The Shining: Chapters 15–23

Danny was hunched over the first of the five battered primers Jack had dug up by culling mercilessly through Boulder’s myriad secondhand bookshops.

He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read.

Guttural sounds came from his throat.

“You mean he was behind you?” Wendy asked.
“No, he was in the mirror.” Danny was very emphatic on this point. “Way down deep. And then I went through the mirror. The next thing I remember Daddy was shaking me and I thought I was being bad again.”

When his back was against the light blue silk wallpaper with the embossed pattern of wavy lines, his legs gave way and he collapsed to the carpet, hands splayed on the jungle of woven vines and creepers, the breath whistling in and out of his throat.

She took a coloring book off his worktable and slammed it down on the wasp. It left a viscous brown smear.

His eyes, circled with the white of shock, looked at Jack reproachfully.

She cupped her hands over her elbows and hugged herself, looking pale and wan.

“But now whenever he comes he shows me bad things. Awful things. Like in the bathroom last night. The things he shows me, they sting me like those wasps stung me. Only Tony’s things sting me up here.” He cocked a finger gravely at his temple, a small boy unconsciously burlesquing suicide.

Somewhere not far distant was a steady mechanical roaring sound, but muted, not frightening. Soporific. It was the thing that would be forgotten, Danny thought with dreamy surprise.

Wendy nodded—of course she thought Danny would be quite a man—but the doctor’s explanation struck her as glib. It tasted more like margarine than butter.

Balanced on top of those, keeping its angle of repose for who knew how many years, was a thick scrapbook with white leather covers, its pages bound with two hanks of gold string that had been tied along the binding in gaudy bows.

He could almost see them in the dining room, the richest men in America and their women. Tuxedos and glimmering starched shirts; evening gowns; the band playing; gleaming high-heeled pumps. The clink of glasses, the jocund pop of champagne corks.

There had been rumors, Jack recalled, that some of the means employed by Derwent to keep his head above water were less than savory. Involvement with bootlegging...Smuggling in the coastal areas of the South where his fertilizer factories were. Finally an association with the nascent western gambling interests.

Probably Derwent’s most famous investment was the purchase of the foundering Top Mark Studios, which had not had a bit since their child star, Little Margery Morris, had died of a heroin overdose in 1934.

Reputed to be a friend of royalty, presidents, and underworld kingpins, it was supposed by many that he was the richest man in the world.

In a terse communique yesterday from the Chicago offices of the monolithic Derwent Enterprises, it was revealed that millionaire (perhaps billionaire) Horace Derwent has sold out of Colorado in a stunning financial power play that will be completed by October 1, 1954.

The accompanying photos wrenched at Jack’s heart: the paint on the front porch peeling, the lawn a bald and scabrous mess, windows broken by storms and stones.

He said that the group he represents hopes to sell memberships to high echelon executives in American and foreign companies.

The Overlook Hotel, a white elephant that has been run lucklessly by almost a dozen different groups and individuals since it first opened its doors in 1910, is now being operated as a security-jacketed “key club,” ostensibly for unwinding businessmen. The question is, what business are the Overlook’s key holders really in?

And these same gaming honchos have been linked in the past to both suspected and convicted underworld kingpins.

“Are you happy here, Danny?” He looked at her guilelessly, a milk mustache on his lip. “Uh-huh.”

He had been drawn to Room 217 by a morbid kind of curiosity.

Danny knew that this was one of the worst epithets his father could summon.

As he reached the hose, some trick of the light made the nozzle seem to move, to revolve as if to strike, and he leaped high in the air above it; in his panicky state it seemed that his legs pushed him nearly all the way to the ceiling, that he could feel the stiff back hairs that formed his cowlick brushing the hallway’s plaster ceiling, although later he knew that couldn’t have been so.

You see, stupid? he berated himself. You made it all up, scaredy-cat. It was all your imagination, scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat.

The Sidewinder Public Library was a small, retiring building one block down from the town’s business area.

Actually he had traced down the last of the Overlook’s fascinating history—the years between the gangland shooting and the takeover by Stuart Ullman & Co. But he felt the same reticence about telling Wendy.

Nag and nag and nag until you wanted to clout her one just to shut her up and stop the (Where? When? How? Are you? Will you?) endless flow of questions.

I’m calling about some things that you didn’t tell me during your history of the Overlook's great and honorable past. Like how Horace Derwent sold it to a bunch of Las Vegas sharpies who dealt it through so many dummy corporations that not even the IRS knew who really owned it. About how they waited until the time was right and then turned it into a playground for Mafia bigwigs, and about how it had to be shut down in 1966 when one of them got a little bit dead.

“I just do not believe your cheek, your...impertinence,” Ullman said. He sounded as if he might be choking. “I’d like to sack you. And perhaps I will.”

So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.

And so he had hung up and that was when the cramps had come, hitting him like lightning bolts, making him curl up in front of the telephone like a penitent, hands over his belly, head throbbing like a monstrous bladder.

Thinking of the conversation with Al, how he had groveled, still made him hot and cold by turns.

Dr. Edmonds’s patter about inductive reasoning and subconscious logic was just that: patter.

And now, lying wakeful in her bed and listening to her husband’s breathing and the wind outside (miraculously, they’d had only another flurry that afternoon; still no heavy snow), she let her mind turn fully to her lovely, troubling son, born with a caul over his face, a simple tissue of membrane that doctors saw perhaps once in every seven hundred births, a tissue that the old wives’ tales said betokened the second sight.

The snow was coming, and when it did, any poor options he had would be abrogated. And after the snow, what?

Along one of the highways in Vermont there had been a hedge billboard on a high slope overlooking the road, advertising some kind of ice cream. Making nature peddle ice cream, that was just wrong.

He recognized the similarity himself and he shook the chain link, put a harried expression on his face, and whispered: “Lemme outta here! Lemme outta here!”

What kind of sound would there be if they got him?
But of course he knew. A snapping, rending, breaking sound.