Stephen King's excised prologue to The Shining -- Before the Play, part one

Did you know that Stephen King wrote a prologue to The Shining that was cut from the published version?

Here's what King himself has said about it:

Before the Play was published by Stuart Schiff Whispers in August of 1982.

I will post the first segment here, and begin a comments thread. I'm happy to continue transcribing the lengthy prologue for your enjoyment, as long as people seem interested in reading, and in discussing/critiquing this unseen King work.

Before the Play by Stephen King

Scene 1: The Third Floor of a Resort Hotel Fallen Upon Hard Times

It was October 7, 1922, and the Overlook Hotel had closed its doors on the end of another season. When it re-opened in mid-May of 1923, it would be under new management. Two brothers named Clyde and Cecil Brandywine had bought it, good old boys from Texas with more old cattle money and new oil money than they knew what to do with.

Bob T. Watson stood at the huge picture window of the Presidential Suite and stared out at the climbing heights of the Rockies, where the aspens had now shaken most of their leaves, and hoped the Brandywine brothers would fail. Since 1915 the hotel had been owned by a man named James Parris. Parris had begun his professional life as a common shyster in 1880. One of his close friends rose to the presidency of a great western railroad, a robber baron among robber barons. Parris grew rich on his friend’s spoils, but had none of his friend’s colorful flamboyancy. Parris was a gray little man with an eye always turned to an inward set of accounting books. He would have sold the Overlook anyway, Bob T. Watson thought as he continued to stare out the window. The little shyster bastard just happened to drop dead before he got a chance.

The man who had sold the Overlook to James Parris had been Bob T. Watson himself. One of the last of the Western giants that arose in the years 1870 - 1905, Bob T. came from a family that had made a staggering fortune in silver around Placer, Colorado. They lost the fortune, rebuilt it in land speculation to the railroads, and lost most of it again in the depression of ’93 - ’94, when Bob T.’s father was gunned down in Denver by a man suspected of organizing.

Bob T. had rebuilt the fortune himself, single-handedly, in the years 1895 to 1905, and had begun searching then for something, some perfect thing, to cap his achievement. After two years of careful thought (during the interim he had bought himself a governor and a representative to the U.S. Congress), he had decided, in modest Watson fashion, to build the grandest resort hotel in America. It would stand at the roof of America, with nothing in the country at a higher altitude except the sky. It would be a playground of the national and international rich – the people that would be known three generations later as the super-rich.

Construction began in 1907, forty miles west of Sidewinder, Colorado, and supervised by Bob T. himself.

"And do you know what?" Bob T. said aloud in the third-floor suite, which was the grandest set of apartments in the grandest resort hotel in America. "Nothing ever went right after that. Nothing."

The Overlook had made him old. He had been forty-three when ground was broken in 1907, and when construction was completed two years later (but too late for them to be able to open the hotel’s doors until 1910), he was bald. He had developed an ulcer. One of his two sons, the one he had loved best, the one that had been destined to carry the Watson banner forward into the future, had died in a stupid riding accident. Boyd had tried to jump his pony over a pile of lumber where the topiary now was, and the pony had caught its back feet and broken its leg. Boyd had broken his neck.

There had been financial reverses on other fronts. The Watson fortune, which had looked so secure in 1905, had begun to look decidedly shaky in that autumn of 1909. There had been a huge investment in munitions in anticipation of a foreign war that did not happen, and had not happened until 1914. There had been a dishonest accountant in the timbering end of the Watson operation, and although he had been sent to jail for twenty long years, he had done half a million dollars worth of damage first.

Perhaps disheartened by the death of his oldest son, Bob T. had become unwisely convinced that the way to recoup was the way that his father had couped in the first place: silver. There were advisors who contended against this, but after the calumny of the head accountant, who was the son of one of his father’s best friends, Bob T. trusted his advisers less and less. He had refused to believe that Colorado’s mining days were over. A million dollars in dry investments hadn’t convinced him. Two million had. And by the time the Overlook opened its doors in the late spring of 1910, Bob T. realized that he was precariously close to being in shirt-sleeves again … and building on the ruins at the age of forty-five might be an impossibility.

The Overlook was his hope.

