multimillions instead of just one or two million by this time next
year. Of course there were some weak sisters who claimed the
market was riding for a fall, but no one had ever called Lottie
Kilgallon a weak sister.
Lottie Kilgallon. Pillsbury now at least that's the way I'll have to
sign my checks, of course. But inside I'll always be Lottie
Kilgallon. Because he's never going to touch me Not inside where
it counts.
The most tiresome thing about this first contest of her marriage
was that Bill actually liked the Overlook. He was up even, day at
two minutes past the crack of dawn, disturbing what ragged bits of
sleep she had managed after the restless nights, staring eagerly out
at the sunrise like some sort of disgusting Greek nature boy. He
had been hiking two or three times, he had gone on several nature
rides with other guests, and bored her almost to the point of
screaming with stories about the horse he rode on these jaunts, a
bay mare named Tessie. He had tried to get her to go on these
outings with him, but Lottie refused. Riding meant slacks, and her
posterior was just a trifle too-wide for slacks. The idiot had also
suggested that she go hiking with him and some of the others - the
caretaker's son doubled as a guide, Bill enthused, and he knew a
hundred trails. The amount of game you saw, Bill said, would
make you think it was 1829, instead of a hundred years later. Lottie
had dumped cold water on this idea too.
"I believe, darling, that all hikes should be one-way, you see."
"One-way?" His wide Anglo-Saxon brow crippled and croggled
into its usual expression of befuddlement. "How can you have a
one-way hike, Lottie?"
"By hailing a taxi to take you home when your feet begin to hurt,"
she replied coldly,
The barb was wasted. He went without her, and came back
glowing. The stupid bastard was getting a tan.
She had not even enjoyed their evenings of bridge in the
downstairs recreation room, and that was most unlike her. She was
something of a barracuda at bridge, and if it had been ladylike to
play for stakes in mixed company, she could have brought a cash
dowry to her marriage (not that she would have, of course). Bill
was a good bridge partner, too; he had both qualifications: He
understood the basic rules and he allowed Lottie to dominate him.
She thought it was poetic justice that her new husband spent most
of their bridge evenings as the dummy.
Their partners at the Overlook were the Compsons occasionally,
the Vereckers more frequently. Dr. Verecker was in his early 70s, a
surgeon who had retired after a near-fatal heart attack. His wife
smiled a lot, spoke softly, and had eyes like shiny nickels. They
played only adequate bridge, but they kept beating Lottie and Bill.
On the occasions when the men played against the women, the
men ended up trouncing Lottie and Malvina Verecker. When
Lottie and Dr. Verecker played Bill and Malvina, she and the
doctor usually won, but there was no pleasure in it because Bill
was a dullard and Malvina, could not see the game of bridge as
anything but a social tool.
Two nights before, after the doctor and his wife had made a bid of
four clubs that, they had absolutely no right to make, Lottie had
mussed the cards in a sudden flash of pique that was very unlike
her. She usually kept her feelings under much better control.
"You could have led into my spades on that third trick!" she rattled
at Bill. "That would have put a stop to it right there!"
"But dear," said Bill, flustered , "I thought you were thin in
spades."
'If I had been thin in spades, I shouldn't have bid two of them,
should I? Why I continue to play this game with you I don't.
know!"
The Vereckers blinked at them in mild surprise. Later that evening
Mrs. Verecker, she of the nickel-bright eyes, would tell her
husband that she had thought them such a nice couple, so loving,
but when she rumpled the cards like that she had looked just like a
shrew.
Bill was staring at her with jaws agape.
"I'm very sorry," said Lottie, gathering up the reins of her control
and giving them an inward shake. "I'm off my feed a little, I
suppose. I haven't been sleeping well."
"That's a pity," said the doctor. "Usually this mountain air-we're
almost 12,000 feet above sea level, you know is very conducive to
good rest. Less oxygen, you know. The body doesn't-"
"I've had bad dreams," Lottie told him shortly.
And so she had. Not just bad dreams but nightmares. She had
never been much of one to dream (which said something
disgusting and Freudian about, her psyche, no doubt), even as a
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