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Later, looking back — in those rare moments when she was conscious enough of herself and of back to look back — Lydia Grady thought maybe she was being punished for being dumb. Dumb enough, at least, to make that first, enormous mistake: loving the hotel at first sight. Going gladly into its soft mouth. By the time she felt the teeth, it was too late.
Annie hadn’t even wanted to get out of the Rambler when they first arrived, because she was five and a big baby about heights. She had cried the whole way up the mountain. As her mother fussed, Lydia sprang to her feet to follow her daddy across the lawn, skipping to keep pace. A chill breeze was playing in her hair and raising goosebumps on her arms, and the hotel soared up from the peak like a great big beautiful castle in a fairytale, just waiting to be woken up. When Daddy swept her off her feet and spun her in the air, crowing “Look at this place, Liddy! They’re gonna pay us to move in here! What a trick —“
She had wanted to stay at the Overlook for the rest of her life.
It was August 1970, and no guests had come in almost five years. The hotel had been inhabited, on and off, but not properly lived in. Something slept there, yes. It was ready to love Liddy back.
For as long as the weather held, the girls spent as much time as they could outside. In fact, they were mostly outside even after the morning frosts settled in to stay, and could not always be coaxed into their coats; as Mrs. Grady remarked, what could you do when you had two little girls living in an old run-down hotel filled with the junk left over from God-only-knows what kind of enterprise? The unpleasant little manager had said it had been refurbished, but Judith Grady was a local, and she remembered the talk.
She would have to do something about how wild the girls were getting before they went back to school — but what was the harm in letting them play? Up here, there were no judgmental neighbors to worry about.
Her husband only laughed at this. He was in high spirits.
Almost every morning, Lydia hiked down the wide front stairs (sometimes pausing to stand with her hands on her hips and admire the view of the landscape, like an Alpine tourist), past the pool, and into what she thought of as the Enchanted Woods. It didn’t bother her that the trees were young and slim, poking up from cool brown cones of heat-sterilized mulch. The aspens whispered pleasantly to her, and the pines wrapped her in ribbons of shadow. When she sat under those trees, they grew taller, greener, more welcoming.
And the playground! Lydia adored the swings, which seemed eager to toss her higher and higher, and the zoo-ish parade of the hedge animals, and most of all she loved the playhouse that was shaped like a miniature Overlook. It seemed like a shame to leave the little hotel empty, so one day in September, she packed her rag dolls in an old suitcase and road-tripped them down the lawn to their new home. The playhouse was hollow, with no furnishings or interior walls. She confined herself to dramas playing out on the ground floor.
The only problem came when she ran out of ideas. Playing dolls was easier with two people, but Annie hated the playground. She still trailed after Liddy, making faces like a dog being dragged over hot asphalt, because she hated being alone even more. But she was scared of the big, empty gray sheet of the sky, and the way the lawn sloped off to the chain-link fence, which might be the only thing keeping them from sliding away.
Lydia knew all this because Annie whined about it nonstop. For her part, she had developed ambitions of using the playhouse as a proper clubhouse, with a secret handshake to get in, so she pointed out reasonably that if they were inside it, they wouldn’t have to look at the sky or anything.
This argument did not work. Under the matching stares of Annie and of Annie’s teddy bear, Lydia climbed in by herself and shut the hinged box. The inside of the house was white, but plywood peeked out at her from all the corners that the paint hadn’t reached. She had to bend her head against the low ceiling, and her neck would start to ache soon.
“Liddy! Come out!”
Lydia wrapped her arms around her knees.
There came a banging on the walls and a shaking of the foundations, as if the miniature hotel was being buffeted by a miniature storm. Annie was wailing, high and wordless. Lydia waited.
The first snow of 1970 blew down the coast from Alaska in the form of a winter cyclone. It snagged on the Rockies and hung around like an unwelcome guest, darkening the windows, beating at the walls, and keening through the upper hallways. Back in town, the snowfall was measured at two feet; from the caretaker’s apartment, it simply looked as if the rest of the world had vanished.
Another man might have been cowed by this extravagant display of power. Lydia’s daddy put on his coat and went out on his rounds – leaving the girls and their mother in the apartment, where they had covered most of the windows with extra blankets to keep the heat in – and came back whistling as he rubbed his reddened hands together. He made a pot of coffee, then hot chocolate for the girls.
“That old boiler,” said his wife, shaking her head. “If they want to keep guests here until September, they’ll need to have someone come up next year and get it working properly.”