The Overlook Hotel, built against the roof of the sky, with its topiary of hedge animals to enchant the children, its playground, its long and lovely croquet course, its putting green for the gentlemen, its tennis courts outside and shuffleboard courts inside, its dining room with the western exposure looking out over the last rising jagged peaks of the Rockies, its ballroom facing east, where the land dropped into green valleys of spruce and pine. The Overlook with its one hundred and ten rooms, its staff of specially trained domestics, and not one but two French chefs. The Overlook with its lobby as wide and grand as three Pullman cars, the grand staircase rising to the second floor, and its ponderous neo-Victorian furniture, all capped by the huge crystal chandalier which hung over the stairwell like a monster diamond.

Bob T. had fallen in love with the hotel as an idea, and his love had deepened as the hotel took shape, no longer a mental thing but an actual edifice with strong, clean lines and infinite possibility. His wife had grown to hate it – at one point in 1908 she told him that she would have preferred competing with another woman, that at least she would have known how to cope with – but he had dismissed her hate as a hysterical female reaction to Boyd’s death on the grounds.

"You’re not natural on the subject," Sarah had told him. "When you look at that there, it’s like there was no sense left in you. No one can talk to you about what it’s costing, or how people are going to get here when the last sixty miles of road aren’t even paved --."

"They’ll be paved," he said quietly. "I’ll pave them."

"And how much will that cost?" Sarah asked hysterically. "Another million?"

"Nowhere near," Bob T. said. "But if it did, I’d pay it."

"You see? Can’t you see? You’re just not natural on the subject. It’s taken your wits, Bob T.!"

Perhaps it had at that.

The Overlook’s premier season had been a nightmare. Spring came late, and the roads were not passable until the first of June, and even then they were a nightmare of washboards and axle-smashing chuckholes and hastily-laid corduroy over stretches of jellied mud. There was more rain that year than Bob T. had ever seen before or since, climaxed by a day of snow flurries in August … black snow, the old woman called it, a terrible omen for the winter ahead. In September he had hired a contractor to pave the last twenty miles of the road that led west from Estes Park to Sidewinder, and the forty miles from Sidewinder to the hotel itself, and it had turned into an expensive, round-the-clock operation to finish the two roads before the snow covered them for the long, long winter. The winter his wife had died.

But the roads and the abbreviated season had not been the worst of the Overlook’s first year. No. The hotel had been officially opened on June 1, 1910 at a ribbon-cutting ceremony presided over by Bob T.’s pet congressman. That day had been hot and clear and bright, the kind of day the Denver Post must have had in mind when they took "’Tis a privilege to live in Colorado" as their motto. And when the pet congressman cut the ribbon, the wife of one of the first guests fainted dead away. The applause that had begun at the cutting of the ribbon dried up in little exclamations of alarm and concern. Smelling salts had brought her around, of course, but she had come back to the world with such an expression of dazed terror on her vapid little face that Bob T. could cheerfully have strangled her.

"I thought I saw something in the lobby," she said. "It didn’t look like a man."

Later she admitted that it must have been the unexpected heat after all the chilly weather, but of course by then the damage had been done.

Nor was the tale of that day’s reverses all told.

One of the two chefs had scalded his arm while preparing lunch and had to be taken to the hospital closest by, far away in Boulder. Mrs. Arkinbauer, the wife of the meat-packing king, had slipped while toweling herself dry after her bath and had broken her wrist. And finally, the crowning touch, at dinner that night, Bob T.’s pet congressman swallowed a piece of heavy Western sirloin strip steak the wrong way and choked to death in the full and horrified view of two hundred guests, nearly all of them there at Bob T. Watson’s personal invitation.

The pet congressman had clawed and clutched at his throat, he had turned first red and then purple, he had actually begun to stagger among the assembled company in his death-throes, bouncing from table to table, his wildly swinging arms knocking over wine-glasses and vases full of freshly cut flowers, his eyes bulging hideously at the assembled revellers. It was as if, one of Bob T.’s friends told him much later in private, Poe’s story about the Red Death had come to life in front of all of them. And perhaps Bob T.’s chance to make his beloved hotel a success had died on that very first night, had died a jittering, twitching, miserable death right alongside the pet congressman and in full view of those assembled.

The son of one of the guests who had been invited for the gratis opening week was a second-year med student, and he had performed an emergency tracheotomy in the kitchen. Either he was too late to begin with or his hand shook at a critical moment; in either case the results were the same. The man was dead, and before the end of the week, half the guests had departed.

