Misery

1

“Oh blessed Jesus,” Ia moa ed, a d made a co vulsive moveme t forward. Geoffrey grasped his frie d's arm. The steady beat of the drums pulsed i his head like somethi g heard i a killi g delirium. Bees dro ed arou d them, but o e paused; they simply flew past a d i to the cleari g as if draw by a mag et - which, Geoffrey hough sickly, hey

2

Paul picked up the typewriter and shook it. After a tune, a small piece of steel fell out onto the board across the arms of the wheelchair. He picked it up and looked at it.

It was the letter t. The typewriter had just thrown its t.

He thought: I am going to complain to the management. I am going to not just ask for a new typewriter but fucking demand one. She's got the money - I know she does. Maybe it's squirrelled away in fruit-jars under the barn or maybe it's stuffed in the walls at her Laughing Place, but she's got the dough, and t, my God, the second-most-common letter in the English language -!

Of course he would ask Annie for nothing, much less demand. Once there had been a man who would at least have asked. A man who had been in a great deal more pain, a man who had had nothing to hold onto, not even this shitty book. That man would have asked. Hurt or not, that man had had the guts to at least try to stand up to Annie Wilkes.

He had been that man, and he supposed he ought to be ashamed, but that man had had two big advantages over this one: that man had had two feet… and two thumbs.

Paul sat reflectively for a moment, re-read the last line (mentally filling in the omissions), and then simply went back to work.

3

had been.

“Let me go!” Ian snarled, and turned on Geoffrey, his right hand curling into a fist. His eyes bulged madly from his livid face, and he seemed totally unaware of who was holding him back from his darling. Geoffrey realized with cold certainty that what they had seen when Hezekiah pulled the protective screen of bushes aside had come very close to driving Ian mad. He still tottered on the brink, and the slightest push would send him over. If that happened he would take Misery with him.

“Ian - “

“Let me go, I say!” Ian pulled backward with furious strength, and Hezekiah moaned fearfully. “No boss, make dem bees crazy, dem sting Mis'wee - “ Ian seemed not to hear. Eyes wild and blank, he lashed out at Geoffrey, striking his old friend high on the cheekbone. Black stars rocketed through Geoffrey's head.

In spite of them, he saw Hezekiah beginning to swing the potentially deadly gosha - a sand-filled bag the Bourkas favored for close work - in time to hiss: “No! Let me handle this!” Reluctantly, Hezekiah allowed the gosha to subside to the end of its leather string like a slowing pendulum.

Then Geoffrey's head was rocked back by a fresh blow. This one mashed his lips back against his teeth, and he felt the warm salt-sweet taste of blood begin to seep into his mouth. There was a rough purring sound as Ian's dress shirt, now sun-faded and already torn in a dozen places, began to come apart in Geoffrey's grasp. In another moment he would be free. Geoffrey realized with dazed wonder that it was the same shirt Ian had worn to the Baron and Baroness's dinner party three nights ago… of course it was. There had been no opportunity to change since then, not for Ian, not for any of them. Only three nights ago… but the shirt looked as if Ian had been wearing it for at least three years, and Geoffrey felt as if at least three hundred had passed since the party. Only three nights ago, he thought again with stupid wonder, and then Ian was raining blows into his face.

“Let me go, damn you!” Ian drove his bloody fist into Geoffrey's face again and again - his friend for whom, in his right” mind, he would have died.

“Do you want to demonstrate your love for her by killing her?” Geoffrey asked quietly. “If you want to do that, then by all means, old boy, knock me senseless.” Ian's fist hesitated. Something at least approximating sense came back into his terrified, maddened gaze.

“I must go to her,” he murmured like a man in a dream. “I'm sorry I hit you, Geoffrey - truly sorry, my dear old man, and I'm sure you know it - but I must… You see her… “ He looked again, as if to confirm the dreadfulness of the sight, and again made as if to rush to where Misery had been tied to a post in a jungle clearing, her arms over her head. Glimmering on her wrists and fastening her to the lowest branch of the eucalyptus, which was the only tree in the clearing, was something the Bourkas had apparently taken a fancy to before sending Baron Heidzig into the mouth of the idol and to his undoubtedly terrible death: the Baron's blued steel handcuffs.

This time it was Hezekiah who grabbed Ian, but the bushes rustled again and Geoffrey looked into the clearing, his breath momentarily catching in his throat, as a bit of fabric may catch on a thorn - he felt like a man who must walk up a rocky hill with a load of decayed and dangerously volatile explosives in his arms. One sting, he thought. Just one and it's all over for her “No, boss mussun”,” Hezekiah was saying with a kind of terrified patience. “It like d'utha boss be sayin”… if you go out dere, de bees wake up from dey dream. And if de bees wake, it doan matter for her if she be dine of one sting or one-de-one t'ousan” sting. If de bees wake up from dey dream we all die, but she die firs” and de mos” horrible.” Little by little Ian relaxed between the two men, one of them black, the other white. His head turned toward the clearing with dreadful reluctance, as if he did not wish to look and yet could not forbear to.

“Then what are we to do? What are we ft do for my poor darling?” I don't know came to Geoffrey's lips, and in his own state of terrible distress, he was barely able to bite them back. Not for the first time it occurred to him that Ian's possession of the woman Geoffrey loved just as dearly (if secretly) allowed Ian to indulge in an odd sort of selfishness and an almost womanly hysteria that Geoffrey himself must forgo; after all, to the rest of the world he was only Misery's friend.

Yes, just her friend, he thought with half-hysterical irony, and then his own eyes were drawn back to the clearing. To his friend.

Misery wore not a stitch of clothing, yet Geoffrey thought that even the most prudish church-thrice-a-week village biddy could not have faulted her for indecency. The hypothetical old prude might have run screaming from the sight of Misery, but her screams would have been caused by terror and revulsion rather then outraged propriety. Misery wore not a stitch of clothing, but she was far from naked.

She was dressed in bees. From the tips of her toes to the crown of her chestnut hair, she was dressed in bees. She seemed almost to be wearing some strange nun's habit - strange because it moved and undulated across the swells of her breasts and hips even though there was not even a ghost of a breeze. Likewise, her face seemed encased in a wimple of almost Mohammedan modesty - only her blue eye peered our of the mask of bees which crawled sluggishy over her face, hiding mouth and nose and chin and brows. More bees, giant Africa browns, the most poisonous and bad-tempered bees in all the world, crawled back and forth over the steel bracelet's before joining the living gloves on Misery's hands.

As Geoffrey watched, more and more bees flew into the clearing from all points of the compass - yet it was clear to him, even in his current distraction, that most of them were coming from the west, where the great dark stone face of the goddess loomed.

The drums pulsed their steady rhythm, in it's way as much a soporific as the sleepy drone of the bees. But Geoffrey knew how deceptive that sleepiness was, had seen what happened to the Baroness, and only thanked God that Ian had been spared that… and the sound of that sleepy hum suddenly rising to a furious buzz-saw squeal… a sound which had at first muffled and then drowned the woman's agonized dying screams. She had been a vain and foolish creature, dangerous as well - she had almost gotten them killed when she had freed Stringfellow's bushmaster - but silly or not, foolish or not, dangerous or not, no man or women deserved to die like that.

In his mind Geoffrey echoed Ian's question: What are we going to do? What are we to do for our poor darling?

Hezekiah said: “Nothing can do now, boss - but she is in no danger. As long as de drums dey beat, de bees will sleep. And Mis'wess, she is goan sleep, too.

Now the bees covered her in a thick and moving blanket; her eyes, open but unseeing, seemed to be receding into a living cave of crawling, stumbling, droning bees.

“And if the drums stop?” Geoffrey asked in a low almost strengthless voice, and just then, the drums did.

For a mom h hr of h m

4

Paul looked unbelievingly at the last line, then picked the Royal up - he had gone on lifting it like some weird barbell when she was out of the room, God knew why - and shook it again. The keys clittered, and then another chunk of metal fell out on the board which served as his desk.

Outside he could hear the roaring sound of Annie's bright-blue riding lawnmower - she was around front, giving the grass a good trim so those cockadoodie Roydmans wouldn't have anything to talk about in town.

He set the typewriter down, then rocked it up so he could fish out this new surprise. He looked at it in the strong late afternoon sunlight slanting in through the window. His expression of disbelief never altered.

Printed in raised and slightly ink-stained metal on the head of the key was:

E

e

Just to add to the fun, the old Royal had now thrown the most frequently used letter in the English language.

Paul looked at the calendar. The picture was of a flowered meadow and the month said May, but Paul kept his own dates now on a piece of scrap paper, and according to his home-made calendar it was June 21.

Roll out those lazy hazy crazy days of summer, he though sourly, and threw the key-hammer in the general direction of the wastebasket.

Well, what do I do now? he thought, but of course he knew what came next. Longhand. That was what came next.

But not now. Although he had been tearing along like house afire a few seconds ago, anxious to get Ian, Geoffrey, and the ever-amusing Hezekiah caught in the Bourkas ambush so that the entire party could be transported to the caves behind the face of the idol for the rousing finale, he was suddenly tired. The hole in the paper had closed with an adamant bang.

Tomorrow.

He would go to longhand tomorrow.

Fuck longhand. Complain to the management, Paul.

But he would do no such thing. Annie had gotten to too weird.

He listened to the monotonous snarl of the riding lawnmower, saw her shadow, and, as so often happened when he thought of how weird Annie was getting, his mind recalled the image of the axe rising, then falling; the image of her horrid impassive deadly face splattered with his blood. I was clear. Every word she had spoken, every word he had screamed, the squeal of the axe pulling away from the severed bone, the blood on the wall. All crystal-clear. And, as he also so often did, he tried to block this memory; and found himself a second too late.

Because the crucial plot-twist of Fast Cars concerned Tony Bonasaro's near-fatal crack-up in his last desperate effort to escape the police (and this led to the epilogue, which consisted of the bruising interrogation conducted by the late Lieutenant Gray's partner in Tony's hospital room), Paul had interviewed a number of crash victims. He had heard the same thing time and time again. It came in different wrappers, but it always boiled down to the same thing: I remember getting into the car, and I remember waking up here. Everything else is a blank.

Why couldn't that have happened to him Because writers remember everything, Paul. Especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels, not amnesia. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar.

Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Who had said that? Thomas Szasz? William Faulkner? Cyndi Lauper?

But that last name brought its own association, a painful and unhappy one under these circumstances: a memory of Cyndi Lauper hiccuping her way cheerfully through “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” that was so clear it was almost auditory: Oh daddy dear, you're still number one / But girls, they wanna have fuh-un / Oh when the workin day is done / Girls just wanna have fun.

Suddenly he wanted a hit of rock and roll worse than he had ever wanted a cigarette. It didn't have to be Cyndi Lauper. Anyone would do. Jesus Christ, Ted Nugent would be just fine.

The axe coming down.

The whisper of the axe.

Don't think about it.

But that was stupid. He kept telling himself not to think about it, knowing all the while that it was there, like a bone in his throat. Was he going to let it stay there, or was he going to be a man and sick the fucking thing up?

Another memory came then; it seemed like this was an All Request Oldies day for Paul Sheldon. This one was of Oliver Reed as the mad but silkily persuasive scientist in David Cronenberg's movie, The Brood. Reed urging his patients at The Institute of Psychoplasmatics (a name Paul had found deliciously funny) to “go through it! Go all the way through it!” Well… maybe sometimes that wasn't such bad advice.

I went through it once. That was enough.

Bullshit was what that was. If going through things once was enough, he would have been a fucking vacuum-cleaner salesman, like his father.

Go through it, then. Go all the way through it, Paul. Start with Misery.

No.

Yes.

Fuck you.

Paul leaned back, put his hand over his eyes, and, like it or not, he began to go through it.

All the way through it.

5

He hadn't died, hadn't slept, but for awhile after Annie hobbled him the pain went away. He had only drifted, feeling untethered from his body, a balloon of pure thought rising away from its string.

Oh shit, why was he bothering? She had done it, and all the time between then and now had been pain and boredom and occasional bouts of work on his stupidly melodramatic book to escape the former two. The whole thing was meaningless.

Oh, but it's not - there is a theme here, Paul. It's the thread that runs through everything. The thread that runs so true. Can't you see it?

Misery, of course. That was the thread that ran through everything, but, true thread or false, it was so goddam silly.

As a common noun it meant pain, usually lengthy and often pointless; as a proper one it meant a character and a plot, the latter most assuredly lengthy and pointless, but on which would nonetheless end very soon. Misery ran through the last four (or maybe it was five) months of his life, all right, plenty of Misery, Misery day in and Misery day out but surely that was too simple, surely - Oh no, Paul. Nothing is simple about Misery. Except that you owe her your life, such as that may be… because you turned out to be Scheherazade after all, didn't you?

Again he tried to turn aside from these thoughts, but found himself unable. The persistence of memory and all that. Hacks just want to have fun. Then an unexpected idea came, a new one which opened a whole new avenue of thought.

What you keep overlooking, because it's so obvious, is that you were - are - also Scheherazade to yourself.

He blinked, lowering his head and staring stupidly out into the summer he had never expected he would see. Annie's shadow passed and then disappeared again.

Was that true?

Scheherazade to myself he thought again. If so, then he was faced with an idiocy that was utterly colossal: he owed his survival to the fact that he wanted to finish the piece of shit Annie had coerced him into writing. He should have died… but couldn't. Not until he knew how it all came out.

Oh you're fucking crazy.

You sure?

No. He was no longer sure. Not about anything.

With one exception: his whole life had hinged and continued to hinge on Misery.

He let his mind drift.

The cloud, he thought. Begin with the cloud.

6

This time the cloud had been darker, denser, somehow smoother. There was a sensation not of floating but of sliding. Sometimes thoughts came, and sometimes there was pain, and sometimes, dimly, he heard Annie's voice, sounding the way it had when the burning manuscript in the barbecue had threatened to get out of control: “Drink this, Paul… you've got to!” Sliding?

No.

That was not quite the right verb. The right verb was sinking. He remembered a telephone call which had come at three in the morning - this was when he was in college. Sleepy fourth-floor dorm proctor hammering on his door, telling him to come on and answer the fucking phone. His mother. Come home as quick as you can, Paulie. Your father has had a bad stroke. He's sinking. And he had come as fast as he could, pushing his old Ford wagon to seventy in spite of the front-end shimmy that developed at speeds over fifty, but in the end it had all been for nothing. When he got there, his father was no longer sinking but sunk.

How close had he himself come to sinking on the night of the axe? He didn't know, but the fact that he had felt almost no pain during the week following the amputation was a pretty clear indicator of just how close, perhaps. That, and the panic in her voice.

He had lain in a semi-coma, barely breathing because of the respiratory-depressant side-effects of the medication, the glucose drips back in his arms again. And what brought him out of it was the beat of drums and the drone of bees.

Bourka drums.

Bourka bees.

Bourka dreams.

Color bleeding slowly and relentlessly into a land and a tribe that never were beyond the margins of the paper on which he wrote.

A dream of the goddess, the face of the goddess, looming black over the jungle green, brooding and eroded. Dark goddess, dark continent, a stone head full of bees. Overlying even all this was a picture, which grew clearer and clearer (as if a giant slide had been projected against the cloud in which he lay) as time passed. It was a picture of a clearing in which one old eucalyptus tree stood. Hanging from the lowest branch of this tree was an old-fashioned pair of blued steel handcuffs. Bees were crawling over them. The cuffs were empty. They were empty because Misery had - - escaped? She had, hadn't she? Wasn't that how the story was supposed to go?

It had been - but now he wasn't so sure. Was that what those empty handcuffs meant? Or had she been taken away? Taken into the idol? Taken to the queen bee, the Big Babe of the Bourkas?

You were also Scheherazade to yourself.

Who are you telling this story for, Paul? Who are you telling it to? To Annie?

Of course not. He did not look through that hole in the paper to see Annie, or please Annie… he looked through it to get away from Annie.

The pain had started. And the itch. The cloud began to lighten again, and rift apart. He began to glimpse the room, which was bad, and Annie, which was even worse. Still, he had decided to live. Some part of him that was as addicted to the chapter-plays as Annie had been as a child had decided he could not die until he saw how it all came out.

Had she escaped, with the help of Ian and Geoffrey? Or had she been taken into the head of the goddess. It was ridiculous, but these stupid questions actually seemed to need answering.

7

She didn't want to let him go back to work - not at first. He could see in her skittery eyes how frightened she had been and still was. How close he had come. She was taking extravagant care of him, changing the bandages on his weeping stump every eight hours (and at first, she had informed him with the air of one who knows she will never get a medal for what she has done - although she deserves one - she had done it every four hours), giving him sponge baths and alcohol rubs - as if to deny what she had done. Work, she said, would hurt him. It would put you back, Paul. I wouldn't say it if it weren't so - believe me. At least you know what's ahead - I'm dying to find out what happens next. It turned out she had read everything he had written - all his pre-surgery work, you might say - while he lingered near death… better than three hundred manuscript pages. He hadn't filled in the n's in the last forty or so; Annie had done that. She showed him these with an uneasily defiant sort of pride. Her n's were textbook neat, a striking comparison with his own, which had degenerated into a humpbacked scrawl.

Although Annie never said so, he believed she had filled in the n's either as another evidence of her solicitude - How can you say I was cruel to you, Paul, when you see all the n's I have filled in? - or as an act of atonement, or possibly even as a quasi-superstitious rite: enough bandage-changes, enough sponge baths, enough n's filled in, and Paul would live. Bourka bee-woman work powful mojo-magic, Bwana, fill in all dese hoodaddy n's an” all be well again.

That was how she had begun… but then the gotta set in. Paul knew all the symptoms. When she said she was dying to find out what happened next, she wasn't kidding.

Because you went on living to find out what happened next, isn't that what you're really saying?

Crazy as it was - shameful, even, in its absurdity - he thought it was.

The gotta.

It was something he had been irritated to find he could generate in the Misery books almost at will but in his mainstream fiction erratically or not at all. You didn't know exactly where to find the gotta, but you always knew when you did. It made the needle of some internal Geiger counter swing all the way over to the end of the dial. Even sitting in front of the typewriter slightly hung-over, drinking cups of black coffee and crunching a Rolaid or two every couple of hours (knowing he should give up the fucking cigarettes, at least in the morning, but unable to bring himself to the sticking point), months from finishing and light-years from publication, you knew the gotta when you got it. Having it always made him feel slightly ashamed - manipulative. But it also made him feel vindicated in his labor. Christ, days went by and the hole in the paper was small, the light was dim, the overheard conversations witless. You pushed on because that was all you could do. Confucius say if man want to grow one row of corn, first must shovel one ton of shit. And then one day the hole widened to VistaVision width and the light shone through like a sunray in a Cecil B. De Mille epic and you knew you had the gotta, alive and kicking.

