He forced his eyes open. Yes, it was her, and for a moment his panic grew even stronger. Then it simply seeped away, like fluid running down a partly clogged drain.
What the hell -?
He was totally disoriented. She was standing there in the shadows as if she had never been away, wearing one of her woolly skirts and frumpy sweaters; he saw the needle in her hand and understood it hadn't been a sting but an injection. What the fuck - either way it was the same thing. He had been gotten by the goddess. But what had she -?
That bright panic tried to come again, and once again it hit a dead circuit. All he could feel was a kind of academic surprise. That, and some intellectual curiosity about where she had come from, and why now. He tried to lift his hands and they came up a little… but only a little. It felt as if there were invisible weights dangling from them. They dropped back onto the sheet with little dull thumps.
Doesn't matter what she shot me up with. It's like what you write on the last page of a book. It's THE END.
The thought brought no fear. Instead he felt a kind of calm euphoria.
At least she's tried to make it kind… to make it…
“Ah, there you are!” Annie said, and added with lumbering coquettishness: “I see you, Paul… those blue eyes. Did I ever tell you what lovely blue eyes you have? But I suppose other women have - women who were much prettier than I am, and much bolder about their affections, as well.” Came back. Came creeping in the night and killed me, hypo or bee-sting, no difference, and so much for the knife under the bed. All I am now is the latest number in Annie's considerable body-count. And then, as the numbing euphoria of the injection began to spread, he thought almost with humor: Some lousy Scheherazade I turned out to be.
He thought that in a moment sleep would return - a more final sleep - but it did not. He saw her slip the hypo into the pocket of her skirt and then she sat down on the bed… not where she usually sat, however; she sat on its foot and for a moment he saw only her solid, impervious back as she bent over, as if to check on something. He heard a wooden thunk, a metallic clunk, and then a shaking sound he had heard some place before. After a moment he placed it. Take the matches, Paul.
Diamond Blue Tips. He didn't know what else she might have there at the foot of the bed, but one of them was a box of Diamond Blue Tip matches.
Annie turned to him and smiled again. Whatever else might have happened, her apocalyptic depression had passed. She brushed an errant lock of hair back behind her ear with a girlish gesture. It went oddly with the lock's dull dirty half-shine.
Dull dirty half-shine oh boy you gotta remember that one that one ain't half-bad oh boy I am stoned now, all the past was prologue to this shit hey baby this here is the mainline oh fuck I'm tucked but this is crystal top-end shit this is going out on a mile-high wave in a fucking Rolls this is - “What do you want first, Paul?” she asked. “The good news or the bad news?”
“Good news first.” He managed a big foolish grin. “Guess the bad news is that this is THE END, huh? Guess you didn't like the book so great, huh? Too bad I tried. It was even working. I was just starting to… you know… starting to drive on it.” She looked at him reproachfully. “I love the book, Paul. I told you that, and I never lie. I love it so much I don't want to read any more until the very end. I'm sorry to have to make you fill in the n's yourself, but… it's like peeking.” His big foolish grin stretched even wider; he thought soon it would meet in the back, tie a lover's knot there, and most of his poor old bean would just topple off. Maybe it would land in the bedpan beside the bed. In some deep, dim part of his mind where the dope hadn't yet reached, alarm bells were going off. She loved the book, which meant she didn't mean to kill him. Whatever was going on, she didn't mean to kill him. And unless his assessment of Annie Wilkes was totally off the beam, that meant she had something even worse in store.
Now the light in the room did not look dull; it looked marvellously pure, marvellously full of its own gray and eldritch charm; he could imagine cranes half-glimpsed in gunmetal mist standing in one-legged silence beside upland lakes in that light, could imagine the mica flecks in rocks jutting from spring grasses in upland meadows shining with the shaggy glow of glazed window-glass in that light, could imagine elves shucking their busy selves off to work in lines under the dew-soaked leaves of early ivy in that light…
Oh BOY are you stoned, Paul thought, and giggled faintly.
