The Shining Read online

  (Stop! Stop that now!)

  He knuckled the tears furiously from his eyes. He would try as hard as he could to keep that from happening. Not to himself, not to his daddy and mommy. He would try as hard as he could.

  He closed his eyes and sent his mind out in a high, hard crystal bolt.

  (!!! DICK PLEASE COME QUICK WE'RE IN BAD TROUBLE DICK WE NEED)

  And suddenly, in the darkness behind his eyes, the thing that chased him down the Overlook's dark halls in his dreams was there, right there, a huge creature dressed in white, its prehistoric club raised over its head:

  "I'll make you stop it! You goddam puppy! I'll make you stop it because I am your FATHER!"

  "No!" He jerked back to the reality of the bedroom, his eyes wide and staring, the screams tumbling helplessly from his mouth as his mother bolted awake, clutching the sheet to her breasts.

  "No Daddy no no no--"

  And they both heard the vicious, descending swing of the invisible club, cutting the air somewhere very close, then fading away to silence as he ran to his mother and hugged her, trembling like a rabbit in a snare.

  The Overlook was not going to let him call Dick. That might spoil the fun, too.

  They were alone.

  Outside the snow came harder, curtaining them off from the world.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  MID-AIR

  Dick Hallorann's flight was called at 6:45 A.M., EST, and the boarding clerk held him by Gate 31, shifting his flight bag nervously from hand to hand, until the last call at 6:55. They were both looking for a man named Carlton Vecker, the only passenger on TWA's Flight 196 from Miami to Denver who hadn't checked in.

  "Okay," the clerk said, and issued Hallorann a blue first-class boarding pass. "You lucked out. You can board, sir."

  Hallorann hurried up the enclosed boarding ramp and let the mechanically grinning stewardess tear his pass off and give him the stub.

  "We're serving breakfast on the flight," the stew said. "If you'd like--"

  "Just coffee, babe," he said, and went down the aisle to a seat in the smoking section. He kept expecting the no-show Vecker to pop through the door like a jack-in-the-box at the last second. The woman in the seat by the window was reading You Can Be Your Own Best Friend with a sour, unbelieving expression on her face. Hallorann buckled his seat belt and then wrapped his large black hands around the seat's armrests and promised the absent Carlton Vecker that it would take him and five strong TWA flight attendants to drag him out of his seat. He kept his eye on his watch. It dragged off the minutes to the 7:00 takeoff time with maddening slowness.

  At 7:05 the stewardess informed them that there would be a slight delay while the ground crew rechecked one of the latches on the cargo door.

  "Shit for brains," Dick Hallorann muttered.

  The sharp-faced woman turned her sour, unbelieving expression on him and then went back to her book.

  He had spent the night at the airport, going from counter to counter--United, American, TWA, Continental, Braniff--haunting the ticket clerks. Sometime after midnight, drinking his eighth or ninth cup of coffee in the canteen, he had decided he was being an asshole to have taken this whole thing on his own shoulders. There were authorities. He had gone down to the nearest bank of telephones, and after talking to three different operators, he had gotten the emergency number of the Rocky Mountain National Park Authority.

  The man who answered the telephone sounded utterly worn out. Hallorann had given a false name and said there was trouble at the Overlook Hotel, west of Sidewinder. Bad trouble.

  He was put on hold.

  The ranger (Hallorann assumed he was a ranger) came back on in about five minutes.

  "They've got a CB," the ranger said.

  "Sure they've got a CB," Hallorann said.

  "We haven't had a Mayday call from them."

  "Man, that don't matter. They--"

  "Exactly what kind of trouble are they in, Mr. Hall?"

  "Well, there's a family. The caretaker and his family. I think maybe he's gone a little nuts, you know. I think maybe he might hurt his wife and his little boy."

  "May I ask how you've come by this information, sir?"

  Hallorann closed his eyes. "What's your name, fellow?"

  "Tom Staunton, sir."

  "Well, Tom, I know. Now I'll be just as straight with you as I can be. There's bad trouble up there. Maybe killin bad, do you dig what I'm sayin?"

