“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.