The gotta, as in: “I think I'll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom.

The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now - he'll be mad if it's TV dinners again - but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live.

I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father.

I gotta know if she finds out her best friend's screwing her husband.

The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world's most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn't matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record - don't stop til you get enough.

8

You were also Scheherazade to yourself.

That was not an idea he was able to articulate or even understand, not then; he had been in too much pain. But he had known just the same, hadn't he?

Not you, The guys in the sweatshop. They knew.

Yes. That had the ring of the right.

The sound of the riding mower swelled louder. Annie came into view for a moment. She looked at him, saw him looking back, and raised a hand to him. He raised one of his own - the one with the thumb still on it - in return. She passed from sight again. Good deal.

He was finally able to convince her that returning to work would put him forward, not back… He was haunted by the specificity of those images which had lured him out of the cloud, and haunted was exactly the right word: until the3 were written down they were shades which would remain unlaid.

And while she hadn't believed him - not then - she had allowed him to go back to work just the same. Not because he had convinced her but because of the gotta.

At first he had been able to work only in painfully short bursts - fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour if the story really demanded it of him. Even short bursts were agony. A shift in position caused the stump to come brightly alive, the way a smouldering brand will burst into flame when fanned by a breeze. It hurt furiously while he wrote, but that was not the worst - the worst was the hour or two afterward, when the healing stump would madden him with a droney itch, like swarming, sleepy bees.

He had been right, not her. He never became really well - probably could not do in such a situation - but his health did improve and some of his strength came back. He was aware that the horizons of his interest had shrunk, but he accepted this as the price of survival. It was a genuine wonder he had survived at all.

Sitting here in front of this typewriter with its increasingly bad teeth, looking back over a period which had consisted of work rather than events, Paul nodded. Yes, he supposed he had been his own Scheherazade, just as he was his own dream-woman when he grabbed hold of himself and jacked off to the feverish beat of his fantasies. He didn't need a psychiatrist to point out that writing had its autoerotic side - you beat a typewriter instead of your meat, but both acts depended largely on quick wits, fast hands and a heartfelt commitment to the art of the farfetched.

But hadn't there also been some sort of fuck, even if of the driest variety? Because once he started again… well she wouldn't interrupt him while he was working, but she” would take each day's output as soon as he was done, ostensibly to fill in the missing letters, but actually - he knew this by now, just as sexually acute men know which dates will put out at the end of the evening and which ones will not - to get her fix. To get her gotta.

The chapter-plays. Yes. Back to that. Only for the last few months she's been going every day instead of just on Saturday afternoons, and the Paul who takes her is her pet writer instead of her older brother.

His stints at the typewriter grew gradually longer as the pain slowly receded and some of his endurance returned… but ultimately he wasn't able to write fast enough to satisfy her demands.

The gotta which had kept them both alive - and it had, for without it she surely would have murdered both him and herself long since - was also what had caused the loss of his thumb. It was horrible, but also sort of funny. Have a little irony, Paul - it's good for your blood.

And think how much worse it could have been.

It could have been his penis, for instance.

“And I only have one of those,” he said, and began to laugh wildly in the empty room in front of the hateful Royal with its gap-toothed grin. He laughed until his gut and stump both ached. Laughed until his mind ached. At some point the laughter turned to horrible dry sobs that awoke pain even in what remained of his left thumb, and when that happened he was finally able to stop. He wondered in a dull sort of way how close he was to going insane.

Not that it really mattered, he supposed.

9

One day not long before the thumbectomy - perhaps even less than a week - Annie had come in with two giant dishes of vanilla ice-cream, a can of Hershey's chocolate syrup, a pressure can of Reddi-Whip, and a jar in which maraschino cherries red as heart's blood floated like biology specimens.

“I thought I'd make us sundaes, Paul,” Annie said. Her tone was spuriously jolly. Paul didn't like it. Not her tone of voice, nor the uneasy look in her eyes. I'm being a naughty girl, that look said. It made him wary, put his wind up. It was too easy for him to imagine her looking exactly the same way when she put a heap of clothes on one set of stairs, a dead cat on another.

“Why, thank you, Annie.” he said, and watched as she poured the syrup and puffed two cumulus clouds of whipped cream out of the pressure can. She performed these chores with the practiced, heavy hand of the long-time sugar junkie.

“No need for thanks. You deserve it. You've been working so hard.” She gave him his sundae. The sweetness became cloying after the third bite, but he kept on. It was wiser. One of the key rules to survival here on the scenic Western Slope was, to wit, When Annie's treatin, you best be eatin. There was silence for awhile, and then Annie put her spoon down, wiped a mixture of chocolate syrup and melting ice-cream off her chin with the back of her hand, and said pleasantly: “Tell me the rest.” Paul put his own spoon down. “I beg your pardon?”

“Tell me the rest of the story. I can't wait. I just can't.” And hadn't he known this was coming? Yes. If someone had delivered all twenty reels of the new Rocket Man chapter-play to Annie's house, would she have waited, parcelling out only one a week, or even one a day?

He looked at the half-demolished avalanche of her sundae, one cherry almost buried in whipped cream, another floating in chocolate syrup. He remembered the way the living room had looked, with sugar-glazed dishes everywhere.

No. Annie was not the waiting type. Annie would have watched all twenty episodes in one night, even if they gave her eyestrain and a splitting headache.

Because Annie loved sweet things.

“I can't do that,” he said.

Her face had darkened at once, but hadn't there been a shadowy relief there, as well? “Oh? Why not?” Because you wouldn't respect me in the morning, he thought of saying, and clamped down on that. Clamped down hard.

“Because I'm a rotten story-teller,” he answered instead.

She slurped up the remainder of her sundae in five huge spoonfuls that would have left Paul's throat gray with frostbite. Then she set her dish down and looked at him angrily, not as if he were the great Paul Sheldon but as if he were someone who had presumed to criticize the great Paul Sheldon.

“If you're such a rotten story-teller, how come you have best-sellers and millions of people love the books you write?”

“I didn't say I was a rotten story-writer. I actually happen to think I'm pretty good at that. But as a story-teller, I'm the pits.”

“You're just making up a big cockadoodie excuse.” Her face was darkening. Her hands were clenched into shiny fists on the heavy material of her skirt. Hurricane Annie was back in the room. Everything that went around came around. Except things no longer had been quite the same, had they? He was as scared of her as ever, but her hold over him had nonetheless diminished. His life no longer seemed like such a big deal, gotta or no gotta. He was only afraid she would hurt him.

“It's not an excuse,” he had replied. “The two things are like apples and oranges, Annie. People who tell stories usually can't write stories. If you really think people who can write stories can talk worth a damn, you never watched some poor slob of a novelist fumbling his way through an interview on the Today show.”

“Well, I don't want to wait,” she sulked. “I made you that nice sundae and the least you could do is tell me a few things. It doesn't have to exactly be the whole story, I guess, but… did the Baron kill Calthorpe?” Her eyes sparkled. “That's one thing I really want to know. And what did he do with the body if he did? Is it all cut up in that trunk his wife won't let out of her sight? That's what I think.” Paul shook his head - not to indicate she had it wrong but to indicate he would not tell.

She became even blacker. Yet her voice was soft. “You're making me very angry - you know that, don't you, Paul?”

“Of course I know it. But I can't help it.”

“I could make you. I could make you help it. I could make you tell.” But she looked frustrated, as if knowing that she could not. She could make him say some things, but she could not make him tell.

“Annie, do you remember telling me what a little kid says to his mother when she catches him playing with the cleaning fluid under the sink and makes him stop? Mommy, you're mean! Isn't that what you're saying now? Paul, you're mean!”

“If you make me much madder, I don't promise to be responsible,” she said, but he sensed the crisis was already past - she was strangely vulnerable to these concepts of discipline and behavior.

“Well, I'll have to chance that,” he said, “because I'm just like that mother - I'm not saying no to be mean, or to spite you - I'm saying no because I really want you to like the story… and if I give you what you want, you won't like it, and you won't want it anymore.” And then what will happen to me, Annie? he thought but did not say.

“At least tell me if that nigger Hezekiah really does know where Misery's father is! At least tell me that!”

“Do you want the novel, or do you want me to fill out a questionnaire?”

“Don't you take that sarcastic tone to me!”

“Then don't you pretend you don't understand what I'm saying!” he shouted back. She recoiled from him in surprise and unease, the last of that blackness going out of her face, and all that was left was that weird little-girl look, that I've-been-naughty look. “You want to cut open the golden goose! That's what it comes down to! But when the farmer in the story finally did that, all he had was a dead goose and a bunch of worthless guts!”

“All right,” she said. “All right, Paul. Are you going to finish your sundae?”

“I can't eat any more,” he said.

“I see. I've upset you. I'm sorry. I expect that you're right. I was wrong to ask.” She was perfectly calm again. He had half-expected another period of deep depression or rage to follow, but none had. They had simply gone back to the old routine, Paul writing, Annie reading each day's output, and enough time had passed between the argument and the thumbectomy that Paul had missed the connection. Until now.

I bitched about the typewriter, he thought, looking at it now and listening to the drone of the mower. It sounded fainter now, and he was marginally aware that wasn't because Annie was moving away but because he was. He was drowsing off. He did that a lot now, simply drowsed off like some old fart in a nursing home.

Not a lot; I only bitched about it that once. But once was enough, wasn't it? More than enough. That was - what? - a week after she brought those oogy sundaes? Just about that. Just one week and one bitch. About how the clunk of that dead key was driving me crazy. I didn't even suggest she get another used typewriter from Nancy Whoremonger or whoever that woman was, one with all its keys intact. I just said those clunks are driving me crazy, and then, in almost no time at all, presto chango, when it comes to Paul's left thumb, now you see it and now you don't. Except she didn't really do it because I bitched about the typewriter, did she? She did it because I told her no and she had to accept that. It was an act of rage. The rage was the result of realization. What realization? Why, that she didn't hold all the cards after all - that I had a certain passive hold over her. The power of the gotta. I turned out to be a pretty passable Scheherazade after all.

It was crazy. It was funny. It was also real. Millions might scoff, but only because they failed to realize how pervasive the influence of art - even of such a degenerate sort as popular fiction - could become. Housewives arranged their schedules around the afternoon soaps. If they went back into the workplace, they made buying a VCR a top priority so they could watch those same soap operas at night. When Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls, all of Victorian England rose as one and demanded him back. The tone of their protests had been Annie's exactly - not bereavement but outrage. Doyle was berated by his own mother when he wrote and told her of his intention to do away with Holmes. Her indignant reply had come by return mail: “Kill that nice Mr Holmes? Foolishness! Don't you dare!” Or there was the case of his friend Gary Ruddman, who worked for the Boulder Public Library. When Paul had dropped over to see him one day, he had found Gary's shades drawn and a black crepe fluff on the door. Concerned, Paul had knocked hard until Gary answered. Go away, Gary had told him. I'm feeling depressed today. Someone died. Someone important to me. When Paul asked who, Gary had responded tiredly: Van der Valk. Paul had heard him walk away from the door, and although he knocked again, Gary had not come back. Van der Valk, it turned out, was a fictional detective created - and then uncreated - by a writer named Nicolas Freeling.

Paul had been convinced Gary's reaction had been more than false; he thought it had been pretentiously arty. In short, a pose. He continued to feel this way until 1983, when he read The World According to Garp. He made the mistake of reading the scene where Garp's younger son dies, impaled on a gearshift]ever, shortly before bed. It was hours before he slept. The scene would not leave his mind. The thought that grieving for a fictional character was absurd did more than cross his mind during his tossings and turnings. For grieving was exactly what he was doing, of course. The realization had not helped, however, and this had caused him to wonder if perhaps Gary Ruddman hadn't been a lot more serious about Van der Valk than Paul had given him credit for at the time. And this had caused another memory to resurface: finishing William Golding's Lord of the Flies at the age of twelve on a hot summer day, going to the refrigerator for a cold glass of lemonade… and then suddenly changing direction and speeding up from an amble to an all-out bolt which had ended in the bathroom. There he had leaned over the toilet and vomited.

Paul suddenly remembered other examples of this odd mania: the way people had mobbed the Baltimore docks each month when the packet bearing the new installment of Mr Dickens's Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist was due (some had drowned, but this did not discourage the others); the old woman of a hundred and five who had declared she would five until Mr Galsworthy finished The Forsyte Saga - and who had died less than an hour after having the final page of the final volume read to her; the young mountain climber hospitalized with a supposedly fatal case of hypothermia whose friends had read The Lord of the Rings to him nonstop, around the clock, until he came out of his coma; hundred s of other such incidents.

Every “best-selling” writer of fiction would, he supposed, have his own personal example or examples of radical reader involvement with the make-believe worlds the writer creates… examples of the Scheherazade complex, Paul thought now, half-dreaming as the sound of Annie's mower ebbed and flowed at some great echoing distance. He remembered getting two letters suggesting Misery theme parks, on the order of Disney World or Great Adventure. One of these letters had included a crude blueprint. But the blue-ribbon winner (at least until Annie Wilkes had entered his life) had been Mrs Roman D. Sandpiper III, of Ink Beach, Florida. Mrs Roman D. Sandpiper, whose given name was Virginia, had turned an upstairs room of her home into Misery's Parlor. She included Polaroids of Misery's Spinning Wheel, Misery's Escritoire (complete with a half-completed bread-and-butter note to Mr Faverey, saying she would be in attendance at the School Hall Recitation on 20th Nov. inst. - done in what Paul thought was an eerily apt hand for his heroine, not a round and flowing ladies” script but a half-feminine copperplate), Misery's Couch, Misery's Sampler (Let Love Instruct You; Do Not Presume to Instruct Love), etc., etc. The furnishings, Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper's letter said, were all genuine, not reproductions and while Paul could not tell for sure, he guessed that it was the truth. If so, this expensive bit of make-believe must have cost Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper thousands of dollars. Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper hastened to assure him that she was not using his character to make money, nor did she have any plans in that direction - heaven forbid! - but she did want him to see the pictures, and to tell her what she had wrong (which, she was sure, must be a great deal). Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper also hoped for his opinion. Looking at those pictures had given him a feeling which was strange yet eerily intangible - it had been like looking at photographs of his own imagination, and he knew that from that moment on, whenever he tried to imagine Misery's little combination parlor and study, Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper's Polaroids would leap immediately into his mind, obscuring imagination with their cheery but one-dimensional concreteness. Tell her what was wrong? That was madness. From now on he would be the one to wonder about that. He had written back, a brief note of congratulations and admiration - a note which hinted not at all at certain questions concerning Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper which had crossed his mind: how tightly wrapped was she? for instance - and had received another letter in return, with a fresh slew of Polaroids. Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper's first communication had consisted of a two-page handwritten letter and seven Polaroids. This second consisted of a ten-page handwritten letter and forty Polaroids. The letter was an exhaustive (and ultimately exhausting) manual of where Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper had found each piece, how much she had paid, and the restoration processes involved. Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper told him that she had found a man named McKibbon who owned an old squirrel-rifle, and had gotten him to put the bullet-hole in the wall by the chair while she could not swear to the historical accuracy of the gun, Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper admitted, she knew the caliber was right. The pictures were mostly close detail shots. But for the handwritten captions on the backs, they could have been photos in one of those WHAT IS THIS PICTURE? features in puzzle magazines, where maxiphotography makes the straight-arm of a paper-clip took like a pylon and the pop-top of a beer-can like a Picasso sculpture. Paul had not answered this letter, but that had not deterred Mrs Roman D. ("Virginia") Sandpiper, who had sent five more (the first four with additional Polaroids) before finally lapsing into puzzled, slightly hurt silence.

The last letter had been simply, stiffly signed Mrs Roman D. Sandpiper. The invitation (however parenthetically made) to call her “Virginia” had been withdrawn.

This woman's feelings, obsessed though they might have been, had never evolved into Annie's paranoid fixation, but Paul understood now that the wellspring had been the same. The Scheherazade complex. The deep and elemental drawing power of the gotta.

His floating deepened. He slept.

10

He dozed off these days as old men doze off, abruptly and sometimes at inappropriate times, and he slept as old men sleep - which is to say, only separated from the waking world by the thinnest of skins. He didn't stop hearing the riding mower, but its sound became deeper, rougher, choppier: the sound of the electric knife.

He had picked the wrong day to start complaining about the Royal and its missing n. And, of course, there was never a right day to say no to Annie Wilkes. Punishment might be deferred… but never escaped.

Well, if it bothers you so much, I'll just have to give you something to take your mind off that old n. He heard her rummaging around in the kitchen, throwing things, cursing in her strange Annie Wilkes language. Ten minutes later she came in with the syringe, the Betadine, and the electric knife. Paul began to scream at once. He was, in a way, like Pavlov's dogs. When Pavlov rang a bell, the dogs salivated. When Annie came into the guest bedroom with a hypo, a bottle of Betadine, and a sharp cutting object, Paul began to scream. She had plugged the knife into the outlet by his wheelchair and there had been more pleading and more screaming and more promises that he would be good. When he tried to thrash away from the hypo she told him to sit still and be good or what was going to happen would happen without the benefit of even light anesthesia. When he continued to pull away from the needle, mewling and pleading, Annie suggested that if that was really the way he felt, maybe she just ought to use the knife on his throat and be done with it.

Then he had been still and let her give him the injection and this time the Betadine had gone over his left thumb as well as the blade of the knife (when she turned it on and the blade began to saw rapidly back and forth in the air the Betadine flew in a spray of maroon droplets she seemed not to notice) and in the end of course there had been much redder droplets spraying into the air as well. Because when Annie decided on a course of action, she carried it through. Annie was not swayed by pleas. Annie was not swayed by screams. Annie had the courage of her convictions.

As the humming, vibrating blade sank into the softweb of flesh between the soon-to-be-defunct thumb and his first finger, she assured him again in her this-hurts-Mother-more-than-it-hurts Paulie voice that she loved him.

Then, that night…

You're not dreaming, Paul. You're thinking about things you don't dare think about when you're awake. So wake up. For God's sake, WAKE up!

He couldn't wake up.