Bob T. mourned to his wife that he had never seen or heard of such a spectacular run of bad luck.

"Are you so sure that bad luck is all it is?" She responded, only six months away from her own death now.

"What else, Sarah? What else?"

"You’ve put that hotel up in the tabernacle of your heart!" She assured him in a shrill voice. "Built it on the bones of your first-born son!"

Mention of Boyd still made his throat roughen, even a year later. "Sarah, Boyd is buried in Denver, next to your own mother."

"But he died here! He died here! And how much is it costing you, Bob T.? How much have you sunk into the wretched place that we’ll never get back?"

"I’ll get it back."

Then his unlettered wife, who had once kept house for him in a one-room log cabin, had spoken prophecy to him:

"You’ll die a poor and sorry man, Bob T. Watson, before you see the first pennyworth of profit from that place."

She had died of influenza, and took her place between her son and her mother.

The season of 1911 had begun just as badly. Spring and then summer had come at more normal times, but Bob T.’s younger son, a fourteen-year-old boy named Richard, had brought him the bad news in mid-April, still a full month before the hotel was due to open.

"Daddy," Richard said, "that bastard Grondin has diddled you."

Grondin was the contractor who had paved the sixty miles of road, at a total cost of seventy thousand dollars. He had cut corners and had used substandard material. After an autumn of frost, a winter of freeze, and a spring of thaw, the paving was breaking up in great, rotted chunks. The last sixty miles of the trip to the Overlook would be impassable by buggy, let alone by one of the new flivvers.

The worst thing about it to Bob T.’s mind, the most frightening thing, was that he had spent at least two days of every week supervising Grondin’s work. How could Grondin have slipped the substandard materials past him? How could he have been so blind?

Grondin, of course, was nowhere to be found.

Repaving the roads was more expensive than the original paving had been, because the original paving had to be taken up. It would not serve even as a foundation for the new road. Once again work had to proceed around the clock, entailing overtime wages. There were holdups and snags and confusions. Wagons drawing the materials up from the railroad in Estes Park lost their wheels. Horses burst their hearts trying to draw overloaded wagons up the steep grades. There was a week of rain at the beginning of May. The road was not re-completed until the first week of July, and by then most of the people Bob T. had hoped to draw had made their summer plans and less than half of the Overlook’s one hundred and ten rooms were occupied.

In spite of the panicked clamorings of his accountants – and even his son Richard – Bob T. had refused to lay off any of the hotel’s staff. He would not even let one of the two expensive chefs go (two new chefs; neither of the two from the previous year had come back), although there was barely enough work for one. He was stubbornly convinced that in late July … or August … or even in September when the aspens had begun to turn … that the guests would come, the rich would come with their retainers and their hangers-on and their careless money. The statesmen would come, the machine politicians, the actors and actresses who graced the Broadway stage, the foreign nobility who were always in search of a new and diverting place. They would hear about the gorgeous hotel that had been built for their pleasure at the roof of America, and they would come. But they never came. And when winter put finishes to the Overlook’s second season, only one hundred and six guests had signed the register in three months.

Bob T. sighed and continued to stare out the wide window of the Presidential Suite, where, in 1922, only one President had actually stayed – Woodrow Wilson. And when he had come he had already been a man broken in all the ways a man could be broken – in body, in spirit, in his believability with the people. When Wilson had come here he had been a sorry joke. There had been talk in the country that his wife was actually the President of the United States.

If Sarah hadn’t died, Bob T. thought, tracing aimlessly on the window with the tip of his finger, I might have laid them off, some of them at least. She might have badgered me into it. She might have … but I don’t believe it.

You’ve put that hotel up in the tabernacle of your heart.

The 1912 season had been better. In a manner of speaking, at least; the Overlook had only run eighty thousand dollars in the red. The two previous seasons had cost him over a quarter of a million, not counting the paving of that double … no, triple-damned road. When the 1912 season ended he had been hopefully convinced that the pump had finally been primed, that his whining accountants could finally put away their pots of red ink and begin writing with black.

The 1913 season had been better still – only fifty thousand dollars in losses. He became convinced that they would turn the corner in 1914. That the Overlook was gradually coming into its own.

His head accountant had come to him in September of 1914, while the season still had three weeks to run, and advised that he file for bankruptcy.

"What in the name of God are you talking about?" Bob T. asked.

