The Shining

it wasn’t greatly different from the perceptions Danny had from time to time… like father, like son. Wasn’t that how it was popularly expressed?
It wasn’t a perception of sight or sound, although it was very near to those things, separated from those senses by the filmiest of perceptual curtains. It was as if another Overlook now lay scant inches beyond this one, separated from the real world (if there is such a thing as a “real world,” Jack thought) but gradually coming into balance with it. He was reminded of the 3-D movies he’d seen as a kid. If you looked at -the screen without the special glasses, you saw a double image-the sort of thing he was feeling now. But when you put the glasses on, it made sense.
All the hotel’s eras were together now, all but this current one, the Torrance Era. And this would be together with the rest very soon now. That was good. That was very good.
He could almost hear the self-important ding!ding! of the silver-plated bell on the registration desk, summoning bellboys to the front as men in the fashionable flannels of the 1920s checked in and men in fashionable 1940s double-breasted pinstripes checked out. 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 blueand-white-figured ties, Charles Grondin and Vito Gienelli discussed profit and loss, life and death. There were a dozen trucks in the loading bays out back, some laid one over the other like bad time exposures. In the east-wing ballroom, a dozen different business conventions were going on at the same time within temporal centimeters of each other. There was a costume ball going on. There were soirees, wedding receptions, birthday and anniversary parties. Men talking about Neville Chamberlain and the Archduke of Austria. Music. Laughter. Drunkenness. Hysteria. Little love, not here, but a steady undercurrent of sensuousness. And he could almost hear all of them together, drifting through the hotel and making a graceful cacophony. In the dining room where he stood, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for seventy years were all being served simultaneously just behind him. He could almost… no, strike the almost. He could hear them, faintly as yet, but clearly-the way one can hear thunder miles off on a hot summer’s day. He could hear all of them, the beautiful strangers. He was becoming aware of them as they must have been aware of him from the very start.
All the rooms of the Overlook were occupied this morning.
A full house.
And beyond the batwings, a low murmur of conversation drifted and swirled like lazy cigarette smoke. More sophisticated, more private. Low, throaty female laughter, the kind that seems to vibrate in a fairy ring around the viscera and the genitals. The sound of a cash register, its window softly lighted in the warm halfdark, ringing up the price of a gin rickey, a Manhattan, a depression bomber, a sloe gin fizz, a zombie. The jukebox, pouring out its drinkers’ melodies, each one overlapping the other in time.
He pushed the batwings open and stepped through
“Hello, boys,” Jack Torrance said softly. “I’ve been away but now I’m back.”
“Good evening, Mr. Torrance,” Lloyd said, genuinely pleased. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to be back, Lloyd,” he said gravely, and hooked his leg over a stool between a man in a sharp blue suit and a bleary-eyed woman in a black dress who was peering into the depths of a singapore sling.
“What will it be, Mr. Torrance?”
“Martini,” he said with great pleasure. He looked at the backbar with its rows of dimly gleaming bottles, capped with their silver siphons. Jim Beam. Wild Turkey. Gilby’s. Sharrod’s Private Label. Toro. Seagram’s. And home again.
“One large martian, if you please,” he said. “They’ve landed somewhere in the world, Lloyd.” He took his wallet out and laid a twenty carefully on the bar.
As Lloyd made his drink, Jack looked over his shoulder. Every booth was occupied. Some of the occupants were dressed in costumes… a woman in gauzy harem pants and a rhinestone-sparkled brassiere, a man with a foxhead rising slyly out of his evening dress, a man in a silvery dog outfit who was tickling the nose of a woman in a sarong with the puff on the end of his long tail, to the general amusement of all.
“No charge to you, Mr. Torrance,” Lloyd said, putting the drink down on Jack’s twenty. “Your money is no good here. Orders from the manager.”
“Manager?”
A faint unease came over him; nevertheless he picked up the martini glass and swirled it, watching the olive at the bottom bob slightly in the drink’s chilly depths.
“Of course. The manager.” Lloyd’s smile