Ella's Oneshots

[Ella]

Fandom: The Shining
Summary: When you encounter something you can’t comprehend to exist, there are two possibilities: you have lost your mind and are seeing things that aren’t truly there, or everything you previously believed was wrong.
Words: 762

He Knew How to Play Elevator

            The first time that Jack had felt like he was, as Danny would put it, ‘losing his marbles’, was that time with the two-way radio. He had never believed in ghosts, who they were interesting in a literary sense at most, and despite Al’s frequent insistence that really, he would enjoy it, Jack had never been tempted to enter the realm of found footage films. His wife was the one who loved ghost stories, who saved his scarce collection of Poe and Lovecraft from gathering dust. The only ghosts he believed in were the ones he had buried. His father was never one of them. His father was a ghost he had cut out of him. A ghost who was dead, in his grave, and not in him at all. A ghost who didn’t exist anymore.
            Then that ghost had started talking, screaming at him from the radio, working its way through him from the old clocksprings and tubes. He raised his hands over his ears and expected to fall to his knees, to roll up on the ground in a foetal position, but he found himself standing there, unmoving, with his eyes closed as the voice rang in his ears.
            “—kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too.”
            Jack raised the radio up, brought it down, and it smashed on the floor. His father’s voice was gone, but someone was still screaming, still hurting his ears with shrill crying.
            “—dead, you’re dead, you’re dead!”
            His wife entered the room, and all that was left was the shattered radio and a booming headache. He told her it was a dream. An unnerving dream, but a dream nonetheless. He told himself the same, because the alternative was unfathomable. It was not right that his father should come back, creeping through this hotel two thousand miles from the New England town where he had lived and died. It just couldn’t be. He didn’t believe in ghosts.
            He remembered the lectures in his college days, John Clarke’s endless talks about ‘the unknown’ in Gothic fiction. When you encounter something you can’t comprehend to exist, there are two possibilities: you have lost your mind and are seeing things that aren’t truly there, or everything you previously believed was wrong.
            “Both are equally terrifying,” Clarke used to add, and Jack used to agree.
            Now he realised it wasn’t all that simple. He was too stubborn to change his view of the world – he had seen his father be lowered in his grave, he had seen that empty bag of skin in the coffin. Perhaps he was insane, even though he doubted it. He knew his wife feared that he was losing it, to put it mildly. She was wary when they went to bed, and he felt her looking at his back as he attempted to catch his sleep on the too-soft mattress. Every time he took a shower, he could feel her eyes on the door, as if she was afraid of what he would transform into under the influence of the lukewarm water. As if he would return a monster. He could see it written on Wendy’s face, clearly, the words almost escaping her trembling lips on several occasions. But even though she constantly looked as if she might have cried her thoughts out loud, the silence always held.
            The third, new option (the option that had creeped into his mind ever since the incident with the radio, that had been on his mind when he saw Danny’s bruises, when he saw the dead woman, when he worked on his play, when he craved a drink or when he wished Wendy would just shut up or he might actually take that breadknife and simply) he judged much less simple, and much more terrifying. No physical ghost, and no imagination either. The third option was that his father hadn’t been in of the hotel at all. He hadn’t been in the radio. He hadn’t left his grave in their hometown, he had just never entered it.
            (Have a drink, Jacky my boy, and we’ll play the elevator game. Then I’ll go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it, of course you can. You must kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man—)
            The third option was that his father (miserable, bullying drunk that he had been) remained inside of him, buried after all. An animal caught in a snare. Well, perhaps that was insanity.