"I’m talking about nearly two hundred thousand dollars in debts which you cannot hope to repay." The accountant’s name was Rutherford and he was a fussy little man, an Easterner.

"That’s ridiculous," Bob T. said. "Get out of here." His head cook Geroux would be in soon. They were going to plan the menu for the closing three nights, what Bob T. had conceived of as the Overlook Festival.

The accountant put a thin sheaf of papers down on Bob T.’s desk and left.

Three hours later, after the cook had left, Bob T. found himself looking at the papers. Never mind them, he told himself. Into the wastebasket with them. I'll pink the little bastard, him with his Boston accent and his three-piece suits. He was nothing but an incompetent tenderfoot. And did you keep folks on your payroll after they advised you to go into bankruptcy? It was laughable.

He had picked up the papers Rutherford had left, to file them in the circular file, and found himself looking at them. What he saw was enough to make his blood stop in his veins.

On top was a bill from the Keystone Paving Works of Golden. Principal plus interest in the sum of seventy thousand dollars. Account due on receipt of bill. Below that, a bill from the Denver Electrical Outfitters, Inc., who had wired the Overlook for electricity and had installed not one but two gigantic power generators in the cavernous basement. All of this had happened in the late fall of 1913 when his son Richard had assured him that electricity was not going to go away, and that soon his guests would come to expect it, not as a luxury but as a necessity. That bill was in the sum of eighteen thousand dollars.

Bob T. flicked through the remainder of the papers with growing horror. A building maintenance bill, a landscaping bill, the second well he had sunk, the contractors who were even now putting in a health room, the contractors who had just finished the two greenhouses, and last … last, an itemization in Rutherford’s neat and ruthless hand of salaries outstanding.

Fifteen minutes later, Rutherford was standing before him again.

"It can’t be this bad," Bob T. whispered hoarsely.

"It is worse," Rutherford said. "If my estimates are correct, you will finish this season twenty thousand dollars or better in the red."

"Only twenty? If we can hold out until next year, we can turn the corner--."

"There is no way we can do that," Rutherford said patiently. "The Overlook’s accounts are not depleted, Mr. Watson, they are empty. I even closed out the petty cash account last Thursday afternoon so I could finish making up the staff’s pay envelopes. The checking accounts are likewise empty. Your mining interest in Haggle Notch is closed out, as per your order this July. That is everything …" Rutherford’s eyes gleamed with brief hope. "That is, everything I know of."

"It’s everything," Bob T. agreed dully, and the hope in Rutherford’s eyes was extinguised. Bob T. sat up a little straighter. "I’ll go to Denver tomorrow. I’ll see about a second mortgage on the hotel."

"Mr. Watson," Rutherford said with a curious gentleness. "You took the second mortgage last winter."

And so he had. How could he have forgotten a thing like that? Bob T. wondered with real fright. The same way he had forgotten two hundred thousand dollars worth of payment due? Just forgotten it? When a man started "just forgetting" things like that, it was time for that man to get out of business before he was pushed out.

But he would not let the Overlook go.

"I’ll get a third," he said. "Bill Steeves will give me a third."

"No, I don’t believe he will," Rutherford said.

"What do you mean, you don’t believe he will, you little Boston bean?" Bob T. roared. "Billy Steeves and me go back to 1890 together! I got him his start in business … helped to capitalize his bank … kept my money in with him in ’94 when everybody west of the Mississippi was shitting in their drawers! He’ll give me a tenth mortgage, or I’ll know the reason why!"

Rutherford looked at Bob T. and wondered what he should say, what he could say that the old man didn’t already know. Could he tell him that William Steeves had put his position as President of the First Mercantile Bank of Denver in severe jeopardy by granting the second mortgage when the situation at the Overlook was clearly hopeless? That Steeves had done it anyway under the ridiculous conviction that he owed Bob T. Watson a debt (to Rutherford’s precision-balanced mind the only real debt was a debt that had been contracted for in triplicate)? Could he tell Watson that even if Steeves cut his own throat and agreed to try and get him a third mortgage that he would succeed in doing nothing but putting himself on the severely depressed executive job market? That even if the unthinkable happened and the mortgage were issued, it would not be even enough to clear the outstanding debts?

Surely the old man must know those things.

