after The Shining
I know what it looked like, but seriously, would we have left the door wide open like that? Not even with the hotel as empty as we thought it was would we have. Without even thinking we would have closed it, and locked it, too, because the doors of rooms are made for just such things, even in the emptiness of an empty hotel.
Truly we were just playing, frolicking you might even say, not unlike little kids (we had found the bear suit hanging in the closet), when we saw her coming up the stairs, so ashen and wild-eyed, with that carving knife curved in her hand. We stiffened and stared at her staring stiffly at us there in the shadowed silence, and then, as if she were the one who had earned the right to tremble, she was the one who ran away.
We hear now that we’re the scary ones, scarier than the boy’s talking finger, scarier than the backward spelling, scarier than the twin sisters in dresses of cornflower blue, scarier than the conniving old woman rotting naked in the bathtub, scarier than even the tide of blood that pulsed from the elevator. Us! And that’s simply not possible. It’s just not. Nor is it fair. We brandished no axes. We demolished no doors. We chased no children through a midnight maze of foggy snow. No, we were guilty of nothing but an innocent cavorting in what we thought was an empty hotel, after having found a lonely bear suit waiting for us in the lonely closet of a lonely room buried in winter.
