The clock in the church tower began to chime the hour of twelve - the hour when, her mother had told her, the door between life and death sways open a bit and the dead may pass both ways - and it was all Mrs. Ramage could do to keep herself from shrieking and fleeing in a panic which would not abate but grow stronger with each step; if she began running, she knew, she would simply run until she fell down insensible.
Stupid, fearful woman! she berated herself, and then amended that to: Stupid, fearful, selfish woman! It's My Lord ye want to be thinkin” of now, and not yer own fears My Lord… and if there is even one chance that My Lady - Ah, but no - it was madness to even think of such a thing. It had been too long, too long, too long.
Geoffrey had led her to Misery's tombstone, and the two of them stood looking down at it, as if mesmerized. LADY CALTHORPE, the stone read. Other than the dates of her birth and death, the only inscription was: LOVED BY MANY.
She looked at Geoffrey and said, like one awakening from a deep daze: “Ye've not brought the tools.”
“No - not yet,” he responded, and threw himself full-length on the ground and placed his ear against the earth, which had already begun to show the first tender shoots of new grass between the rather carelessly replaced sods.
For a moment the only expression she saw there by the lamp she carried was the one Geoffrey had worn since she had first opened her door to him - a look of agonized dread. Then a new expression began to surface. This new expression was one of utter horror mingled with an almost demented hope.
He looked up at Mrs. Ramage, eyes staring, mouth working. “I believe she lives,” he whispered strengthlessly. “Oh, Mrs. Ramage - “ Suddenly he turned over onto his belly and screamed at the ground - under other circumstances it would have been comic. “Misery! MISERY! WE'RE HERE! WE KNOW! HOLD ON! HOLD ON, MY DARLING!” He was on his feet a moment later, sprinting back toward the pony-trap, where the digging tools were, his slippered feet sending the placid groumdmist into excited little roils.
Mrs. Ramage's knees unlocked and she buckled forward, near to swooning again. Of its own accord, seemingly, her head slipped to one side so her right ear was pressed against the ground - she had seen children in similar postures by the railway line, listening for trains.
And she heard it - low, painful scraping sounds in the earth - not the sounds of a burrowing animal, these; these were the sounds of fingers scraping helplessly on wood.
She drew in breath in one great convulsive gulp, re-starting her own heart, it seemed. She shrieked: “WERE COMING, MY LADY! PRAISE GOD AND PLEAD SWEET JESUS WE BE IN TIME - WE'RE COMING!” She began to pull half healed turves out of the ground with her trembling fingers, and although Geoffrey returned in almost no time, she had by then already clawed a hole some eight inches deep.
7
He was already nine pages into Chapter 7 - Geoffrey and Mrs Ramage had managed to get Misery out of her grave in the barest nick of time only to realize that the woman had no idea at all who they were, or who she herself was - when Annie came into the room. This time Paul heard her. He stopped typing, sorry to be out of the dream.
She held the first six chapters at the side of her skirt. It had taken her less than twenty minutes to read his first stab at it; it had been an hour since she had taken this sheaf of twenty-one pages. He looked at her steadily, observing with faint interest that Annie Wilkes was a bit pale.
“Well?” he asked. “Is it fair?”
“Yes,” she said absently, as if this was a foregone conclusion - and Paul supposed it was. “It's fair. And it's good. Exciting. But it's gruesome, too! It's not like any of the other Misery books. That poor woman who scraped the ends of her fingers off - “ She shook her head and repeated: “It's not, like any of the other Misery books.” The man who wrote these pages was in a rather gruesome frame of mind, my dear, Paul thought.
“Shall I go on?” he asked.
“I'll kill you if you don't!” she responded, smiling a little. Paul didn't smile back. This comment, which would once have struck him as in a league with such banalities as You look so good I could just eat you up now seemed not banal at all.
Yet something in her attitude as she stood in the doorway fascinated him. It was as if she was a little frightened to come any closer - as if she thought something in him might burn her. It wasn't the subject of premature burial that had done it, and he was wise enough to know it. No - it was the difference between his first try and this one. That first one had had all the life of an eighth- grader's “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” theme. This one was different. The furnace was on. Oh, not that he had written particularly well the story was hot, but the characters as stereotyped and predictable as ever - but this time he had been able to at least generate some power; this time there was heat baking out from between the lines.
Amused, he thought: She felt the heat. I think she's afraid to get too close in case I might burn her.
“Well,” he said mildly, “ you won't have to kill me, Annie. I want to go on. So why don't I get at it?”
“All right,” she said. She brought the pages to him, put them on the board, and then stepped back quickly.
“Would you like to read it as I go along?” he asked.
Annie smiled. “Yes! It would be almost like the chapter-plays, when I was a kid!”
“Well, I can't promise a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter,” he said. “It just doesn't work that way.”
“It will for me,” she said fervently. “I'd want to know what was going to happen in Chapter 18 even if I7 ended with Misery and Ian and Geoffrey sitting in armchairs on the porch, reading newspapers. I'm already wild to know what's going to happen next - don't tell me!” she added sharply, as if Paul had offered to do this.