She had cut his thumb off in the morning and that night she swept gaily into the room where he sat in a stupid daze of drugs and pain with his wrapped left hand held against his chest and she had a cake and she was bellowing “Happy Birthday to You” in her on-key but tuneless voice although it was not his birthday and there were candles all over the cake and sitting in the exact center pushed into the frosting like an extra big candle had been his thumb his gray dead thumb the nail slightly ragged because he sometimes chewed it when he was stuck for a word and she told him If you Promise to be good Paul you can have a piece of birthday cake but you won't have to eat any of the special candle so he promised to be good because he didn't want to be forced to eat any of the special candle but also because mostly because surely because Annie was great Annie was good let us thank her for our food including that we don't have to eat girls just wanna have fun but something wicked this way comes please don't make me eat my thumb Annie the mom Annie the goddess when Annie's around you better stay honest she knows when you've been sleeping she knows when you're awake she knows if you've been bad or good so be good for goddess” sake you better not cry you better not pout but most of all you better not scream don't scream don t scream don't scream don't He hadn't.

And now, as he awoke, he did so with a jerk that hurt him all over, hardly aware that his lips were pressed tightly together to keep the scream inside, although the thumbectomy had happened over a month ago.

He was so preoccupied with not screaming that for a moment he didn't even see what was coming into the driveway, and when he did see it, he believed at first that it must be a mirage.

It was a Colorado State Police car.

11

Following the amputation of his thumb there had been a dim period when Paul's greatest single accomplishment, other than working on the novel, had been to keep track of the days. He had become pathological about it, sometimes spending as long as five minutes lost in a daze, counting back, making sure he hadn't somehow forgotten one.

I'm getting as bad as she is, he thought once.

His mind had returned wearily: So what?

He had done pretty well with the book following the loss of his foot - during what Annie so mincingly called his convalescent period. No - pretty well was false modesty if ever there was such a thing. He had done amazingly well for a man who had once found it impossible to write if he was out of cigarettes or if he had a backache or a headache a degree or two above a low drone. It would be nice to believe he had performed heroically, but he supposed it was only that escape thing again, because the pain had been really dreadful. When the healing process finally did begin, he thought the “phantom itch” of the foot which was no longer there was even worse than the pain. It was the arch of the missing foot which bothered him the most. He awoke time after time in the middle of the night using the big toe of his right foot to scratch thin air four inches below the place where, on that side, his body now ended.

But he had gone on working just the same.

It wasn't until after the thumbectomy, and that bizarre birthday cake like a left-over prop from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, that the balls of crumpled-up paper had begun to proliferate in the wastebasket again. Lose a foot, almost die, go on working. Lose a thumb and run into some kind of weird trouble. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Well, there was the fever - he had-spent a week in bed with that. But it was pretty minor-league stuff; the highest his temperature had ever gone was 100.7, and that wasn't exactly the stuff of which high melodrama was made. The fever had probably been caused more by his general run- down condition than any specific infection, and an oogy old fever was no problem for Annie; among her other souvenirs, Annie had Keflex and Ampicillin up the old kazoo. She dosed him and he got better… as better as it was possible to get under such bizarre circumstances, at any rate. But something was wrong. He seemed to have lost some vital ingredient, and the mix had become a lot less potent as a result. He tried to blame it on the missing n, but he'd had that to contend with before, and, really, what was a missing n compared to a missing foot and now, as an extra added attraction, a missing thumb?

Whatever the reason, something had disturbed the dream, something was whittling away the circumference of that hole in the paper through which he saw. Once - he would have sworn it was so - that hole had been as big as the bore of the Lincoln Tunnel. Now it was no more than the size of a knothole which a sidewalk superintendent might stoop to snoop through on an interesting piece of building construction. You had to peer and crane to see anything at all, and more often than not the really important things happened outside your field of vision… not surprising, considering the field of vision was so small.

In practical terms, what had happened following the thumbectomy and ensuing bout of fever was obvious. The language of the book had grown florid and overblown again - it was not self-parody yet, not quite, but it was floating steadily in that direction and he seemed helpless to stop it. Continuity lapses had begun to proliferate with the stealth of rats breeding in cellar corners: for a space of thirty pages, the Baron had become the Viscount from Misery's Quest. He'd had to go back and tear that all out.

It doesn't matter, Paul, he told himself again and again in those last few days before the Royal coughed up first its t and then its e, the damned thing is almost done. So it was. Working on it was torture, and finishing it was going to mean the end of his life. That the latter had begun to look slightly more attractive than the former said all that probably needed to be said about the worsening state of his body, mind, and spirit. And the book moved on in spite of everything, seemingly independent of them. The continuity drops were annoying but minor. He was having more problems with the actual make-believe than he ever had before - the game of Can You? had become a labored exercise rather than simple good fun. Yet the book had continued to roll in spite of all the terrible things Annie had subjected him to, and he could bitch about how something - his guts, maybe - had run out of him along with the half-pint or so of blood he'd lost when she took his thumb, but it was still a goddam good yarn, the best Misery novel by far. The plot was melodramatic but well constructed, in its own modest way quite amusing. If it were ever to be published in something other than the severely limited (first printing: one copy) Annie Wilkes Edition, he guessed it might sell like a mad bastard. Yeah, he supposed he would get through it, if the goddam typewriter held together.

You were supposed to be so tough, he had thought once, after one of his compulsive lifting exercises. His thin arms were trembling, the stump of his thumb aching feverishly, his forehead covered with a thin oil of sweat. You were the tough young gunsel looking to make a rep off the tired old turd of a sheriff, right? Only you've already thrown one key and I see the way some of the others - the t, the e, and the g, for instance, are starting to look funny… sometimes leaning one way, sometimes leaning the other, sometimes riding a little high on the line, sometimes dipping a little low. I think maybe the tired old turd is going to win this one, my friend. I think maybe the tired old turd is going to beat you to death… and it could be that the bitch knew it. Could be that's why she took my left thumb. Like the saying goes, she may be crazy, but she sure ain't dumb.

He looked at the typewriter with tired intensity.

Go on. Go on and break. I'll finish anyway. If she wants to get me a replacement, I'll thank her kindly, but if she doesn't I'll finish on the goddam legal pads The one thing I won't do is scream.

I won't scream.

I.

I won't

12

I won't scream!

He sat at the window, totally awake now, totally aware that the police car he was seeing in Annie's driveway was as real as his left foot had once been.

Scream! Goddammit, scream!

He wanted to, but the dictum was too strong - just too strong. He couldn't even open his mouth. He tried and saw the brownish droplets of Betadine flying from the blade of the electric knife. He tried and heard the squeal of axe against bone, the soft flump as the match in her hand lit the Bernz-O-matiC.

He tried to open his mouth and couldn't.

Tried to raise his hands. Couldn't.

A horrible moaning sound passed between his closed lips and his hands made light, haphazard drumming sounds on either side of the Royal, but that was all he could do, all the control of his destiny he could seem to take. Nothing which had gone before - except perhaps for the moment when he had realized that, although his left leg was moving, his left foot was staying put - was as terrible as the hell of this immobility. In real time it did not last long; perhaps five seconds and surely no longer than ten. But inside Paul Sheldon's head it seemed to go on for years.

There, within plain sight, was salvation: all he had to do was break the window and the dog-lock the bitch had put on his tongue and scream Help me, help me, save me from Annie! Save me from the goddess!

At the same time another voice was screaming: I'll be good, Annie! I won't scream! I'll be good, I'll be good for goddess” sake! I promise not to scream, just don't chop off any more of me! Had he known, before this had he really known how badly she had cowed him, or how much of his essential self - the liver and lights of his spirit - she had scraped away? He knew how constantly he had been terrorized, but did he know how much of his own subjective reality, once so strong he had taken it for granted, had been erased?

He knew one thing with some certainty - a lot more was wrong with him than paralysis of the tongue, just as a lot more was wrong with what he had been writing than the missing key or the fever or continuity lapses or even a loss of guts. The truth of everything was so simple in its horridness; so dreadfully simple. He was dying by inches, but dying that way wasn't as bad as he'd already feared. But he was also fading, and that was an awful thing because it was moronic.

Don't scream! the panicky voice screamed just the as the cop opened the door of his cruiser and stepped out, adjusting his Smokey Bear hat as he did so. He was young, no more than twenty-two or -three, wearing sunglasses as black and liquid-looking as dollops of crude oil. He paused to adjust the creases of his khaki uniform pants and thirty yards away a man with blue eyes bulging from his white and whiskery old-man's face sat staring at him from behind a window, moaning through closed lips, hands rattling, uselessly on a board laid across the arms of a wheelchair.

don't scream (yes scream) scream and it will be over scream and it can end (never never going to end not until I'm dead that kid's no match for the goddess) Paul oh Christ are you dead already? Scream, you chicken-shit motherfucker! SCREAM YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF!!!

His lips pulled apart with a minute tearing sound. He hitched air into his lungs and closed his eyes “ He had no idea what was going to come out or if anything really was… until it came.

“AFRICA!” Paul screamed. Now his trembling hands flew up like startled birds and clapped against the sides of his head, as if to hold in his exploding brains. “Africa! Help me! Help me! Africa!”

13

His eyes snapped open. The cop was looking towards the house. Paul could not see the Smokey's eyes because of the sunglasses, but the tilt of his head expressed moderate puzzlement. He took a step closer, then stopped.

Paul looked down at the board. To the left of the typewriter was a heavy ceramic ashtray. Once upon a time it would have been filled with crushed butts; now it held nothing more hazardous to his health than paper-clips and a typewriter eraser. He seized it and threw it at the window. Glass shattered outward. To Paul it was the most liberating sound he had ever heard. The walls came tumbling down, he thought giddily, and screamed: “Over here! Help me! Watch out for the woman! She's crazy!” The state cop stared at him. His mouth dropped open.

He reached into his breast pocket and brought out something that could only be a picture. He consulted it and then advanced to the edge of the driveway. There he spoke the only four words Paul ever heard him say, the last four word s anyone ever heard him say. Following them he would make a number of inarticulate sounds but no real words.

“Oh, shit!” the cop exclaimed. “It's you!” Paul's attention had been so fiercely focused on the trooper that he did not see Annie until it was too late. When he did see her, he was struck by a real superstitious horror. Annie had become a goddess, a thing that was half woman and half Lawnboy, a weird female centaur. Her baseball cap had fallen off. Her face was twisted in a frozen snarl. In one hand she held a wooden cross. It had marked the grave of the Bossie - Paul didn't remember if it was No. 1 or No. 2 which had finally stopped bawling.

That Bossie had indeed died, and when spring had softened the ground enough, Paul had watched from his window, sometimes dumbstruck with awe and sometimes overcome with shrieking attacks of the giggles, as she first dug the grave (it had taken her most of the day) and then dragged Bossie (who had also softened considerably) out from behind the barn. She had used a chain attached to the Cherokee's trailer-hitch to do this. She had looped the other end of the chain around Bossie's middle. Paul made a mental bet with himself that Bossie would tear in half before Annie got her to the grave, but that one he lost. Annie tumbled Bossie in, then stolidly began refilling the hole, a job she hadn't finished until long after dark.

Paul had watched her plant the cross and then read the Bible over the grave by the light of a new-risen spring moon.

Now she was holding the cross like a spear, the dirt darkened point of its vertical post pointed squarely at the trooper's back.

“Behind you! Look out!” Paul shrieked, knowing he was too late but shouting anyway.

With a thin warbling cry, Annie plunged Bossie's cross, into the trooper's back.

“AG!” the cop said, and walked slowly onto the lawn, his pierced back arched and his gut sticking out. His face was the face of a man either trying to pass a kidney stone or having a terrible gas attack. The cross began to droop toward the ground as the trooper approached the window in which Paul sat, his gray invalid's face framed by jags of broken glass. The cop reached slowly over his shoulders with both hands. He looked to Paul like a man trying very hard to scratch that one itch you can never quite reach.

Annie had dismounted the Lawnboy and had been standing frozen, her tented fingers pressed against the peaks of her breasts. Now she lunged forward and snatched the cross out of the trooper's back.

He turned toward her, groping for his service pistol, and Annie drove the cross point-first into his belly.

“OG!” the cop said this time, and dropped to his knees, clutching his stomach. As he bent over Paul could see the slit in his brown uniform shirt where the first blow had gone home.

Annie pulled the cross free again - its sharpened point had broken off, leaving a jagged, splintery stump - and drove it into his back between the shoulderblades. She looked like a woman trying to kill a vampire. The first two blows had perhaps not gone deep enough to do much damage, but this time the cross's support post went at least three inches into the kneeling trooper's back, driving him flat.

“THERE!” Annie cried, wrenching Bossie's memorial marker out of his back. “HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT, YOU DIRTY OLD BIRD?”

“Annie, stop it!” Paul shouted.

She looked up at him, her dark eyes momentarily as shi ay as coins, her hair fungus-frowzy around her face, the corners of her mouth drawn up in the jolly grin of a lunatic who has, at least for the moment, cast aside all restraints. Then she looked back down at the state trooper.

“THERE!” she cried, and drove the cross into his back again. And his buttocks. And the upper thigh of one leg. And his neck. And his crotch. She stabbed him with it half a dozen times, screaming “THERE!” every time she brought it down again. Then the cross's upright split.

“There,” she said, almost conversationally, and walked away m the direction from which she had come running. Just before she passed from Paul's view she tossed the bloody cross aside as if it no longer interested her.

14

Paul put his hands on the wheels of the chair, not at all sure where he intended to go or what, if anything, he meant to do when he got there - to the kitchen for a knife, perhaps? Not to try to kill her with, oh no; she would take one look at the knife in his hand and step back into the shed for her.30-30. Not to kill her but to defend himself from her revenge by cutting his wrists open. He didn't know if that had been his intention or not, but it surely did seem like a hell of a good idea, because if there had ever been a time to exeunt stage left, this was it. He was tired of losing pieces of himself to her fury.

Then he saw something which froze him in place. The cop.

The cop was still alive.

He raised his head. His sunglasses had fallen off. Now Paul could see his eyes. Now he could see how young the cop was, how young and hurt and scared. Blood ran down his face in streams. He managed to get to his hands and knees, fell forward, and then got painfully back up again. He began to crawl toward his cruiser.

He worked his way halfway down the mild slope of grass between the house and the driveway, then overbalanced and fell on his back. For a moment he lay there with his legs drawn up, looking as helpless as a turtle on its shell. Then he slowly rolled over on his side and began the terrible job of getting to his knees again. His uniform shirt and pants were darkening with blood - small patches were slowly spreading, meeting other patches, growing bigger still.

The Smokey reached the driveway.

Suddenly the noise of the riding lawnmower was louder.

“Look out!” Paul screamed. “Look out, she's coming!” The cop turned his head. Groggy alarm surfaced on his face, and he grappled for his gun once more. He got it out something big and black with a long barrel and brown woodgrips - and then Annie reappeared, sitting tall in the saddle and driving the Lawnboy as fast as it would go.

“SHOOT HER!” Paul screamed, and instead of shooting Annie Wilkes with his big old Dirty (birdie) Harry gun, he first fumbled, then dropped it.

He stretched out his hand for it. Annie swerved and ran over both his reaching hand and his forearm. Blood squirted from the Lawnboy's grass-exhaust in an amazing jet. The kid in the trooper uniform screamed. There was a sharp clang as the mower's whirling blade struck the pistol. Then Annie was swerving up the side lawn, using it to turn, and her gaze fell on Paul for one second and Paul felt sure he knew what that momentary gaze meant. First the Smokey, then him.

The kid was lying on his side again. When he saw the mower bearing down on him he rolled over on his back and dug frantically at the driveway dirt with his heels, trying to push himself under the cruiser where she couldn't get him. He didn't even come close. Annie throttled the riding lawnmower up to a scream and drove it over his head.

Paul caught a last glimpse of horrified brown eyes, saw tatters of brown khaki uniform shirt hanging from an arm raised in a feeble effort at protection, and when the eyes were gone, Paul turned away.

The Lawnboy's engine suddenly lugged down and there was a series of fast, strangely liquid thudding sounds.

Paul vomited beside the chair with his eyes closed.

15

He only opened them when he heard the rattle of her key in the kitchen door. His own door was open; he watched her approach down the hall in her old brown cowboy boots and her blue-jeans with the keyring dangling from one of the belt-loops and her man's tee-shirt now spotted with blood. He cringed away from her. He wanted to say: If you cut anything else off me, Annie, I'm going to die. It won't take the shock of another amputation, either. I'll die on purpose. But no words came out - only terrified chuffing noises that disgusted him.

She gave him no time to speak anyway.

“I'll deal with you later,” she said, and pulled - his door closed. One of her keys rattled in the lock - a new Kreig that would have defeated even Tom Twyford himself, Paul thought - and then she was striding down the hall again, the thud of her boot-heels mercifully diminishing.

He turned his head and looked dully out the window. He could see only part of the trooper's body. His head was still under the mower, which was, in turn, canted at a drunken angle against the cruiser. The riding mower was a small tractor-like vehicle meant for keeping larger-than-average lawns neat and clipped. It had not been designed to keep its balance as it passed over jutting rocks, fallen logs, or the heads of state troopers. If the cruiser hadn't been parked exactly where it was, and if the trooper hadn't gotten exactly as close to it as he had before Annie struck him, the mower would almost surely have tipped over, spilling her off. This might have caused her no harm at all, but it might have hurt her quite badly.

She has the luck of the devil himself, Paul thought drearily, and watched as she put the mower in neutral and then pushed it off the trooper with one hard shove. The side of the mower squalled along the side of the cruiser and took off some paint.

Now that he was dead, Paul could look at him. The cop looked like a big doll that has been badly treated by a gang of nasty children. Paul felt a terrible aching sympathy for this unnamed young man, but there was another emotion mixed with that. He examined it and was not much surprised to find it was envy. The trooper would never go home to his wife and kids, if he had had them, but on the other hand, he had escaped Annie Wilkes.

She grabbed a bloody hand and dragged him up the driveway and through the barn doors, which stood ajar on their tracks. When she came out, she pushed them along their tracks as far as they would go. Then she walked back down to the cruiser. She was moving with a calm that was almost serenity. She started the cruiser and drove it into the barn. When she came out again she closed the doors almost completely, leaving a gap just wide enough for her to slip in and out.

She walked halfway down the driveway and looked around, hands on her hips. Again Paul saw that remarkable expression of serenity.

The bottom of the mower was smeared with blood, particularly around the grass-exhaust, which was still dripping. Little scraps of khaki uniform lay in the driveway or fluttered in the freshly cut grass of the side lawn. There were daubs and splashes of blood everywhere. The trooper's gun, with a long slash of bright metal now scarring its barrel, lay in the dust. A square of stiff white paper had caught on the spines of a small cactus Annie had set out in May. Bossie's splintered cross lay in the driveway like a comment on the whole filthy mess.

