Danny's bathroom trance

One evening in late October, after a day of reading lessons and play, Danny Torrance locked himself in the bathroom of the family's quarters at the Overlook Hotel. The water ran full force in the basin, a tube of Crest with the cap off lay beside it, and Danny sat on the rim of the bathtub, his toothbrush clasped limply in his left hand, a thin foam of toothpaste around his mouth. He was staring, trancelike, into the mirror on the front of the medicine cabinet above the washbasin. The expression on his face was one of drugged horror. When his mother, Wendy Torrance, knocked and received no answer, and his father, Jack Torrance, broke the lock, they found Danny in this catatonic state, making guttural sounds and uttering fragmented, ominous words: "Roque!" and "Redrum." Jack shook him hard, and Danny's eyes suddenly cleared, but the event left the family deeply shaken and marked a turning point in Danny's experience of the hotel's supernatural influence.

The Trance and Its Manifestations

Danny had been brushing his teeth and thinking hard about his reading when he saw Tony, his "invisible playmate," deep in the mirror. Tony said he had to show him something again. Danny felt himself go through the mirror, entering a vision. In this trance, he spoke in a voice that was not his own, saying "Roque!" and "Stroke. The roque mallet… has two sides." The most significant utterance was the word "Redrum," which would later be revealed to be "Murder" spelled backward. The trance was so deep that Danny did not respond to his parents' calls or to Jack's physical shaking until Jack screamed at him, causing Danny to cry out in shock and collapse into tears. This episode was not an isolated incident; it was part of a pattern of increasingly disturbing visions that Danny had been experiencing since the family moved to the Overlook.

The Aftermath and Family Tensions

The immediate aftermath of the trance exposed the deep fractures within the Torrance family. Wendy, who had been asleep, was terrified and immediately suspected Jack had harmed Danny, a suspicion rooted in Jack's history of breaking Danny's arm two years earlier. Jack, in turn, was horrified by his own reaction—he had screamed at his son for stuttering, a behavior that reminded him of his own violent temper and his past cruelty to George Hatfield, a student he had mocked for his stutter. The event also revealed Danny's psychic abilities more clearly to his parents. Danny explained that Tony had told him to lock the door and that he had seen things in the mirror. When Jack asked Danny what "redrum" meant, Danny could only say he didn't know. Later that night, Danny asked his father, "You'd never hurt Mommy, would you, Daddy?" and "Or me?" Jack assured him he would not, but the questions hung in the air, a testament to the fear the trance had instilled.

Connection to the Overlook's Malevolence

The bathroom trance was not merely a psychological episode; it was a direct manifestation of the Overlook Hotel's supernatural influence. The words Danny spoke—"Roque" and "Redrum"—were directly linked to the hotel's history and its violent past. Roque was a game played on the hotel's court, and the roque mallet would later become the weapon Jack uses to attack his family. "Redrum" was a prophecy of the murder that the hotel was orchestrating. The trance also connected to Danny's earlier visions, including the nightmare he had while waiting for his father to return from his job interview, in which he saw a monster wielding a mallet and the word REDRUM. This event demonstrated that the hotel was actively using Danny's psychic sensitivity to terrorize him and to foreshadow the violence to come. It was a clear signal that the Overlook was not a passive setting but a malevolent entity that was beginning to exert its will over the family.