The Shining (The Shining, #1)

by Stephen King

How do you get into these things, Winnifred? Do you practice?

That’s what these resorts get a lot of, old types that want one last fling. They come up here to the mountains to pretend they’re twenty again.

Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble a single word appeared in green fire and that word was: REDRUM.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong.

He loved his mother but he was his father’s boy.

I’m rentin a car at the Miama Airport and on my way to sunny St. Pete’s,

“You shine on, boy. Harder than anyone I ever met in my life. And I’m sixty years old this January.”

“It would be like peeking into the bedroom and watching while they’re doing the thing that makes babies. Do you know that thing?” “I have had acquaintance with it,” Hallorann said gravely.

“If there is trouble … you give a call. A big loud holler like the one you gave a few minutes ago. I might hear you even way down in Florida. And if I do, I’ll come on the run.” “Okay,” Danny said, and smiled. “You take care, big boy.” “I will.”

Danny feel sick. It was like a crazy picture drawn in blood, a surrealistic etching of a man’s face drawn back in terror and pain, the mouth yawning and half the head pulverized

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.

He suddenly flushed, not with anger but with shame at his own cruelty. This was not a man in front of him but a seventeen-year-old boy who was facing the first major defeat of his life, and maybe asking in the only way he could for Jack to help him find a way to cope with

You couldn’t offer a tongue an extra fifty a week and a bonus at Christmas if it would agree to stop flapping like a record needle in a defective groove.

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.

“these’ll do just fine.” But of course they wouldn’t, and she should have known it, too. At times she could be the stupidest bitch …

“The boiler’s okay and I haven’t even gotten around to murdering my wife yet. I’m saving that until after the holidays, when things get dull.”

Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.

He rolled in his bed, twisting the sheets, grappling with a problem years too big for him, awake in the night like a single sentinel on picket.

Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.

Time passed. And he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realize that the door must be unlocked and he could go, when the years-damp, bloated, fish-smelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face.

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

because something in this hotel seems to want him. And it will go through us to get him if it has to.

Jack’s, on the other hand, was calm, as if he had been reading a rather dull book instead of engaging in foreplay with his wife.

She was totally excited now, leaning over him, her breasts tumbling out of her shirt. He had a sudden impulse to seize one and twist it until she shrieked. Maybe that would teach her to shut up.

Now, kneeling in the sun and watching his son playing in the shadow of the hotel, he knew that it was all true. The hotel wanted Danny, maybe all of them but Danny for sure. The hedges had really walked. There was a dead woman in 217, a woman that was perhaps only a spirit and harmless under most circumstances, but a woman who was now an active danger.

The Overlook was having one hell of a good time. There was a little boy to terrorize, a man and his woman to set one against the other, and if it played its cards right they could end up flitting through the Overlook’s halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel, whatever walked in Hill House walked alone, but you wouldn’t be alone in the Overlook, oh no, there would be plenty of company here.

She tossed it out and it came to rest on the blue-black jungle carpet, a black silk cat’s-eye mask, dusted with sequins at the temples. “Does that look like a short circuit to you, Jack?” she screamed at him. Jack stepped slowly away from it, shaking his head mechanically back and forth. The cat’s-eye mask stared up blankly at the ceiling from the confetti-strewn hallway carpet.

He knew the boy and the boy knew him, because they each had a kind of searchlight in their heads, something they hadn’t asked for, something that had just been given. (Naw, you got a flashlight, he the one with the searchlight.)

“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.”

He would never hurt Danny again. Not for the world.

Then he struggled to the top of it, for that moment not thinking about the hedge animals, or Wendy Torrance, or even the boy. He rolled over on his back so he could watch it die.

From the window of the Presidential Suite he thought he saw a huge dark shape issue, blotting out the snowfield behind it. For a moment it assumed the shape of a huge, obscene manta, and then the wind seemed to catch it, to tear it and shred it like old dark paper. It fragmented, was caught in a whirling eddy of smoke, and a moment later it was gone as if it had never been.

“Look!” Danny shouted as Hallorann slowed for the front gate. He was pointing toward the playground. The hedge creatures were all in their original positions, but they were denuded, blackened, seared. Their dead branches were a stark interlacing network in the fireglow, their small leaves scattered around their feet like fallen petals. “They’re dead!” Danny screamed in hysterical triumph. “Dead! They’re dead!”

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

That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.”