“It’s good enough for me,” he said.
“Well, they didn’t fix the place up for you, sweetheart.”
She didn’t say it meanly, but Lydia thought her daddy looked sad. She agreed with him about the boiler, anyway. The apartment was like a little model house, comfortably enclosed inside the bigger building.
Where would they go when the snow melted?
It was the first time the question had occurred to her.
More storms came and went. Lydia helped to make a cake for Annie’s sixth birthday, stirring oil and applesauce into the dry ingredients (most of the eggs had gone off). She learned how to work the kerosene heater – by observation, because her mother said it was old-fashioned and dangerous and wouldn’t let her touch it. When they got too stir-crazy, the girls were swaddled in snow pants and scarves and released into the moonscape outside.
The young pine trees were neat and geometric under their smooth white coats. The pool was a pristine rectangle of unbroken snow inside the safety fence. Once, Lydia fell asleep in one of the armchairs in the sitting room, and woke, drenched in sweat, from a nightmare where she stumbled over an invisible line and was lost, plunging through a crust of snow into the ice-cold slush pooled in the tarp, thrashing with the taste of dead leaves in her mouth.
The playground was less interesting now, with the swings mired in snow, but Liddy borrowed her daddy’s snow shovel to dig out the playhouse. It was hard work, harder than she expected. The shovel was too large for her. The snow was packed densely against the wooden walls. She cleared a narrow trench all the way around, then discovered that the loose snow she’d shoveled out was still close enough to block the doors. Even after she moved it again, the playhouse wouldn’t budge.
At last she flung herself down on her belly and shoved with the whole bow of her spine, hot and irritated under her winter clothes and glad of the cold on her bare face. The shell shifted, then cracked like an egg.
Lydia lay on her front. She was winded and she had to pee. She looked at her prize in the blue and white winter light, and at first she could not make sense of what she saw.
Snowmelt must have filtered in through the seams of the miniature hotel, then frozen. An inch of cloudy, uneven ice, broken into pieces now, covered the floor. Sticking out of it were funny hunched trash-shapes, all wet – she squinted and reached out towards them, slowly.
They were rag dolls. Here was the Holly Hobby she’d given up as lost. Here was the grinning skew-eyed boy doll in the striped shirt, his yarn locks heavy and dark with water.
Lydia wriggled backwards on her elbows and went back inside.
“I don’t see why not,” her daddy said, when Annie asked about looking around the hotel.
Annie had been talking less and less. Lydia set down her dolls, uneasy. Her sister was standing by the apartment door, frowning, still looking to her mother for permission.
“Judy?” her daddy said — humoring his serious little girl.
“Oh… why not,” Lydia’s mother echoed, looking up at last from her paperback. “There’s no one here, it’s not as if it’s really…”
She shook her head as if to clear it, then nodded, more firmly. Permission had been granted – oh, and Lydia, would you go and keep your sister out of trouble?
The playground had lost most of its appeal. Lydia agreed, and it became a new routine: day after day she tramped along after her sister, who cut a small, top-heavy figure in her puffer jacket and appliquéd skirt. Annie didn’t seem to enjoy her search, but she was as grimly determined as a polar explorer.
So, when Lydia couldn’t find her, she assumed at first that the other girl had gotten tired of waiting and gone out into the high wilderness of the hotel on her own. Annie’s jacket was gone, but her blue snow pants were folded on the armchair by the door. Lydia’s daddy had gone to check the boiler, and her mother was reading in her room again. She paused. Better not to call attention to her dereliction of duty. She pulled her jacket on as she snuck out the door.
Annie wasn’t in the lobby, or the dining room, or the Colorado Lounge. She wasn’t in the first or second or – Lydia puffed back down the stairs – third floor hallway, and all of the rooms were locked, they had checked. And only Daddy was allowed in the basement, and Annie was scared of the spiders down there anyway.
Lydia was in the living room, pulling on her snow pants to check outside, when the penny dropped. If Annie was outside, and her winter clothes were here – for a moment she could only picture the sodden rag dolls, and she half-fell back out into the hall, wiggling her foot through the second leg in a blind panic. Her boots scuffed over the blue carpet; the hotel was so quiet, and she was an absurd cacophony jogging down the hallway, polyester wisking against polyester.
She stumbled down the wide front stairs. The sky was a flat gray, and the air was still and empty. The snow unrolled pristinely before her, marked by only one set of tracks.