  "Mr. Hall, I really have to know how you--"

  "Look," Hallorann had said. "I'm telling you I know. A few years back there was a fellow up there name of Grady. He killed his wife and his two daughters and then pulled the string on himself. I'm telling you it's going to happen again if you guys don't haul your asses out there and stop it!"

  "Mr. Hall, you're not calling from Colorado."

  "No. But what difference--"

  "If you're not in Colorado, you're not in CB range of the Overlook Hotel. If you're not in CB range you can't possibly have been in contact with the, uh ..." Faint rattle of papers. "The Torrance family. While I had you on hold I tried to telephone. It's out, which is nothing unusual. There are still twenty-five miles of aboveground telephone lines between the hotel and the Sidewinder switching station. My conclusion is that you must be some sort of crank."

  "Oh man, you stupid ..." But his despair was too great to find a noun to go with the adjective. Suddenly, illumination. "Call them!" he cried.

  "Sir?"

  "You got the CB, they got the CB. So call them! Call them and ask them what's up!"

  There was a brief silence, and the humming of longdistance wires.

  "You tried that too, didn't you?" Hallorann asked. "That's why you had me on hold so long. You tried the phone and then you tried the CB and you didn't get nothing but you don't think nothing's wrong ... What are you guys doing up there? Sitting on your asses and playing gin rummy?"

  "No, we are not," Staunton said angrily. Hallorann was relieved at the sound of anger in the voice. For the first time he felt he was speaking to a man and not to a recording. "I'm the only man here, sir. Every other ranger in the park, plus game wardens, plus volunteers, are up in Hasty Notch, risking their lives because three stupid assholes with six months' experience decided to try the north face of King's Ram. They're stuck halfway up there and maybe they'll get down and maybe they won't. There are two choppers up there and the men who are flying them are risking their lives because it's night here and it's starting to snow. So if you're still having trouble putting it all together, I'll give you a hand with it. Number one, I don't have anybody to send to the Overlook. Number two, the Overlook isn't a priority here--what happens in the park is a priority. Number three, by daybreak neither one of those choppers will be able to fly because it's going to snow like crazy, according to the National Weather Service. Do you understand the situation?"

  "Yeah," Hallorann had said softly. "I understand."

  "Now my guess as to why I couldn't raise them on the CB is very simple. I don't know what time it is where you are, but out here it's nine-thirty. I think they may have turned it off and gone to bed. Now if you--"

  "Good luck with your climbers, man," Hallorann said. "But I want you to know that they are not the only ones who are stuck up high because they didn't know what they were getting into."

  He had hung up the phone.

  At 7:20 A.M. the TWA 747 backed lumberingly out of its stall, turned, and rolled out toward the runway. Hallorann let out a long, soundless exhale. Carlton Vecker, wherever you are, eat your heart out.

  Flight 196 parted company with the ground at 7:28, and at 7:31, as it gained altitude, the thought-pistol went off in Dick Hallorann's head again. His shoulders hunched uselessly against the smell of oranges and then jerked spasmodically. His forehead wrinkled, his mouth drew down in a grimace of pain.

  (!!! DICK PLEASE COME QUICK WE'RE IN BAD TROUBLE DICK WE NEED)

  And that was all. It was suddenly gone. No fading out this time. The communicati
on had been chopped off cleanly, as if with a knife. It scared him. His hands, still clutching the seat rests, had gone almost white. His mouth was dry. Something had happened to the boy. He was sure of it. If anyone had hurt that little child--

  "Do you always react so violently to takeoffs?"

  He looked around. It was the woman in the hornrimmed glasses.

  "It wasn't that," Hallorann said. "I've got a steel plate in my head. From Korea. Every now and then it gives me a twinge. Vibrates, don't you know. Scrambles the signal."

  "Is that so?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "It is the line soldier who ultimately pays for any foreign intervention," the sharp-faced woman said grimly.

  "Is that so?"

  "It is. This country must swear off its dirty little wars. The CIA has been at the root of every dirty little war America has fought in this century. The CIA and dollar diplomacy."

  She opened her book and began to read. The NO SMOKING sign went off. Hallorann watched the receding land and wondered if the boy was all right. He had developed an affectionate feeling for that boy, although his folks hadn't seemed all that much.

