36
He wouldn't have dared put the pills under the rug even if he thought he had time to do so before she came back - the packages were small, but the bulges would still be all too obvious. As he heard her go into the downstairs bathroom, he took them, reached painfully around his body, and stuffed them into the back of his underpants. Sharp cardboard corners poked into the cleft of his buttocks.
She came back with the urinal, an old-fashioned tin device that looked absurdly like a blow-dryer, in one hand. She had two Novril capsules and a glass of water in the other.
Two more of those on top of the ones you took half an hour ago may drop you into a coma and then kill you, he thought, and a second voice answered at once: Fine with me.
He took the pills and swallowed them with water.
She held out the urinal. “Do you need help?”
“I can do it,” he said.
She turned considerately away while he fumbled his penis into the cold tube and urinated. He happened to he looking at her when the hollow splashing sounds commenced, and he saw that she was smiling.
“All done?” she asked a few moments later.
“Yes.” He actually had needed to urinate quite badly - in all the excitement he hadn't had time to think of such things.
She took the urinal away from him and set it carefully on the floor. “Now let's get you back in bed,” she said. “You must be exhausted… and your legs must be singing grand opera.” He nodded, although the truth was that he could not feel anything - this medication on top of what he'd already given himself was rolling him toward unconsciousness at an alarming rate, and he was beginning to see the room through gauzy layers of gray. He held onto one thought - she was going to lift him into bed, and when she did that she would have to be blind as well as numb not to notice that the back of his underwear happened to be stuffed with little boxes.
She got him over to the side of the bed.
“Just a minute longer, Paul, and you can take a snooze.”
“Annie, could you wait five minutes?” he managed. She looked at him, gaze narrowing slightly. “I thought you were in a lot of pain, buster.”
“I am,” he said. “It hurts… too much. My knee, mostly. Where you… uh, where you lost your temper. I'm not ready to be picked up. Could I have five minutes to… to… “ He knew what he wanted to say but it was drifting away from him. Drifting away and into the gray. He looked at her helplessly, knowing he was going to be caught after all.
“To let the medication work?” she asked, and he nodded gratefully.
“Of course. I'll just put a few things away and come right back.” As soon as she was out of the room he was reaching behind him, bringing out the boxes and stuffing them under the mattress one by one. The layers of gauze kept thickening, moving steadily from gray toward black.
Get them as far under as you can, he thought blindly. Make sure you do that so if she changes the bed she won't pull them out with the ground sheet. Get them as far under as you… you…
He shoved the last under the mattress, then leaned back and looked up at the ceiling, where the W's danced drunkenly across the plaster.
Africa, he thought.
Now I must rinse, he thought.
Oh, I am in so much trouble here, he thought. Tracks, he thought. Did I leave tracks? Did I - Paul Sheldon fell unconscious. When he woke up, fourteen hours had gone by and outside it wa snowing again.
Part II
Misery
Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.
1
Although Ian Carmichael would not have moved from Little Dunthorpe for all the jewels in the Queen's treasury, he had to admit to himself that when it rained in Cornwall it rained harder than anywhere else in England.
There was an old strip of towelling hung from a hook in the entryway, and after hanging up his dripping coat and removing his boots, he used it to towel his dark-blonde hair dry.
Distantly, from the parlor, he could hear the rippling strains of Chopin, and he paused with the strip of towel still in his left hand, listening.
The moisture running down his cheeks now was not rainwater but tears.
He remembered Geoffrey saying You must not cry in front of her, old man - that is the one thing you must never do!
Geoffrey was right, of course - dear old Geoffrey was rarely wrong - but sometimes when he was alone, the Gearless of Misery's escape from the Grim Reaper came forcibly home to him, and it was nearly impossible to hold the tears back. He loved her so much; without her he would die. Without Misery, there would simply be no life left for him, or in him.
Her labor had been long and hard, but no longer and no harder than that of many other young ladies she had seen, the midwife declared. It was only after midnight, an hour after Geoffrey had ridden into the gathering storm to try and fetch the doctor, that the midwife had grown alarmed. That was when the bleeding had started.
“Dear old Geoffrey!” He spoke it aloud this time as he stepped into the huge and stuporously warm West Country kitchen.
“Did ye speak, young sair?” Mrs. Ramage, the Carmichaels” crotchety but lovable old housekeeper, asked him as she came in from the pantry. As usual, her mobcap was askew and she smelled of the snuff she still firmly believed, after all these years, to be a secret vice.
“Not on purpose, Mrs. Ramage,” Ian said.
“By the sound o” ye coat a-drippin” out there in the entry, ye nairly drowned between the sheds and the hoose!”
“Aye, so I nearly did,” Ian said, and thought: If Geoffrey had returned with the doctor even ten minutes later, I believe she would have died. This was a thought he tried consciously to discourage - it was both useless and gruesome - but the thought of life without Misery was so terrible that it sometimes crept up on him and surprised him.
Now, breaking into these gloomy meditations, there came the healthy bawl of a child - his son, awake and more than ready for his afternoon meal. Faintly he could hear the sound of Annie Wilkes, Thomas” capable nurse, as she began to soothe him and change his napkin.
“The wee bairn's in good voice today,” Mrs. Ramage observed. Ian had one moment to think again, with surpassing wonder, that he was the father of a son, and that his wife spoke from the doorway: “Hello, darling.” He looked up, looked at his Misery, his darling. She stood lightly poised in the doorway, her chestnut hair with its mysterious deep-red glints like dying embers flowing over her shoulders in gorgeous profusion. Her complexion was still too pallid, but in her cheeks Ian could see the first signs of returning color. Her eyes were dark and deep, and the glow of the kitchen lamps sparkled in each, like small and precious diamonds lying upon darkest jewellers” felt.
“My darling!” he cried, and ran to her, as he had that day in Liverpool, when it seemed certain that the pirates had taken her away as Mad Jack Wickersham had sworn they would.
Mrs. Ramage suddenly remembered something she had left undone in the parlor and left them together - she went, however, with a smile co her face. Mrs. Ramage, too, had her moments when she could not help wondering what life might have been like if Geoffrey and the doctor had arrived an hour later on that dark and stormy night two months ago, or if the experimental blood transfusion in which her young master had so bravely poured his own life's blood into Misery's depleted veins had not worked.
“Och, girrul,” she told herself as she hurried down the hall. “Some things dinna bear thinkin” a”.” Good advice - advice Ian had given himself. But both had discovered that good advice was sometimes easier to give than receive.
In the kitchen, tall hugged Misery tightly to him, feeling his soul live and die and then live again in the sweet smell of her warm skin.
He touched the swell of her breast and felt the strong, and steady beat of her heart.
“If you had died, I should have died with you,” he whispered.
She put her arms about his neck, bringing the firm of her breast more fully into his hand. “Hush, my darling,” Misery whispered, “and don't be silly. I'm here… right here. Now kiss me! If I die, I fear it will be with desire for you.” He pressed his mouth against hers and plunged his hands deeply into the glory of her chestnut hair, and for a few moments there was nothing at all, except for the two of them.
