“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.

To: OVERLOOK HOTEL

From: SIDEY'S WAREHOUSE, 1210 16th Street, Denver, CO.

Via: CANDIAN PACIFIC RR

Contents: 400 CASES DELSEY TOILET TISSUE, 1 GROSS/CASE

Signed D E F

Date August 24, 1954

Smiling, Jack let the paper drop back into the box.

He flashed the light above it and it speared a hanging lightbulb, almost buried in cobwebs. There was no chain pull.

He stood on tiptoe and tried screwing the bulb in. It lit weakly. He picked up the toilet-paper invoice again and used it to wipe off some of the cobwebs. The glow didn't brighten much.

Still using the flashlight, he wandered through the boxes and bales of paper, looking for rat spoor. They had been here, but not for quite a long time… maybe years. He found some droppings that were powdery with age, and several nests of neatly shredded paper that were old and unused.

Jack pulled a newspaper from one of the bundles and glanced down at the headline.

Says Work Begun by JFK Will Go Forward

in Coming Year

The paper was the Rocky Mountain News, dated December 19, 1963. He dropped it back onto its pile.

He supposed he was fascinated by that commonplace sense of history that anyone can feel glancing through the fresh news of ten or twenty years ago. He found gaps in the piled newspapers and records; nothing from 1937 to 1945, from 1957 to 1960, from 1962 to 1963. Periods when the hotel had been closed, he guessed. When it had been between suckers grabbing for the brass ring.

Ullman's explanations of the Overlook's checkered career still didn't ring quite true to him. It seemed that the Overlooks spectacular location alone should have guaranteed its continuing success. There had always been an American jetset, even before jets were invented, and it seemed to Jack that the Overlook should have been one of the bases they touched in their migrations. It even sounded right. The Waldorf in May, the Bar Harbor House in June and July, the Overlook in August and early September, before moving on to Bermuda, Havana, Rio, wherever. He found a pile of old desk registers and they bore him out. Nelson Rockefeller in 1950. Henry Ford amp; Fam. in 1927. Jean Harlow in 1930. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. In 1956 the whole top floor had been taken for a week by “Darryl F. Zanuck amp; Party.” The money must have rolled down the corridors and into the cash registers like a twentieth-century Comstock Lode. The management must have been spectacularly bad.

There was history here, all right, and not just in newspaper headlines. It was buried between the entries in these ledgers and account books and room-service chits where you couldn't quite see it. In 1922 Warren G. Harding had ordered a whole salmon at ten o'clock in the evening, and a case of Coors beer. But whom had he been eating and drinking with? Had it been a poker game? A strategy session? What?

Jack glanced at his watch and was surprised to see that forty-five minutes had somehow slipped by since he had come down here. His hands and arms were grimy, and he probably smelled bad. He decided to go up and take a shower before Wendy and Danny got back.

He walked slowly between the mountains of paper, his mind alive and ticking over possibilities in a speedy way that was exhilarating. He hadn't felt this way in years. It suddenly seemed that the book he had semijokingly promised himself might really happen. It might even be right here, buried in these untidy heaps of paper. It could be a work of fiction, or history, or both-a long book exploding out of this central place in a hundred directions.

He stood beneath the cobwebby light, took his handkerchief from his back pocket without thinking, and scrubbed at his lips with it. And that was when he saw the scrapbook.

A pile of five boxes stood on his left like some tottering Pisa. The one on top was stuffed with more invoices and ledgers. Balanced on top of those, keeping its angle of repose for who knew how many years, was a thick scrapbook with white leather covers, its pages bound with two hanks of gold string that bad been tied along the binding in gaudy bows.