How It All Goes Down
217 Revisited
- Jack takes the elevator to the second floor. At Wendy's insistence, they hadn't been using it.
- As he steps out onto the second floor, he decides he isn't afraid of anything in the hotel. He thinks they have an understanding.
- The door to 217 is open a little, and the key is still in the lock. He starts getting angry that Danny disobeyed him by taking the key and going where he isn't supposed to go. He'll talk to Danny about it later. Some dads would be much more severe than he plans to be.
- Pocketing the key, Jack goes into the room.
- He's pretty sure this is the room where the lawyer's wife killed herself in the tub after her young lover ran off on her.
- He goes into the bathroom and turns on the light. The shower curtain is closed tightly around the tub.
- Feeling a sudden intense chill, he's no longer angry at Danny.
- He pulls open the shower curtain. Nothing. The tub is dry and recently cleaned.
- He's feels both "relief and irritation" (30.11). Thinking that Danny was "either hallucinating or outright lying" (30.12), Jack gets mad again.
- Standing back, Jack decides that there's nothing funny going on in here. Then he begins to catch a whiff of some lady's soap.
- No, no, it doesn't matter. He is isn't going to worry about 217 on top of everything else, even if he does smell lady's soap.
- As he closes the door to 217, he hears a clanking noise. He starts in panic, then gets it together. He reopens the door, and walks to the bathroom. The shower curtain is closed again. The noise he'd heard was the shower curtain opening.
- He feels like he felt when he was on the playground. He knows there's something behind the shower curtain – maybe the dead woman.
- Jack tells himself to open the curtain, but he instead leaves 217, shutting the door behind him.
- He thinks he hears footsteps behind the door.
- Afraid he's going insane, he prays for sanity.
- He thinks he hears the doorknob of 217 turning, and knows if he looks at it and sees it moving, he will go insane. So, he keeps his eyes shut.
- After some time, he opens his eyes and gets moving.
- On the way down the hall he thinks that the nozzle on the fire extinguisher has changed positions since he passed it before.
- He decides he didn't see it.
- The elevator is out of the question, because it looks "too much like an open mouth" (30.46).
- Jack goes up the stairs.