Annie smiled in return. “The good news,” she said, “is that your car is gone. I've been very worried about your car, Paul. I knew it would take a storm like this to get rid of it and maybe even that wouldn't do the trick. The spring run-off got rid of that Pomeroy dirty bird, but a car is ever so much heavier than a man, isn't it? Even a man as full of cockadoodie as he was. But the storm and the run-off combined was enough to do the trick. Your car is gone. That's the good news.”
“What…” More faint alarm bells. Pomeroy… he knew that name, but couldn't think exactly how he knew it. Then it came to him. Pomeroy. The late great Andrew Pomeroy, twenty-three, of Cold Stream Harbor, New York. Found in the Grider Wildlife Preserve, wherever that was.
“Now Paul,” she said, in the prim voice he knew so well. “No need to be coy. I know you know who Andy Pomeroy was, because I know you've read my book. I suppose that I sort of hoped you would read it, you know; otherwise, why would I have left it out? But I made sure, you know - I make sure of everything. And sure enough, the threads were broken.”
“The threads,” he said faintly.
“Oh yes. I read once about a way you're supposed to find out for sure if someone has been snooping around in your drawers. You tape a very fine thread across each one, and if you come back and find one broken, why you know, don't you? You know someone's been snooping. You see how easy it is?”
“Yes, Annie.” He was listening, but what he really wanted to do was trip out on the marvellous quality of the light.
Again she bent over to check whatever it was she had at the foot of the bed; again he heard a faint dull clunk/clank, wood thumping against some metallic object, and then she turned back, brushing absently at her hair again.
“I did that with my book - only I didn't really use threads, you know; I used hairs from my own head. I put them across the thickness of the book in three different places and when I came in this morning - very early, creeping like a little mousie so I wouldn't wake you up - all three threads were broken, so I knew you had been looking at my book.” She paused, and smiled. It was, for Annie, a very winning smile, yet it had an unpleasant quality he could not quite put his finger on. “Not that I was surprised. I knew you had been out of the room. That's the bad news. I've known for a long, long time, Paul.” He should feel angry and dismayed, he supposed. She had known, known almost from the start, it seemed… but he could only feel that dreamy, floating euphoria, and what she was saying did not seem nearly as important as the glorious quality of the strengthening light as the day hovered on the edge of becoming.
“But,” she said with the air of one returning to business, “we were talking about your car. I have studded tires, Paul, and at my place in the hills I keep a set of 10X tire chains. Early yesterday afternoon I felt ever so much better - I spent most of my time up there on my knees, deep in prayer, and the answer came, as it often does, and it was quite simple, as it often is. What you take to the Lord in prayer, Paul, He giveth back a thousandfold. So I put the chains on and I crept back down here. It was not easy, and I knew I might well have an accident in spite of the studs and the chains. I also knew that there is rarely such a thing as a “minor accident” on those twisty upcountry roads. But I felt easy in my mind, because I felt safe in the will of the Lord.”
“That's very uplifting, Annie,” Paul croaked.
She gave him a look which was momentarily startled and narrowly suspicious… and then she relaxed and smiled “I've got a present for you, Paul,” she said softly, and before he could ask her what it was - he wasn't sure he wanted any sort of present from Annie - she went on: “The roads were terribly icy. I almost went off twice… The second time Old Bessie slid all the way around in a circle and kept right on going downhill while she did it!” Annie laughed cheerily “Then I got stuck in a snowbank - this was around midnight - but a sanding-crew from the Eustice Public Works Department came along and helped me out.”
“Bully for the Eustice Public Works Department,” Paul said, but what came out was badly slurred - Burry furdah Estice Pulleyqurks Deparrent.
“The two miles in from the county highway, that was the last hard patch. The county highway is Route 9, you know. The road you were on when you had your wreck. They had sanded that one to a fare-thee-well. I stopped where you went off and looked for your car. And I knew what I would have to do if I saw it. Because there would be questions, and I'd be just about the first one they'd ask those questions to for reasons I think you know.” I'm way ahead of you, Annie, he thought. I examined this whole scenario three weeks ago.
“One of the reasons I brought you back was because it seemed like more than a coincidence… it seemed moral like the hand of Providence.”
“What seemed like the hand of Providence, Annie?” he, managed.