Old man, Rutherford mused. Surely he can’t be more than fifty, but right at this minute he looks more like seventy-five. What is there to tell him? That his wife was right, maybe, that the creditors were right. The hotel had sucked him dry. It had stolen his business acumen, his savvy, even his common sense. You needed a special kind of sense to survive in American business, a special kind of sight. And now Bob T. Watson was blind. It was the hotel that had blinded him and made him old.

Rutherford said, "I believe the time has come for me to thank you for my two years of employment and give my notice, Mr. Watson. I’ll waive any further emolument." That was a bitter joke.

"Go on, then," Bob T. said. His face was gray and drawn. "You don’t belong in the west anyway. You don’t understand what the west is all about. You are just a cheap tin Eastern chamberpot with a time-clock for a mind. Get out of here."

Bob T. took the stack of accounts due, ripped them in half, in fourths, and with a clench that went all the way up his arms to his shoulders, in eighths. He threw the pieces in Rutherford’s face.

"Get out!" He yelled. "Go on back to Baaaston! I’ll still be running this hotel in 1940! Me and my son Richard! Get out! Get out!"

Bob. T. turned away from the window and looked thoughtfully at the large double bed where President Wilson and his wife had slept … if they had slept. It seemed to Bob T. that a great many people who came to the Overlook slept very poorly.

I’ll still be running this hotel in 1940!

Well, in a way that might be true. I just might. He went into the living room, a tall, stooped man, mostly bald now, wearing carpenter’s overalls and heavy workshoes instead of the expensive Western boots he had once worn. There was a hammer in one pocket and a keychain in the other, and on the ring attached to the chain were all the keys to the hotel. Better than fifty in all, including a different passkey for each wing of each floor, but none of them were labelled. He knew them all by sight and by touch.

The Overlook had not wanted for a buyer, and Bob T. supposed it never would. There was something about the place that reminded him of that old Greek story about Homer and the sirens on the rock. Businessmen (the Homers of the 20th century) who were otherwise sane and hardheaded, became irrationally convinced that they could take the place over and prosper beyond their wildest dreams. This pleased Bob T. to no end. It was finding out that he wasn’t alone in his craziness, it seemed. Or maybe it was just knowing that the Overlook would never stand empty and deserted. He didn’t think he could have borne that.

Despite Rutherford’s protests that he could only salvage something by declaring bankruptcy and letting the bank sell the Overlook, Bob T. had sold it himself. He had grown more and more fond of his son Richard – perhaps he would never be able to fill Boyd’s shoes but he was a good, hardworking boy and now that his mother was dead they only had each other – and he was not going to let the boy grow up with the stigma of a bankruptcy case hanging over his head.

There had been three interested parties and Bob T. had held on grimly until he got his price, always staying just one jump ahead of the baying creditors who wanted to bring him down and divide the spoils up among themselves. He had called a hundred old debts, some of them going back to his father’s time. To keep the Overlook out of the bank’s hands and in his own he had browbeaten a widow into hysteria, he had threatened an Albuquerque newspaper publisher with exposure (the newspaper publisher had a penchant for young, pre-pubescent, actually – girls), he had gotten down on his knees once and begged a man who had been so revolted that he had given Bob T. a check for ten thousand dollars just to get him off his knees and out of his office.

None of it was enough to blot away the rising tide of red ink – nothing could do that, he recognized – but he mustered enough in that winter of 1914-15 to keep his hotel out of receivership.

In the spring he had dealt with James Parris, the man who had begun life as a common shyster. Bob T.’s price – a ridiculously low one – had been one hundred and eighty thousand dollars plus lifetime jobs for himself and his son … as the Overlook’s maintenance men.

"You’re insane, man," Parris had said. "Is that what you want to avoid bankruptcy for? So the Denver papers can report you’re working as a janitor in the hotel you once owned?" And he reiterated: "You’re insane."

Bob T. was adamant. He would not leave the hotel. And for all his cold businessman’s talk, he knew that Parris would give in. The cold talk did not hide the funny, eager look in Parris’s eyes. Didn’t Bob T. know that look well enough? Hadn’t he seen it in his own mirror every day for the last six years?

"I don’t have to dicker with you over it," Parris had replied, affecting indifference. "If I wait another two months, perhaps only three weeks, you’ll crash. And then I can deal with the First Mercantile."

"And they’ll charge you a quarter of a million if they charge you a penny," Bob T. replied.

