face.
Understanding rushed through Danny.
Then the mallet began to rise and descend, destroying the last of Jack Torrance's image. The thing in the hall danced an eerie, shuffling polka, the beat counterpointed by the hideous sound of the mallet head striking again and again. Blood splattered across the wallpaper. Shards of bone leaped into the air like broken piano keys. It was impossible to say just how long it went on. But when it turned its attention back to Danny, his father was gone forever. What remained of the face became a strange, shifting composite, many faces mixed imperfectly into one. Danny saw the woman in 217; the dogman; the hungry boything that had been in the concrete ring.
"Masks off, then," it whispered. "No more interruptions."
The mallet rose for the final time. A ticking sound filled Danny's ears.
"Anything else to say?" it inquired. "Are you sure you wouldn't like to run? A game of tag, perhaps? All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. After all, we're missing the party."
It grinned with broken-toothed greed.
And it came to him. What his father had forgotten.
Sudden triumph filled his face; the thing saw it and hesitated, puzzled.
"The boiler!" Danny screamed. "It hasn't been dumped since this morning! It's going up! It's going to explode!"
An expression of grotesque terror and dawning realization swept across the broken features of the thing in front of him. The mallet dropped from its fisted hands and bounced harmlessly on the black and blue rug.
"The boiler!" it cried. "Oh no! That can't be allowed! Certainly not! No! You goddamned little pup! Certainly not! Oh, oh, oh-"
"It is!" Danny cried back at it fiercely. He began to shufe and shake his fists at the ruined thing before him. "Any minute now! I know it! The boiler, Daddy forgot the boiler! And you forgot it, tool"
"No, oh no, it mustn't, it can't, you dirty little boy, I'll make you take your medicine, I'll make you take every drop, oh no, oh no-"
It suddenly turned tail and began to shamble away. For a moment its shadow bobbed on the wall, waxing and waning. It trailed cries behind itself like wornout party streamers.