The Shining (The Shining, #1)

by Stephen King

three days later the man who had dominated Jacky’s life, the irrational white ghost-god, was underground.

In his shallow, uneasy sleep his face rose before him as if in a glass, his face but not his face, the wide eyes and innocent bowed mouth of a boy sitting in the hall with his trucks, waiting for his daddy, waiting for the white ghost-god, waiting for the elevator to rise up with dizzying, exhilarating speed through the salt-and-sawdust mist of exhaled taverns, waiting perhaps for it to go crashing down, spilling old clocksprings out of his ears while his daddy roared with laughter, and it

the Happy Jack frequency.

(Medoc, are you here? I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. It’s the inhuman monsters that I fear …)

And another voice which he dialed back to.

“—kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. Right this minute that boy of yours is in where he shouldn’t be. Trespassing. That’s what he’s doing. He’s a goddam little pup. Cane him for it, Jacky, cane him within an inch of his life. Have a drink, Jacky my boy, and we’ll play the elevator game. Then I’ll go with you while you give him his medicine. I know you can do it, of course you can. You must kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man—”

He broke a radio in his sleep. He shouldn’t immediately discount that he could have also hurt Danny

It was as if he had taken a very mild mescaline hit.

No. He would never hurt Danny. (He fell down the stairs, Doctor.) He would never hurt Danny now. (How could I know the bug bomb was defective?) Never in his life had he been willfully vicious when he was sober. (Except when you almost killed George Hatfield.) “No!” he cried into the darkness. He brought both fists crashing down on his legs, again and again and again.

He had folded onto her lap with neither protest nor gladness, like a paper cutout of himself,

(Exactly how dangerous is he?)

If it had been reported, she might have remembered that Jack’s hands, as he had hugged her in the office and sobbed against her neck, had been dry.

Evidence of real supernatural not just hallucinations

She was aware now that she had made one bad decision when she had gone against her feelings (and Danny’s) and allowed the snow to close them in…for Jack’s sake.

Yes, he could even smell beer, that damp and fermented and yeasty odor, no different from the smell that had hung finely misted around his father’s face every night when he came home from work.

All the same, a bitterly powerful wave of nostalgia swept over him, and the physical craving for a drink seemed to work

itself up from his belly to his throat to his mouth and nose, shriveling and wrinkling the tissues as it went, making them cry out for something wet and long and cold.

scratchings on the bar’s leather-padded edge. “Hi, Lloyd,” he said. “A little slow tonight, isn’t it?” Lloyd said it was. Lloyd asked him what it would be. “Now I’m really glad you asked me that,” Jack said,

Nice going, Wendy. You bleeding bitch.

If the backbar had featured a mirror instead of those damn stupid empty shelves, he could have seen them. Let them stare. Fuck them. Let anybody stare who wanted to stare.

He came off the stool, numb from the waist down, more frightened than he had ever been in his life. What hole had his son poked through and into? What dark nest? And what had been in there to sting him?

Daddy, it was her. Jack looked slowly up into Wendy’s face. His eyes were like small silver coins. “Wendy?” Voice soft, nearly purring. “Wendy, what did you do to him?”

“I do believe it,” he said, although he had to admit to himself that it gave him a certain amount of pleasure to see the shoe switched to the other foot with such dazzling, unexpected speed.

Wendy felt the familiar twist of jealousy somewhere in her middle, knowing the boy would not have drunk it for her.

She had never even given Jack the benefit of the doubt. Not the smallest. Wendy felt her face burn yet knew with a kind of helpless finality that if the whole thing were to be played over again, she would do and think the same way. She carried part of her mother with her always, for good or bad.

Danny looked from Jack to Wendy, then back again. In the silent pause, their setting and situation made themselves known: the whoop of the wind outside, driving fresh snow down from the northwest; the creaking and groaning of the old hotel as it settled into another storm. The fact of their disconnect came to Wendy with unexpected force as it sometimes did, like a blow under the heart.

“Exactly what did you talk about?” Jack asked. “I’m not sure how much I like my wife and son—” “—discussing how much they love you?” “Whatever it was, I don’t understand it.

I’m the goddam caretaker.

He threw the brass handle over and it wheezed vibratoriously up the shaft, the brass grate rattling madly.

The contemptuous smile flicked over his features again.

Nothing in the Overlook frightened him. He felt that he and it were simpático.

The door to Room 217 was ajar, and the passkey hung from the lock on its white paddle. He frowned, feeling a wave of irritation and even real anger. Whatever had come of it, the boy had been trespassing.

He would talk to him reasonably but sternly. There were plenty of fathers who would have done more than just talk. They would have administered a good shaking, and perhaps that was what Danny needed. If the boy had gotten a scare, wasn’t that at least his just desserts?

(nevertheless they did move)

(cracking up not playing with a full deck lostya marbles guy just went loony tunes he went up and over the high side went bananas lost his football crackers nuts half a seabag) all meaning the same thing: losing your mind.

What would he be eyeball to eyeball with?

He stopped halfway to the stairs and looked at the fire extinguisher. He thought that the folds of canvas were arranged in a slightly different manner. And he was quite sure that the brass nozzle had been pointing toward the elevator when he came up the hall. Now it was pointing the other way.

“I didn’t see that at all,” Jack Torrance said quite clearly. His face was white and haggard and his mouth kept trying to grin. But he didn’t take the elevator back down. It was too much like an open mouth. Too much by half. He took the stairs.

Wendy had been crying, he saw; her eyes were red and darkly circled. He felt a sudden burst of gladness at this. He wasn’t suffering alone, that was sure.

Her face registered slow hurt.

But the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if it hadn’t been a piece of play-acting put on to escape his punishment. He had, after all, been trespassing.

His temper flared. He slammed the playscript down, knocking the edges of the pile out of true again and crumpling the sheets on the bottom.

“Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I sounded mad, Wendy. It’s not really for you. But I broke the radio. If it’s anybody’s fault it’s mine.

because something in this hotel seems to want him. And it will go through us to get him if it has to. That’s why we must get him out, Jack. I know that! I feel that! We must get him out!”

But Jack was leaving something out of the picture. It was too bleak. There was something else…what?

(?Something I’ve forgotten?)

He had a sudden impulse to seize one and twist it until she shrieked. Maybe that would teach her to shut up.

Torrance, standing in line to change his sixty dollars into food stamps,

Blood had begun to trickle down from his palms. Like stigmata, oh yes. He squeezed tighter, savaging himself with pain.

(kill her.) The thought rose up from nowhere, naked and unadorned.

Turning point

He would make her take her medicine. Every drop. Every last bitter drop.