She moved out of his field of vision, heading toward the kitchen again. When she came in he heard her singing. “She'll be driving six white horses when she COMES!… she'll be driving six white horses when she COMES! She'll be driving six white HORSES, driving six white HORSES… she'll be driving six white HORSES when she COMES!” When he saw her again, she had a big green garbage bag in her hands and three or four more sticking out of the back pockets of her jeans. Big sweatstains darkened her tee-shirt around her armpits and neck. When she turned, he saw a sweatstain that looked vaguely tree-like rising up her back.

That's a lot of bags for a few scraps of cloth, Paul thought, but he knew that she would have plenty to put in them before she was done.

She picked up the shreds of uniform and then the cross. She broke it into two pieces, and dropped it into the plastic bag. Incredibly, she genuflected after doing this. She picked up the gun, rolled the cylinder, dumped the slugs, put hem in one hip pocket, snapped the cylinder back in with a practiced flick of her wrist, and then stuck the gun in the waistband of her jeans. She plucked the piece of paper off the saguaro and looked at it thoughtfully. She stuck it into the other hip pocket. She went to the barn, tossed the garbage bags inside the doors, then came back to the house.

She walked up the side lawn to the cellar bulkhead which was almost directly below Paul's window. Something e se caught her eye. It was his ashtray. She picked it up and handed it politely to him through the broken window.

“Here, Paul.” Numbly, he took it.

“I'll get the paper-clips later,” she said, as if this was a question which must already have occurred to him. For one moment he thought of bringing the heavy ceramic ashtray down on her head as she bent over, cleaving her skull with it, letting out the disease that passed for her brains.

Then he thought of what would happen to him - what could happen to him - if he only hurt her, and put the ashtray where it had been with his shaking thumbless hand.

She looked up at him. “I didn't kill him, you know.”

“Annie - “

“You killed him. If you had kept your mouth shut, I would have sent him on his way. He'd be alive now and there would be none of this oogy mess to clean up.”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Down the road he would have gone, and what about me, Annie?” She was pulling her hose out of the bulkhead and looping it over her arm. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Yes you do.” In the depth of his shock he had achieved his own serenity. “He had my picture. It's in your pocket right now, isn't it?”

“Ask me no questions and I will tell you no lies.” There was a faucet bib on the side of the house to the left of his window. She began to screw the end of the hose onto it.

“A state cop with my picture means someone found my car. We both knew someone would. I'm only surprised it took so long. In a novel a car might be able to float right out of the story - I guess I could make people believe it if I had to - but in real life, no way. But we went on fooling ourselves just the same, didn't we, Annie? You because of the book, me because of my life, miserable as it has become to me.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” She turned on the faucet. “AR I know is you killed that poor kid when you threw the ashtray through the window. You're getting what might happen to you mixed up with what already happened to him.” She grinned at him. There was craziness in that grin, but he saw something else in it as well, something that really frightened him. He saw conscious evil in it - a demon capering behind her eyes.

“You bitch,” he said.

“Crazy bitch, isn't that right?” she asked, still smiling.

“Oh yeah - you're crazy,” he said.

“Well, we'll have to talk about that, won't we? When I have more time. We'll have to talk about that a lot. But right now I'm very busy, as I think you can see.” She unreeled the hose and turned it on. She spent nearly half an hour hosing blood off the mower and driveway and the side lawn, while interlinked rainbows glimmered in the spray.

Then she twisted the nozzle off and walked back along the hose's length, looping it over her arm. There was still plenty of light but her shadow trailed long behind her. It was now six o'clock.

She unscrewed the hose, opened the bulkhead, and dropped the green plastic snake inside. She closed the bulkhead, shot the bolt, and stood back, surveying the puddly driveway and the grass, which looked as though a heavy dew had fallen upon it.

Annie walked back to the mower, got on, started it up, and drove it around back. Paul smiled a little. She had the luck of the devil, and when she was pressed she had almost the cleverness of the devil - but almost was the key word. She had slipped in Boulder and wriggled away mostly due to luck. Now she had slipped again. He had seen it. She had washed the blood off the mower but forgotten the blade underneath - the whole blade housing, for that matter. She might remember later, but Paul didn't think so. Things had a way of dropping out of Annie's mind once the immediate moment was past. It occurred to him that the mind and the mower had a lot in common - what you could see looked all right. But if you turned the thing over to take a look at the works, you saw a blood-slimed killing machine with a very sharp blade.

She returned to the kitchen door and let herself into the house again. She went upstairs and he heard her rummaging there for awhile. Then she came down again, more slowly, dragging something that sounded soft and heavy. After a moment's consideration, Paul rolled the wheelchair across to his door and leaned his ear against the wood.

Dim, diminishing footfalls - slightly hollow. And still that soft flumping sound of something being dragged. Immediately his mind lit up with panicky floodlights and his skin flushed with his terror.

Shed! She's gone to the shed to get the axe! It's the axe again!

But this was only a momentary atavism, and he pushed it roughly away. She hadn't gone into the shed; she was going down cellar. Dragging something down cellar.

He heard her come up again and he rolled back to the window. As her boot-heels approached his door, as the key slid into the lock again, he thought: She's come to kill me. And the only emotion this thought engendered was tired relief.

16

The door opened and Annie stood there, looking at him contemplatively. She had changed into a fresh white tee-shirt and a pair of chinos. A small khaki bag, too big to be a purse and not quite big enough to be a knapsack, was slung over one shoulder.

As she came in, he was surprised to find himself able to say it, and say it with a certain amount of dignity: “Go ahead and kill me, Annie, if that's what you mean to do, but at least have the decency to make it quick. Don't cut anything more off me.”

“I'm not going to kill you, Paul.” She paused. “At least, not if I have just a little luck. I should kill you - I know that - but I'm crazy, right? And crazy people often don't look after their best interests, do they?” She went behind him and propelled him across the room, out the door, and down the hall. He could hear her bag slapping solidly against her side, and it occurred to him that he had never seen her carrying a bag like that before. If she went to town in a dress, she carried a big, clunky purse - the sort of purse maiden aunts tote to church jumble sales. If she went in pants, she went with a wallet stuck in her hip pocket, like a man.

The sunlight slanting into the kitchen was strong bright gold. Shadows from the legs of the kitchen table lay across the linoleum in horizontal stripes like the shadows of prison bars. It was quarter past six according to the clock over the range, and while there was no reason to believe she was any less sloppy about her clocks than her calendars (the one out here had actually made it to May), that seemed about right. He could hear the first evening crickets tuning up in Annie's field. He thought, I heard that same sound as a small, unhurt boy, and for a moment he nearly wept.

She pushed him into the pantry, where the door to the basement stood open. Yellow light staggered up the stairs and fell dead on the pantry floor. The smell of the late-winter rainstorm which had flooded it still lingered.

Spiders down there, he thought. Mice down there. Rats down there.

“Uh-uh,” he told her. “Count me out.” She looked at him with a level sort of impatience, and he realized that since killing the cop, she had seemed almost sane. Her face was the purposeful if slightly harried face of a woman making ready for a big dinner party.

“You're going down there,” she said. “The only question is whether you're going down piggyback or bum over teakettle. I'll give you five seconds to decide.”

“Piggy-back.” he said at once.

“Very wise.” She turned around so he could put his arms around her neck. “Don't do anything stupid like trying to choke me, Paul. I took a karate class in Harrisburg. I was good at it. I'll flip you. The floor is dirt but very hard. You'll break your back.” She hoisted him easily. His legs, now unsplinted but as crooked and ugly as something glimpsed through a rip in the canvas of a freak-show tent, hung down. The left, with the salt-dome where the knee had been, was fully four inches shorter than the right. He had tried standing on the right leg and had found he could, for short times, but doing so produced a low, primal agony that lasted for hours. The dope couldn't touch that pain, which was like a deep physical sobbing.

She carried him down and into a thickening smell of old stone and wood and flood and rotting vegetables. There were three naked light-bulbs. Old spiderwebs hung in rotting hammocks between bare beams. The walls were rock, carelessly chinked - they looked like a child's drawing of rock walls. It was cool, but not a pleasant cool.

He had never been as close to her as he was then, as she carried him piggyback down the steep stairs. He would only be as close once again. It was not a pleasant experience. He could smell the sweat of her recent exertions, and while he actually liked the smell of fresh perspiration - he associated it with work, hard effort, things he respected - this smell was secretive and nasty, like old sheets thick with dried come. And below the smell of sweat was a smell of very old dirt. Annie, he guessed, had gotten as casually catch-as-catch-can about showering as she had about changing her calendars. He could see dark-brown wax plugging one ear and wondered with faint disgust how the hell she could hear anything.

Here, by one of the rock walls, was the source of that flumping, dragging sound: a mattress. Beside it she had placed a collapsed TV tray. There were a few cans and bottles on it. She approached the mattress, turned around, and squatted.

“Get off, Paul.” He released his hold cautiously and allowed himself to fall back on the mattress. He looked up at her warily as she stood and reached into the little khaki bag.

“No,” he said immediately when he saw the tired yellow cellar-light gleam on the hypodermic needle. “No. No.”

17

“Oh boy,” she said. “You must think Annie's in a real poopie-doopie mood today. I wish you'd relax, Paul.” She put the hypo on the TV tray. “That's scopolamine, which is a morphine-based drug. You're lucky I have any morphine at all. I told you how closely they watch it in the hospital pharmacies. I'm leaving it because it's damp down here and your legs may ache quite badly before I get back.

“Just a minute.” She gave him a wink which had strangely unsettling undertones - a wink one conspirator might give another. “You throw one cockadoodie ashtray and I'm as busy as a one-armed paperhanger. I'll be right back.” She went upstairs and came back shortly with the cushions from the sofa in the parlor and the blankets from his bed. She arranged the cushions behind him so he could sit up without too much discomfort - but he could feel the sullen chill of the rocks even through the cushions, waiting to steal out and freeze him.

There were three bottles of Pepsi on the collapsed TV tray. She opened two of them, using the opener on her keyring, and handed him one. She upended her own and drank half of it without stopping; then she stifled a burp, ladylike, against her hand.

“We have to talk,” she said. “Or, rather, I have to talk and you have to listen.”

“Annie, when I said you were crazy - “

“Hush! Not a word about that. Maybe we'll talk about that later. Not that I would ever try to change your mind about anything you chose to think - a Mister Smart Guy like you who thinks for a living. All I ever did was pull you out of your wrecked car before you could freeze to death and splint your poor broken legs and give you medicine to ease your pain and take care of you and talk you out of a bad book you'd written and into the best one you ever wrote. And if that's crazy, take me to the loonybin.” Oh, Annie, if only someone would, he thought, and before he could stop himself he had snapped: “You also cut off my fucking foot!” Her hand flickered out whip-quick and rocked his head over to one side with a thin spatting sound.

“Don't you use that effword around me,” Annie said. “I was raised better even if you weren't. You're lucky I didn't cut off your man-gland. I thought of it, you know.” He looked at her. His stomach felt like the inside of an ice-maker. “I know you did, Annie,” he said softly. Her eyes widened and for just a moment she looked both startled and guilty - Naughty Annie instead of Nasty Annie.

“Listen to me. Listen closely, Paul. We're going to be all right if it gets dark before anyone comes to check on that fellow. It'll be full dark in an hour and a half. If someone comes sooner - “ She reached into the khaki bag again and brought out the trooper's.44. The cellar lights shone on the zigzagging lightning-bolt the Lawnboy's blade had chopped into the gun's barrel.

“If someone comes sooner there's this,” she said. “For whoever comes, and then you, and then me.”

18

Once it was dark, she said, she was going to drive the police cruiser up to her Laughing Place. There was a lean-to beside the cabin where she could park it safely out of sight. She thought the only danger of being noticed would come on Route 9, but even there the risk would be small - she only had to drive four miles of it. Once she was off 9, the way into the hills was by little-travelled meadow-line roads, many fallen into casual disuse as grazing cattle this high up became a rarity. A few of these roads, she said, were still gated off - she and Ralph had obtained keys to them when they bought the property. They didn't have to ask; the owners of the land between the road and the cabin gave them the keys. This was called neighboring, she told Paul, managing to invest a pleasant word with unsuspected depths of nuance: suspicion, contempt, bitter amusement.

“I would take you with me just to keep an eye on you, now that you've shown how untrustworthy you can be, but it wouldn't work. I could get you up there in the back of the police-car, out getting you back down would be impossible. I'm going to have to ride Ralph's trail-bike. I'll probably fall off and break my cockadoodie neck!” She laughed merrily to show what a joke on her that would be, but Paul did not join her.

“If that did happen, Annie, what would happen to me?”

“You'll be fine, Paul,” she said serenely. “Gosh, you're such a worry-wart!” She walked over to one of the cellar windows and stood there a moment, looking out, measuring the fall of the day. Paul watched her moodily. If she fell off her husband's bike or drove off one of those unpaved ridge-roads, he did not actually believe he would be fine. What he actually believed was that he would die a dog's death down here, and when it was finally over he would make a meal for the rats which were even now undoubtedly watching these two unwelcome bipeds who had intruded upon their domain. There was a Kreig lock on the pantry door now, and a bolt on the bulkhead almost as thick as his wrist. The cellar windows, as if reflecting Annie's paranoia (and there was nothing strange about that, he thought; didn't all houses come, after awhile, to reflect the personalities of their inhabitants?), were not much more than dirty gun-slits, about twenty inches long by fourteen wide. He didn't think he could have wriggled through one of those even on his fittest day, which this wasn't. He might be able to break one and yell for help if someone showed up here before he starved to death, but that wasn't much comfort.

The first twinges of pain slipped down his legs like poisoned water. And the want. His body yelling for Novril. It was the gotta, wasn't it? Sure it was.

Annie came back and took the third bottle of Pepsi. “I'll bring down another couple of these before I go,” she said. “Right now I need the sugar. You don't mind, do you?”

“Absolutely not. My Pepsi is your Pepsi.” She twisted the cap off the bottle and drank deeply. Paul thought: Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug, make ya want to holler hi-de-ho. Who was that? Roger Miller, right? Funny, the stuff your mind coughed up.

Hilarious.

“I'm going to put him in his car and drive it up to my Laughing Place. I'm going to take all his things. I'll put the car in the shed up there and bury him and his you know, his scraps… in the woods up there.” He said nothing. He kept thinking about Bossie, bawling and bawling and bawling until she couldn't bawl anymore because she was dead, and another of those great axioms of Life on the Western Slope was just this: Dead cows don't bawl.

“I have a driveway chain. I'm going to use it. If the police come, it may raise suspicion, but I'd rather have them suspicious than have them drive up to the house and hear you making a big cockadoodie fuss. I thought of gagging you, but gags are dangerous, especially if you're taking drugs that affect respiration. Or you might vomit. Or your sinuses might close up because it's so damp down here. If your sinuses closed up tight and you couldn't breathe through your mouth… “ She looked away, unplugged, as silent as one of the stones in the cellar wall, as empty as the first bottle of Pepsi she had drunk. Make ya want to holler hi-de-ho. And had Annie hollered hi-de-ho today? Bet your ass. O brethren, Annie had yelled hi-de-ho until the whole yard was oogy. He laughed. She made no sign she had heard him.

Then, slowly, she began to come back.

She looked around at him, blinking.

“I'm going to stick a note through one of the links in the fence,” she said slowly, re-gathering her thoughts. “There's a town about thirty-five miles from here. It's called Steamboat Heaven, isn't that a funny name for a town? They're having what they call The World's Biggest Flea Market this week. They have it every summer. There's always lots of people there who sell ceramics. I'll write in my note that I'm there, in Steamboat Heaven, looking at ceramics. I'll say I'm staying overnight. And if anyone asks me later where I stayed, so they can check the register, I'll say there were no good ceramics so I started back. Only I got tired. That's what I'll say. I'll say I pulled over to take a nap because I was afraid I might fall asleep behind the wheel. I'll say I only meant to take a short nap but I was so tired from working around the place that I slept all night.” Paul was dismayed by the depth of this slyness. He suddenly realized that Annie was doing exactly what he could not: she was playing Can You? in real life. Maybe, he thought, that's why she doesn't write books. She doesn't have to.

“I'll get back just as soon as I can, because policemen will come here,” she said. The prospect did not seem to disturb Annie's weird serenity in the least, although Paul could not believe that, in some part of her mind, she did not realize how close to the end of the game they had now come. “I don't think they'll come tonight - except maybe to cruise by - but they will come. As soon as they know for sure he's really missing. They'll go all along his route, looking for him and trying to find out where he stopped, you know, showing up. Don't you think so, Paul?”

“Yes.”

“I should be back before they come. If I start out on the bike at first light, I might even be able to make it back before noon. I should he able to beat them. Because if he started from Sidewinder, be would. have stopped at lots of places before he got here.

“By the time they come, you should be back in your own room, snug as a bug in a rug. I'm not going to tie you up, or gag you, or anything like that, Paul. You can even peek when I go out to talk to them. Because it will be two next time, I think. At least two, don't you think so?” Paul did.

She nodded, satisfied. “But I can handle two, if I have to.” She patted the khaki purse. “I want you to remember that kid's gun while you're peeking, Paul. I want you to remember that it's going to be in here all the time I'm talking to those police when they come tomorrow or the next day. The bag won't be zipped. It's all right for you to see them, but if they see you, Paul - either by accident or because you try something tomorrow like you did today - if that happens, I'm going to take the gun out of the bag and start shooting. You're already responsible for that kid's death.”

“Bullshit,” Paul said, knowing she would hurt him for it but not caring.

She didn't, though. She only smiled her serene, maternal smile.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “I don't kid myself that you care, I don't kid myself about that at all, but you know. I don't kid myself that you'd care about getting another two people killed, if it would help you… but it wouldn't, Paul. Because if I have to do two, I'll do four. Them… and us. And do you know what? I think you still care about your own skin.”

“Not much,” he said. “I'll tell you the truth, Annie - everyday that passes, my skin feels more and more like something I want to get out of.” She laughed.

“Oh, I've heard that one before. But let them see you put one hand on their oogy old respirators! Then it's a different story! Yes! When they see that, they yell and cry and turn into a bunch of real brats!” Not that you ever let that stop you, right, Annie?

“Anyway,” she said, “I just wanted you to know how things are. If you really don't care, yell your head off when they come. It's entirely up to you.” Paul said nothing.