It was a familiar route. Her heart jumped into her throat as she came up to the safety fence, but the tracks continued on past the pool. She wisked between the trees, which hulked shapelessly above her. Down to the swings – her eyes were drawn to the playhouse. The tracks went past it without turning or stopping.
She started to go on. She stopped.
At first she couldn’t say why, only that something was wrong. She stood holding her breath, waiting for her brain to catch up with her senses.
Without the noise of her breathing and her movement, she could hear – she swung back to the playhouse. It was shaking. A scratching, scrabbling sound –
Annie – her little sister was in there, stuck, with the ice and the wet, dead dolls. Lydia threw herself across the untouched snow and pulled. It was stuck, of course, but the moment she touched the playhouse, a throaty scream erupted from inside. It was low and harsh, a ripped-out sound, and Lydia flinched. “Annie,” she was saying, “Annie, Annie, just wait –”
She braced herself against the freezing wood and pulled as hard as she could on the other half of the playhouse. It creaked angrily. Her feet slid towards it. She kicked out in fury.
As her foot connected, the hinge burst open and she fell backwards into the snow. A great red thing came boiling out, snarling and snapping at her with long yellow teeth. It flashed through the air and landed on her chest, heavily, with all four paws – the breath went out of her, and she sucked in air pervaded with the rank, animal smell of fox. Its muzzle swayed so close to her that she could see the individual wet spikes of hair around the red mouth.
Then it was gone, over her head and out of sight.
Lydia fought her way to her feet, imagining the fox bunching its muscles to pounce. When she turned, it was sitting calmly, watching her from the other side of the swings.
“Go away,” she shouted. She had been too startled to cry; now her voice cracked. It wasn’t fair. It shouldn’t be allowed. She had liked the playhouse so much, and she still had to find Annie. She grabbed a piece of ice and threw it at the fox. It danced back a few steps, then sat down again.
Fine. Fine. She swung around to follow the tracks again. The fox watched her go, then padded back to the playhouse to finish its meal.
At the entrance of the closest concrete cylinder, there was an unruly confusion of shoe prints and drag marks. Some of the snow was pushed aside. Lydia ducked to look into the dark mouth of the tunnel. “Annie?” she whispered.
Nothing. And (she straightened, breathing hard) the tracks came away again and went beneath the paws of one of the two lion topiaries. Her lungs burned with the effort of wading through the snow, but she made herself lift her feet again and again.
Then she saw a flicker of pink between the lion’s paws, and her exhaustion was overtaken by urgency. She tumbled across the gap on all fours, plunging her hands into the snow up to the elbows.
Annie was curled against the lion’s flank. Her eyes opened narrowly as Lydia came crashing around the outermost branches of the topiary, and Lydia grabbed the shoulders of her puffer jacket – not to shake her, just to feel her moving under her hands. Annie was shivering and her skirt was wet through, but it was surprisingly warm here, sheltered from the wind. It was as if the lion were alive, with warm fur that rose and fell as it breathed. Lydia wrapped her arms around Annie, who mumbled something into her neck and sighed.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Why did you come out here? You don’t like it! Annie?”
“Sleepy,” Annie said, letting the sounds run together like Daddy did when he drank.
“Annie!” Lydia shook her a little, after all. Annie batted clumsily at her hands. “You’re not supposed to sleep. We have to go home.”
Annie pulled her knees up towards her chest, curling into Lydia’s lap. “Cold out there.”
This was true. Lydia bit her lip, thinking ferociously, as she rubbed Annie’s fingers in between her palms. Could it be better to try and warm her up here, out of the wind?
“I saw a boy,” Annie was saying. “He was happy but he looked sick. He wasn’t standing up. He said he fell off a horse.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“He said he hurt his head. But his daddy built the hotel. So he didn’t have to go away.”
“Shh-hhh-hhh,” Lydia said, and realized that her teeth were chattering, even though she didn’t feel cold. When she breathed out, she saw a cloud. It was hard to think. The lion felt so warm, but –
But it was a lie. It wanted to trick her, and she couldn’t trust it. She grunted as she pulled Annie to her feet, dragging her sideways. Glaring at the lion, she started to stagger back towards the hotel, supporting most of Annie’s weight as she tripped over numb feet. “I want to stay,” Annie whined, banging the sides of her fists into Liddy’s ribcage. She hardly felt it. She just had to get back to the hotel. They just had to get back inside, and it would be okay.
