The Shining: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

As Watson talks about the furnace, Ullman’s words run through Jack’s mind. “You lost your temper,” he’d said. Watson moves on to the boiler, and Jack follows, but his mind is on Danny. It had happened so fast, but it had seemed like an eternity. Jack’s papers—most importantly the manuscript of his play—had been strewn about the study, and spilled beer was foaming everywhere. Danny, at three years old, stood grinning in the middle of the mess, and Jack lost it. He grabbed Danny’s arm, spun him around to spank him, and heard the sickening snap of Danny’s bone and his son’s instant screams. Jack was immediately remorseful, but when Wendy saw Danny’s arm hanging at an extreme angle, Jack knew that she hated him.

As Watson’s voice cuts through Jack’s thoughts, Jack runs his hand over his lips. He is badly craving a drink and wonders if this feeling will ever leave him. Watson is pointing at the boiler’s pressure gauge, which measures in pounds per square inch. The boiler is old, Watson says, and doesn’t have an automatic shut off. Jack will want to keep the gauge at 50 or 60 to alternately heat the wings of the hotel—the west wing one day, and then the central wing, followed by the east wing—like Ullman wants. “I hate that little fucker,” Watson says of Ullman. “Yap-yap-yap, all the livelong day.”

Watson tells Jack that the thermostats in the hotel are only for show. Jack will have to come down to boiler twice a day and check the gauge. “She creeps,” Watson says. He tells Jack that the boiler is going to blow the whole place up one day, but Ullman is cheap and says the hotel can’t afford a new one until 1982. As long as Jack checks the gauge twice a day and dumps the boiler when it gets too hot, he and his family will be just fine. Watson again stresses how important checking the gauge is and warns Jack that if he doesn’t, his family will “wake up on the fuckin moon.”  

The boiler is rated to 250 psi, Watson tells Jack, but Watson wouldn’t stand next to it at 180. As Watson moves on to the plumbing, Jack looks at the mounds of cardboard boxes and papers stacked in the basement. There are layers of records, invoices, and receipts, and Jack thinks the Overlook’s entire history is rotting in the old boxes. The plumbing freezes occasionally, Watson continues, but if Jack hits the frozen portion of pipe with direct heat and runs the faucets, he should be fine. Jack interrupts Watson and asks about Grady, the first winter caretaker.

Watson nods. Grady was a bad guy, he says. A ranger from the National Park found them. Grady stashed the bodies of his wife and daughters in the west wing to freeze before he shot himself. Ullman came back from Florida, where he runs a resort during the off-season, and managed to keep the murder-suicide mostly out of the papers. There wasn’t much that could be done about the obituaries, Watson says, but that wasn’t bad considering the hotel’s reputation and history of scandals. Jack’s interest is piqued.

All big hotels have scandals, Watson tells Jack, and ghosts, too. Lots of people come and go in hotels, and some of those people die of heart attacks or strokes. Plus, hotels are superstitious. They don’t have a 13th floor or room 13, and they don’t hang mirrors on the backs of doors. In fact, Watson says, a woman named Mrs. Massey, died in the hotel just this past July. She was at least 60 years old and shacked up with a kid who wasn’t more than 17. One night, the kid came to the desk and said that his “wife” was “indisposed”—which meant she was drunk—and he was going into town. He left in Mrs. Massey’s Porsche and never came back.

The next day, Ullman offered to call the police, but Mrs. Massey refused. She went to the Colorado Lounge and drank all day. At 10:30 that night, she went up to her room and took 30 sleeping pills. Her husband, a hotshot lawyer from New York, convinced the coroner to say she died of a heart attack. A week later, a maid named Delores Vickery went to clean the room where Mrs. Massey stayed, and Delores screamed and promptly fainted. She said she saw Mrs. Massey’s ghost, a purple and bloated corpse, in the bathtub. Mr. Ullman had given Delores two weeks’ pay and fired her.

Indeed, Watson tells Jack, about 40 or 50 people have died in the hotel since Watson's grandfather built it in 1910, but Watson has never seen a ghost. Watson directs Jack toward the stairs. He will show him the equipment shed next. The shingles are in the shed, Watson says, and Ullman wants Jack to reshingle the west roof before the snow falls. Watson goes on about Ullman, warning Jack how cheap Ullman is and that he will weasel free work out of Jack, but Jack is thinking about Grady, stuck in the snow and slowly going insane. Jack wonders if Grady’s family screamed when he killed them. As Jack follows Watson up the stairs, he thinks that he could use a drink—or 1,000 drinks.