The Shining: Chapters 1–7

Wendy didn’t much care for Ullman or his officious, ostentatiously bustling manner.

Ullman stood five-five, and when he moved, it was with the prissy speed that seems to be the exclusive domain of all small plump men.

“For the winter caretaker, that’s the most important level of all. Where the action is, so to speak.”

He frowned impressively, perhaps to show that as manager, he did not concern himself with such mundane aspects of the Overlook’s operation as the boiler and the plumbing.

They had resumed their original positions, Ullman behind the desk and Jack in front of it, interviewer and interviewee, supplicant and reluctant patron.

In order to cope with the problem, I’ve installed a full-time winter caretaker to run the boiler and to heat different parts of the hotel on a daily rotating basis. To repair breakage as it occurs and to do repairs, so the elements can’t get a foothold. To be constantly alert to any and every contingency.

It’s a slang term for the claustrophobic reaction that can occur when people are shut in together over long periods of time. The feeling of claustrophobia is externalized as dislike for the people you happen to be shut in with.

Ullman looked rather nonplussed, which did Jack a world of good.

The people living above them on the third floor weren’t married, and while that didn’t bother her, their constant, rancorous fighting did.

Tom started to bluster and Jack had said something else to him, too quietly for Wendy to hear, and Tom had only shaken his head sullenly and walked away.

Tom started to bluster and Jack had said something else to him, too quietly for Wendy to hear, and Tom had only shaken his head sullenly and walked away.

Sweeping her dress under her and sitting down on the curb beside him, she said: “What’s up, doc?” He smiled at her but it was perfunctory. “Hi, Mom.”

“Mommy, why did Daddy lose his job?” She was jolted out of her reverie and floundering for an answer.

She stopped, out of words, and waited in dread for the deluge of questions.

The iron radiated a stuporous heat at them, and for some reason Jack thought of a large, dozing cat.

He tapped the main dial, which had crept from a hundred pounds per square inch to a hundred and two as Watson soliloquized.

Then he comes down one night around ten, sayin his ‘wife’ is ‘indisposed’—which meant she was passed out again like every other night they was there—and he’s goin to get her some stomach medicine.

He looked shrewdly at Jack.

He thought of Grady, locked in by the soft, implacable snow, going quietly berserk and committing his atrocity.

As he followed Watson through the door, the words echoed back to him like a knell, accompanied by a sharp snap—like a breaking pencil lead.

The most terrifying thing about DIVORCE was that he had sensed the word—or concept, or whatever it was that came to him in his understandings—floating around in his own parents’ heads, sometimes diffuse and relatively distant, sometimes as thick and obscuring and frightening as thunderheads.

DIVORCE. It was a constant undercurrent in their thoughts, one of the few he could always pick up, like the beat of simple music.

It had a mallet in one hand and it was swinging it (REDRUM) from side to side in vicious arcs, slamming it into the walls, cutting the silk wallpaper and knocking out ghostly bursts of plasterdust: Come on and take your medicine!

In his ears he could still hear that huge, contrapuntal booming sound and smell his own urine as he voided himself in the extremity of his terror.

He was working on a play, and thought there might be a novel incubating in some mental back room. But now he was not producing and his teaching had become erratic.

Jack thought later that some queer providence, bent on giving them both a last chance, had kept the cops away, had kept any of the passersby from calling them.

Now she turned to him, her hands lacy with suds, her pretty face pale and disillusioned.

“Go ahead,” the operator said dourly.

Had that been Billie Holiday? Or someone more prosaic like Peggy Lee?

She ended up typing a novel for one of them, a novel that never got published...much to Jack’s very irreverent and very private glee.

Jack sitting at the table, pallid and grizzled, a cigarette jittering between his fingers.

Jack sitting at the table, pallid and grizzled, a cigarette jittering between his fingers.

She had expected to discover his anger, to provoke the bitterness, the recriminations.

It was almost as though the Jack she had lived with for six years had never come back last night—as if he had been replaced by some unearthly doppelganger that she would never know or be quite sure of.

They twined sinuously together, making shapes like the vines and creepers in a jungle, like patterns woven into the nap of a thick carpet.