“When they come I'll stand right out there in the driveway and say yes, there was a state trooper that came by here. I'll say he came just when I was getting ready to leave for Steamboat Heaven to look at the ceramics. I'll say he showed me your picture. I'll say I hadn't seen you. Then one of them will ask me, “This was last winter, Miss Wilkes, how could you be so positive?” And I'll say, “If Elvis Presley was still alive and you saw him last winter, would you remember seeing him?” And he'll say yes, probably so, but what does that have to do with the price of coffee in Borneo, and I'll say Paul Sheldon is my favorite writer and I've seen his picture lots of times. I have to say that, Paul. Do you know why?” He knew. Her slyness continued to astound him. He supposed it shouldn't, not anymore, but it did. He remembered the caption below the picture of Annie in her detainment cell, the picture taken in the caesura between the end of the trial and the return of the jury. He remembered it word for word. IN MISERY? NOT THE DRAGON LADY. Annie reads calmly as she waits for the verdict.

“So then,” she continued, “I'll say the policeman wrote it all down in his book and thanked me. I'll say I asked him in for a cup of coffee even though I was in a hurry to be on my way and they'll ask me why. I'll say he probably knew about my trouble before, and I wanted to satisfy his mind that everything was on the up-and-up here. But he said no, he had to move along. So I asked if he'd like to take a cold Pepsi along with him because the day was so hot and he said yes, thanks, that was very kind.” She drained her second Pepsi and held the empty plastic bottle between her and him. Seen through the plastic her eye was huge and wavering, the eye of a Cyclops. The side of her head took on a ripply, hydrocephalic bulge.

“I'm going to stop and put this bottle in the ditch about two miles up the road,” she said. “But first I'll put his fingers on it, of course.” She smiled at him - a dry, spitless smile.

“Fingerprints,” she said. “They'll know he went past my house then. Or they'll think they do, and that's just as good, isn't it, Paul?” His dismay deepened.

“So they'll go up the road and they won't find him. He'll just be gone. Like those swamis who toot their flutes until ropes come out of baskets and they climb the ropes and disappear. Poof!”

“Poof,” Paul said.

“It won't take them long to come back. I know that. After all, if they can't find any trace of him except that one bottle after here, they'll decide they better think some more about me. After all, I'm crazy, aren't I? All the papers said so. Nutty as a fruitcake!

“But they'll believe me at first. I don't think they'll actual want to come in and search the house - not at first. They look in other places and try to think of other things before they come back. We'll have some time. Maybe as much as a week.” She looked at him levelly.

“You're going to have to write faster, Paul,” she said.

19

Dark fell and no police came. Annie did not spend the time before it did with Paul, however; she wanted to re-glaze his bedroom window, and pick up the paper-clips and broken glass scattered on the lawn. When the police come tomorrow looking for their missing lamb, she said, we don't want the to see anything out of the ordinary, do we, Paul?

Just let them look under the lawnmower, kiddo. Just let them look under there and they'll see plenty out of the ordinary.

But no matter how hard he tried to make his vivid imagination work, he could not make it come up with a scenario which would lead up to that.

“Do you wonder why I told you all of this, Paul?” she asked before going upstairs to see what she could do with the window. “Why I went into my plans for dealing with this in such great detail?”

“No,” he said wanly.

“Partly because I wanted you to know exactly what the stakes are, and exactly what you'll have to do to stay alive. I also wanted you to know that I'd end it right now. Except for the book. I still care about the book.” She smiled. It was a smile which was both radiant and strangely wistful. “It really is the best Misery story of them all, and I do so much want to know how it all comes out.”

“So do I, Annie,” he said.

She looked at him, startled. “Why… you know don't you?”

“When I start a book I always think I know how things will turn out, but I never actually had one end exactly that way. It isn't even that surprising, once you stop to think about it. Writing a book is a little like firing an ICBM… only it travels over time instead of space. The book-time the characters spend living in the story and the real time the novelist spends writing it all down. Having a novel end exactly the way you thought it would when you started out would be like shooting a Titan missile halfway around the world and having the payload drop through a basketball hoop. It looks good on paper, and there are people who build those things who'd tell you it was easy as pie - and even keep a straight face while they said it - but the odds are always against.”

“Yes,” Annie said. “I see.”

“I must have a pretty good navigation system built into the equipment, because I usually get close, and if you have enough high explosive packed into the nosecone, close is good enough. Right now I see two possible endings to the book. One is very sad. The other, while not your standard Hollywood happy ending, at least holds out some hope for the future.” Annie looked alarmed… and suddenly thunderous. “You're not thinking of killing her again, are you, Paul?” He smiled a little. “What would you do if I did, Annie? Kill me? That doesn't scare me a bit. I may not know what's going to happen to Misery, but I know what's going to happen to me… and you. I'll write THE END, and you'll read, and then you'll write THE END, won't you? The end of us. That's one I don't have to guess at. Truth really isn't stranger than fiction, no matter what they say. Most times you know exactly how things are going to turn out.”

“But - “

“I think I know which ending it's going to be. I'm about eighty percent sure. If it turns out that way, you'll like it. But even if it turns out the way I think, neither of us will know the actual details until I get them written down, will we?”

“No - I suppose not.”

“Do you remember what the old Greyhound Bus ads used to say? “Getting there is half the fun.”

“Either way, it's almost over, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Almost over.”

20

Before she left she brought him another Pepsi, a box of Ritz crackers, sardines, cheese… and the bedpan.

“If you bring me my manuscript and one of those yellow legal pads, I'll work in longhand,” he said. “It will pass the time.” She considered, then shook her head regretfully. “I wish you could, Paul. But that would mean leaving at least one light on, and I can't risk it.” He thought of being left alone down here in the cellar and felt panic flush his skin again, but just for a moment. Then it went cold. He felt tiny hard goosebumps rising on his skin. He thought of the rats hiding in their holes and runs in the rock walls. Thought of them coming out when the cellar went dark. Thought of them smelling his helplessness, perhaps.

“Don't leave me in the dark, Annie. Please don't do that.”

“I have to. If someone noticed a light in my cellar, they might stop to investigate, driveway chain or no driveway chain, note or no note. If I gave you a flashlight, you might try to signal with it. If I gave you a candle, you might try to burn the house do” with it. You see how well I know you?” He hardly dared mention the times he had gotten out of his room, because it always made her furious; now his fear of being left alone down here in the dark drove him to it. “If I had wanted to burn the house down, Annie, I could have done it long before this.”

“Things were different then,” she said shortly. “I'm sorry you don't like being left in the dark. I'm sorry you have to be. But it's your own fault, so quit being a brat. I've got to go. If you feel like you need that injection, stick it in your leg.” She looked at him.

“Or stick it up your ass.” She started for the stairs.

“Cover the windows, then!” he yelled after her. “Use some pieces of sheet… or… or… paint them black… or… or… Christ, Annie, the rats! The rats!” She was on the third stair. She paused, looking at him from those dusty-dime eyes. “I haven't time to do any of those things,” she said, “and the rats won't bother you, anyway. They may even recognize you for one of their own, Paul. They may adopt you.” Annie laughed. She climbed the stairs, laughing harder and harder. There was a click as the lights went out and. Annie went on laughing and he told himself he wouldn't scream, wouldn't beg; that he was past all that. But the damp wildness of the shadows and the boom of her laughter were too much and he shrieked for her not to do this to him, not to leave him, but she only went on laughing and there was a click as the door was shut and her laughter was muted but her laughter was still there, her laughter was on the other side of the door, where there was light, and then the lock clicked, and then another door closed and her laughter was even more muted (but still there), and another lock clicked and a bolt slammed, and her laughter was going away, her laughter was outside, and even after she had started the cruiser up, backed out, put the chain across the driveway, and driven away, he thought he could still hear her. He thought he could still hear her laughing and laughing and laughing.

21

The furnace was a dim bulk in the middle of the room. It looked like an octopus. He thought he would have been able to hear the chiming of the parlor clock if the night had been still, but a strong summer wind had blown up, as it so often did these nights, and there was only time, spreading out forever. He could hear crickets singing just outside the house when the wind dropped… and then, sometime later, he heard the stealthy noises he had been afraid of: the low, momentary scuff-and-scurry of the rats.

Only it wasn't rats he was afraid of, was it? It was the trooper. His so-fucking-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running on full choke. That there was no sense at all in what he was thinking made not a whit of difference in the dark. In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin. He kept seeing the trooper coming back to life - some sort of life - out in the barn, sitting up, the loose hay with which Annie had covered him falling to either side of him and into his lap, his face plowed into bloody senselessness by the mower's blade. Saw him crawling out of the barn and down the driveway to the bulkhead, the torn streamers of his uniform swinging and fluttering. Saw him melting magically through the bulkhead and reintegrating his corpse's body down here. Saw him crawling across the packed dirt floor, and the little noises Paul heard weren't rats but the sounds of his approach, and there was but a single thought in the cooling clay of the trooper's dead brain: You killed me. You opened your mouth and killed me. You threw an ashtray and killed me. You cockadoodie son of a bitch, you murdered my life.

Once Paul felt the trooper's dead fingers slip, tickling, down his cheek, and he screamed loudly, jerking his legs and making them bellow. He brushed frantically at his face and knocked away not fingers but a large spider.

The movement ended the uneasy truce with the pain in his legs and the drug-need in his nerves, but it also diffused his terror a little. His night vision was coming on strong now, he could see better, and that was a help. Not that there was much to look at - the furnace, the remains of a coal-pile, a table with a bunch of shadowy cans and implements lying on it and to his right, up a way from where be was propped… what was that shape? The one next to the shelves? He knew that shape. Something about it that made it a bad shape. It stood on three legs. Its top was rounded. It looked like one of Wells's death-machines in The War Of the Worlds, only in miniature. Paul puzzled over this, dozed a little, woke, looked again, and thought: Of course, I should have known from the first. It is a death-machine. And if anyone on Earth's a Martian, it's Annie-fuckin-Wilkes. It's her barbecue pot. It's the crematorium where she made me burn Fast Cars.

He shifted a little because his ass was going to sleep, and moaned. Pain in his legs - particularly in the bunched remains of his left knee - and pain in his pelvis as well. That! probably meant he was in for a really bad night, because his” pelvis had gotten pretty quiet over the last two months.

He felt for the hypo, picked it up, then put it back. A very light dose, she had said. Best to save it for later, then. He heard a light shuffle-scuffle and looked quickly in the corner, expecting to see the trooper crawling toward him, one brown eye peering from the hash of his face. If not for you I could be home watching TV now with my hand on my wife's leg.

No cop. A dim shape which was maybe just imagination but was more likely a rat. Paul willed himself to relax.

Oh what a long night this was going to be.

22

He dozed a little and woke up slumped far over to the left with his head hung down like a drunk in an alley. He straightened up and his legs cursed him roundly. He used the bedpan and it hurt to piss and he realized with some dismay that a urinary infection was probably setting in. He was so vulnerable now. So fucking vulnerable to everything. He put the urinal aside and picked up the hypo again.

A light dose of scopolamine, she said - well, maybe so. Or maybe she loaded it with a hot shot of something. The sort of stuff she used on folks like Ernie Gonyar and “Queenie” Beaulifant.

Then he smiled a little. Would that really be so bad? The answer was a resounding HELL, NO! It would be good. The pilings would disappear forever. No more low tide. Forever.

With that thought in mind he found the pulse in his left thigh, and though he had never injected himself in his life, he did it efficiently now, even eagerly.

23

He did not die and he did not sleep. The pain went away and he drifted, feeling almost untethered from his body, a balloon of thought drifting at the end of a long string.

You were also Scheherazade to yourself, he thought, and looked at the barbecue pot. He thought of Martian deathrays, burning London in fire.

He thought suddenly of a song, a disco tune, something by a group called the Trammps: Burn, baby, burn, burn the mother down…

24

When he woke up the cellar was filled with the ashy light of dawn. A very large rat sat on the tray Annie had left him, nibbling cheese with its tail neatly curled around its body.

Paul screamed, jerked, then screamed again as pain flowed up his legs. The rat fled.

She had left him some capsules. He knew that the Novril wouldn't take care of the pain, but it was better than nothing.

Besides, pain or no pain, it's time for the old morning fix, right, Paul?

He washed two of the caps down with Pepsi and then leaned back, feeling the dull throb in his kidneys. He was growing something down there, all right. Great.

Martians, he thought. Martian death-machines He looked toward the barbecue pot, expecting it to look like a barbecue pot in the morning light: a barbecue pot and nothing else. He was surprised to find it still looked to him like one of Wells's striding machines of destruction.

You had an idea - what was it?

The song came back, the one by the Trammps: Burn, baby, burn, burn the mother down!

Yeah? And just what mother is that? She wouldn't even leave you a candle. You couldn't light a fart.

Up came a message from the boys in the sweatshop.

You don't need to burn anything now. Or here.

What the fuck are we talking about, guys? Could you let me in on - Then it came, it came at once, the way all the really ideas came, rounded and smooth and utterly persuasive in its baleful perfection.

Burn the mother down…

He looked at the barbecue pot, expecting the pain of what he had done - what she had made him do - to return. It did, but it was dull and faint; the pain in his kidneys was worse. What had she said yesterday? All I ever did was… talk you out of a bad book you'd written and into the best one you ever wrote…

Maybe there was a queer sort of truth in that. Maybe he had wildly overestimated just how good Fast Cars had been.

That's just your mind trying to heal itself, part of him whispered. If you ever get out of this, you'll work yourself around in much the same fashion to thinking you never needed your left foot anyway - hell, five less nails to clip. And they do wonders with prosthetics these days. No, Paul, one was a damned good book and the other was a damned good foot. Let's not kid ourselves.

Yet a deeper part of him suspected that to think that way was kidding himself.

Not kidding yourself, Paul. Tell the goddam truth. Lying to yourself. A guy who makes up stories, a guy like that is lying to everyone, so that guy can't ever lie to himself. It's funny, but it's also the truth. Once you start that shit, you might as well just cover up your typewriter and start studying for a broker's license or something, because you're down the toilet.

So what was the truth? The truth, should you insist, was that the increasing dismissal of his work in the critical press as that of a “popular writer” (which was, as he understood it, one step - a small one - above that of a “hack") had hurt him quite badly. It didn't jibe with his self-image as a Serious Writer who was only churning out these shitty romances in order to subsidize his (flourish of trumpets, please!) REAL WORK! Had he hated Misery? Had he really? If so, why had it been so easy to slip back into her world? No, more than easy; blissful, like slipping into a warm bath with a good book by one hand and a cold beer by the other. Perhaps all he had hated was the fact that her face on the dust jackets had overshadowed his in his author photographs, not allowing the critics to see that they were dealing with a young Mailer or Cheever here - that they were dealing with a heavyweight here. As a result, hadn't his “serious fiction” become steadily more self-conscious, a sort of scream? Look at me! Look how good this is! Hey, guys! This stuff has got a sliding perspective! This stuff has got stream-of-consciousness interludes! This is my REAL WORK, you assholes! Don't you DARE turn away from me! Don't you DARE, you cockadoodie brats! Don't you DARE turn away from my REAL WORK! Don't you DARE, or I'll - What? What would he do? Cut off their feet? Saw off their thumbs?

Paul was seized by a sudden fit of shivering. He had to urinate. He grabbed the bedpan and finally managed, although it hurt worse than before. He moaned while he was pissing, and continued moaning for a long while after it was done.

Finally, mercifully, the Novril began to kick in - a little and he drowsed.

He looked at the barbecue pot with heavy-lidded eyes.

How would you feel if she made you burn Misery's Return? the interior voice whispered, and he jumped a little. Drifting away, he realized that it would hurt, yes, it would hurt terribly, it would make the pain he had felt when Fast Cars went up in smoke look like the pain of this kidney infection compared with what he had felt when she brought the axe down, cutting off his foot, exercising editorial authority over his body.

He also realized that wasn't the real question.

The real question was how it would make Annie feel.

There was a table near the barbecue pot. There were maybe half a dozen jars and cans on it.

One was a can of charcoal lighter fluid.

What if Annie was the one screaming in pain? Are you curious about how that might sound? Are you curious at all? The proverb says revenge is a dish best eaten cold, but Ronson Fast-Lite had yet to be invented when they made that one up.

Paul thought: Burn the mother down, and fell asleep. There was a little smile on his pale and fading face.

25

When Annie arrived back at quarter of three that afternoon, her normally frizzy hair flattened around her head in the shape of the helmet she had been wearing, she was in a silent mood that seemed to indicate tiredness and reflection rather than depression. When Paul asked her if everything had gone all right, she nodded.

“Yes, I think so. I had some trouble starting the bike, or I would have been back an hour ago. The plugs were dirty. How are your legs, Paul? Do you want another shot before I take you upstairs?” After almost twenty hours in the dampness, his legs felt as if someone had studded them with rusty nails. He wanted a shot very badly, but not down here. That would not do at all.

“I think I'm all right.” She turned her back to him and squatted. “All right, grab on. But remember what I said about choke-holds and things like that. I'm very tired, and I don't think I'd react very well to funny jokes.”

“I seem to be all out of jokes.”

“Good.” She lifted him with a moist grunt, and Paul had to bite back a scream of agony. She walked across the floor toward the stairs, her head turned slightly, and he realized she was - or might be - looking at the can-littered table. Her glance was short, seemingly casual, but to Paul it seemed to go on for a very long time, and he was sure she would realize the can of lighter fluid was no longer there. It was stuffed down the back of his underpants instead. Long months after his earlier depredations, he had finally summoned up the courage to steal something else… and if her hands slipped up his legs as she climbed the stairs, she was going to grab, more than a handful of his skinny ass.

Then she glanced away from the table with no change of expression, and his relief was so great that the thudding, shifting ascent up the stairs to the pantry was almost bearable. She kept up a very good poker face when she wanted to, but he thought - hoped - that he had fooled her.

That this time he had really fooled her.

26

“I guess I'd like that shot after all, Annie,” he said when she had him back in bed.

She studied his white, sweat-beaded face for a moment, then nodded and left the room.

As soon as she was gone, he slid the flat can out of his underwear and under the mattress. He had not put anything under there since the knife, and he did not intend to leave the lighter fluid there long, but it would have to stay there for the rest of the day. Tonight he intended to put it in another, safer place.

She came back and gave him an injection. Then she put a steno pad and some freshly sharpened pencils on the windowsill and rolled his wheelchair over so it was by the bed.

“There,” she said. “I'm going to get some sleep. If a car comes in, I'll hear it. If we're left alone, I'll probably sleep right through until tomorrow morning. If you want to get up and work in longhand, here's your chair. Your manuscript is over there, on the floor. I frankly don't advise it until your legs start to warm up a little, though.”

“I couldn't right now, but I guess I'll probably soldier along awhile tonight. I understand what you meant about time being short now.”

“I'm glad you do, Paul. How long do you think you need?”

