The Shining (The Shining, #1)

by Stephen King

“He killed them, Mr. Torrance, and then committed suicide. He murdered the little girls with a hatchet, his wife with a shotgun, and himself the same way. His leg was broken. Undoubtedly so drunk he fell downstairs.”

She thought that to children adult motives and actions must seem as bulking and ominous as dangerous animals seen in the shadows of a dark forest. They were jerked about like puppets, having only the vaguest notions why. The thought brought her dangerously close to tears again,

If brains was black powder he couldn’t blow his own nose. It’s a pity the things you see when you ain’t got a gun.

Jack felt a wave of nearly desperate love for the boy. The emotion showed on his face as a stony grimness.

He would look at them and the self-loathing would back up his throat in a bitter wave, even stronger than the taste of beer and cigarettes and martinis—martians, as Al called them. Those were the times that his mind would turn thoughtfully and sanely to the gun or the rope or the razor blade.

Lovin’ you baby, is just like rollin’ off a log, But if I can’t be your woman, I sure ain’t goin’ to be your dog

caul nevertheless. She did not hold with wives’ tales, but the boy

she felt that the three of them had been permanently welded together—that if their three/oneness was to be destroyed, it would not be destroyed by any of them but from outside.

“I tried them like I did you,” Hallorann said. “Your momma jumped the tiniest bit. I think all mothers shine a little, you know, at least until their kids grow up enough to watch out for themselves.

When you unwittingly stuck your hand into the wasps’ nest, you hadn’t made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honor. It just happened to you. Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the mind and became a creature of the nerve endings; from college-educated man to wailing ape in five easy seconds.

It was possible to graduate from passive to active, to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest.

Someday her child would be a stranger to her, and she would be strange to him…but not as strange as her own mother had become to her. Please don’t let it be that way, God. Let him grow up and still love his mother.

Still it made her sad. Next year he would be in school and she would lose at least half of him, maybe more, to his friends.

At last Danny was quiet, only faintly trembling in her arms. Yet it was Jack he spoke to first, Jack who was now sitting beside them on the bed, and she felt the old faint pang (It’s him first and it’s always been him first) of jealousy. Jack had shouted at him, she had comforted him, yet it was to his father that Danny said,

(You lost your temper. You lost your temper. You lost your temper.) an almost superstitious dread. They had come back. He had killed the wasps but they had come back. In his mind he heard himself screaming into his frightened, crying son’s face: Don’t stutter!

He could almost see them in the dining room, the richest men in America and their women.

Where did he go when he slept, she wondered. To some amusement park, a Great Barrington of dreams where all the riders were free and there was no wife mother along to tell them they’d had enough hot dogs or that they’d better be going if they wanted to get home by dark? Or was it some fathoms-deep bar where the drinking never stopped and the batwings were always propped open and all the old companions were gathered around the electronic hockey game, glasses in hand, Al Shockley prominent among them with his tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone? A place where both she and Danny were excluded and the boogie went on endlessly?

Tough old world, baby. If you’re not bolted together tightly, you’re gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.

“It’s time you got some of the home truths into you, Wendy. You don’t seem to have internalized them, as the sociologists say. They’re knocking around up in your head like a bunch of loose cueballs. You need to shoot them into the pockets. You need to understand that we are snowed in

The thought rose up from nowhere, naked and unadorned. The urge to tumble her out of bed, naked, bewildered, just beginning to wake up; to pounce on her, seize her neck like the green limb of a young aspen and to throttle her, thumbs on windpipe, fingers pressing against the top of her spine, jerking her head up and ramming it back down against the floor boards, again and again, whamming, whacking, smashing, crashing.

His hands had clenched into fists again. (Not fair, goddammit, not fair!) Why couldn’t he have looked someplace else? Anyplace! Why hadn’t he had a crick in his neck or an itch in his nose or the need to blink? Just one of those little things. He never would have seen it.

You had seen it in one gestalt leap, the conscious and unconscious melding in that one shocking moment of understanding. You would always see it. You were damned to always see it.

Was it possible, Danny wondered, to be glad you had done something and still be so ashamed of that something that you tried not to think of it? The

he collapsed, weeping, between the sofa and the window, his parents staring at him helplessly, the way children might stare at a toy broken in a furious tussle over to whom it belonged.

Three shopping sacks filled with Bermuda onions, the sweetest vegetable a loving God ever created, some pretty good sweet peas, which would be served with the entree and come back uneaten nine times out of ten, and a single blue Hubbard squash that was strictly for personal consumption.

tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge.

When it did, he would say thank you very much and board a bus. Wilmington became Albany and Albany became Utica. Utica became New Paltz. New Paltz gave way to Sturbridge, where he got drunk at an outdoor folk concert and woke up the next day in jail with a broken wrist.