  He hoped to God they were watching out for Danny.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  DRINKS ON THE HOUSE

  Jack stood in the dining room just outside the batwing doors leading into the Colorado Lounge, his head cocked, listening. He was smiling faintly.

  Around him, he could hear the Overlook Hotel coming to life.

  It was hard to say just how he knew, but he guessed it wasn't greatly different from the perceptions Danny had from time to time ... like father, like son. Wasn't that how it was popularly expressed?

  It wasn't a perception of sight or sound, although it was very near to those things, separated from those senses by the filmiest of perceptual curtains. It was as if another Overlook now lay scant inches beyond this one, separated from the real world (if there is such a thing as a "real world," Jack thought) but gradually coming into balance with it. He was reminded of the 3-D movies he'd seen as a kid. If you looked at the screen without the special glasses, you saw a double image--the sort of thing he was feeling now. But when you put the glasses on, it made sense.

  All the hotel's eras were together now, all but this current one, the Torrance Era. And this would be together with the rest very soon now. That was good. That was very good.

  He could almost hear the self-important ding ! ding! of the silver-plated bell on the registration desk, summoning bellboys to the front as men in the fashionable flannels of the 1920s checked in and men in fashionable 1940s double-breasted pinstripes checked out. There would be three nuns sitting in front of the fireplace as they waited for the check-out line to thin, and standing behind them, nattily dressed with diamond stickpins holding their blue-and-white-figured ties, Charles Grondin and Vito Gienelli discussed profit and loss, life and death. There was a dozen trucks in the loading bays out back, some laid one over the other like bad time exposures. In the east-wing ballroom, a dozen different business conventions were going on at the same time within temporal centimeters of each other. There was a costume ball going on. There were soirees, wedding receptions, birthday and anniversary parties. Men talking about Neville Chamberlain and the Archduke of Austria. Music. Laughter. Drunkenness. Hysteria. Little love, not here, but a steady undercurrent of sensuousness. And he could almost hear all of them together, drifting through the hotel and making a graceful cacophony. In the dining room where he stood, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for seventy years were all being served simultaneously just behind him. He could almost ... no, strike the almost. He could hear them, faintly as yet, but clearly--the way one can hear thunder miles off on a hot summer's day. He could hear all of them, the beautiful strangers. He was becoming aware of them as they must have been aware of him from the very start.

  All the rooms of the Overlook were occupied this morning.

  A full house.

  And beyond the batwings, a low murmur of conversation drifted and swirled like lazy cigarette smoke. More sophisticated, more private. Low, throaty female laughter, the kind that seems to vibrate in a fairy ring around the viscera and the genitals. The sound of a cash register, its window softly lighted in the warm half-dark, ringing up the price of a gin rickey, a Manhattan, a depression bomber, a sloe gin fizz, a zombie. The jukebox, pouring out its drinkers' melodies, each one overlapping the other in time.

  He pushed the batwings open and stepped through.

  "Hello, boys," Jack Torrance said softly. "I've been away but now I'm back."

  "Good evening, Mr. Torrance," Lloyd said, genuinely pleased. "It's good to see you."

  "It's good to be back, Lloyd," he said gravely, and hooked his leg over a stool between a man in a sharp blue suit and a bleary-eyed woman in a black dress who was peering into the depths of a Singapore sling.

  "What will it be, Mr. Torrance?"

  "Martini," he said with great pleasure. He looked at the backbar with its rows of dimly gleaming bottles, capped with their silver siphons. Jim Beam. Wild Turkey. Gilby's. Sharrod's Private Label. Toro. Seagram's. And home again.

  "One large martian, if you please," he said. "They've landed somewhere in the world, Lloyd." He took his wallet out and laid a twenty carefully on the bar.

  As Lloyd made his drink, Jack looked over his shoulder. Every booth was occupied. Some of the occupants were dressed in costumes ... a woman in gauzy harem pants and a rhinestone-sparkled brassiere, a man with a foxhead rising slyly out of his evening dress, a man in a silvery dog outfit who was tickling the nose of a woman in a sarong with the puff on the end of his long tail, to the general amusement of all.