“Under ordinary circumstances, I'd say a month. The way I've been working just lately, two weeks. If I really go into overdrive, five days. Or maybe a week. It'll be ragged, but it'll be there.” She sighed and looked down at her hands with dull concentration. “I know it's going to be less than two weeks.”

“I wish you'd promise me something.” She looked at him with no anger or suspicion, only faint curiosity. “What?”

“Not to read any more until I'm done… or until I have to… you know… “

“Stop?”

“Yes. Or until I have to stop. That way you'll jet the conclusion without a lot of fragmentation. It'll have a lot more punch.”

“It's going to be a good one, isn't it?”

“Yes.” Paul smiled. “It's going to be very hot stuff.”

27

That night, around eight o'clock, he hoisted himself carefully into the wheelchair. He listened and heard nothing at all from upstairs. He had been hearing the same nothing ever since the squeak of the bedsprings announced her lying down at four o'clock in the afternoon. She really must have been tired.

Paul got the lighter fluid and rolled across to the spot by the window where his informal little writer's camp was pitched: here was the typewriter with the three missing teeth in its unpleasant grin, here the wastebasket, here the pencils and pads and typing paper and piles of scrap-rewrite, some of which he would use and some of which would go into the wastebasket.

Or would have, before.

Here, all unseen, was the door to another world. Here too, he thought, was his own ghost in a series of overlays, like still pictures which, when riffled rapidly, give the illusion of movement.

He wove the chair between the piles of paper and the casually stacked pads with the ease of long practice, listened once more, then reached down and pulled out a nine-inch section of the baseboard. He had discovered it was loose about a month ago, and he could see by the thin film of dust on it (Next you'll be taping hairs across it yourself just to make sure, he had thought) that Annie hadn't known this loose piece of board was here. Behind it was a narrow space empty save for dust and a plentiful scattering of mouse-turds.

He stowed the can of Fast-Lite in the space and pushed the board back into place. He had an anxious moment when he was afraid it would no longer fit flush against its mates (and God! her eyes were so fucking sharp!), and then it slipped neatly home.

Paul regarded this a moment, then opened his pad, picked up a pencil, and found the hole in the paper.

He wrote undisturbed for the next four hours - until the points on all three of the pencils she had sharpened for him were written flat - and then he rolled himself back to the bed, got in, and went easily off to sleep.

28

Geoffrey's arms were beginning to feel like white iron. He had been standing in the deep shadows outside the hut which belonged to M'Chibi “Beautiful One” for the last five minutes, looking rather like a too-slim version of the circus strong-man with the Baronesses” trunk poised over his head.

Just as he came to believe that nothing Hezekiah could say would convince M'Chibi to leave his hut, he heard sounds of movement. Geoffrey turned even further, the muscles in his arms now twitching wildly. Chief M'Chibi “Beautiful One” was the Keeper of the Fire, and inside his hut were better than a hundred torches, the head of each coated with a thick, gummy resin. This resin oozed from the low trees of the area, and the Bourka called it Fire-Oil or Fire-Blood-Oil. Like most essentially simple languages, that of the Bourkas could at times be oddly elusive. Whatever you called the stuff, however, there were enough torches in there to get the whole village afire - it would burn like a Guy Fawkes dummy, Geoffrey thought… if, that was, M'Chibi could be gotten out of the way.

Fear not to strike, Boss Ge'ff'y Hezekiah had said. M'Chibi, he come out firs” one, “cause he the fire-man. Hezekiah, he be comin” out secon” one. So you don't be waitin” to see my gold toot” flash! You break that brat's head, damn quick!

But when he actually did hear them coming, Geoffrey felt a moment's doubt in spite of the agony in his arms. Suppose that, just this once, the one

29

His pencil paused in mid-word at the sound of an approaching engine. He was surprised at how calm he felt - the strongest emotion in him right now was mild annoyance at being interrupted just when it was starting to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Annie's boot-heels rattled staccato down the hallwav.

“Get out of sight.” Her face was tight and grim. The khaki bag, unzipped, was over her shoulder. “Get out of s - “ She paused and saw that he had already rolled the wheelchair back from the window. She looked to make sure that none of his things were on the sill, then nodded.

“It's the State Police,” she said. She looked tense but in control. The shoulder-bag was within easy reach of her right hand. “Are you going to be good, Paul?”

“Yes,” he said.

Her eyes searched his face.

“I'm going to trust you,” she said finally and turned away, closing the door but not bothering to lock it.

The car turned into the driveway, the smooth, sleepy beat of that big 442 Plymouth engine almost like a trademark. He heard the kitchen screen door bang shut and eased the wheelchair close enough to the window so he could remain in an angle of shadow and still peek out. The cruiser pulled up to where Annie stood, and the engine died. The driver got out and stood almost exactly where the young trooper had been standing when he spoke his last four words… but there all resemblance ended. That trooper had been a weedy young man hardly out of his teens, a rookie cop pulling a shit detail, chasing the cold trail of some numbnuts writer who had wrecked up his car and then either staggered deeper into the woods to die or walked blithely away from the whole mess with his thumb cocked.

The cop currently unfolding himself from behind the cruiser's wheel was about forty, with shoulders seemingly as wide as a barnbeam. His face was a square of granite with a few narrow lines carved into it at the eyes and the corners of the mouth. Annie was a big woman, but this fellow made her look almost small.

There was another difference as well. The trooper Annie killed had been alone. Getting out of the shotgun seat of this cruiser was a small, slope-shouldered plainsclothesman with lank blonde hair. David and Goliath, Paul thought. Mutt and Jeff. Jesus.

The plainclothesman did not so much walk around the cruiser as mince around it. His face looked old and tired, the face of a man who is half-asleep… except for his faded blue eyes. The eyes were wide-awake, everywhere at once. Paul thought he would be quick.

They bookended Annie and she was saying something to them, first looking up to speak to Goliath, then half-turning and looking down to reply to David. Paul wondered what would happen if he broke the window again and screamed for help again. He thought the odds were maybe eight in ten that they would take her. Oh, she was quick, but the big cop looked as if he might be quicker in spite of his size, and strong enough to uproot middling-sized trees with his bare hands. The plainclothesman's self-conscious walk might be as deliberately deceptive as his sleepy look. He thought they would take her… except what surprised them wouldn't surprise her, and that gave her an outside chance, anyway.

The plainclothesman's coat. It was buttoned in spite of the glaring heat. If she shot Goliath first, she might very well be able to put a slug in David's face before he could get that oogy goddam coat unbuttoned and his gun out. More than anything else, that buttoned coat suggested that Annie had been right: so far, this was just a routine check-back.

So far.

I didn't kill him, you know. You killed him. If you had kept your mouth shut, I would have sent him on his way. He'd be alive now…

Did he believe that? No, of course not. But there was still that strong, hurtful moment of guilt - like a quick deep stab-wound. Was he going to keep his mouth shut because there were two chances in ten that she would off these two as well if he opened it?

The guilt stabbed quickly again and was gone. The answer to that was also no. It would be nice to credit himself with such selfless motives, but it wasn't the truth. The fact was simple: he wanted to take care of Annie Wilkes himself. They could only put you in jail, bitch, he thought. I know how to hurt you.

30

There was always the possibility, of course, that they would smell a rat. Rat-catching was, after all, their job, and they would know Annie's background. If that was the way things turned out, so be it… but he thought Annie might just be able to wriggle past the law this one last time.

Paul now knew as much of the story as he needed to know, he supposed. Annie had listened to the radio constantly since her long sleep, and the missing state cop, whose name was Duane Kushner, was big news. The fact that he had been searching for traces of a hotshot writer named Paul Sheldon was reported, but Kushner's disappearance had not been linked, even speculatively, with Paul's own. At least, not yet.

The spring runoff had sent his Camaro rolling and tumbling five miles down the wash. It might have lain undiscovered in the forest for another month or another year but for merest coincidence. A couple of National Guard chopper-jockeys sent out as part of a random drug-control sweep (looking for back-country pot-farmers, in other words) had seen a sunflash on what remained of the Camaro's windshield and set down in a nearby clearing for a closer look. The seriousness of the crash itself had been masked by the violent battering the Camaro had taken as it travelled to its final resting place. If the car had yielded traces of blood to forensic analysis (if, indeed, there had been a forensic analysis), the radio did not say so. Paul knew that even an exhaustive analysis would turn up precious few traces of blood - his car had spent most of the spring with snowmelt running through it at flood-speed.

And in Colorado, most of the attention and concern were focused on Trooper Duane Kushner - as he supposed these two visitors proved. So far all speculation centered on three illegal substances: moonshine, marijuana, and cocaine. It seemed possible that Kushner might have stumbled across the growing, distilling, or stockpiling of one of these substances quite by accident during his search for signs of the tenderfoot writer. And as hope of finding Kushner alive began to fade, questions about why he had been out there alone in the first place began to grow louder - and while Paul doubted if the State of Colorado had money enough to finance a buddy system for its vehicle police, they were obviously combing the area for Kushner in pairs. Taking no chances.

Goliath now gestured toward the house. Annie shrugged and shook her head. David said something. After a moment she nodded and led them up the path to the kitchen door. Paul heard the screen's hinges squeak, and then they were in. The sound of so many footfalls out there was Tightening, almost a profanation.

“What time was it when he came by?” Goliath asked - it had to be Goliath. He had a rumbling Midwestern voice, roughened by cigarettes.

Around four, Annie said. Give or take. She had just finished mowing the grass and she didn't wear a watch. It had been devilish hot; she remembered that well enough.

“How long did he stay, Mrs Wilkes? David asked.

“It's Miss Wilkes, if you don't mind.”

“Excuse me.” Annie said she couldn't reckon on how long for sure, only it hadn't been long. Five minutes, maybe.

“He showed you a picture?” Yes, Annie said, that was why he came. Paul marvelled at how composed she sounded, how pleasant.

“And had you seen the man in the picture?” Annie said certainly, he was Paul Sheldon, she knew that right away. “I have all his books,” she said. “I like them very much. That disappointed Officer Kushner. He said if that was the case, he guessed I probably knew what I was talking about. He looked very discouraged. He also looked very hot.”

“Yeah, it was a hot day, all right,” Goliath said, and Paul was alarmed by how much closer his voice was. In the parlor? Yes, almost certainly in the parlor. Big or not, the guy moved like a goddamned lynx. When Annie responded, her own voice was closer. The cops had moved into the parlor. She was following. She hadn't asked them, but they had gone in there anyway. Looking the place over.

Although her pet writer was now less than thirty-five feet away, Annie's voice remained composed. She had asked if he would like to come in for an iced coffee; he said he couldn't. So she had asked if he'd like to take along a cold bottle of - “Please don't break that,” Annie interrupted herself, her voice sharpening. “I like my things, and some of them are quite fragile.”

“Sorry, ma'am.” That had to be David, his voice low and whispery, both humble and a little startled. That tone coming from a cop would have been amusing under other circumstances, but these were not other circumstances and Paul was not amused. He sat stiffly, hearing the small sound of something being set carefully back down (the penguin on his block of ice, perhaps), his hands clasped tightly on the arms of the wheelchair. He imagined her fiddling with the shoulder-bag. He waited for one of the cops - Goliath, probably - to ask her just what the hell it was she had in there.

Then the shooting would start.

“What were you saying?” David asked.

“That I asked him if he'd like to take along a cold Pepsi from the fridge because it was such a hot day. I keep them right next to the freezer compartment, and that keeps them as cold as you can get them without freezing them. He said that would be very kind. He was a very polite boy. Why did they let such a young boy out alone, do you know?”

“Did he drink the soda here?” David asked, ignoring her question. His voice was closer still. He had crossed the parlor. Paul didn't have to close his eyes to imagine him standing there, looking down the short hall which passed the little downstairs bathroom and ended in the closed guest-room door. Paul sat tight and upright, a pulse beating rapidly in his scrawny throat.

“No,” Annie said, as composed as ever. “He took it along. He said he had to keep rolling.”

“What's down there?” Goliath asked. There was a double thud of booted heels, the sound slightly hollow, as he stepped off the parlor carpet and onto the bare boards of the hallway.

“A bath and a spare bedroom. I sometimes sleep there when it's very hot. Have a look, if you like, but I promise you I don't have your trooper tied to the bed.”

“No, ma'am, I'm sure you don't,” David said, and, amazingly, their footfalls and voices began to fade toward the kitchen again. “Did he seem excited about anything while he was here?”

“Not at all,” Annie said. “Just hot and discouraged.” Paul was beginning to breathe again.

“Preoccupied about anything?”

“No.”

“Did he say where he was going next?” Although the cops almost surely missed it, Paul's own practiced ear sensed the minutest of hesitations - there could be a trap here, a snare which might spring at once or after a short delay. No, she said at last, although he had headed west, so she assumed he must have gone toward Springer's Road and the few farms out that way.

“Thank you, ma'am, for your cooperation,” David said. “We may have to check back with you.”

“All right,” Annie said. “Feel free. I don't see much company these days.”

“Would you mind if we looked “m your barn?” Goliath asked abruptly.

“Not at all. Just be sure to say howdy when you go in.”

“Howdy to who, ma'am?” David asked.

“Why, to Misery,” Annie said. “My pig.”

31

She stood in the doorway looking at him fixedly - so fixedly that his face began to feel warm and he supposed he was blushing. The two cops had left fifteen minutes ago.

“You see something green?” he asked finally.

“Why didn't you holler?” Both cops had tipped their hats to her as they got in their cruiser, but neither had smiled, and there had been a look in their eyes Paul had been able to see even from the narrow angle afforded by the corner of his window. They knew who she was, all right. “I kept expecting you to holler. They would have fallen on me like an avalanche.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“But why didn't you?”

“Annie, if you spend your whole life thinking the worst thing you can imagine is going to happen, you have to be wrong some of the time.”

“Don't be smart with me!” He saw that beneath her assumed impassivity she was deeply confused. His silence did not fit well into her view of all existence as a sort of Big-Time Wrestling match: Honest Annie vs. that all-time, double-ugly tag-team of The Cockadoodie Brats.

“Who's being smart? I told you I was going to keep my mouth shut and I did. I want to finish my book in relative peace. And I want to finish it for you.” She looked at him uncertainly, wanting to believe, afraid to believe… and ultimately believing anyway. And she was right to believe, because he was telling the truth.

“Get busy, then,” she said softly. “Get busy right away. You saw the way they looked at me.”

32

For the next two days life went on just as it had before Duane Kushner; it was almost possible to believe Duane Kushner had never happened at all. Paul wrote almost constantly. He had given the typewriter up for the nonce. Annie put it on the mantel below the picture of the Arc de Triomphe without comment. He filled three legal pads in those two days. There was only one left. When he had filled that one, he would move on to the steno pads. She sharpened his half-dozen Berol Black Warrior pencils, he wrote them dull, and Annie sharpened them again. They shrank steadily as he sat in the sun by the window, bent over, sometimes scratching absently with the great toe of his right foot at the air where the sole of his left foot had been, looking through the hole in the paper. It had yawned wide open again, and the book rushed toward its climax the way the best ones did, as if on a rocket sled. He saw everything with perfect clarity - three groups all hellbent for Misery in the crenellated passages behind the idol's forehead, two wanting to kill her, the third - consisting of Ian, Geoffrey, and Hezekiah - trying to save her… while below, the village of the Bourkas burned and the survivors massed at the one point of egress - the idol's left ear - to massacre anyone who happened to stagger out alive.

This hypnotic state of absorption was rudely shaken but not broken when, on the third day after the visit of David and Goliath, a cream-colored Ford station wagon with KTKA / Grand Junction written on the side pulled into Annie's driveway. The back was full of video equipment.

“Oh God!” Paul said, frozen somewhere between humor, amazement, and horror. “What's this fuck-a-row?” The wagon had barely stopped before one of the rear doors flew open and a guy dressed in combat-fatigue pants and a Deadhead tee-shirt leaped out. There was something big and black pistol-gripped in one hand and for one wild moment Paul thought it was a tear-gas gun. Then he raised it to his shoulder, and swept it toward the house, and Paul saw it was a minicam. A pretty young woman was getting out of the front passenger seat, fluffing her blow-dried hair and pausing for one final appraising look at her makeup in the outside rear-view mirror before joining her camera-man.

The eye of the outside world, which had slipped away from the Dragon Lady these last few years, had now returned with a vengeance.

Paul rolled backward quickly, hoping he had been in time.

Well, if you want to know for sure, just check the six o'clock news, he thought, and then had to raise both hands to his mouth to plug up the giggles.

The screen door banged open and shut.

“Get the hell out of here!” Annie screamed. “Get the hell off my land!” Dimly: “Ms Wilkes, if we could have just a few - “

“You can have a couple of loads of double-ought buck up your cockadoodie bumhole if you don't get out of here!”

“Ms Wilkes, I'm Glenna Roberts from KTKA - “

“I don't care if you're John O. Jesus Johnnycake Christ from the planet Mars! Get off my land or you're DEAD!”

“But - “ KAPOW!

Oh Annie oh my Jesus Annie killed that stupid broad - He rolled back and peeked through the window. He had no choice - he had to see. Relief gusted through him. Annie had fired into the air. That seemed to have done quite well. Glenna Roberts was diving head-first into the KTKA newsmobile. The camera-man swung his lens toward Annie, Annie swung her shotgun toward the camera-man; the camera-man, deciding he wanted to live to see the Grateful Dead again more than he wanted to roll tape on the Dragon Lady, immediately dropped into the back seat again. The wagon was reversing down the driveway before he got his door all the way closed.

Annie stood watching them go, the rifle held in one hand, and then she came slowly back into the house. He heard the clack as she put the rifle on the table. She came down to Paul's room. She looked worse than he had ever seen her, her face haggard and pate, her eyes darting constantly.

“They're back,” she whispered.

“Take it easy.”

“I knew all those brats would come back. And now they have.”

“They're gone, Annie. You made them go.”

“They never go. Someone told them that cop was at Dragon Lady's house before he disappeared. So here they are.”

“Annie - “

“You know what they want?” she demanded.

“Of course. I've dealt with the press. They want the same two things they always want - for you to fuck up while the tape's running and for someone else to buy the martinis when Happy Hour rolls around. But, Annie, you've got: to settle d- “ I “This is what they want,” she said, and raised one hooked hand to her forehead. She pulled down suddenly, sharply, opening four bloody furrows. Blood ran into her eyebrows, down her cheeks, along either side of her nose.

“Annie! Stop it!”

“And this!” She slapped herself across the left cheek with her left hand, hard enough to leave an imprint. “And this!” The right cheek, even harder, hard enough to make droplets of blood fly from the fingernail gouges.