For that Parris had no answer. He could pay the two Watsons’ salaries for the rest of their lives out of the money he would save by dealing with this lunatic instead of the bank.

So the deal was made. The one hundred and eighty thousand dollars at last mopped up the red ink. The road was paid for, and the electricity, and the landscaping, and all the rest. Bankruptcy was avoided. James Parris took over in the manager’s office upstairs. Bob T. and Dick Watson moved downstairs from their suite in the west wing of the third floor to an apartment in the huge cellar. Their domain was behind a door that said Maintenance Only – Keep Out!

If James Parris had ever thought that Bob T.’s insanity would extend to his work, he was wrong. He was the ideal maintenance man, and his son, who was more fitted for this life than one of affluence and college and business things that made his head hurt to think of them, was his eager apprentice. "If we’re janitors," Bob T. had once told his son, "then that thing going on over in France is nothing but a barroom squabble."

They kept the place clean, yes, Bob T. was something of a fanatic about that. But they did more. They kept the generators in perfect running condition. From June of 1915 to this day, October 7th, 1922, there had never been a power outage. When the telephones had been installed, Bob T. and his son Richard had put in the switchboard themselves, working from manuals they had pored over night after late night in preparation. They kept the roof in perfect condition, replaced broken panes of glass, turned the rug in the dining room once a month, painted, plastered, and oversaw the installation of the elevator in 1917.

And they lived there in the winter.

"Not too exciting up there in the winter, is it?" The bell-captain had asked them once while they were on a coffee break. "What do you do, hibernate?"

"We keep busy," Bob T. had answered shortly. And Richard had only offered an uneasy grin, uneasy, yes, because every hotel had a skeleton or two in the closet, and sometimes the skeletons rattled their bones.

One late January afternoon when Bob T. had been putting a piece of glass over the top of the reception desk, a terrible noise had come from the dining room, a horrible choking noise that had encased him in horror and had taken him back over the years to that first night, when his pet congressman had choked to death on a piece of steak.

He stood stock-still, willing the noise to stop, but the terrible strangling noises went on and on and he thought, if I went in there now I’d see him, staggering around from table to table like some awful beggar at a king’s feast, his eyes bulging, begging someone to help him –

His entire body broke out in gooseflesh – even the thin skin on his back knobbed up into bumps. And as suddenly as it had begun, the choking sound sank to a breathless, gargling moan, and then to nothing.

Bob T. broke the paralysis that had gripped him and lunged for the big double doors that gave on the dining room. Surely time had taken some sort of twist, and when he got inside he would see the congressman stretched out on the floor with the guests gathered helplessly around him. Bob T. would call out as he had on that long-ago day, "Is there a doctor in the house?" and the second-year med student would brush through the crowd and say, "Let’s take him into the kitchen."

But when he pushed through the double doors, the dining room was empty, all the tables in one corner with their chairs upturned on them, and there was no sound but the wind sighing high around the eaves. Outside it was snowing, obscuring the mountains for a moment and then revealing them for another moment, like the flap of ragged curtains.

There had been other things. Dick reported hearing knocking noises from inside the elevator, as if somebody had been caught in there and was rapping to be let out. Only when he opened the door with the special key and slid back the brass gate, the elevator was empty. One night they had both awakened thinking they heard a woman sobbing somewhere above them, in the lobby it sounded like, and went up to find nothing.

These things had all happened in the off-season, and Bob T. didn’t have to tell Dick not to talk about them. There were enough folks, Mr.-Hihg-and-Mighty-Parris among them, who thought they were crazy already.

But sometimes Bob T. wondered if things didn’t sometimes happen in season. If some of the staff and some of the guests hadn’t heard things themselves … or seen things. Parris had maintained the quality of the service, and had even added a feature to it that Bob T. had never thought of: a limousine which made a run from The Longhorn House in downtown Denver right up to the Overlook once every three days. He had kept prices low in spite of the inflation the Kaiser’s war had brought on, hoping to build the trade. Hoping to build a name. He had added a swimming pool to the hotel’s other formidable recreation features.

The people who came to the Overlook to enjoy these features rarely re-booked for a second season, though. Nor did they give the Overlook benefit of that best and cheapest advertising, word-of-mouth, by recommending it to their friends. Some of them would book for a month and then leave in two weeks, shaking their heads in an almost embarrassed way and brushing aside Parris’s earnest questions: Was something wrong with the food? You were treated poorly? The service was slow? The housekeeping was sloppy? It seemed it was none of those things. The people left and rarely came back.