“Your car was wrecked in almost exactly the same spot where I got rid of that Pomeroy creep. The one who said he was an artist.” She slapped a hand in contempt, shifted her feet, and there was that wooden clunking sound as one of them brushed some of whatever it was she had down there on the floor.
“I picked him up on my way back from Estes Park. I was there at a ceramics show. I like little ceramic figurines.”
“I noticed,” Paul said. His voice seemed to come from light-years away. Captain Kirk! There's a voice coming in over the sub-etheric, he thought, and chuckled dimly. That deep part of him - the part the dope couldn't reach - tried to warn him to shut his mouth, just shut it, but what was the sense? She knew. Of course she knows - the Bourka Bee-Goddess knows everything. “I particularly liked the penguin on the block of ice.”
“Thank you, Paul… he is cute, isn't he?
“Pomeroy was hitchhiking. He had a pack on his back. He said he was an artist, although I found out later he was nothing but a hippie dope-fiend dirty bird who had been washing dishes in an Estes Park restaurant for the last couple of months. When I told him I had a place in Sidewinder, he said that was a real coincidence. He said he was going to Sidewinder. He said he'd gotten an assignment from a magazine in New York. He was going to go up to the old hotel and sketch the ruins. His pictures were going to be with an article they were doing. It was a famous old hotel called the Overlook. It burned down ten years ago. The caretaker burned it down. He was crazy. Everybody in town said so. But never mind; he's dead.
“I let Pomeroy stay here with me.
“We were lovers.” She looked at him with her black eyes burning in her solid yet doughy white face and Paul thought: If Andrew Pomeroy could get it up for you, Annie, he must have been as crazy as the caretaker that burned down the hotel.
“Then I found out that he didn't really have an assignment to draw pictures of the hotel at all. He was just doing them on his own, hoping to sell them. He wasn't even sure the magazine was doing an article on the Overlook. I found that out pretty quick! After I did, I sneaked a look at his sketchpad. I felt I had a perfect right to do that. After all, he was eating my food and sleeping in my bed. There were only eight or nine pictures in the whole book and they were terrible.” Her face wrinkled, and for a moment she looked as she had when she had imitated the sound the pig made.
“I could have made better pictures! He came in while I was looking and he got mad. He said I was snooping. I said I didn't call looking at things in my own house snooping. I said if he was an artist, I was Madame Curie. He started to laugh. He laughed at me. So I… I… “
“You killed him,” Paul said. His voice sounded dim and ancient.
She smiled uneasily at the wall. “Well, I guess it was something like that. I don't remember very well. Just when he was dead. I remember that. I remember giving him a bath.” He stared at her and felt a sick, soupy horror. The image came to him - Pomeroy's naked body floating in the downstairs tub like a piece of raw dough, head reclining aslant against the porcelain, open eyes staring up at the ceiling…
“I had to,” she said, lips drawing back a bit from her teeth. “You probably don't know what the police can do with just one piece of thread, or dirt under someone's fingernails or even dust in a corpse's hair! You don't know but I worked in hospitals all my life and I do know! I do know! I know about for-EN-sics!” She was working herself into one of her patented Annie Wilkes frenzies and he knew he should try and say something which would at least temporarily defuse her, but his mouth seemed numb and useless.
“They're out to get me, all of them! Do you think they would have listened if I tried to tell them how it was? Do you? Do you? Oh no! They'd probably say something crazy like I made a pass at him and he laughed at me and so I killed him! They'd probably say something like that!” And you know what, Annie? You know what? I think that just might be a little closer to the truth.
“The dirty birdies around here would say anything to get me in trouble or smear my name.” She paused, not quite panting but breathing hard, looking at him hard, as if inviting him to just dare and tell her different. Just you dare!
Then she seemed to get herself under some kind of control and she went on in a calmer voice.
“I washed… well… what was left of him… and his clothes. I knew what to do. It was snowing outside, the first real snow of the year, and they said we'd have a foot by the next morning. I put his clothes in a plastic bag and wrapped the body in sheets and took everything out to that dry wash on Route 9 after dark. I walked about a mile farther down from where your car ended up. I walked