“STOP it!” he screamed.

“It's what they want!” she screamed back. She raised her hands to her forehead and pressed them against the wounds, blotting them. She held her bloody palms out toward him for a moment. Then she plodded out of the room.

After a long, long time, Paul began to write again. It went slowly at first - the image of Annie pulling those furrows into her skin kept intruding - and he thought it was going to be no good, he had just better pack it in for the day, when the story caught him and he fell through the hole in the paper again.

As always these days, he went with a sense of blessed relief

33

More police came the next day: local yokels this time. With them was a skinny man carrying a case which could only contain a steno machine. Annie stood in the driveway with them, listening, her face expressionless. Then she led them into the kitchen.

Paul sat quietly, a steno pad of his own on his lap (he had finished the last legal pad the previous evening), and listened to Annie's voice as she made a statement which consisted of all the things she had told David and Goliath four days ago. This, Paul thought, was nothing more than blatant harassment. He was amused and appalled to find himself feeling a little sorry for Annie Wilkes The Sidewinder cop who asked most of the questions began by telling Annie she could have a lawyer present if she wanted. Annie declined and simply re-told her story. Paul could detect no deviations.

They were in the kitchen for half an hour. Near the end one of them asked how she had come by the ugly-looking scratches on her forehead.

“I did it in the night,” she said. “I had a bad dream.”

“What was that?” the cop asked.

“I dreamed that people remembered me after all this time and started coming out here again,” Annie said.

When they were gone, Annie came to his room. Her face was doughy and distant and ill.

“This place is turning into Grand Central,” Paul said.

She didn't smile. “How much longer?” He hesitated, looked at the pile of typescript with the ragged stack of handwritten pages on top, then back at Annie. “Two days,” he said. “Maybe three.”

“The next time they come they'll have the search warrant,” she said, and left before he could reply.

34

She came in that evening around quarter of twelve and said: “You should have been in bed an hour ago, Paul.” He looked up, startled out of the story's deep dream Geoffrey - who had turned out to be very much the hero of this one - had just come face to face with the hideous queen bee, whom he would have to battle to the death for Misery's life.

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “I'll turn in after awhile. Sometimes you get it down or it gets away.” He shook his hand, which was sore and throbbing. A large hard growth, half callus and half blister, had risen on the inside of his index finger, where the pencil pressed most firmly. He had pills, and they would take away the pain, but they would also blur his thoughts.

“You think it's good, don't you?” she asked softly. “Really good. You're not doing it just for me anymore, are you?”

“Oh no,” he said. For a moment he trembled on the edge of saying something more - of saying, It was never for you, Annie, or all the other people out there who sign their letters “Your number-one fan.” The minute you start to write all those people are at the other end of the galaxy, or something. It was never for my ex-wives, or my mother, or for my father. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.

But it would be unwise to say such a thing to her.

He wrote until dawn was coming up in the east and then fell into bed and slept for four hours. His dreams were confused and unpleasant. In one of them Annie's father was climbing a long flight of stairs. He had a basket of what appeared to be newspaper clippings in his arms. Paul tried; to cry out to him, to warn him, but every time he opened his mouth nothing came out but a neatly reasoned paragraph of narration - although this paragraph was different each time he tried to scream, it always opened the same way: “One day, about a week later… “ And now came Annie Wilkes, screaming, rushing down the hall, hands out-stretched to give her father the killing push… only her screams were becoming weird buzzing noises, and her body was rippling and humping and changing under her skirt and cardigan sweater, because Annie was changing into a bee.

35

No one official came by the following day, but lots of i unofficial people showed up. Designated Gawkers. One of the cars was full of teenagers. When they turned into the driveway to reverse direction, Annie rushed out and screamed at them to get off her land before she shot them for the dirty dogs they were.

“Fuck off, Dragon Lady!” one of them shouted.

“Where'd you bury him?” another yelled as the car backed out in a boil of dust.

A third threw a beer-bottle. As the car roared away, Paul could make out a bumper sticker pasted to the rear window. SUPPORT THE SIDEWINDER BLUE DEVILS, it read.

An hour later he saw Annie stalk grimly past his window, drawing on a pair of work-gloves as she headed for the barn. She came back some time later with the chain. She had taken the time to interlace its stout steel loops with barbed wire. When this prickly knitting was padlocked across the driveway, she reached into her breast pocket, and took out some red pieces of cloth. These she tied to several of the links to aid visibility.

“It won't keep the cops out,” she said when she finally came in, “but it'll keep the rest of the brats away.”

“Yes.”

“Your hand… it looks swollen.”

“Yes.”

“I hate to be a cockadoodie pest, Paul, but… “

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow? Really?” She brightened at once.

“Yes, I think so. Probably around six.”

“Paul, that's wonderful! Shall I start reading now, or - “

“I'd prefer that you wait.”

“Then I will.” That tender, melting look had crept into her eyes again. He had come to hate her most of all when she looked that way. “I love you, Paul. You know that, don't you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.” And bent over his pad again.

36

That evening she brought him his Keflex pill - his urinary infection was improving, but very slowly - and a bucket of ice. She laid a neatly folded towel beside it and left without saying a word.

Paul put his pencil aside - he had to use the fingers of his left hand to unbend the fingers of his right - and slipped his hand into the ice. He left it there until it was almost completely numb. When he took it out, the swelling seemed to have gone down a little. He wrapped the towel around it and sat, looking out into the darkness, until it began to tingle. He put the towel aside, flexed the hand for awhile (the first few times made him grimace with pain, but then the hand began to limber up), and started to write again.

At dawn he rolled slowly over to his bed, lurched in, and was asleep at once. He dreamed he was lost in a snowstorm, only it wasn't snow; it was flying pages which filled the world, destroying direction, and each page was covered with typing, and all the n's and t's and e's were missing, and he understood that if he was still alive when the blizzard ended, he would have to fill them all in himself, by hand, deciphering words that were barely there.

37

He woke up around eleven, and almost as soon as Annie heard him stirring about, she came in with orange juice, his pills, and a bowl of hot chicken soup. She was glowing with excitement. “It's a very special day, Paul, isn't it?”

“Yes.” He tried to pick up the spoon with his right hand and could not. It was puffy and red, so swollen the skin was shiny. When he tried to bend it into a fist, it felt as though long rods of metal had been pushed through it at random. The last few days, he thought, had been like some nightmare autographing session that just never ended.

“Oh, your poor hand!” she cried. “I'll get you another pill! I'll do it right now!”

“No. This is the push. I want my head clear for it.”

“But you can't write with your hand like that!”

“No,” he agreed. “My hand's shot. I'm going to finish this baby the way I started - with that Royal. Eight or ten pages should see it through. I guess I can fight my way through that many n's, t's, and e's.”

“I should have gotten you another machine,” she said. She looked honestly sorry; tears stood in her eyes. Paul thought that the occasional moments like this were the most ghastly of all, because in them he saw the woman she might have been if her upbringing had been right or the drugs squirted out by all the funny little glands inside her had been less wrong. Or both. “I goofed. It's hard for me to admit that, but it's true. It was because I didn't want to admit that Dartmonger woman got the better of me. I'm sorry, Paul. Your poor hand.” She raised it, gentle as Niobe at the pool, and kissed it.

“That's all right,” he said. “We'll manage, Ducky Daddles and I. I hate him, but I've got a feeling he hates me as well, so I guess we're even.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“The Royal. I've nicknamed it after a cartoon character.”

“Oh…” She trailed away. Turned off. Came unplugged. He waited patiently for her to return, eating his soup as he did so, holding the spoon awkwardly between the first and second fingers of his left hand.

At last she did come back and looked at him, smiling radiantly like a woman just awakening and realizing it was going to be a beautiful day. “Soup almost gone? I've got something very special, if it is.” He showed her the bowl, empty except for a few noodles stuck to the bottom. “See what a Do-Bee I am, Annie?” he said without even a trace of a smile.

“You're the most goodest Do-Bee there ever was, Paul and you get a whole row of gold stars! In fact… wait! Wait till you see this!” She left, leaving Paul to look first at the calendar and then at the Arc de Triomphe. He looked up at the ceiling and saw the intertinked W's waltzing drunkenly across the plaster. Last of all he looked across at the typewriter and the vast, untidy pile of manuscript. Goodbye to all that, he thought randomly, and then Annie was bustling back in with another tray.

On it were four dishes: wedges of lemon on one, grated egg on a second, toast points on a third. In the middle was a larger plate, and on this one was a vast (oogy) gooey pile of caviar.

“I don't know if you like this stuff or not,” she said shyly. I don't even know if I like it. I never had it.” Paul began to laugh. It hurt his middle and it hurt his legs and it even hurt his hand; soon he would probably hurt even more, because Annie was paranoid enough to think that if someone was laughing it must be at her. But still he couldn't stop. He laughed until he was choking and coughing, his cheeks red, tears spurting from the corners of his eyes. The woman had cut off his foot with an axe and his thumb with an electric knife, and here she was with a pile of caviar big enough to choke a warthog. And for a wonder, that black look of crevasse did not dawn on her face. She began to laugh with him, instead.

38

Caviar was supposed to be one of those things you either loved or hated, but Paul had never felt either way. If he was flying first class and a stewardess stuck a plate of it in front of him, he ate it and then forgot there was such a thing as caviar until the next time a stewardess stuck a plate of it in front of him. But now he ate it hungrily, with all the trimmings, as if discovering the great principle of food for the first time in his life.

Annie didn't care for it at all. She nibbled at the one dainty teaspoonful she'd put on a toast point, wrinkled her face in disgust, and put it aside. Paul, however, plowed ahead with undimmed enthusiasm. In a space of fifteen minutes he had eaten half of Mount Beluga. He belched, covered his mouth, and looked guiltily at Annie, who went off into another gay gust of laughter.

I think I'm going to kill you, Annie, he thought, and smiled warmly at her. I really do. I may go with you - probably will, in fact - but I am going to go with a by-God bellyful of caviar. Things could be worse.

“That was great, but I can't eat any more,” he said.

“You'd probably throw up if you did,” she said. “That stuff is very rich.” She smiled back. “There's another surprise. I have a bottle of champagne. For later… when you finish the book. It's called Dom Perignon. It cost seventy-five dollars! For one bottle! But Chuckie Yoder down at liquor store says it's the best there is.”

“Chuckie Yoder is right,” Paul said, thinking that it was partly Dom's fault that he'd gotten himself into this hell in the first place. He paused a moment and then said: “There's something else I'd like, as well. For when I finish.”

“Oh? What's that?”

“You said once you had all of my things.”

“I do.”

“Well… there was a carton of cigarettes in my suitcase. I'd like to have a smoke when I finish.” Her smile had faded slowly. “You know those things are no good for you, Paul. They cause cancer.”

“Annie, would you say that cancer is something I have to worry about just now?” She didn't answer.

“I just want that one single cigarette. I've always leaned back and smoked one when I finished. It's the one that always tastes the best, believe me - even better than the one you have after a really fine meal. At least that's how it used to be. I suppose this time it'll make me feel dizzy and like puking, but I'd like that little link with the past. What do you say, Annie? Be a sport. I have been.”

“All right… but before the champagne. I'm not drinking a seventy-five-dollar bottle of fizzy beer in the same room where you've been blowing that poison around.”

“That's fine. If you bring it to me around noon, I'll put it on the windowsill where I can look at it once in awhile. I'll finish, and then I'll fill in the letters, and then I'll smoke it until I feel like I'm going to fall down unconscious, and then I'll butt it. Then I'll call you.”

“All right,” she said. “But I'm still not happy about it. Even if you don't get lung cancer from just one, I'm still not happy about it. And do you know why, Paul?”

“No.” Because only Don't-Bees smoke,” she said, and began to gather up the dishes.

39

“Mistuh Boss Ian, is she -?”

“Shhhhh!” Ian hissed fiercely, and Hezekiah subsided. Geoffrey felt a pulse beating with wild rapidity in his throat. From outside came the steady soft creak of lines and rigging, the slow flap of the sails in the first faint breezes of the freshening trade winds, the occasional cry of a bird. Dimly, from the afterdeck, Geoffrey could hear a gang of men singing a shanty in bellowing, off-key voices. But in here all was silence as the three men, two white and one black, waited to see if Misery would live… or - Ian groaned hoarsely, and Hezekiah gripped his arm. Geoffrey merely tightened his already hysterically tight hold on himself. After all of this, could God really be cruel enough to let her die? Once he would have denied such a possibility confidently, and with humor rather than indignation. The, idea that God could be cruel would in those days have struck him as absurd.

But his ideas about God - like his ideas about so many things, had changed. They had changed in Africa. In Africa he had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel - they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.

These wretched musings were interrupted by a harsh, half-superstitious gasp from Hezekiah.

“Mist” Boss Ian! Mist” Boss Geoffrey! Look! She eyes Look she eyes!” Misery's eyes, that gorgeously delicate shade of cornflower blue, had fluttered open. They passed from Ian to Geoffrey and then back to Ian again. For a moment Geoffrey saw only puzzlement in those eyes… and then recognition dawned in them, and he felt gladness roar through his soul.

“Where am I?” she asked, yawning and stretching. “Ian - Geoffrey - are we at sea? Why am I so hungry?” Laughing, crying, Ian bent and hugged her, speaking her name over and over again.

Bewildered but pleased, she hugged him back - and because he knew she was all right, Geoffrey found he could abide their love, now and forever. He would live alone, could live alone, in perfect peace.

Perhaps the gods were not insane after all… at least, not all of them.

He touched Hezekiah on the shoulder. “I think we should leave them alone, old man, don” you?”

“I guess that be right, Mist” Boos Geoffrey,” Hezekiah said. He grinned widely, flashing all seven of his gold teeth.

Geoffrey stole one last look at her, and for just a moment those cornflower eyes flashed his way, warming him, filling him. Fulfilling him.

I love you, my darling, he thought. Do you hear me?

Perhaps the answer which came back was only the wistful call of his own mind, but he thought not - it was too clear, too much her own voice.

I hear… and I love you, too.

Geoffrey closed the door and went up to the afterdeck. Instead of throwing himself over the rail, as he might have done, he lit his pipe and smoked a bowl of tobacco slowly, watching the sun go down behind that distant, disappearing cloud on horizon - that cloud which was the coast of Africa.

And then, because he could not stand to do otherwise, Paul Sheldon rolled the last page out of the typewriter and scrawled the most loved and hated phrase in the writer's vocabulary with a pen:

40

His swollen right hand had not wanted to fill in the missing letters, but he had forced it through the work nonetheless. If he wasn't able to work at least some of the stiffness out of it, he was not going to be able to carry through with this.

When it was done, he put the pen aside. He regarded his work for a moment. He felt as he always did when he finished a book - queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.

It was always the same, always the same - like toiling uphill through jungle and breaking out to a clearing at the top after months of hell only to discover nothing more rewarding than a view of a freeway - with a few gas stations and bowling alleys thrown in for good behavior, or something.

Still, it was good to be done - always good to be done. Good to have produced, to have caused a thing to be. In a numb sort of way he understood and appreciated the bravery of the act, of making little lives that weren't, creating the appearance of motion and the illusion of warmth. He understood - now, finally - that he was a bit of a dullard at doing this trick, but it was the only one he knew, and if he always ended up doing it ineptly, he at least never failed to do it with love. He touched the pile of manuscript and smiled a little bit.

His hand left the big pile of paper and stole to the single Marlboro she had put on the windowsill for him. Beside it was a ceramic ashtray with a paddlewheel excursion boat printed on the bottom encircled by the words, SOUVENIR OF HANNIBAL, MISSOURI - HOME OF AMERICA'S STORY TELLER!

In the ashtray was a book of matches, but there was only one match in it - all she had allowed him. One, however, should be enough.

He could hear her moving around upstairs. That was good. He would have plenty of time to make his few little preparations, plenty of warning if she decided to come down before he was quite ready for her.

Here comes the real trick, Annie. Lees see if I can do it. Let's see - can I?

He bent over, ignoring the pain in his legs, and began to work the loose section of baseboard out with his fingers.

41

He called for her five minutes later, and listened to her heavy, somehow toneless tread on the stairs. He had expected to feel terrified when things got to this point, and was relieved to find he felt quite calm. The room was filled with the reek of lighter fluid. It dripped steadily from one side of the board which lay across the arms of the wheelchair.

“Paul, are you really done? she called down the length of hallway.

Paul looked at the pile of paper sitting on the board beside the hateful Royal typewriter. Lighter fluid soaked the stack. “Well,” he called back, “I did the best I could, Annie.”

“Wow! Oh, great! Gee, I can hardly believe it! After all this time! Just a minute! I'll get the champagne!”

“Fine!” He heard her cross the kitchen linoleum, knowing where each squeak was going to come the instant before it did come. I am hearing all these sounds for the last time, he thought, and that brought a sense of wonder, and wonder broke the calm open like an egg. The fear was inside… but there was something else in there as well. He supposed it was the receding coast of Africa.

The refrigerator door was opened, then banged shut. Here she came across the kitchen again; here she came.

He had not smoked the cigarette, of course; it still lay on the windowsill. It had been the match he wanted. That one single match.

What if it doesn't light when you strike it?

But it was far too late for such considerations.

He reached over to the ashtray and picked up the matchbook. He tore out the single match. She was coming down the hallway now. Paul struck the match and, sure enough, it didn't light.

Easy! Easy does it!

He struck it again. Nothing.

Easy… easy…

He scratched it along the rough dark-brown strip on the back of the book a third time and a pale-yellow flame bloomed at the end of the paper stick.

42

“I just hope this - “ She stopped, the next word pulled back inside her she sucked in breath. Paul sat in his wheelchair behind a barricade of heaped paper and ancient Royal stenomongery. He had purposely turned the top sheet around so she could read this:

By Paul Sheldon

Above this sopping pile of paper Paul's swollen right hand hovered, and held between the thumb and first finger was a single burning match.

She stood in the doorway, holding a bottle of champagne wrapped in a strip of towelling. Her mouth dropped open. She closed it with a snap.

“Paul?” Cautiously. “What are you doing?”

“It's done,” he said. “And it's good, Annie. You were right. The best of the Misery books, and maybe the best thing I ever wrote, mongrel dog or not. Now I'm going to do a little trick with it.It's a good trick. I learned it from you.”