Bob T. had been pleased to see the Overlook become something of an obsession with Parris. The man was going gray over it, trying to figure out what was wrong and having no luck.

Had the Overlook ever had a season in the black between 1915 and 1922? Bob T. wondered now, as he sat in the Presidential Suite living room and looked at his reflection. That was between Parris and his accountant, of course, and they had been a couple of close ones. But it was Bob T.’s guess that it never had. Maybe Parris had never let his obsession get out of hand as the Overlook’s owner and builder had done (Bob T. sometimes thought these days that he had tried to ride and break whatever jinx had been built into his hotel the way his grandfather would have ridden and broken a wild mustang pony), but he was quite sure that Parris had pumped large amounts of money into the hotel every season without getting anything back, as Bob T. himself had done.

You’ll die a poor and sorry man before you see the first pennyworth of profit from that place.

Sarah had told him that. Sarah had been right. She had been right for Parris, too. The shyster might not have been stony broke, but he surely must have been sorry he had ever hooked up to this combination when he died of an apparent heart attack while strolling the grounds this August past.

Bob T.’s boy (although Dick wasn’t such a boy now; old enough to drink and smoke and vote, old enough to plan on getting married this December) had himself found Parris early in the morning. Dick had been down in the topiary by the playground with his hedge-trimmers at seven AM and there Parris had been, stretched out stone dead between two of the hedge lions.

It was funny about that topiary; it had become the Overlook’s trademark in a way, and it had come into being in a very offhand fashion. It had been the landscaper’s idea to fringe the playground with hedge animals. He had submitted a sketch to Bob T. showing the playground area surrounded by lions, buffalo, a rabbit, a cow, and so on. Bob T. had scratched a go-ahead on the memo accompanying the sketch without a pause. He couldn’t remember that he had even thought twice about it, one way or another. But it had often been the playground topiary that the guests went away talking about instead of the meals or the spare-no-expense decor of the rooms and suites. Bob T. supposed it was just another example of how nothing at the Overlook had gone as he had expected.

Parris, they figured, must have gone out for a late evening stroll across the front lawn and the putting green and through the playground to the road. On the way back the heart attack had struck him down. There had been no one to miss him, because his wife had left him in 1920.

In a way, that had been the Overlook’s fault, too. In the years 1915- 1917, Parris had spent no more than two weeks of the season here. His wife, a sulky, pretty thing who had been something on Broadway, didn’t like the place – or so it was rumored. In 1918 they had spent a month, and according to the gossip there had been several bitter fights over it. She saying that she wanted to go to the Bahamas or to Cuba. He asking sarcastically if she wanted to catch some kind of jungle rot. She saying that if he didn’t take her she would go on her own. He saying that if she did that she could find someone else to support her expensive tastes. She stayed. That year.

In 1919, Parris and his wife stayed for six weeks, occupying a suite on the third floor. The hotel was getting hold of him, Bob T. thought with some satisfaction. After awhile it got so you felt like a gambler who couldn’t leave the table.

Anyway, Parris had been planning on a longer stay, and then, at the end of their sixth week, the woman had gone into hysterics. Two of the upstairs maids had heard her, weeping and screaming and begging for him to take her away, to take her anyplace. They had left that same afternoon, Parris’s brow like thunder, his wife’s pretty face pale and devoid of make-up, her eyes resting like dark raisins in the hollows of her eyesockets, as if she had been sleeping badly or not at all. Parris had not even stopped to confer with his manager or with Bob T. And when he had shown up in June of 1921, it had been sans wife. The head housekeeper’s sister lived in New Jersey, and she sent out one of those gossip papers saying that Parris’s wife had asked for a divorce on the grounds of "mental cruelty," whatever that meant.

"What I guess it means," Harry Durker, the groundskeeper told Bob T. over bourbon, "is that she couldn’t pan out the gold as fast as she thought she could."

Or was it the Overlook? Bob T. wondered. Anyway, didn’t matter. Parris had been up here on opening day of the season just past, the Overlook’s thirteenth, and he hadn’t left until they carried him off in the Sidewinder funeral hack. The little shyster’s will was still in probate, but that matter was going to be quite straightforward. Parris’s hotel manager had gotten a letter from the firm of New York lawyers acting as executors, and the letter had mentioned the Brandywine brothers from Texas, who were expected to buy. They wanted to keep Parris’s manager on if he wanted to stay, and at a substantially higher salary. But the manager had already told Bob T. (also over bourbon) that he was going to turn the offer down.

