The Shining

forgetting all fears in favor of that intoxicating shaft behind the wall. “Just like in Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters!”
Mr. Ullman frowned but Wendy smiled indulgently. Danny ran over to the dumbwaiter and peered down the shaft.,
“This way, please.”
He opened the door on the far side of the living room. It gave on the bedroom, which was spacious and airy. There were twin beds. Wendy looked at her husband, smiled, shrugged.
“No problem,” Jack said. “We’ll push them together.”
Mr. Ullman looked over his shoulder, honestly puzzled. “Beg pardon?”
“The beds,” Jack said pleasantly. “We can push them together.”
“Oh, quite,” Ullman said, momentarily confused. Then his face cleared and a red flush began to creep up from the collar of his shirt. “Whatever you like.”
He led them back into the sitting room, where a second door opened on a second bedroom, this one equipped with bunk beds. A radiator clanked in one corner, and the rug on the floor was a hideous embroidery of western sage and cactus-Danny bad already fallen in love with it, Wendy saw. The walls of this smaller room were paneled in real pine.
“Think you can stand it in here, doc?” Jack asked.
“Sure I can. I’m going to sleep in the top bunk. Okay?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I like the rug, too. Mr. Ullman, why don’t you have all the rugs like that?”
Mr. Ullman looked for a moment as if he had sunk his teeth into a lemon. Then he smiled and patted Danny’s head. “Those are your quarters,” he said, “except for the bath, which opens off the main bedroom. It’s not a huge apartment, but of course you’ll have the rest of the hotel to spread out in. The lobby fireplace is in good working order, or so Watson tells me, and you must feel free to eat in the dining room if the spirit moves you to do so.” He spoke in the tone of a man conferring a great favor.
“All right,” Jack said.
“Shall we go down?” Mr. Ullman asked.
“Fine,” Wendy said.
They went downstairs in the elevator, and now the lobby was wholly deserted except for Watson, who was leaning against the main doors in a rawhide jacket, a toothpick between his lips.
“I would have thought you’d be miles from here by now,” Mr. Ullman said, his voice slightly chill.
“Just stuck around to remind Mr. Torrance here about the boiler,” Watson said, straightening up. “Keep your good weather eye on her, fella, and she’ll be fine. Knock the press down a couple of times a day. She creeps.”
She creeps, Danny thought, and the words echoed down a long and silent corridor in his mind, a corridor lined with mirrors where people seldom looked.
“I will,” his daddy said.
“You’ll be fine,” Watson said, and offered Jack his hand. Jack shook it. Watson turned to Wendy and inclined his head. “Ma’am,” he said.
“I’m pleased,” Wendy said, and thought it would sound absurd. It didn’t. She had come out here from New England, where she had spent her life, and it seemed to her that in a few short sentences this man Watson, with his fluffy fringe of hair, had epitomized what the West was supposed to be all about. And never mind the lecherous wink earlier.
“Young master Torrance,” Watson said gravely, and put out his hand. Danny, who had known all about handshaking for almost a year now, put his own hand out gingerly and felt it swallowed up. “You take good care of em, Dan.”
“Yes, sir.”
Watson let go of Danny’s hand and straightened up fully. He looked at Ullman. “Until next year, I guess,” he said, and held his hand out.
Ullman touched it bloodlessly. His pinky ring caught the lobby’s electric lights in a baleful sort of wink.
“May twelfth, Watson,” he said. “Not a day earlier or later.”
“Yes, sir,” Watson said, and Jack could almost read the codicil in Watson’s mind:… you fucking little faggot.
“Have a good winter, Mr. Ullman.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Ullman said remotely.
Watson opened one of the two big main doors; the wind whined louder and began to flutter the collar of his jacket. “You folks take care now,” he said.
It was Danny who answered. “Yes, sir, we will.”
Watson, whose not-so-distant ancestor had owned this place, slipped humbly through the door. It closed behind him, muffling the wind. Together they watched him clop down the porch’s broad front steps in his battered black cowboy boots. Brittle yellow aspen leaves tumbled around his heels as he crossed the lot to his International Harvester pickup and climbed in. Blue smoke jetted from the rusted exhaust pipe as he started it up. The spell of silence held among them as he backed, then pulled out of the parking lot. His truck disappeared over the brow of the hill and then reappeared, smaller, on the main road, heading