The Other Side: Tony's Story

—the shining— He knew that the ghosts we inherit, we carry for the rest of our lives.

(a/n) This was done for part of my final English project. To clear things up, I chose to explore the idea that Tony was actually Dany from the future. Please enjoy, and read and review, if you will.

(disc) The Shining is copyright to Stephen King, 1977, all rights reserved, et al, et cetera, e pluribus unum, ad infinitum.

"And you are?"

"Tony."

The woman behind the counter glared at him a little. "Your license doesn't say so, kid."

"Oh, yeah, my name's Daniel, but I go by Tony. My middle name. Daniel Anthony Torrance." The youth held out his hand, a hesitant smile wavering on his lips. "It's nice to meet you."

The woman, who couldn't have been more than ten years older than Tony himself, surveyed his hand with some distaste. "I don't like renting to tourists, much less kid tourists, Mister Tony," she pronounced, finally. Jerking a thumb over her shoulder at the rows of All-Terrain Vehicles behind her, the young woman continued, "These puppies are tough, but the mountains 're tougher. We lose at least two a year to idiots trying to go around the back roads, go up and gawk at the old hotel ruins. Not to mention the same idiots dyin' off themselves—'s why the road up there's closed off except for high summer. Now, young man, is it high summer?"

"No, ma'am." Out of habit, she shot him a look, but he had said it without a trace of sarcasm.

"No. It's not. It's the end of August, and the road's been closed for three weeks. So I'm going to tell you that I really, really do not want to rent you and your sixteen-year-old self an ATV." She handed Tony's drivers' license back to him. "This month isn't exactly tourist season around here. You got family close?"

The youth seemed to ponder for a long moment, his penetrating gray eyes drifting towards the window before he replied, "I suppose you could say so," and chuckled without mirth.

The woman glanced up at that, perhaps wondering how such a joyless sound could fall from the lips of one so young. "You know, you've been in here every day for the past three days. My coworkers turned you down every day—just because our policy's not to rent to a minor without legal consent of their parent or guardian. What in God's green earth do you need one of these for? And it had better not be that dang hotel, either. If I had a quarter for every numbnuts tourist that came up here to see it, I'd have a heckuva lotta quarters. Haunted? Don't make me laugh. I don't believe in ghosts."

Tony seemed to miss the tirade; his eyes had not yet lost the oddly distant cast they'd taken on when she'd asked about his family. The woman shivered. She felt strange—for a second, she'd suddenly gotten a feeling, a horrible naked feeling, as if a freezing draft had blown across the back of her neck on a hot day when she wasn't wearing a whole lot. As if the world's biggest goose had walked over her grave.

The boy's eyes suddenly snapped up to meet her own, and she jumped slightly. They were like searchlights, his eyes, like a pair of the brightest, bluest headlights

(but weren't they gray before? when he walked in?)

on the darkest road in the state of Colorado. The kind that made your head hurt even after you'd turned away from the glare. He smiled slightly, though, and that broke the sudden tension a little.

"I guess you could say I'm out here to find myself," he said.

The woman stared at him for a long moment. For reasons she couldn't quite articulate, she felt like she could trust this strange teen. It may have been something in his voice, in the way he carried himself, or perhaps it was just that look in his eyes. It was the look of someone carrying a lot of ghosts around with him.

She sighed. "Listen. I can't rent you an ATV without your guardian's consent, and since you haven't gotten it for us yet, I'd probably say you're not going to. But—"

—and here he inexplicably smiled, as if he somehow knew what she was going to say next—

"—but I've got a brother a few roads down with a garage where I store my own quad. Go there, and tell him Karen sent you. He'll give you the keys." She scrawled an address on a sheet of paper and handed it to Tony. He smiled again, beatifically, like the sun breaking through clouds.

"Thanks, Ms. LaRue," he said, and bounced out.

Karen LaRue watched him leave, and felt an inexplicable chill. She wondered, When did I tell him my name?

Daniel Anthony Torrance had not always been called Tony. Not many people knew this. He used to be called "Danny," back when he was younger—in fact, he remembered with a sudden pang of loss, his father used to call him "Doc." His friend Dick Hallorann called him that, too, for a time. He hadn't in years, though. Dick was a perceptive man, even without taking his shining into account.

Tony had been Danny until six days after his thirteenth birthday, when he suffered two petit mal seizures and slipped into a coma for three days. He woke up in the hospital to Dick's face hovering a foot from his own. It's about time, he'd said. I heard you screaming all the way up in Maine. You were shining like a dang Vegas sign. What happened?

I tried to see Tony, Danny whispered. I tried to talk to him.

And?

I couldn't. The road ahead was dark. I couldn't see anything. Even shining, I couldn't see. And then I turned around. I saw...

...Someone?