"This place is never going to make a go," he told Bob T. "I don’t care if Jesus Christ Himself bought the place and got John the Baptist to manage it. I feel more like a cemetary caretaker than a hotel manager. It’s like something died up in the walls and everybody who comes here can smell it from time to time."

Yes, Bob T. thought, that’s exactly what it’s like. Only ain’t it funny how something like that can sometimes get a hold on a man?

He stood up and stretched. Sitting here and thinking over old times was all very well and good, but it wasn’t getting the work done. And there was a lot of it this winter. New elevator cables to be put in. A new service shed to be built out back, and that had to be done before the snow flew and cut them off. The shutters had to be put up, of course, and –

Bob T., on his way to the door, stopped dead still.

He heard, or thought he heard, Boyd’s voice, high and young and full of joy. It was faint with distance, but unmistakably Boyd’s. Coming from the direction of what was now the topiary.

"Come on, Rascal! Come on! Come on! Go it!"

Rascal? The name of Boyd’s pony.

Like a man in a dream, like a man caught in some slow and slushy delirium, Bob T. turned to the wide window. Again that curious feeling of time doubling back on itself. When he reached the window and looked out he would not see the hedge animals because the year was 1908 and the topiary had not yet been set in. Instead he would see a muddy stretch of hill clumped and clotted with building materials, he would see a pile of new lumber where the entrance to the playground would later be, he would see Boyd racing toward that pile of lumber on board Rascal, he would see them go up together, he would see Rascal’s rear feet catch the top of the pile, and he would see them tumble down, together with all grace gone, and hope of life with it.

Bob T. staggered toward the window where he would see these things, his face dough-pale, his mouth a slack wound. He could hear – surely it was not only in his mind? -- hoofbeats drumming on muddy ground.

"Go it, Rascal! Get up, boy! Get--"

A thudding, flat crack. And then the screaming began, the high, unhuman scream of the pony, the rattle of boards, the final thud.

"Boyd!" Bob T. screamed. "Oh my God, Boyd! BOYD!"

He struck the window forcibly, shattering three of the six panes of glass, drawing a jagged though shallow cut across the back of his right hand. The glass fell outward, turning over and over, twinkling in the sun, to strike and shatter on the outsloping second floor roof below.

He saw the lawn, green and manicured, sloping smoothly down to the putting green and beyond it to the topiary. The three hedge lions that guarded the gravel path were crouched in their usual half-threatening, half-playful postures. The hedge rabbit stood on its hind legs with its ears perked up cockily. The hedge cow stood as was its wont, cropping at the grass, now with a few autumn-yellow aspen leaves caught on its head and stuck to its sides.

No pile of lumber. No Boyd. No Rascal.

Running footsteps up the hall. Bob T. turned to the door just as it opened and Dick hurried in with his tool box in one hand.

"Daddy, are you all right?"

"Fine."

"You’re bleeding."

"Cut my hand," Bob T. said. "Tripped over my own stupid feet and hit that window. Guess I made us some work."

"But you’re all right?"

"Fine, I told you," he said testily.

"I was down at the end of the hall, looking at those elevator cables. I thought I heard someone outside."

Bob T. looked at his son sharply.

"You didn’t hear anyone, did you, daddy?"

"No," Bob T. said. He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and wrapped it around his bleeding hand. "Who’d be up here this time of year?"

"That’s right," Dick said. And his eyes and his father’s eyes met with a kind of electric shock, and in that second they both saw more than they might perhaps have wished. They dropped their eyes simultaneously.

"Come on," Bob T. said gruffly. "Let’s see if we’ve got the glass to fix this bastard."

They went out together and Bob T. spared a single backward glance at the living room of the Presidential Suite with its silk wallpaper and its heavy furnishings dreaming in the late afternoon sun.

Guess they’ll have to carry me out in the meatwagon, the same as they did Parris, he thougtht. Only way they’ll get me to leave. He looked with love at his son, who had drawn ahead of him.

Dick, too. This place has got us, I guess.

It was a thought that made him feel loathing and love at the same time.