The Shining: Chapters 49–58

In the hills, the snow was falling faster and more furiously than Hallorann had ever seen (which was, perhaps, not to say a great deal, since Hallorann had seen as little snow as he could manage in his lifetime), and the wind was blowing a capricious gale—now from the west, now backing around to the north, sending clouds of powdery snow across his field of vision...

Between rock ‘n’ roll tunes on the radio, the disc jockey constantly adjured motorists to stay off the main highways and under no conditions to go into the mountains, because many roads were impassable and all of them were dangerous.

WHAAAAAAAAA! the airhorn bellowed indignantly.

And that was where the car stopped, canting forward at a thirty-degree angle, the left fender jammed against a guardrail, the rear wheels nearly off the ground.

The driver shifted his stance companionably as if they were having a desultory chat on the back steps instead of standing in a blizzard halfway between hoot and holler, with Hallorann’s car balanced three hundred feet above the tops of the trees below.

By the time he got to the Upland Highway it was full dark, but the snowstorm showed no sign of abating.

The driver had merely swung around his car, not getting out to chew the fat, but he did deliver one of the two finger gestures that all Americans above the age of ten recognize, and it was not the peace sign.

She wondered when he had last gotten a full night’s sleep, one without tormenting dreams or long periods of dark wakefulness, listening to revels that had only become audible—and visible—to her in the last couple of days, as the Overlook’s grip on the three of them tightened.

There was only one way to allay those fears and she knew what it was.

All the lights in the ballroom went on. There was a huge, shrieking flourish of brass. Wendy screamed aloud, the sound of her cry insignificant against the blare issuing from those brazen lungs.

She stepped backward, tripped over a hassock, fell to the lobby rug.

Larry Durkin was a tall and skinny man with a morose face overtopped with a luxuriant mane of red hair.

He was speaking with a country man, and he knew that all country men feel a similar need to approach their business obliquely, to smell around its corners and sides before plunging into the middle of dealing.

“All right,” Durkin said, unperturbed.

He could feel the voice that had almost wrecked him outside of Sidewinder still trying to get in, to get past his defenses to the soft meat inside. If it had been strong twenty-five miles back, how much stronger would it be now? He couldn’t keep it out entirely. Some of it was slipping through, flooding his brain with sinister subliminal images.

Limned in stark blacks and whites, Hallorann first thought it was some hideously huge timberwolf that had been driven down from the high country by the storm.

There was a thump as her record player was overturned, a hollow crash as the secondhand TV’s picture tube was smashed, the tinkle of windowglass followed by a cold draft under the bathroom door. A dull thud as the mattresses were ripped from the twin beds where they had slept together, hip to hip. Boomings as Jack struck the walls indiscriminately with the mallet.

There was nothing of the real Jack in that howling, maundering, petulant voice, though.

It alternately whined in tones of self-pity and rose in lurid screams; it reminded her chillingly of the screams that sometimes rose in the geriatrics ward of the hospital where she had worked summers as a high school kid.

In an instant the whole creature was in flames, a prancing, writhing pyre on the snow.

A rocket exploded in his head, leaving a contrail of stars…and then nothing.

He had been afraid every day for two months now, to a degree that ranged from dull disquiet to outright, mind-bending terror.

Nonetheless, death images came to him: dead frog plastered to the turnpike like a grisly stamp; Daddy’s broken watch lying on top of a box of junk to be thrown out; gravestones with a dead person under every one; dead jay by the telephone pole; the cold junk Mommy scraped off the plates and down the dark maw of the garbage disposal.

He began to struggle, and the darkness and the hallway began to waver. Tony’s form became chimerical, indistinct.

For a moment she fixed stupidly on the memory, and then in a single vertiginous and nauseating swoop, her mind seemed to pan back, showing her everything at once.

“You lied about me! You connived with her! You plotted against me! And you cheated! You copied that final exam!”

It staggered drunkenly and stared at him with maudlin self-pity that began to turn to hate.

“No, oh no, it mustn’t, it can’t, you dirty little boy, I’ll make you take your medicine, I’ll make you take every drop, oh no, oh no—” It suddenly turned tail and began to shamble away.

He ran faster, bolting headlong across the lobby toward the double doors.

The hedge dog, which had been approaching Danny and his mother, recoiled away from it, its green and shadow-marbled ears flattening, its tail coming down between its legs as its haunches flattened abjectly.

He struggled to his feet to go to the other two and help them, and as he did so he saw something more nightmarish than all the rest: the hedge rabbit, still coated with snow, was battering itself crazily at the chainlink fence at the far end of the playground, and the steel mesh was jingling with a kind of nightmare music, like a spectral zither.

It fragmented, was caught in a whirling eddy of smoke, and a moment later it was gone as if it had never been.

But in those few seconds as it whirled blackly, dancing like negative motes of light, he remembered something from his childhood…fifty years ago, or more.

“Mr. Hallorann?” Her voice was low, weak, querulous. He didn’t much like the sound of it.

His face was shiny with tears, and he was shaking as if with ague.