Yeah.

Who?

Me. When I was three. The first time...the first time Tony ever talked to me. It was like...

As if you were done being Danny, Dick said, and it was time for you to be Tony.

Danny had nodded. Yeah. Exactly.

He spoke to his younger self often in the following years, reliving many events in his life, momentous and trivial alike, that involved for his younger self the awakening of his latent psychic abilities—lost items, overheard thoughts, the brief period when his parents had tried for another baby... Sometimes Tony initiated the contact, and sometimes Danny did, but he always made sure to protect Danny from trying too much or too hard with his power—for, as Tony was gradually coming to understand, he was frighteningly, frighteningly gifted. Still, the time passed steadily.

Tony was beginning to worry, though. At this point, Danny was fast approaching—no, Tony had to admit, was already mired in a very bad time. The Overlook is coming, Tony knew. The Overlook is coming, and it this time around, it might get him. Me. He often wondered what would happen if he did something wrong on his end. What if he failed to protect Danny? Would time alter itself to account for his demise? Or would history divide and make up the difference? Maybe he would slowly go insane, torn apart as the two possibilities of his past warred with each other inside his own head. These weren't the kind of thoughts any teen wanted to have on the brightest of days, much less the darkest and coldest of nights.

Tony gunned the ATV over a rough patch in the road. He felt a little bad for manipulating Ms. Karen LaRue like that, but he was running out of options and time. Danny was five weeks into his stay the last time Tony checked, and it was getting harder and harder to check. He had a feeling that maybe he was somehow being blocked or delayed by the Overlook itself. Whatever mortally wounded and expiring, but still breathing element of the hotel was left was keeping Tony from making contact with Danny, and it was both infuriating and terrifying him.

He had tried to ask Dick about it. Well, kid, I don't really know, Dick had said. I'm not as gifted as you, and I ain't never heard of something like this. But if you're really asking me, it sounds like you might hafta get closer.

Closer?

Dick had thrown his hands into the air. I'm old! he'd cried in mock despair. Let me be! Figure it out for yourself!

Tony hated what his instincts were telling him. But he had no other ideas.

He had to go to the Overlook.

And here he was, on an ATV he'd psycho-conned out of a lonely young woman, ready to stand on the blackest nexus of darkshine he'd ever encountered in order to make contact with a younger version of himself and do...what? What more could he do?

He felt a lurch beneath him. The ATV was stalling. "Shoot," he hissed. "Shoot." He stopped, climbed off and examined it. Nothing seemed wrong, but then, he wasn't a mechanic. "Freaking thing's all shot to shit," he muttered, with a hysterical giggle for punctuation. "Shot to shit" was once a famous expression of his father's.

With a growing sense of secret dread, he walked the rest of the way to the hotel ruins.

It was somehow more nightmarish and twisted in death. Charred bricks formed the skeleton of a foundation. The gates were nothing more than black, warped steel branches, bent out towards him from the force of the explosion that had taken the Overlook's "life."

Gravel crunched under his sneakers like thin bone fragments. The wind rustled like harsh, wounded breathing through the trees. After ten years, the hedges had grown wild all over the lawn, completely obscuring the roque court—

(nice game, isn't it, makes you think of)

(GET OUT OF MY HEAD)

Tony blinked. The place really wasn't dead all the way. It would probably be better not to get too close. Then again, it would have been even better still to stay far, far away. I shouldn't have come, he thought despairingly.

He walked forward. He saw things he thought he'd never have to see again. There was the scale model playhouse of the Overlook, eerily identical down to the last charred brick. There was the play tunnel—

(come play with us)

the front door—

(this inhuman place makes human monsters)

the site of the elevator shaft—

(imagine standing there and looking up to see a small square growing larger and larger and larger and)

the blackened and buckled ballroom floor—

(and the red death held sway over all)

Tony wiped his mouth unconsciously. I really shouldn't have come. The dust and ashes rustled around his feet. He stopped and stood in the rubble-strewn remnants of the floor of a room, some room; he didn't know which it was or whether it was terribly important. He couldn't have known about the fragments of the CB radio mixed with the stone and drywall and wood of the floors above.

He closed his eyes, and spoke defiantly aloud, "There was never anything in the dark that wasn't there when the lights went on."

And how the lights went on.

Tony shone like a beacon, like a lighthouse, like a nova. A rush of sound, color, cold and heat, and a feeling like a file being drawn across his teeth blasted across his consciousness as he pulled his mind back in time. Black filmy tentacles wrapped themselves around his legs—physically or mentally, he couldn't tell which—trying to hold him back. He snarled an uncharacteristically vulgar epithet concerning the Overlook's parentage, and blasted them off with his mind, clawing closer to Danny.