“Well, I generally don't show my work until it's all done,” he said, and then smiled at her. “But since this is a special situation, I'll be happy to let you read it chapter by chapter.” And so began the thousand and one nights of Paul Sheldon, he thought. “But I wonder if you'd do something for me?”
“What?”
“Fill in these damned n's,” he said.
She smiled at him radiantly. “It would be an honor. I'll leave you alone now.” She went back to the door, hesitated there, and turned back. Then, with a deep and almost painful timidity, she offered the only editorial suggestion she ever made to him. “Maybe it was a bee.” He had already dropped his gaze to the sheet of paper in the typewriter; he was looking for the hole. He wanted to get Misery back to Mrs Ramage's cottage before he knocked off, and he looked back up at Annie with carefully disguised impatience. “I beg pardon?”
“A bee,” she said, and he saw a blush creeping up her neck and over her cheeks. Soon even her ears were glowing. “One person in every dozen is allergic to bee-venom. I saw lots of cases of it before… before I retired from service as an R.N. The allergy can show in lots of different ways. Sometimes a sting can cause a comatose condition which is… is similar to what people used to call… uh… catalepsy.” Now she was so red she was almost purple.
Paul held the idea up briefly in his mind and then tossed it on the scrap-heap. A bee could have been the cause of Miss Evelyn-Hyde's unfortunate live burial; it even made sense, since it had happened in mid-spring; in the garden, to boot. But he had already decided that credibility depended on the two live burials” being related somehow, and Misery had succumbed in her bedroom. The fact that late fall was hardly bee-season was not really the problem. The problem was the rarity of the cataleptic reaction. He thought Constant Reader would not swallow two unrelated women in neighboring townships being buried alive six months apart as a result of bee-stings.
Yet he could not tell Annie that, and not just because it might rile her up. He could not tell her because it would hurt her badly, and in spite of all the pain she had afforded him, he found he could not hurt her in that way. He had been hurt that way himself.
He fell back on that most common writers'-workshop euphemism: “It's got possibilities, all right. I'll drop it into the hopper, Annie, but I've already got some ideas in mind. It may not fit.”
“Oh, I know that - you're the writer, not me. just forget I said anything. I'm sorry.”
“Don't be s - “ But she was gone, her heavy tread almost running down the hallway to the parlor. He was looking at an empty space. His eyes dropped - then widened.
On either side of the doorway, about eight inches up from the floor, was a black mark - they had been left, he understood at once, by the hubs of the wheelchair when he forced it through. So far she hadn't noticed them. It had been almost a week, and her failure to notice was a small miracle. But soon - tomorrow, perhaps even this afternoon she would be in to vacuum, and then she would.
She would.
Paul managed very little during the rest of the day. The hole in the paper had disappeared.
8
The following morning Paul was sitting up in bed, propped on a pile of pillows, drinking a cup of coffee, and eyeing those marks on the sides of the door with the guilty eye of a murderer who has just seen some bloody item of clothing of which he somehow neglected to dispose. Suddenly Annie came rushing into the room, her eyes wide and bulging. She held a dustcloth in one hand. In the other, incredibly, she held a pair of handcuffs.
“What - “ It was all he had time for. She seized him with panicky strength and pulled him into an upright sitting position. Pain - the worst in days - bellowed through his legs, and he screamed. The coffee cup flew out of his hand and shattered on the floor. Things keep breaking in here, he thought, and then: She saw the marks. Of course. Probably a long time ago. That was the only way he could account for this bizarre behavior - she had seen the marks after all, and this was the beginning of some new and spectacular punishment.
“Shut up, stupid,” she hissed, and then his hands were pinned behind him, and just as he heard the click of the handcuffs, he also heard a car turning into the driveway.
He opened his mouth, meaning to speak or perhaps scream again, and she stuffed the rag into it before he could do either. There was some ghastly dead taste on the rag. Pledge, he supposed, or Endust, or something like that.
“Make no sound,” she said, leaning over him with one hand on either side of his head, strands of her hair tickling his cheeks and forehead. “I warn you, Paul. If whoever that is hears something - or even if I hear something and think he might have heard something - I will kill him, or them, then you, then myself.” She stood up. Her eyes were bulging. There was sweat on her face and dried egg-yolk on her lips.
“Remember, Paul.” He was nodding but she didn't see. She was already running out.
An old but well-preserved Chevy Bel Air had pulled up behind Annie's Cherokee. Paul heard a door open somewhere off the parlor and then bang shut. It gave off the oddly interrogative squeak that told him it was the closet where she kept her outdoors stuff.
The man getting out of the car was as old and well preserved as the car itself - a Colorado Type if ever Paul had seen one. He looked sixty-five but might be eighty; he might be the senior partner of a law firm or the semi-retired patriarch of a construction company, but was more likely a rancher or a realtor. He would be a Republican of the sort who would no more put a bumper sticker on his car than he would put a pair of pointy-toed Italian shoes on his feet; he must also be some sort of town official, and here on town business, because it was only on town business that a man like this and a reclusive woman like Annie Wilkes would have occasion to meet.
