How It All Goes Down
Inside 217
- It's eight or nine days later now. The phone is out, though the CB radio still works.
- There's more snow every day. Jack, Wendy, and Danny frolic and play in it, when the sun is shining. Jack is teaching Danny how to snowshoe.
- Today it's cloudy. By midday it's already snowing heavily. Wendy's knitting in her room. She's not too happy about all this snow.
- Jack is down in the cellar with the papers again. He finds some strange things, including "[a] bloody strip of sheeting" (25.5), "[a] dismembered teddy bear that seems to have been slashed to pieces" (25.5), and an odd poem written on the back of an old menu. He's sure that things will help him solve the mystery of the Overlook, if he could only find the missing pieces. He stays down there, looking for answers.
- Meanwhile, "Danny [is] standing outside 217, again" (25.6), with the key in his pocket.
- He's sooo curious. What he saw in the Presidential Suite turned out to be nothing, as did the scary fire extinguisher hose. Like Halloran told him, nothing here can really hurt him.
- On the way to 217 he'd stopped and taunted the fire hose some, telling it that it can't do anything to him.
- Danny puts the key in the lock, turns it, and opens the door to 217.
- It looks like a completely normal hotel room, a great place for a writer to write and look at the view of the snowy mountains.
- The bathroom door is open just a little. Danny can see himself in the mirror that's on the door. He peeks into the bathroom.
- Danny walks toward the bathtub; the shower curtain is pulled closed. He thinks maybe he'll "see something nice when he pull[s] the shower curtain back, something Daddy had forgotten or Mommy had lost, something that would make them both happy—" (25.45).
- Now he's pulling it back…
- In the tub is a woman who "had been dead for a long time" (25.47). She stares and grins at Danny, her body swollen, discolored, and naked.
- Danny screams, steps back, and wets his pants.
- The woman sits up in the tub.
- Danny runs, his eyes bulging, and his hair standing on end.
- The door to the outside is closed; it's unlocked but he doesn't know it. He's screaming and screaming and banging on the door. He hears the moving corpse get closer and closer…
- Then he remembers Dick Halloran telling him that none of the things he sees here are real.
- As he begins to calm down, "fish-smelling hands closed softly around his throat and he turn[s] […] to stare into that dead and purple face" (25.59).