The Shining

“Nothin is that urgent,” the plow driver said slowly and kindly, as if speaking to a mental defective. “If you’d ‘a hit that post a leetle mite harder, nobody woulda got you out till All Fools’ Day. Don’t come from these parts, do you?”
“No. And I wouldn’t be here unless my business was as urgent as I say.”
“That so?” 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.
“Where you headed? Estes?”
“No, a place called the Overlook Hotel,” Hallorann said. “It’s a little way above Sidewinder-”
But the driver was shaking his head dolefully.
“I guess I know well enough where that is,” he said. “Mister, you’ll never get up to the old Overlook. Roads between Estes Park and Sidewinder is bloody damn hell. It’s driftin in right behind us no matter how hard we push. I come through drifts a few miles back that was damn near six feet through the middle. And even if you could make Sidewinder, why, the road’s closed from there all the way across to Buckland, Utah. Nope.” He shook his head. “Never make it, mister. Never make it at all.”
“I have to try,” Hallorann said, calling on his last reserves of patience to keep his voice normal. “There’s a boy up there-”
“Boy? Naw. The Overlook closes down at the last end of September. No percentage keepin it open longer. Too many shit-storms like this.”
“He’s the son of the caretaker. He’s in trouble.”
“How would you know that?”
His patience snapped.
“For Christ’s sake are you going to stand there and flap y’jaw at me the rest of the day? I know, I know! Now are you going to pull me back on the road or not?”
“Kind of testy, aren’t you?” the driver observed, not particularly perturbed. “Sure, get back in there. I got a chain behind the seat.”
Hallorann got back behind the wheel, beginning to shake with delayed reaction now. His hands were numbed almost clear through. He had forgotten to bring gloves.
The plow backed up to the rear of the Buick, and he saw the driver get out with a long coil of chain. Hallorann opened the door and shouted: “What can I do to help?”
“Stay out of the way, is all,” the driver shouted back. “This ain’t gonna take a blink,”
Which was true. A shudder ran through the Buick’s frame as the chain pulled tight, and a second later it was back on the road, pointed more or less toward Estes Park. The plow driver walked up beside the window and knocked on the safety glass. Hallorann rolled down the window.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry I shouted at you.”
“I been shouted at before,” the driver said with a grin. “I guess you’re sorta strung up. You take these.” A pair of bulky blue mittens dropped into Hallorann’s lap. “You’ll need em when you go off the road again, I guess. Cold out. You wear em unless you want to spend the rest of your life pickin your nose with a crochetin hook. And you send em back. My wife knitted em and I’m partial to em. Name and address is sewed right into the linin. I’m Howard Cottrell, by the way. You just send em back when you don’t need em anymore. And I don’t want to have to go payin no postage due, mind.”
“All right,” Hallorann said. “Thanks. One hell of a lot.”
“You be careful. I’d take you myself, but I’m busy as a cat in a mess of guitar strings.”
“That’s okay. Thanks again.”
He started to roll up the window, but Cottrell stopped him.
“When you get to Sidewinder-if you get to Sidewinder-you go to Durkin’s Conoco. It’s right next to the li’brey. Can’t miss it. You ask for Larry Durkin. Tell him Howie Cottrell sent you and you want to rent one of his snowmobiles. You mention my name and show those mittens, you’ll get the cut rate.”
“Thanks again,” Hallorann said.
Cottrell nodded. “It’s funny. Ain’t no way you could know someone’s in trouble up there at the Overlook… the phone’s out, sure as hell. But I believe you. Sometimes I get feelins.”
Hallorann nodded. “Sometimes I do, too.”
“Yeah. I know you do. But you take care.”
“I will.”
Cottrell disappeared into the blowing dimness with a final wave, his engineer cap still mounted perkily on his head. Hallorann got going again, the chains flailing at the snowcover on the road, finally digging in enough to start the Buick moving. Behind him, Howard Cottrell gave a final good-luck blast on his plow’s airhorn, although it was really unnecessary; Hallorann could feel him wishing him good luck.
That’s two shines in one day, he thought, and that ought to be some kind of good omen. But he distrusted omens, good or bad. And meeting two people with the shine in one day (when he usually