—he's having a nightmare, he's asleep or maybe he tried to call but I couldn't hear because it's blocking me, they're blocking me, but if he's asleep I might be able to tell him something—

(REDRUM)

—what day is it, what day what day what day, Danny, help me out help me—

(MURDER)

He could hear part of what Danny was hearing—

(Now I've got you, you—)

—it was the old nightmare—

(—I'll teach you!)

Tony saw him break through the black that had closed in on all sides, far above him, falling as he was also falling—

—the grasping groping blackness continued to snatch at him no matter how many times he banished it; it just kept coming back—

(I can't come anymore, Danny...!) he shouted with his mind. (He won't let me near you! None of them will let me near you. Get Dick! Get Dick!) Above him, he could hear, as if with a strange rippling-water effect, his younger self shout to Dick Hallorann, while around them both, "redrum" and "murder" whirled and reflected and blared.

And he continued to fall.

(come play with us)

—No, no, get off, get away, get out of me, get out of my head, you sh—

(it's down in the basement somewhere)

—wasps buzzing in his ears, a low murderous sound—

(you will remember what your father forgot)

—the buzzing flickered, lightened to the buzz of conversation at a party—

(Unmask! Unmask!)

—turned to the static of a radio between channels—

(this inhuman place)

—turned into a voice.

"Because each man kills the thing he loves, Danny. Because they'll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. I know you can do it,"

Who is this?

"of course you can. You must kill them. You have to kill them, Danny. Because a real genius must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves—"

It was not his father, but it was like his father, like a horrible other-father voice coming at him from nowhere and everywhere. Tony wasn't falling anymore. He was standing in front of the Overlook's boiler, and someone was behind him.

"—ch man kills the thing he loves, Danny, each man kills the thing he loves, each man kills the thing he loves—"

The not-Jack voice continued, was stuck on that one phrase, repeated it over and over and over, and the more he said it, the more the voice sounded like the voice of Jack Torrance. Tony put his hands over his ears but didn't turn around. "Shut up," he hissed through clenched teeth. "Shut up, shut up—"

"—each man kills—"

"Shut up, you're not him!" Tony screamed, whirling to face the figure behind him.

It was not his father.

"Your father couldn't be here today," said the figure of Mark Anthony Torrance, "so I filled in. You might not be able to tell the difference, son. We're the same kind of man, my Jacky and me."

"You're...my grandfather," Tony said, not phrasing it like a question. He looked the man over, feeling the goosebumps rise on his arms. Much of his face was indistinct, being that he stood in the shadows. The one thing that stood out was the item in his hands. It was a roque mallet.

Mark Torrance raised it a little, letting the dim red glow from the boiler play across the mallet's deadly double-sided head. "Go on," he said. "Take it."

"Why?"

"Don't you hate me?" he asked, grinning malevolently. "I drove your dear daddy Jacky to do the things he did. I did that. Me. You hate me for that, don't you?"

Tony didn't answer.

"Take it. Avenge your dear daddy. You don't want him cooped up in this scary hotel for eternity, do you? Exorcize his ghosts, Danny boy. Strike me down. Make me take my medicine."

Tony's hand tentatively crept towards the mallet, then hesitated, wavered. "...No," he said softly, then he repeated himself with more assertion. "No. I won't."

"Why not?" Now Mark's face clouded over, and his words began to slur themselves together a little. Tony could smell it on his breath—the yeasty, poisonous stench of liquor. "Why not, you blazin' pup? Be a man, why don't you. Say you're sorry for what you did to your father—"

"I am," Tony snapped, his voice and hands shaking. "I won't make the mistake my father did; I won't be like you—"

"The apple never rots far from the tree, Danny. I know you're lying. Tell your father—"

"You!" Tony was suddenly screaming. "Are not! My! FATHER!"

Mark Torrance threw his head back and laughed—a shrieking hysterical insane laugh that echoed from the walls and ceiling and black floors. Tony felt like he'd almost rather have a mad chorus of dark bleeding voices from the hotel join in, so he'd be certain of the falseness of this place. But only one man's voice bounced from all directions, mocking him in obscene joy, and that was what made him waver and doubt himself.

"But you are!" his grandfather shrieked, pointing the roque mallet at him as if in malediction, and that echoed, too: you...are..are you..but are...you are but...you but are...you...are, you—

"No," Tony denied. "No, you're insane—"

"I know what you did to your mother."

A ringing silence fell.

"No," Tony whispered.

"I know what you did," Mark Torrance said, no trace of a smile on his half-lit face.

