The Shining: Chapters 33–48

His campchair, stark and geometrical, stood beneath it.

He seized a damp and moldering cardboard box; it split apart in his hands, spilling out a waterfall of yellow flimsies.

Bombardier Skidoo was written on the side of the engine cowling facing him in black letters which had been raked backward, presumably to connote speed.

Come hell, high water, or the welfare line, Wendy was right. 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 found a small, oil-stained box with the abbreviation Skid. laconically marked on it in pencil.

Everything had suddenly clicked into place and he had stared at the picture with fearful wonder, unable to believe he had missed it. The eyes, the zigzag of shadow across the careworn brow, the fine nose, the compassionate lips.

You had seen it in one gestalt leap, the conscious and unconscious melding in that one shocking moment of understanding.

There was a small, ratcheting series of clicks, and then the clock began to tinkle Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz.”

Danny espied tiny grooves in their sides, just below their armpits.

And if you held your head perfectly still, you could see the minute hand creeping inexorably down from XII to V.

But there was another figure in the hallway. Slouched nonchalantly against the wall just behind him. Like a ghost.

Yeah, Hallorann thought, she’d been a goof-off and a sloven and the other girls had resented her, but Delores had had that little twinkle.

Halfway to Miami International, comfortably away from the switchboard where Queems or Queems’s toadies were known to listen in, Hallorann stopped at a shopping center Laundromat and called United Air Lines.

A clunking sound in his ear followed by saccharine Montavani, which was supposed to make being on hold more pleasant.

And suddenly the smell of oranges, heavy and cloying, he had just time to reach the men’s room before it came, deafening, terrified...

It was like the somnolent hum of summer wasps in a ground nest, sleepy, deadly, beginning to wake up.

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

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.

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.

The leaves smoldered but didn’t really burn, and they made a smell—a fragrance that had echoed back to him each fall when men in Saturday pants and light Windbreakers raked leaves together and burned them. A sweet smell with a bitter undertone, rich and evocative.

It hadn’t been the voice of his father but a clever mimic. A voice he knew. Hoarse, brutal, yet underpointed with a vacuous sort of humor.

He was dressed in some sort of silvery, spangled costume.

“I’m going to eat you, little boy,” the dogman answered, and suddenly a fusillade of barks came from his grinning mouth.

Danny turned apprehensively to the closed bedroom door at the end of the hallway and walked quietly down to it.

There would be three nuns sitting in front of the fireplace as they waited for the check-out line to thin, and standing behind them, nattily dressed with diamond stickpins holding their blue-and-white-figured ties, Charles Grondin and Vito Gienelli discussed profit and loss, life and death.

In the east-wing ballroom, a dozen different business conventions were going on at the same time within temporal centimeters of each other.

There were soirees, wedding receptions, birthday and anniversary parties.

Low, throaty female laughter, the kind that seems to vibrate in a fairy ring around the viscera...

A cigarette was cocked in one corner of his mouth at a jaunty angle.

There was a small white plastic bucket on his cart that was filled with olives. For some reason they reminded Jack of tiny severed heads. Grady speared one deftly, dropped it into the glass, and handed it to him.

Cold morning light, winterlight, fell languidly through the high windows.

Outside the window there was nothing to be seen but a buffeting curtain of white.

Hallorann had flown enough to be able to surmise what had happened.

As advertised the plane came down hard, reuniting with the earth forcefully enough to knock most of the magazines out of the rack at the front and to send plastic trays cascading out of the galley like oversized playing cards.

And at the same time he felt a fatalistic certainty that he would not be coming back from this trip.

Resting at every five or six feet along the horseshoe-shaped bar there were wine bottles wrapped in straw, their mouths plugged with candles. Supposed to look bohemian, she supposed.

With almost swooning horror, she realized at last who it was that Jack had been conversing with in the ballroom.

They had heard Daddy’s batterings at the door all the way across the lobby, the batterings and his voice, hoarse and petulantly angry in a weak-king sort of a way, vomiting promises of punishment, vomiting profanity, promising both of them that they would live to regret betraying him after he had slaved his guts out for them over the years.

John Torrance, man of letters, esteemed thinker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize at seventy for his trenchant book of memoirs, My Life in the Twentieth Century.

He heard the fawning servility in his own voice but was unable to control it.