The Shining

“If only that snowmobile-”

“They wouldn't let him,” Da

She slipped an arm around him.

“I believe you, Da

“They'll try to make him,” Da

“What about tomorrow?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Where is he now?” she asked. “'Four daddy?”

“He's in the basement. I don't think he'll be up tonight.”

She stood up suddenly. “Wait right here for me. Five minutes.”

The kitchen was cold and deserted under the overhead fluorescent bars. She went to the rack where the carving knives hung from their magnetized strips. She took the longest and sharpest, wrapped it in a dish towel, and left the kitchen, turning off the lights as she went.

Da

(-Lou, Lou, skip to m' Lou-)

His singing broke off. He listened.

(-Skip to m' Lou my darlin'-)

The voice was in his head, so much a part of him, so frighteningly close that it might have been a part of his own thoughts. It was soft and infinitely sly. Mocking him. Seeming to say:

(Oh yes, you'll like it here. Try it, you'll like it. Try it, you'll liiiiike it-)

Now his ears were open and he could hear them again, the gathering, ghosts or spirits or maybe the hotel itself, a dreadful funhouse where all the sideshows ended in death, where all the specially painted boogies were really alive, where hedges walked, where a small silver key could start the obscenity. Soft and sighing, rustling like the endless winter wind that played under the eaves at night, the deadly lulling wind the summer tourists never heard. It was like the somnolent hum of summer wasps in a ground nest, sleepy, deadly, begi

(Why is a raven like a writing desk? The higher the fewer, of course! Have another cup of tea!)

It was a living sound, but not voices, not breath. A man of a philosophical bent might have called it the sound of souls. Dick Hallora

In the darkened ballroom the clock under glass struck seven-thirty with a single musical note.

A hoarse voice, made brutal with drink, shouted: “Unmask and let's fuck!”

Wendy, halfway across the lobby, jerked to a standstill.

She looked at Da

Da

There would be little sleep for them that night, although they slept together behind a locked door.

And in the dark, his eyes open, Da

(He wants to be one of them and live forever. That's what he wants.)

Wendy thought:

(If I have to, I'll take him further up. If we're going to die I'd rather do it in the mountains.)

She had left the butcher knife, still wrapped in the towel, under the bed. She kept her hand close to it. They dozed off and on. The hotel creaked around them. Outside snow had begun to spit down from a sky like lead.

40. In the Basement

(!!! The boiler the goddam boiler!!!)

The thought came into Jack Torrance's mind full-blown, edged in bright, warning red. On its heels, the voice of Watson:

(If you forget it'll just creep an creep and like as not you an your fambly wilt end up on the fuckin moon… she's rated for two-fifty but she'd blow long before that now… I'd be scared to come down and stand next to her at a hundred and eighty.)

He'd been down here all night, poring over the boxes of old records, possessed by a frantic feeling that time was getting short and he would have to hurry. Still the vital clues, the co

He looked at his watch and jumped up, kicking over e stack of old invoices.

Christ, it was quarter of five in the morning.

Behind him, the furnace kicked on. The boiler was making a groaning, whistling sound.

He ran to it. His face, which had become thi

The boiler pressure gauge stood at two hundred and ten pounds per square inch. He fancied he could almost see the sides of the old patched and welded boiler heaving out with the lethal strain.

(She creeps… I'd be scared to come down and stand next to her at a hundred and eighty…)

Suddenly a cold and tempting i

(Let it go. Go get Wendy and Da

He could visualize the explosion. A double thunderclap that would first rip the heart from this place, then the soul. The boiler would go with an orangeviolet flash that would rain hot and burning shrapnel all over the cellar. In his mind he could see the redhot trinkets of metal careening from floor to walls to ceiling like strange billiard balls, whistling jagged death through the air. Some of them, surely, would whizz right through that stone arch, light on the old papers on the other side, and they would burn merry hell. Destroy the secrets, burn the clues, it's a mystery no living hand will ever solve. Then the gas explosion, a great rumbling crackle of flame, a giant pilot light that would turn the whole center of the hotel into a broiler. Stairs and hallways and ceilings and rooms aflame like the castle in the last reel of a Frankenstein movie. The flame spreading into the wings, hurrying up the black-and-blue-twined carpets like eager guests. The silk wallpaper charring and curling. There were no sprinklers, only those outmoded hoses and no one to use them. And there wasn't a fire engine in the world that could get here before late March. Burn, baby, burn. In twelve hours there would be nothing left but the bare bones.

The needle on the gauge had moved up to two-twelve. The boiler was creaking and groaning like an old woman trying to get out of bed. Hissing jets of steam had begun to play around the edges of old patches; beads of solder had begun to sizzle.

He didn't see, he didn't hear. Frozen with his hand on the valve that would dump off the pressure and damp the fire, Jack's eyes glittered from their sockets like sapphires.

(It's my last chance.)

The only thing not cashed in now was the life-insurance policy he had taken out jointly with Wendy in the summer between his first and second years at Stovington. Forty-thousand-dollar death benefit, double indemnity if he or she died in a train crash, a plane crash, or a fire. Seven-come-eleven, die the secret death and win a hundred dollars.