“Paul, no!” she screamed. Her voice was full of agony and understanding. Her hands flew out, the bottle of champagne dropping from them unheeded. It hit the floor and exploded like a torpedo. Curds of foam flew everywhere. “No! No! PLEASE DON'T - “

“Too bad you'll never read it,” Paul said, and smiled at her. It was his first real smile in months, radiant and genuine. “False modesty aside, I've got to say it was better than good. It was great, Annie.” The match was guttering, printing its small heat on the tips of his fingers. He dropped it. For one terrible moment he thought it had gone out, and then pale-blue fire uncoiled across the title page with an audible sound - foomp! It ran down the sides, tasted the fluid that had pooled along the outer edge of the paper-pile, and shot up yellow.

“OH GOD NO!” Annie shrieked. “NOT MISERY! NOT MISERY! NOT HER! NO! NO!” Now her face had begun to shimmer on the far side of the flames. “Want to make a wish, Annie?” he shouted at her. “Want to make a wish, you fucking goblin?”

“OH MY GOD OH PAUL WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOOING?” She stumbled forward, arms outstretched. Now the pile of paper was not just burning; it was blazing. The gray side of the Royal had begun to turn black. Lighter fluid had pooled under it and now pale-blue tongues of flame shot up between the keys. Paul could feel his face baking, the skin tightening.

“NOT MISERY!” she wailed. “YOU CAN'T BURN MISERY, YOU COCKADOODIE BRAT, YOU CAN'T BURN MISERY!” And then she did exactly what he had almost known she would do. She seized the burning pile of paper and wheeled about, meaning to run to the bathroom with it, perhaps, and douse it in the tub.

When she turned Paul seized the Royal, unmindful of the blisters its hot right side was printing on his already swollen right hand. He lifted it over his head. Little blue firedrops still fell from its undercarriage. He paid them no more mind than he paid the flare of pain in his back as he strained something there. His face was an insane grimace of effort and concentration. He brought his arms forward and down, letting the typewriter fly out of his hands. It struck her squarely in the center of her wide solid back.

“HOO-OWWG!” It was not a scream but a vast, startled grunt. Annie was driven forward onto the floor with the burning stack of paper under her.

Small bluish fires like spirit-lanterns dotted the surface of the board which had served as his desk. Gasping, each breath smooth hot iron in his throat, Paul knocked it aside. He pushed himself up and tottered erect on his right foot.

Annie was writhing and moaning. A lick of flame shot up through the gap between her left arm and the side of her body. She screamed. Paul could smell frying skin, burning fat.

She rolled over, struggling to her knees. Most of the paper was on the floor now, either still burning or hissing to ruin in puddles of champagne, but Annie still held some, and it was still burning. Her cardigan sweater was burning, too. He saw green hooks of glass in her forearms. A larger shard poked out of her right cheek like the blade of a tomahawk.

“I'm going to kill you, you lying cocksucker,” she said, and staggered toward him. She knee-walked three “steps” toward him and then fell over the typewriter. She writhed and managed to turn over halfway. Then Paul fell on her. He felt the sharp angles of the typewriter beneath her even through her body. She screamed like a cat, writhed like a cat, and tried to claw out from under him like a cat.

The flames were going out around them but he could still feel savage heat coming off the twisting, heaving mound beneath him and knew that at least some of her sweater and brassiere must be cooked onto her body. He felt no sympathy at all.

She tried to buck him off. He held on, and now he was lying squarely on top of her like a man who means to commit rape, his face almost on hers; his right hand groped, knowing exactly what it was looking for.

“Get off me!” He found a handful of hot, charry paper.

“Get off me!” He crumpled the paper, squeezing flames out between his fingers. He could smell her - cooked flesh, sweat, hate, madness.

GET OFF ME!” she screamed, her mouth yawning wide, and he was suddenly looking into the dank red-lined pit of the goddess. “GET OFF ME YOU COCKADOODIE BR - “ He stuffed paper, white bond and black charred onionskin, into that gaping, screaming mouth. Saw the blazing eyes suddenly widen even more, now with surprise and horror and fresh pain.

“Here's your book, Annie,” he panted, and his hand closed on more paper. This bunch was out, dripping wet, smelling sourly of spilt wine. She bucked and writhed under him. The salt-dome of his left knee whammed the floor and there was excruciating pain, but he stayed on top of her. I'm gonna rape you, all right, Annie. I'm gonna rape you because all I can do is the worst I can do. So suck my book. Suck my book. Suck on it until you fucking CHOKE. He crumpled the wet paper with a convulsive closing jerk of his fist and slammed it into her mouth, driving the half-charred first bunch farther down.

“Here it is, Annie, how do you like it? It's a genuine first, it's the Annie Wilkes Edition, how do you like it? Eat it, Annie, suck on it, go on and eat it, be a Do-Bee and eat your book all up.” He slammed in a third wad, a fourth. The fifth was still burning; he put it out with the already blistered heel of his right hand as he stuffed it in.

Some weird muffled noise was coming out of her. She gave a tremendous jerk and this time Paul was thrown off. She struggled and flailed to her knees. Her hands clawed at her blackened throat, which had a hideously swelled look. Little was left of her sweater but the charred ring of the neck. The flesh of her belly and diaphragm bubbled with blisters. Champagne was dripping from the wad of paper,which protruded from her mouth.

“Mumpf! Mark! Mark!” Annie croaked. She got to her feet somehow, still clawing at her throat. Paul pushed himself backward, legs sticking untidily out in front of him, watching her warily. “Harkoo? Dorg? Mumpf!” She took one step toward him. Two. Then she tripped over the typewriter again. As she fell this time her head twisted at an angle and he saw her eyes looking at him with an expression that was questioning and somehow terrible: What happened, Paul? I was bringing you champagne, wasn't I?

The left side of her head connected with the edge of the mantelpiece and she went down like a loose sack of bricks, striking the floor in a vast tumble that shook the house.

43

Annie had fallen on the bulk of the burning paper; her body had put it out. It was a smoking black lump in the middle of the floor. The puddles of champagne had put out most of the individual pages. But two or three had wafted against the wall to the left of the door while still burning brightly, and the wallpaper was alight in spots… but burning with no real enthusiasm.

Paul crawled over to his bed, pulling himself on his elbows, and got hold of the coverlet. Then he worked his way over to the wall, pushing the shards of broken bottle out of his way with the sides of his hands as he went. He had strained his back. He had burned his right hand badly. His head ached. His stomach roiled with the sick-sweet smell of burned meat. But he was free. The goddess was dead and he was free.

He got his right knee under him, reached up clumsily with the coverlet (which was damp with champagne and striped with smeary black swaths of ash), and began to beat at the flames. When he let the coverlet fall into a smoking heap at the baseboard, there was a big smoking bald spot in the middle of the wall, but the paper was out. The bottom page of the calendar had curled up, but that was all.

He began to crawl back toward the wheelchair. He was halfway there when Annie opened her eyes.

44

Paul stared, unbelieving, as she got slowly to her knees. Paul himself was propped on his hands, legs trailing out behind him. He looked Eke a strange adult version of Popeye's nephew, Swee” Pea.

No… no, you're dead.

You are in error, Paul. You can't kill the goddess. The goddess is immortal. Now I must rinse.

Her eyes were staring, horrible. A huge wound, pink-red, glared through her hair on the left side of her head. Blood sheeted down her face.

“Durd!” Annie cried through her throatful of paper. She began to crawl toward him, hands outstretched, flexing. “Ooo durd!” Paul pulled himself around in a half-circle and began to crawl for the door. He could hear her behind him. And then, as he entered the zone of broken glass, he felt her hand close around his left ankle and squeeze his stump excruciatingly. He screamed.

“DIRT!” Annie cried triumphantly.

He looked over his shoulder. Her face was turning slowly purple, and seemed to be swelling. He realized she actually was turning into the Bourkas” idol.

He yanked with all his might and his leg slithered footlessly out of her grasp, leaving her with nothing but the circlet of leather with which she had capped the stump.

He crawled on, beginning to cry, sweat pouring down his cheeks. He pulled himself along on his elbows like a soldier advancing beneath heavy machine-gun fire. He heard the thud of first one knee from behind him, then the other, then the first again. She was still coming. She was as solid as he had always feared. He had burned her broken her back stuffed her tubes full of paper and still still still she was coming.

“BIRT!” Annie screamed now. “DIRT… BIRT!” One of his elbows came down on a hook of glass and it jabbed up into his arm. He crawled forward anyway with it sticking out of him like a push-pin.

Her hand closed over his left calf.

AW! GAW… OOO OW… AW!” He turned back again and yes, her face had gone black, a dusky rotted-plum black from which her bleeding eyes bulged wildly. Her pulsing throat had swelled up like an inner-tube, and her mouth was writhing. She was, he realized, trying to grin.

The door was just in reach. Paul stretched out and laid hold of the jamb in a death grip.

“GAW… OOO… OW!” Her right hand on his right thigh.

Thud. One knee. Thud. The other.

Closer. Her shadow. Her shadow falling over him.

“No, he whimpered. He felt her tugging, pulling. He held onto the jamb grimly, eyes now squeezed shut.

“GAW… OOO… AW!” Over him. Thunder. Goddess-thunder.

Now her hands scuttled up his back like spiders and settled upon his neck.

“GAW… OOO… DIRT… BIRT!” His air was gone. He held the jamb. He held the jamb and felt her over him felt her hands sinking into his neck and he screamed Die can't you die can't you ever die can't you - “GA W… G - “ The pressure slackened. For a moment he could breathe again. Then Annie collapsed on top of him, a mountain of slack flesh, and he couldn't breathe at all.

45

He worked his way out from under her like a man burrowing his way out of a snowshde. He did it with the last of his strength.

He crawled through the door, expecting her hand to settle around his ankle again at any moment, but that did not happen. Annie lay silent and face-down in blood and spilled champagne and fragments of green glass. Was she dead? She must be dead. Paul did not believe she was dead.

He slammed the door shut. The bolt she had put on looked like something halfway up a high cliff, but he clawed his way up to it, shot it, and then collapsed in a shuddery huddle at the door's foot.

He lay in a stupor for some unknown length of time. What roused him from it was a low, minute scratching sound. The rats, he thought. It's the r- Then Annie's thick, blood-grimed fingers poked under the door and tugged mindlessly at his shirt.

He shrieked and jerked away from them, his left leg creaking with pain. He hammered at the fingers with his fist. Instead of pulling back, they jerked a little and lay still.

Let that be the end of her. Please God let that be the end or her.

In horrible pain now, Paul began to crawl slowly toward the bathroom. He got halfway there and looked back. Her fingers were still poking out from under the door. As bad as his pain was, he could not stand to look at that, or even think of that, and so he reversed direction, went back, and pushed them under. He had to nerve himself to do it; he was certain that the moment he touched them, they would clutch him.

He finally reached the bathroom, every part of him throbbing. He pulled himself inside and shut the door.

God, what if she's moved the dope?

But she hadn't. The untidy litter of boxes was still there, including the ones containing the sample packets of Novril. He took three dry, then crawled back to the door and lay down against it, blocking it with the weight of his body.

Paul slept.

46

When he woke up it was dark, and at first he didn't know where he was - how had his bedroom gotten so small? Then he remembered everything, and with his remembering a queer certainty came: she was not dead, even now not dead. She was standing right outside this door, she had the axe, and when he crawled out she would amputate his head. It would go rolling off down the hallway like a bowling ball while she laughed.

That is crazy, he told himself, and then he heard thought he did - a little rustling sound, the sound of a woman's starched skirt, perhaps, brushing lightly against the wall.

You just made it up. Your imagination… ii's so vivid.

I didn't. I heard it.

He hadn't. He knew that. His hand reached for the door knob, then fell uncertainly back. Yes, he knew he had heard nothing… but what if he had?

She could have gone out the window.

Paul, she's DEAD!

The return, implacable in its illogic: The goddess never dies.

He realized he was frantically biting his lips and made himself stop it. Was this what going crazy was like? Yes. He was close to that, and who had a better right? But if he gave in to it, if the cops finally returned tomorrow or the day after to find Annie dead in the guest-room and a blubbering ball of protoplasm in the downstairs bathroom, a blubbering ball of protoplasm who had once been a writer named Paul Sheldon, wouldn't that be Annie's victory?

You bet. And now, Paulie, you're going to be a good little Do-Bee and follow the scenario. Right?

Okay.

His hand reached for the knob again… and faltered again. He couldn't follow the original scenario. In it he had seen himself lighting the paper and her picking it up, and that had happened. Only he was to have bashed her brains in with the fucking typewriter instead of hitting her in the back with it. Then he had meant to work his way out into the parlor and light the house on fire. The scenario had called for him to effect his escape through one of the parlor windows. He would take a hell of a thump, but he had already seen how fastidious Annie was about locking her doors. Better thumped than crisped, as he believed John the Baptist had once said.

In a book, all would have gone according to plan… but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?

“Very untidy,” Paul croaked. “Good thing there's guys like me, just to keep things rinsed.” He cackled.

The champagne bottle hadn't been in the scenario, but that was minor compared with the woman's hideous vitality and his current painful uncertainty.

And until he knew whether or not she was dead, he couldn't burn the house down, making a beacon that would bring help on the run. Not because Annie might still be alive; he could roast her alive with no qualms at all.

It wasn't Annie that was holding him back; it was the manuscript. The real manuscript. What he had burned had been nothing more than an illusion with a title page on top - blank pages interspersed with written rejects and culls. The actual manuscript of Misery's Return had been safely deposited under the bed, and there it still was.

Unless she's still alive. If she's still alive, maybe she's in there reading it.

So what are you going to do?

Wait right in here, part of him advised. -Right in here, where it's nice and safe.

But another, braver, part of him urged him to go through with the scenario - as much of it as he could, anyway. Get to the parlor, break the window, get out of this awful house. Work his way to the edge of the road and flag down a car. Under previous circumstances this might have meant waiting for days, but not anymore. Annie's house had become a drawing card.

Summoning all of his courage, he reached for the doorknob and turned it. The door swung slowly open on darkness, and yes, there was Annie, there was the goddess, standing there in the shadows, a white shape in a nurse's uniform - He blinked his eyes tightly shut and then opened them. Shadows, yes. Annie, no. Except in the newspaper photographs, he had never seen her in her nurse's uniform. Only shadows. Shadows and (so vivid) imagination.

He crawled slowly into the hall and looked back down toward the guest-room. It was shut, blank, and he began to crawl toward the parlor.

It was a pit of shadows. Annie could be hidden in any of them; Annie could be any of them. And she could have the axe.

He crawled.

There was the overstuffed sofa, and Annie was behind it. There was the kitchen door, standing open, and Annie was behind that. The floorboards creaked in back of him… of course! Annie was behind him!

He turned, heart hammering, brains squeezing at his temples, and Annie was there, all right, the axe upraised, but only for a second. She blew apart into shadows. He crawled into the parlor and that was when he heard the drone of an approaching motor. A faint wash of headlights illuminated the window, brightened. He heard the tires skid in the dirt and understood they had seen the chain she had strung across the driveway.

A car door opened and shut.

“Shit! Look at this!” He crawled faster, looked out, and saw a silhouette approaching the house. The shape of the silhouette's hat was unmistakable. It was a state cop.

Paul groped on the knickknack table, knocking figurine over. Some fell to the floor and shattered. His hand closed around one, and that at least was like a book; it held the roundness novels delivered precisely because life so rarely did.

It was the penguin sitting on his block of ice.

NOW MY TALE IS TOLD! the legend on the block read, and Paul thought: Yes! Thank God!

Propped on his left arm, he made his right hand close around the penguin. Blisters broke open, dribbling pus. He drew his arm back and heaved the penguin through the parlor window, just as he had thrown an ashtray through the window of the guest bedroom not so long ago.

“Here!” Paul Sheldon cried deliriously. “Here, in here, please, I'm in here!”

47

There was yet another novelistic roundness in this denouement: they were the same two cops who had come the other day to question Annie about Kushner, David and Goliath. Only tonight David's sport-coat was not only unbuttoned, his gun was out. David turned out to be Wicks. Goliath was McKnight. They had come with a search warrant. When they finally broke into the house in answer to the frenzied screams coming from the parlor, they found a man who looked like a nightmare sprung to life.

“There was a book I read when I was in high school,” Wicks told his wife early the next morning. “Count of Monte Cristo, I think, or maybe it was The Prisoner of Zenda. Anyway, there was a guy in that book who'd spent forty years in solitary confinement. He hadn't seen anybody in forty years. That's what this guy looked like.” Wicks paused for a moment, wanting to better express how it had been, the conflicting emotions he had felt - horror and pity and sorrow and disgust - most of all wonder that a man who looked this bad should still be alive. He could not find the words. “When he saw us, he started to cry,” he said, and finally added: “He kept calling me David. I don't know why.”

“Maybe you look like somebody he knew,” she said.

“Maybe so.”

48

Paul's skin was gray, his body rack-thin. He huddled by the occasional table, shivering all over, staring at them with rolling eyes.

“Who - “ McKnight began.

“Goddess,” the scrawny man on the floor interrupted. He licked his lips. “You have to watch out for her. Bedroom. That's where she kept me. Pet writer. Bedroom. She's there.”

“Annie Wilkes?” Wicks. “In that bedroom?” He nodded toward the hall.

“Yes. Yes. Locked in. But of course. There's a window.”

“Who - “ McKnight began a second time.

“Christ, can't you see?” Wicks asked. “It's the guy Kushner was looking for. The writer. I can't remember his name, but it's him.”

“Thank God,” the scrawny man said.

“What?” Wicks bent toward him, frowning.

“Thank God you can't remember my name.”

“I'm not tracking you, buddy.”

“It's all right. Never mind. Just… you have to be careful. I think she's dead. But be careful. If she's still alive… dangerous… like a rattlesnake.” With tremendous effort he moved his twisted left leg directly into the beam of McKnight's flashlight. “Cut off my foot. Axe.” They stared at the place where his foot wasn't for long long seconds and then McKnight whispered: “Good Christ.”

“Come on,” Wicks said. He drew his gun and the two of them started slowly down the hall to Paul's closed bedroom door.

“Watch out for her!” Paul shrieked in his cracked and broken voice. “Be careful!” They unlocked the door and went in. Paul pulled himself against the wall and leaned his head back, eyes closed. He was cold. He couldn't stop shivering. They would scream or she would scream. There might be a scuffle. There might be shots. He tried to prepare his mind for either. Time passed, and it seemed to be a very long time indeed.

At last he heard booted feet coming back down the hall. He opened his eyes. It was Wicks.

“She was dead,” Paul said. “I knew it - the real part of my mind did - but I can still hardly be - “ Wicks said: “There's blood and broken glass and charred paper in there… but there's no one in that room at all.” Paul Sheldon looked at Wicks, and then he began to scream. He was still screaming when he fainted.