(The drop, ah yes, the drop-)
The wingblades on Hallorann's left, fully four feet higher than the Electra's roof, flirted by with no more than an inch or two to spare. Until the plow had actually cleared him, Hallorann had thought a crash inevitable. A prayer which was half an inarticulate apology to the boy flitted through his mind like a torn rag.
Then the plow was past, its revolving blue lights glinting and flashing in Hallorann's rearview mirror.
He jockeyed the Buick's steering wheel back to the left, but nothing doing. The scoot had turned into a skid, and the Buick was floating dreamily toward the lip of the drop, spurning snow from under its mudguards.
He flicked the wheel back the other way, in the skid's direction, and the car's front and rear began to swap places. Panicked now, he pumped the brake hard, and then felt a hard bump. In front of him the road was gone... he was looking into a bottomless chasm of swirling snow and vague greenish-gray pines far away and far below.
(I'm going holy mother of Jesus I'm going off)
And that was where the car stopped, canting forward at a thirty-degree angle, the left fender jammed against a guardrail, the rear wheels nearly off the ground. When Hallorann tried reverse, the wheels only spun helplessly. His heart was doing a Gene Krupa drumroll.
He got out-very carefully he got out-and went around to the Buick's back deck.
He was standing there, looking at the back wheels helplessly, when a cheerful voice behind him said: "Hello there. fella. You must be shit right out of your mind."
He turned around and saw the plow forty yards further down the road, obscured in the blowing snow except for the raftered dark brown streak of its exhaust and the revolving blue lights on top. The driver was standing just behind him, dressed in a long sheepskin coat and a slicker over it. A blue-and-white pinstriped engineer's cap was perched on his head, and Hallorann could hardly believe it was staying on in the teeth of the wind.
(Glue. It sure-God must be glue.)
"Hi," he said. "Can you pull me back onto the road?"
"Oh, I guess I could," the plow driver said. "What the hell you doing way up here, mister? Good way to kill your ass."
"Urgent business."
"Nothin is that urgent," the plow driver said slowly and kindly, as if speaking to a mental defective. "If you'd 'a hit that post a leetle mite harder, nobody woulda got you out till All Fools' Day. Don't come from these parts, do you?"
"No. And I wouldn't be here unless my business was as urgent as I say."
"That so?" The driver shifted his stance companionably as if they were having a desultory chat on the back steps instead of standing in a blizzard halfway between hoot and holler, with Hallorann's car balanced three hundred feet above the tops of the trees below.
"Where you headed? Estes?"
"No, a place called the Overlook Hotel," Hallorann said. "It's a little way above Sidewinder-"
But the driver was shaking his head dolefully.
"I guess I know well enough where that is," he said. "Mister, you'll never get up to the old Overlook. Roads between Estes Park and Sidewinder is bloody damn hell. It's driftin in right behind us no matter how hard we push. I come through drifts a few miles back that was damn near six feet through the middle. And even if you could make Sidewinder, why, the road's closed from there all the way across to Buckland, Utah. Nope." He shook his head. "Never make it, mister. Never make it at all."
"I have to try," Hallorann said, calling on his last reserves of patience to keep his voice normal. "There's a boy up there-"
"Boy? Naw. The Overlook closes down at the last end of September. No percentage keepin it open longer. Too many shit-storms like this."
"He's the son of the caretaker. He's in trouble."
"How would you know that?"
His patience snapped.
"For Christ's sake are you going to stand there and flap y'jaw at me the rest of the day? I know, I know! Now are you going to pull me back on the road or not?"
"Kind of testy, aren't you?" the driver observed, not particularly perturbed. "Sure, get back in there. I got a chain behind the seat."
Hallorann got back behind the wheel, beginning to shake with delayed reaction now. His hands were numbed almost clear through. He had forgotten to bring gloves.
The plow backed up to the rear of the Buick, and he saw the driver get out with a long coil of chain. Hallorann opened the door and shouted: "What can I do to help?"
"Stay out of the way, is all," the driver shouted back. "This ain't gonna take a blink,"
Which was true. A shudder ran through the Buick's frame as the chain pulled tight, and a second later it was back on the road, pointed more or less toward Estes Park. The plow driver walked up beside the window and knocked on the safety glass. Hallorann rolled down the window.