Tony shook his head wildly. "No, you're wrong, it was an accident—"

"Nothing is ever done by accident, whelp! Two years ago—"

"—I didn't know—"

"—your darling milksop mommy heard you screaming one night—"

"—I didn't mean to—"

"—having a bad dream, so she went up to comfort you, little whining—"

"—you don't know anything, you—"

"—and you woke up and hit her with your wondrous shine—"

"—shut up, shut up, shut up, you don't know—"

"—was always so frail, wasn't she, so I guess that grade four cerebral aneurysm wasn't entirely your fault—"

"—stop it, stop it—"

"—maybe someday she'll regain use of the left side of her body, eh? Eh, boy? Maybe some—"

"SHUT UP!" Tony was only aware of the need to force him to shut his mouth, to keep him quiet so he wouldn't have to hear his terrible secret thrown at him over and over again. He snatched the roque mallet and struck Mark Torrance in the jaw, screaming, "You're wrong! I am not like him!"

The man fell, his face partially caved in from the force of Tony's blow, and his face changed—

—to that of Jack Torrance.

Tony's knees buckled. "Oh, oh god, no," he gasped. He crawled to his father's side, half-wishing he'd speak to him, say something, anything—but he lay still. Cold. Unmoving. His eyes gazed glassily up at Tony, and in them, Tony could see himself.

He looked so much like his father. Right down to the bloodstained mallet he held in his right hand.

(this inhuman place makes human monsters)

Voices wailed out of the walls in an indistinct babble. A series of images flashed across Tony's vision—

(a town in ruin, flaming buildings and buckled pavement)

(a country, a continent, a world decimated by an unstoppable disease)

(a black tower in a field of roses, toppling as its final supports snap and all the universes suck in on themselves and explode into the void)

(a single star, flickering, flickering)

(and the red death held sway over all)

"No," Tony whispered, clutching his head. "No."

(the brightest light casts the darkest shadow)

He was dimming, flickering, guttering like a candle before the dark wind of secret self-hate.

(only the big stars go out with a bang, kids, and nothing'll escape the black hole, not light, not hope, not nothing, not nohow)

He was so worried about losing then that he had neglected to ask himself what would happen if he lost now.

(patricide)

Tony had given up.

(you killed your father)

He remembered his father. He remembered a lot of things. He remembered one night, after Jack had gone on one of his drinking binges, silently glancing into his father's mind the way a child would peek around a door, and catching a dark and terrible thought: SUICIDE. He remembered wanting to never know what that word meant. He remembered wondering what such a thought could have to do with love, wondering how someone could love others so much and hate himself so much more.

Now he knew.

The Overlook had him. Black grabbing fingery chains lovingly wrapped themselves around his legs and arms, holding him down, promising oblivion. Promising peaceful silence.

He remembered—

"They promise," he had said to his father, "but they lie."

(patricide)

Tony looked up. "I didn't kill my father," he said.

(patricide, young cur, it was your fault for being so valuable, he loved you and you killed him and you know it)

"I didn't kill my father because he's still alive."

The Overlook roared but could not answer.

"He's still alive inside me. You said it yourself. He loved me and he died because of you, but you couldn't get him at the end because he loved me—"

(a memory of a hand dropping a mallet to the floor, a farewell, and the last tears his face would ever shed)

"—and you can't have him!"

And when Tony's self-doubt fled and he stood up and shined—

The darkness shattered like glass.

Karen LaRue heaved the abandoned ATV into the bed of her pickup. Dusk was falling and the kid wasn't back yet.

"Numbnuts tourists," she growled.

She drove up to the hotel (dang hotel), and walked up. Tony was passed out in the foundation, in a pool of his own vomit, covered in sweat and bleeding from a gash on the head where he'd fallen on the sharp debris.

Karen sighed noisily, and gently lifted him, being careful not to bump his head. She was shocked at how light the kid was. He came to in the truck on the bumpy road.

"What," Karen asked when he made eye contact with her, "did I say about that dang hotel?" He didn't answer. Karen sighed again. "I'm taking you to the police station. You're calling your guardians and explaining where you were and what you were doing." He still didn't answer. Karen drove into the parking lot of the police station and killed the engine, but didn't get out. "I got a little suspicious and did some digging in the library newspapers right after you left, Tony." She waited for him to answer, but he remained silent.

"You were there when the Overlook blew," she said. "The son of Jack Torrance, the caretaker...right?"

Tony, hunched up with his feet on the seat beneath him, nodded once, an oddly childlike gesture. Karen shook her head. "It must have been hard," she said softly. "You're brave, to go up there, you know. To confront...the ghosts."

Tony glanced up. "I thought you didn't believe in ghosts," he said.

Karen shrugged. "In a manner of speaking. I don't believe in spooks, or spirits, or haunted places, or any of that; that's just superstition and smoke. I think that we all carry our own ghosts with us." She glanced sideways at Tony. "When you walked in, I thought you looked like someone carrying quite a few."

Tony smiled a little. "It runs in the family."

fin