The Shining (The Shining, #1)

by Stephen King

The bitter lock of his emotions was broken.

(what monsters capering just behind that ridge of bone?)

“I’ll find it!” he heard himself screaming.

came up with a dry, papery wasps’ nest in one hand and a timer in the other. The timer was ticking.

He had done more than escape George; he had conquered.

With these talismanic objects in his hands, George would never touch him again. George would flee in terror.

“I don’t stutter,” whispered George from behind him. He dropped the wasps’ nest and wasps boiled out of it in a furious brown-and-yellow wave.

sense of triumph returned, along with a cresting wave of righteous wrath.

Instead of connecting the timer to dynamite, the cord ran to the gold knob of ...

it looked like a monstrous mechanized wasp. When it was running it would sound like that, too. Whining and buzzing and ready to sting.

Pounding this machine to death would be the height of folly, no matter how pleasant an aspect that folly made. It would almost be tantamount to pounding his own son to death.

He laughed aloud.

Resentment, a gray, sullen wave of it, pushed up his throat. His hands had clenched into fists again. (Not fair, goddammit, not fair!)

should work. No reason why not. No reason at all except that it was part of the Overlook and the Overlook really didn’t want them out of here. Not at all.

The Overlook was having one hell of a good

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. But there was really no reason why the snowmobile shouldn’t start. Except of course (Except he still didn’t really want to go.) yes, except for that.

(I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear …)

An interjection from the hotel that distracts him again and changes his mind

It had been all right until he had seen Danny playing in the snow. It was Danny’s fault. Everything had been Danny’s fault. He was the one with the shining, or whatever it was. It wasn’t a shining, it was a curse.

How long? Oh Christ, he was so afraid it wouldn’t be long at all. “I can’t win,” he said, very softly.

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 question was a disturbing one. He didn’t think such a thing was possible… in a normal mind.

He waited to see if something

There was a circular patch of darkness at the end of it, a fold of shadow that marked the hole he’d dug to get down inside. Now, in spite of the snow-dazzle, he thought he could see something there. Something moving. A hand. The waving hand of some desperately unhappy child, waving hand, pleading hand, drowning hand. (Save me O please save me If you can’t save me at least come play with me…Forever. And Forever. And Forever.)

He grasped at the strings of reality and held them tightly. He had to get out of here. Concentrate on that.

The air whistled in and out of his dry throat like hot glass.

He couldn’t bring himself to repeat that. And he didn’t know the right words to express the creeping, lassitudinous sense of terror he had felt when he heard the dead aspen leaves begin to crackle furtively

The strangeness in his eyes seemed to break then. “I’m trying to help him find the difference between something real and something that was only a hallucination, that’s all.”

He felt his father stiffen against him. “The porch step, then.” Danny pulled away. Suddenly he had it. It had flashed into his mind all at once, the way things sometimes did, the way it had about the woman wanting to be in that gray man’s pants. He stared at his father with widening eyes. “You know I’m telling the truth,” he whispered, shocked. “Danny—” Jack’s face, tightening. “You know because you saw—” The sound of Jack’s open palm striking Danny’s face was flat, not dramatic at all. The boy’s head rocked back, the palm print reddening on his cheek like a brand. Wendy made a moaning noise.

“I keep hearing voices in my head!” she cried. “What is it? What’s wrong? I feel like I’m going crazy!” “What voices?” He looked at her with deadly blandness.

“Maybe you are both crazy,” Jack said conversationally. “I don’t hear a goddamned thing except that elevator having a case of the electrical hiccups. If you two want to have duet hysterics, fine. But count me out.”

They were both staring at him carefully, as if he was a stranger they had never seen before, possibly a dangerous one. He opened his mouth, not sure what was going to come out. “It…Wendy, it’s my job.” She said clearly: “Fuck your job.”

then her hand was on his shoulder, surprisingly strong, yanking him away. “Wendy!” he shouted. But she had already caught the car’s bottom edge and pulled herself up enough so she could look in.

looking at the clock under glass. It stood in the center of the ballroom’s high, ornamental mantelpiece, flanked by two large ivory elephants.

He looked at the clock inside the glass dome. It was under glass because all its wheels and cogs and springs were showing. A chrome or steel track ran around the outside of these works, and directly below the clockface there was a small axis bar with a pair of meshing cogs at either end. The hands of the clock stood at quarter past XI,

A moment later and things began to run backward.

The clock began to strike a count of silver chimes. (Midnight! Stroke of midnight!)

(Hooray for masks!) Danny whirled on the chair, almost falling down. The ballroom was empty.

But it wasn’t really empty. Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all times were one.

In the Overlook all things had a sort of life. It was as if the whole place had been wound up with a silver key. The clock was running. The clock was running. He was that key, Danny thought sadly.

The balance wheel rocked hypnotically back and forth. And if you held your head perfectly still, you could see the minute hand creeping inexorably down from XII to V. If you held your head perfectly still you could see that— The clockface was gone. In its place was a round black hole. It led down into forever. It began to swell. The clock was gone. The room behind it. Danny tottered and then fell into the darkness that had been hiding behind the clockface all along.

It lurched toward him in a horrible, shambling run, the roque mallet swinging up and up and up. Danny scrambled backward, screaming, and suddenly he was through the wall and falling, tumbling over and over, down the hole, down the rabbit hole and into a land full of sick wonders.

He could not have said why he had chosen this warm sunny day when he felt so well to do something he had been putting off for years, but the impulse had come on him and he hadn’t said no. He was used to following his hunches.

He dialed the radio to a Miami soul station and got the soft, wailing voice of Al Green. “What a beautiful time we had together, Now it’s getting late and we must leave each other…”

It was as if someone had put a psychic gun to his head and shot him with a .45 caliber scream. (!!! OH DICK OH PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE COME !!!)

He had told the boy to call him if he needed help, he remembered that. And now the boy was calling. He suddenly wondered how he could have left that boy up there at all, shining the way he did. There was bound to be trouble, maybe bad trouble.

It was as close to an expression of sympathy as a white man who thought of himself as “good with the coloreds” could get when the object was a black man or his mythical black son.

Hallorann made himself get down to the ground floor and across to the hired help’s compound before bursting into rich, head-shaking laughter. He was still grinning and mopping his streaming eyes with his handkerchief when the smell of oranges came,

Last year in May Ullman had sent him up to the attic to look for the ornate set of firetools that now stood beside the lobby fireplace. While he had been up there the three lightbulbs strung overhead had gone out and he had lost his way back to the trapdoor. He had stumbled around for an unknown length of time, closer and closer to panic, barking his shins on boxes and bumping into things, with a stronger and stronger feeling that something was stalking him in the dark. Some great and frightening creature that had just oozed out of the

woodwork when the lights went out.

In the three years he had been there, the Presidential Suite had been booked nineteen times. Six of the guests who had put up there had left the hotel early, some of them looking markedly ill.

And there had been dozens of children during Hallorann’s association with the Overlook who simply refused to go into the playground. One child had had a convulsion while playing in the concrete rings,