Jack and Al Shockley hit a bicycle

On a late November night in Vermont, Jack Torrance and Al Shockley—both very drunk after a long evening of what they called "martians" (martinis)—were driving Al's Jaguar on U.S. 31 into Barre. Al was behind the wheel, shifting fancily on the curves and sometimes crossing the double yellow line. As they came around the last curve before the bridge at seventy miles an hour, a child's bicycle loomed in the headlights. There was a sharp, hurt squealing as rubber shredded from the Jag's tires, and Jack saw Al's face looming over the steering wheel like a round white moon. Then came the jingling crashing sound as they hit the bike at forty, the handlebars striking the windshield, the bike flying up like a bent and twisted bird before landing on the road behind them with a final dreadful smash. Something thumped underneath them as the tires passed over it. The Jag drifted around broadside, and from far away Jack heard himself saying: "Jesus, Al. We ran him down. I felt it."

The Search and the Cover-Up

Al brought the car to a smoking halt not more than three feet from a bridge stanchion. Two of the Jag's tires were flat, and they had left zigzagging loops of burned rubber for a hundred and thirty feet. They looked at each other for a moment and then ran back in the cold darkness. The bike was completely ruined—one wheel was gone, and Al saw it lying in the middle of the road, half a dozen spokes sticking up like piano wire. Al said hesitantly: "I think that's what we ran over, Tacky-boy." For the next two hours they searched the sides of the road with a powerful four-cell flashlight, finding nothing. Several cars passed the beached Jaguar and the two men with the bobbing flashlight, but none stopped. Jack later thought that some queer providence, bent on giving them both a last chance, had kept the cops away and kept any of the passersby from calling them. At quarter past two they returned to the Jag, sober but queasy. Al demanded: "If there was nobody riding it, what was it doing in the middle of the road? It wasn't parked on the side; it was right in the fucking middle!" Jack could only shake his head. Al hiked across the bridge to the nearest pay phone, called a bachelor friend, and told him it would be worth fifty dollars if the friend would get the Jag's snow tires out of the garage and bring them down to the Highway 31 bridge. The friend showed up twenty minutes later, surveyed the scene, and asked: "Kill anybody?" Al, already jacking up the back of the car, replied: "Providentially, no one." The friend said he would just head on back and to pay him in the morning. The two of them got the tires on without incident and drove back to Al's house. In the dark quiet of the garage, Al said: "I'm off drinking, Jacky-boy. It's all over. I've slain my last martian."

The Aftermath and Jack's Haunting

Jack drove back to his own house in the VW with the radio turned up, but no matter how loud he heard the squealing tires and the crash. When he blinked his eyes shut, he saw that single crushed wheel with its broken spokes pointing at the sky. When he got in, Wendy was asleep on the couch. He looked in Danny's room and saw Danny in his crib on his back, sleeping deeply, his arm still buried in the cast from the broken arm Jack had given him. In the softly filtered glow from the streetlight he could see the dark lines on its plastered whiteness where all the doctors and nurses in pediatrics had signed it. He told himself: "It was an accident. He fell down the stairs," but immediately the counter-thought came: "(o you dirty liar) It was an accident. I lost my temper." The last plea was driven away by the image of that bobbing flashlight as they hunted through the dry late November weeds, looking for the sprawled body that by all good rights should have been there. It didn't matter that Al had been driving—there had been other nights when he had been driving. He pulled the covers up over Danny, went into their bedroom, and took the Spanish Llama .38 down from the top shelf of the closet. He sat on the bed with it for nearly an hour, looking at it, fascinated by its deadly shine. It was dawn when he put it back in the box and put the box back in the closet.

The Turning Point and Unspoken Guilt

The next morning, Wendy told Jack she wanted to talk about what was best for her and Danny. Jack asked her to wait a week. She agreed, and during that week he saw Al Shockley more than ever, but he came home early and there was no liquor on his breath. He drank coffee black and endless cans of Coca-Cola; one night he drank a whole six-pack of Coke and then ran into the bathroom and vomited it up. The level of the bottles in the liquor cabinet did not go down. Weeks passed, and the unspoken word—divorce—retreated further from the back of Wendy's lips. But Jack knew the guilt was permanent. There had been a squib in the paper the next day, no more than a space-filler, but the owner of the bike had not been named. Why it had been out there in the night would always be a mystery. The incident became a secret bond between Jack and Al—both men stopped drinking after that night—but it also became a private emblem of Jack's conviction that he was a man who destroyed things. When he later called Al to thank him for getting the Overlook job, Al asked if he missed drinking. Jack answered: "Every day." Al replied: "I know that scene. But I don't know how you stayed dry after that Hatfield thing, Jack. That was above and beyond." Jack said evenly: "I really bitched things up for myself." But the hit-and-run, not the Hatfield beating, was the deeper wound—the one that had nearly driven him to suicide with the .38, the one that proved to him that even when he wasn't drinking, he was still a danger to everyone around him.