The tips of Lydia’s ears stung painfully in the warm air of the lobby. She kicked off her boots and her snow pants, shedding melting snow all over the beautiful carpet. She was mostly carrying Annie now. She wasn’t much bigger herself, so she had to arch her back to stay upright, and the smaller girl’s feet bumped against the floor.
The door to the apartment was ajar, like she’d left it. She heaved Annie onto the sofa and covered her with a blanket, then crossed the room to bang on the bedroom door. Her mother was reading in her room. She needed help.
There was no answer. She tried the knob. It was locked from the inside. Lydia felt tears welling up in her eyes again, from frustration and terror. Annie shifted, sighing, and Lydia ran back to her to prop her upright. “Don’t go to sleep,” she snapped. “I’m – I’ll be right back. Don’t go to sleep. Okay?”
She shut the door behind her, to keep the cold air out. She padded down to the lobby in her thick wool socks, then paused at the stairs down to the basement. If she was honest with herself, she was scared of the spiders down there too. And she might step on a nail, and get tetanus, and have to get her foot cut off. “Daddy?” she called down the stairs, too quietly. Then, louder: “Daddy?”
No answer. Her face crumpled with anger. She felt certain that he ought to be in earshot, that the walls were somehow twisting the sound so it didn’t reach him. She breathed out hard through her nose and started down the stairs.
The basement was dark, lit by single bulbs instead of the ornate fixtures upstairs. Boxes of paper were mounded in the corners like snowdrifts. It was warmer, and she felt wet and sticky with sweat under her warm clothes.
The furnace loomed up to the ceiling. It was monstrously huge. At once, she thought of how easily it could swallow her up – with plenty of room to spare. The only door was behind it. There was enough space around it that she could edge along the wall, but not as much space as she would have liked; she was terrified of touching it, thinking it would be happy to burn her. It might be able to burn her from feet away.
In the boiler room she found him. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, staring at the boiler where it sat smugly among the spidering pipes.
“Daddy!” she cried, and ran to him and hugged him; he started, and turned, and looked at her with a perplexed smile, as if she had woken him up from a dream.
“What are you doing down here, baby?”
Liddy opened her mouth to answer him and began to sob helplessly, without words. He knelt down to rub her shoulders. He was damp with sweat. She sucked in another breath, but that was all she could manage.
“Shush-a-shush,” her daddy said. “It’s okay, Liddy-baby.”
She sniffled and tried to compose herself.
Then she saw over his shoulder: a small, shapeless figure on the rough concrete floor. She broke from his arms to pick it up. Annie’s teddy bear was limp in her hands. It looked so sad that she started to sob again, harder.
“Oh, honey,” said her daddy. “He doesn’t look like he’s feeling well, huh?”
He took the bear from her hands. He gripped the fabric in his big, rough fingers, tore a hole in the bear’s back, and pushed his hand inside. Liddy stared.
“Look,” he said, holding up the bear and wiggling his fingers. Its head flopped forwards. “He’s alive again. Do you understand, Liddy?”
She backed away – tripped over a box – scrambled to her feet and ran for the stairs. Her daddy chuckled behind her.
Annie was still cold, but she stirred when Lydia shook her awake. Lydia tried to put everything else in a box, to worry about later. What was she going to do?
She took off Annie’s wet clothes. She wrapped her in another blanket, then reconsidered, lifted up both the blankets, and got under them with her. She had no idea if any of this was working. She could be doing exactly the wrong thing.
If only the apartment were warmer.
Lydia got out from under the blanket. She got the box of matches down from the mantel, and pulled the kerosene heater out away from the wall. She opened the little metal door and groped around for the knob to lift the grate out of the way. She lit a match. She held the match to the soaked wick, snatching her hand out of the way before it could burn her – dropping the knob in the process, so that it fell with a clang.
She sat, thinking.
What an awful place this was. How stupid and gullible she had been.
Annie was waking up. Her parents might come back – her daddy might act like himself again, petting her hair and making them hot chocolate. But she couldn’t let herself relax.
In fact, her mother was the first to appear, out of the bedroom where she had fallen asleep. Annie only seemed to remember parts of their ordeal, and no one brought it up at dinner, except that Lydia was scolded for lighting the kerosene heater. She didn’t bother to argue. Her snow pants were folded neatly on her bed, and in the pocket were three waterproof matches.