The Shining: Chapters 24–32

The hedge menagerie was buried up to its haunches; the rabbit, frozen on its hind legs, seemed to be rising from a white pool.

But they all did go out on the days when the sun shone, usually wearing two sets of clothing and mittens on over their gloves. Getting out was almost a compulsive thing; the hotel was circled with the double track of Danny’s Flexible Flyer.

The permutations were nearly endless: Danny riding while his parents pulled; Daddy riding and laughing while Wendy and Danny tried to pull (it was just possible for them to pull him on the icy crust, and flatly impossible when powder covered it); Danny and Mommy riding; Wendy riding by herself while her menfolk pulled and puffed white vapor like drayhorses, pretending she was heavier than she was.

He was staring at the door with a kind of drugged avidity, and his upper body seemed to twitch and jiggle beneath his flannel shirt.

It was as if that thought had come from outside, insectile, buzzing, softly cajoling.

“Come on and hurt me. Come on and hurt me, you cheap prick. Can’t do it, can you? Huh? You’re nothing but a cheap fire hose. Can’t do nothin but lie there. Come on, come on!” He had felt insane with bravado.

Yet he gave each one a cursory glance, afraid that by not being thorough he might miss exactly the piece of Overlookiana he needed to make the mystic connection that he was sure must be here somewhere.

His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside.

It was a Sunday night, the end of a three-day weekend for Daddy, a weekend which he had boozed away in his usual inimitable style.

He had been out of his chair and around to where she lay dazed on the carpet, brandishing the cane, moving with a fat man’s grotesque speed and agility, little eyes flashing, jowls quivering as he spoke to her just as he had always spoken to his children during such outbursts.

He had been out of his chair and around to where she lay dazed on the carpet, brandishing the cane, moving with a fat man’s grotesque speed and agility, little eyes flashing, jowls quivering as he spoke to her just as he had always spoken to his children during such outbursts.

Jack had always felt it was not just the sudden and irrational beating his father had administered at the dinner table but the fact that, in the hospital, their mother had corroborated their father’s story while holding the hand of the parish priest.

He switched the band and dialed across bursts of music, news, a preacher haranguing a softly moaning congregation, a weather report.

Ripped out of her sleep by his voice, raised in that old hectoring pitch she remembered so well, she still felt that she was dreaming—but another part knew she was awake, and that terrified her more.

Then the muscles began to work, began to writhe under the skin, the mouth began to tremble infirmly, the Adam’s apple began to rise and fall.

“I was looking through those old papers. Sitting on a chair I set up down there. Milk receipts. Dull stuff. And I guess I just drowsed off. That’s when I started to dream. I must have sleepwalked up here.” He essayed a shaky little laugh against her neck. “Another first.”

Danny came pliantly enough, but he did not hug her back. It was like hugging a padded stick, and the sweet taste of horror flooded her mouth.

Danny’s head jounced mildly up and down as she ran.

There was really only one question, and it was asked in a mental voice of utter coldness and pragmatism, the voice of her maternity, a cold and passionless voice once it was directed away from the closed circle of mother and child and out toward Jack.

With growing trepidation she walked down to the stairwell, but Jack was not there.

He found himself standing on the other side of the dining room, just outside the stylized batwing doors of the Colorado Lounge where, on that night in 1945, all the booze would have been free.

He carried his empty fist to his mouth and sluiced down another—four down, sixteen to go.

Danny’s face rose before him, not Danny’s normal face, lively and alert, the eyes sparkling and open, but the catatonic, zombielike face of a stranger, the eyes dull and opaque, the mouth pursed babyishly around his thumb.

The three of them made a tableau that Jack felt very strongly; it was just before the curtain of Act II in some oldtime temperance play, one so poorly mounted that the prop man had forgotten to stock the shelves of the Den of Iniquity.

The three of them made a tableau that Jack felt very strongly; it was just before the curtain of Act II in some oldtime temperance play, one so poorly mounted that the prop man had forgotten to stock the shelves of the Den of Iniquity.

The three of them made a tableau that Jack felt very strongly; it was just before the curtain of Act II in some oldtime temperance play, one so poorly mounted that the prop man had forgotten to stock the shelves of the Den of Iniquity.

If the boy had gotten a scare, wasn’t that at least his just deserts?

His face was white and haggard and his mouth kept trying to grin.

He looked down at the play with smoldering ill-temper.

He looked down at the play with smoldering ill-temper. How could he have thought it was good? It was puerile.

Grimmer had to run an understaffed and underfunded institution and try to keep the whole thing together with spit, baling wire, and nickel-and-dime appropriations from a state legislature who had to go back and face the voters.

And meanwhile, people were knocking down the doors. Paranoids, schizoids, cycloids, semicatatonics, men who claimed to have gone to heaven in flying saucers...alcoholics, pyromaniacs, kleptomaniacs, manic-depressives, suicidals.

And meanwhile, people were knocking down the doors. Paranoids, schizoids, cycloids, semicatatonics, men who claimed to have gone to heaven in flying saucers...alcoholics, pyromaniacs, kleptomaniacs, manic-depressives, suicidals.

Let the reader lay blame. In those days he hadn’t wanted to judge. The cloak of the moralist sat badly on his shoulders.

Originally conceived as a bright boy more cursed with money than blessed with it, a boy who wanted more than anything to compile a good record so he could go to a good university because he had earned admission and not because his father had pulled strings, he had become to Jack a kind of simpering Goody Two-shoes, a postulant before the altar of knowledge rather than a sincere acolyte, an outward paragon of Boy Scout virtues, inwardly cynical...

Originally conceived as a bright boy more cursed with money than blessed with it, a boy who wanted more than anything to compile a good record so he could go to a good university because he had earned admission and not because his father had pulled strings, he had become to Jack a kind of simpering Goody Two-shoes, a postulant before the altar of knowledge rather than a sincere acolyte, an outward paragon of Boy Scout virtues, inwardly cynical...

Originally conceived as a bright boy more cursed with money than blessed with it, a boy who wanted more than anything to compile a good record so he could go to a good university because he had earned admission and not because his father had pulled strings, he had become to Jack a kind of simpering Goody Two-shoes, a postulant before the altar of knowledge rather than a sincere acolyte, an outward paragon of Boy Scout virtues, inwardly cynical...

Jack had seen Denker the teacher as not much different from the strutting South American little Caesars in their banana kingdoms, standing dissidents up against the wall of the handiest squash or handball court, a super-zealot in a comparatively small puddle, a man whose every whim becomes a crusade.

Now he tended more and more to see Denker as a Mr. Chips figure, and the tragedy was not the intellectual racking of Gary Benson but rather the destruction of a kindly old teacher and headmaster unable to see through the cynical wiles of this monster masquerading as a boy.

Jack touched the sleeping forehead (what monsters capering just behind that ridge of bone?) and found it warm, but not overly so.