  "No charge to you, Mr. Torrance," Lloyd said, putting the drink down on Jack's twenty. "Your money is no good here. Orders from the manager."

  "Manager?"

  A faint unease came over him; nevertheless he picked up the martini glass and swirled it, watching the olive at the bottom bob slightly in the drink's chilly depths.

  "Of course. The manager." Lloyd's smile broadened, but his eyes were socketed in shadow and his skin was horribly white, like the skin of a corpse. "Later he expects to see to your son's well-being himself. He is very interested in your son. Danny is a talented boy."

  The juniper fumes of the gin were pleasantly maddening, but they also seemed to be blurring his reason. Danny? What was all of this about Danny? And what was he doing in a bar with a drink in his hand?

  He had TAKEN THE PLEDGE. He had GONE ON THE WAGON. He had SWORN OFF.

  What could they want with his son? What could they want with Danny? Wendy and Danny weren't in it. He tried to see into Lloyd's shadowed eyes, but it was too dark, too dark; it was like trying to read emotion into the empty orbs of a skull.

  (It's me they must want ... isn't it? I am the one. Not Danny, not Wendy. I'm the one who loves it here. They wanted to leave. I'm the one who took care of the snowmobile ... went through the old records ... dumped the press on the boiler ... lied ... practically sold my soul ... What can they want with him?)

  "Where is the manager?" He tried to ask it casually but his words seemed to come out between lips already numbed by the first drink, like words from a nightmare rather than those in a sweet dream.

  Lloyd only smiled.

  "What do you want with my son? Danny's not in this ... is he?" He heard the naked plea in his own voice.

  Lloyd's face seemed to be running, changing, becoming something pestilent. The white skin becoming a hepatitic yellow, cracking. Red sores erupting on the skin, bleeding foul-smelling liquid. Droplets of blood sprang out on Lloyd's forehead like sweat and somewhere a silver chime was striking the quarter-hour.

  (Unmask, unmask!)

  "Drink your drink, Mr. Torrance," Lloyd said softly. "It isn't a matter that concerns you. Not at this point."

  He picked his drink up again, raised it to his lips, and hesitated. He heard the hard, horrible snap as Danny's arm broke. He saw the bicycle flying brokenly up over the h
ood of Al's car, starring the windshield. He saw a single wheel lying in the road, twisted spokes pointing into the sky like jags of piano wire.

  He became aware that all conversation had stopped.

  He looked back over his shoulder. They were all looking at him expectantly, silently. The man beside the woman in the sarong had removed his foxhead and Jack saw that it was Horace Derwent, his pallid blond hair spilling across his forehead. Everyone at the bar was watching, too. The woman beside him was looking at him closely, as if trying to focus. Her dress had slipped off one shoulder and looking down he could see a loosely puckered nipple capping one sagging breast. Looking back at her face he began to think that this might be the woman from 217, the one who had tried to strangle Danny. On his other hand, the man in the sharp blue suit had removed a small pearl-handled .32 from his jacket pocket and was idly spinning it on the bar, like a man with Russian roulette on his mind.

  (I want--)

  He realized the words were not passing through his frozen vocal cords and tried again.

  "I want to see the manager. I ... I don't think he understands. My son is not a part of this. He ..."

  "Mr. Torrance," Lloyd said, his voice coming with hideous gentleness from inside his plague-riddled face, "you will meet the manager in due time. He has, in fact, decided to make you his agent in this matter. Now drink your drink."

  "Drink your drink," they all echoed.

  He picked it up with a badly trembling hand. It was raw gin. He looked into it, and looking was like drowning.

  The woman beside him began to sing in a flat, dead voice: "Roll ... out ... the barrel ... and we'll have ... a barrel ... of fun ..."

  Lloyd picked it up. Then the man in the blue suit. The dogman joined in, thumping one paw against the table

  "Now's the time to roll the barrel--"

  Derwent added his voice to the rest. A cigarette was cocked in one corner of his mouth at a jaunty angle. His right arm was around the shoulders of the woman in the sarong, and his right hand was gently and absently stroking her right breast. He was looking at the dogman with amused contempt as he sang.