child. Oh, yes, there had been some pretty humdrum affairs, mostly
he only one she could remember that, came even close to being a
nightmare was one in which she had been delivering a Good
Citizenship speech at the school assembly and had looked down to
discover she had forgotten to put on her dress. Later someone had
told her almost everyone had a dream like that at some point or
another.
The dreams she had had at the Overlook were much worse. It was
not a case of one dream or two repeating themselves with
variations; they were all different. Only the setting of each was
similar: In each one she found herself in a different part of the
Overlook Hotel. Each dream would begin with an awareness on
her part that she was dreaming and that something terrible and
frightening was going to happen to her in the course of the dream.
There was an inevitability about it that was particularly awful.
In one of them she had been hurrying for the elevator because she
was late for dinner, so late that Bill had already gone down before
her in a temper.
She rang for the elevator, which came promptly and was empty
except for the operator. She thought too late that it was odd; at
mealtimes you could barely wedge yourself in. The stupid hotel
was only half full, but the elevator had a ridiculously small
capacity. Her unease heightened as the elevator descended and
continued to descend ... for far too long a time. Surely they must
have reached the lobby or even the basement by now, and still the
operator did not open the doors, and still the sensation of
downward motion continued. She tapped him on the shoulder with
mixed feelings of indignation and panic, aware too late of how
spongy he felt, how strange, like a scarecrow stuffed with rotten
straw. And as he turned his head and grinned at her she saw that
the elevator was being piloted by a dead man, his face a greenish-
white corpselike hue, Ms eyes sunken, his hair under his cap
lifeless and sere. The fingers wrapped around the switch were
fallen away to bones.
Even as she filled her lungs to shriek, the corpse threw the switch
over and uttered, 'Your floor, madam,' in a husky, empty voice.
The door drew open to reveal flames and basalt plateaus and the
stench of brimstone. The elevator operator had taken her to hell.
In another dream it was near the end of the afternoon and she was
on the playground. The light was curiously golden, although the
sky overhead was black with thunderheads. Membranes of shower
danced between two of the saw-toothed peaks further west. It was
like a Brueghel, a moment of sunshine and low pressure. And she
felt something beside her. Moving. Something in the topiary. And
she turned to see with frozen horror that it was the topiary: The
hedge animals had left their places and were creeping toward her,
the lions, the buffalo, even the rabbit that usually looked so comic
and friendly. Their horrid hedge features were bent on her as they
moved slowly toward the playground on their hedge paws, green
and silent and deadly under the black thunderheads.
