Tales from the Overlook

Music

Oh how she so desperately wanted to let the sobs escape past her gritted teeth, but she could not dare it. It was a marvel that she could breath at all with the sheer force she had her hands clamped over her mouth, the messy tears that could not stop falling wetting her hands in an uncomfortable way, but she had no time to contemplate this. She wished that she had the time, but wishes seemed destined to die in the horrid walls that now served as more of a prison than she could have ever imagined. 

Wendy had thought her husband was mad with his talk of music and late night parties that she, herself, had wandered the halls in search of more than once in hope that she might find something, anything at all to explain away his claims. There never was anything there, as she knew it would be. It was just the three of them there, as it always was, and there was not a single soul for miles around, just as they had been told it would be when they first arrived at the accursed hotel.
It was accursed, she had come to this confusion a while ago but the thought was still enough to set her skin crawling unpleasantly. 

There was nobody at all in the hotel outside of her little family, this she knew as a fact. 

The hotel was practically full of strangers that she had not seen, this she knew was just as true. 

She could hear it! By god she could hear the music! It chilled her right down to her very core, terror prickling across her skin like angry ants after their nest was so cruelly disturbed. She was horrified, and rightly so as there was no logical explanation for what she was hearing but there was something in the distant melodies that seemed so terribly, wickedly inviting. 
Sure, there was nobody there that could be playing the music, but it had the distinct quality of live - ha - music rather than the sort of sound that came from a record. 

So what if she wanted to investigate? It was only reasonable to want to find out the source of the music and the laughter that she was more and more sure that she could hear buried beneath the tune. That did not mean she wanted to take part in it. 

And perhaps she was lonely. She had left her friends back home behind for months, and even before the phonelines went down entirely, mere phone calls were little in the way of proper meaningful connections. Perhaps she even entertained the idea of joining the party, they were there already anyway, she wasn't going to be making things worse, and there was no shame in making the best out of a bad situation, she'd always thought so.

Like a woman in a daze, or perhaps a sleepwalker unaware of he world around her, Wendy Torrance wiped away her tears and made her way down the hall to join the party that her husband so enjoyed.