The Shining

healing situation. And I think the very fact that he is able to differentiate so sharply between Tony’s world and `real things’ says a lot about the fundamentally healthy state of his mind. He says that you two are no longer considering divorce. Is he as right as I think he is?”
“Yes,” Wendy said, and Jack squeezed her hand tightly, almost painfully. She squeezed back.
Edmonds nodded. “He really doesn’t need Tony anymore. Danny is flushing him out of his system. Tony no longer brings pleasant visions but hostile nightmares that are too frightening for him to remember except fragmentarily. He internalized Tony during a difficult-desperate-life situation, and Tony is not leaving easily. But he is leaving. Your son is a little like a junkie kicking the habit.”
He stood up, and the Torrances stood also.
“As I said, I’m not a psychiatrist. If the nightmares are still continuing when your job at the Overlook ends next spring, Mr. Torrance, I would strongly urge you to take him to this man in Boulder.”
“I will.”
“Well, let’s go out and tell him he can go home,” Edmonds said.
“I want to thank you,” Jack told him painfully. “I feel better about all this than I have in a very long time.”
“So do I,” Wendy said.
At the door, Edmonds paused and looked at Wendy. “Do you or did you have a sister, Mrs. Torrance? Named Aileen?”
Wendy looked at him, surprised. “Yes, I did. She was killed outside our home in Somersworth, New Hampshire, when she was six and I was ten. She chased a ball into the street and was struck by a delivery van.”
“Does Danny know that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“He says you were thinking about her in the waiting room.”
“I was,” Wendy said slowly. “For the first time in… oh, I don’t know how long.”
“Does the word ‘redrum’ mean anything to either of you?”
Wendy shook her head but Jack said, “He mentioned that word last night, just before he went to sleep. Red drum.”
“No, rum,” Edmonds corrected. “He was quite emphatic about that. Rum. As in the drink. The alcoholic drink.”
“Oh,” Jack said. “It fits in, doesn’t it?” He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his lips with it.
“Does the phrase `the shining’ mean anything to you?”
This time they both shook their heads.
“Doesn’t matter, I guess,” Edmonds said. He opened the door into the waiting room. “Anybody here named Danny Torrance that would like to go home?”
“Hi, Daddy! Hi, Mommy!” He stood up from the small table where he had been leafing slowly through a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and muttering the words he knew aloud.
He ran to Jack, who scooped him up. Wendy ruffled his hair.
Edmonds peered at him. “If you don’t love your mommy and daddy, you can stay with good old Bill.”
“No, sir!” Danny said emphatically. He slung one arm around Jack’s neck, one arm around Wendy’s, and looked radiantly happy.
“Okay,” Edmonds said, smiling. He looked at Wendy. “You call if you have any problems.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you will,” Edmonds said, smiling.

Jack found the scrapbook on the first of November, while his wife and son were hiking up the rutted old road that ran from behind the roque court to a deserted sawmill two miles further up. The fine weather still held, and all three of them had acquired improbable autumn suntans.
He had gone down in the basement to knock the press down on the boiler and then, on impulse, he had taken the flashlight from the shelf where the plumbing schematics were and decided to look at some of the old papers. He was also looking for good places to set his traps, although he didn’t plan to do that for another month-I want them all to be home from vacation, he had told Wendy.
Shining the flashlight ahead of him, he stepped past the elevator shaft (at Wendy’s insistence they hadn’t used the elevator since they moved in) and through the small stone arch. His nose wrinkled at the smell of rotting paper. Behind him the boiler kicked on with a thundering whoosh, making him jump.
He flickered the light around, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. There was a scale-model Andes range down here: dozens of boxes and crates stuffed with papers, most of them white and shapeless with age and damp. Others had broken open and spilled yellowed sheaves of paper onto the stone floor. There were bales of newspaper tied up with hayrope. Some boxes contained what looked like ledgers, and others contained invoices bound with rubber bands. Jack pulled one out and put the flashlight beam on it.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN EXPRESS, INC.