The Shining

room, stood indecisively by the door for a moment, then took the knife from the pocket of her robe and curled her right hand around the wooden haft,:
She pulled the door open.
The short corridor leading to their quarters was bare. The electric wall flambeaux all shone brightly at their regular intervals, showing off the rug’s blue background and sinuous, weaving pattern.
(See? No boogies here.)
(No, of course not. They want you out. They want you to do something silly and womanish, and that is exactly what you are doing.)
She hesitated again, miserably caught, not wanting to leave Danny and the safety of the apartment and at the same time needing badly to reassure herself that Jack was still.
safely packed away.
(Of course he is.)
(But the voices)
(There were no voices. It was your imagination. It was the wind.)
“It wasn’t the wind.”
The sound of her own voice made her jump. But the deadly certainty in it made her go forward. The knife swung by her side, catching angles of light and throwing them on the silk wallpaper. Her slippers whispered against the carpet’s nap. Her nerves were singing like wires.
She reached the corner of the main corridor and peered around, her mind stiffened for whatever she might see there.
There was nothing to see.
After a moment’s hesitation she rounded the corner and began down the main corridor. Each step toward the shadowy stairwell increased her dread and made her aware that she was leaving her sleeping son behind, alone and unprotected. The sound of her slippers against the carpet seemed louder and louder in her ears; twice she looked back over her shoulder to convince herself that someone wasn’t creeping up behind her.
She reached the stairwell and put her hand on the cold newel post at the top of the railing. There were nineteen wide steps down to the lobby. She had counted them enough times to know. Nineteen carpeted stair risers, and nary a Jack crouching on any one of them. Of course not. Jack was locked in the pantry behind a hefty steel bolt and a thick wooden door.
But the lobby was dark and oh so full of shadows.
Her pulse thudded steadily and deeply in her throat.
Ahead and slightly to the left, the brass yaw of the elevator stood mockingly open, inviting her to step in and take the ride of her life.
(No thank you)
The inside of the car had been draped with pink and white crepe streamers. Confetti had burst from two tubular party favors. Lying in the rear left corner was an empty bottle of champagne.
She sensed movement above her and wheeled to look up the nineteen steps leading to the dark second-floor landing and saw nothing; yet there was a disturbing corner-of-the-eye sensation that things
(things)
had leaped back into the deeper darkness of the hallway up there just before her eyes could register them.
She looked down the stairs again.
Her right hand was sweating against the wooden handle of the knife; she switched it to her left, wiped her right palm against the pink terrycloth of her robe, and switched the knife back. Almost unaware that her mind had given her body the command to go forward, she began down the stairs, left foot then right, left foot then right, her free hand trailing lightly on the banister.
(Where’s the party? Don’t let me scare you away, you bunch of moldy sheets! Not one scared woman with a knife! Let’s have a little music around here! Let’s have a little life!)
Ten steps down, a dozen, a baker’s dozen.
The light from the first-floor hall filtered a dull yellow down here, and she remembered that she would have to turn on the lobby lights either beside the entrance to the dining room or inside the manager’s office.
Yet there was light coming from somewhere else, white and muted.
The fluorescents, of course. In the kitchen.
She paused on the thirteenth step, trying to remember if she had turned them off or left them on when she and Danny left. She simply couldn’t remember.
Below her, in the lobby, highbacked chairs hulked in pools of shadow. The glass in the lobby doors was pressed white with a uniform blanket of drifted snow. Brass studs in the sofa cushions gleamed faintly like cat’s eyes. There were a hundred places to hide.
Her legs stilted with fear, she continued down.
Now seventeen, now eighteen, now nineteen.
(Lobby level, madam. Step out carefully.)
The ballroom doors were thrown wide, only blackness spilling out. From within came a steady ticking, like a bomb. She stiffened, then remembered the clock on the mantel, the clock under glass. Jack or Danny must have wound it… or maybe it had wound itself up, like everything else in the Overlook.