Then he saw that the first Paul Sheldon's face had turned a ghastly white as soon as the sand struck it and fear jerked him out of the dream and into the bedroom, where Annie Wilkes was standing over him. She was holding the fat paperback of Misery's Child in one hand. Her bookmark suggested she was about three-quarters of the way through.
“You were moaning,” she said.
“I had a bad dream.”
“What was it about?” The first thing which was not the truth that popped into his head was what he replied: “Africa.”
13
She came in late the following morning, her face the color of ashes. He had been dozing, but he came awake at once; jerking up on his elbows.
“Miss Wilkes? Annie? Are you all r - “
“No.” Christ, she's had a heart attack, he thought, and there was a moment's alarm which was immediately replaced by joy. Let her have one! A big one! A fucking chest-buster! He would be more than happy to crawl to the telephone, no matter how much it might hurt. He would crawl to the telephone over broken glass, if that was what it took.
And it was a heart attack… but not the right kind.
She came toward him, not quite staggering but rolling, the way a sailor will when he's just gotten off his ship at the enc of a long voyage.
“What - “ He tried to shrink away from her, but there was no place to go. There was only the headboard, and behind that, the wall.
“No!” She reached the side of the bed, bumped it, wavered and for a moment seemed on the verge of falling on top of him. Then she just stood there, looking down at him out of her paper-white face, the cords on her neck standing out, one vein pulsing in the center of her forehead. Her hands snapped open, hooked shut into solid rocklike fists, then snapped open again.
“You… you… you dirty bird!”
“What - I don't - “ But suddenly he did, and his entire midsection first seemed to turn hollow and then to entirely disappear. He remembered where her bookmark had been last night, three- quarters of the way through. She had finished it. She knew all there was to know. She knew that Misery hadn't been the barren one, after all; it had been Ian. Had she sat there in her as-yet- unseen-by-him parlor with her mouth open and her eyes wide as Misery finally realized the truth and made her decision and sneaked off to Geoffrey? Had her eyes filled with tears when she realized that Misery and Geoffrey, far from having a clandestine affair behind the back of the man they both loved, were giving him the greatest gift they could - a child he would believe to be his own? And had her heart risen up when Misery told Ian she was pregnant and Ian had crushed her to him, tears flowing from his eyes, muttering “My dear, oh, my dear!” over and over again? He was sure, in those few seconds, that all of those things had happened. But instead of weeping with exalted grief as she should have done when Misery expired giving birth to the boy whom Ian and Geoffrey would presumably raise together, she was mad as hell.
“She can't be dead!” Annie Wilkes shrieked at him. Her hands snapped open and hooked closed in a faster and faster rhythm. “Misery Chastain CANNOT BE DEAD!”
“Annie - Annie, please - “ There was a glass water-pitcher on the table. She seized it up and brandished it at him. Cold water splashed his face. An ice-cube landed beside his left ear and slid down the pillow into the hollow of his shoulder. In his mind ('So vivid!”) he saw her bringing the pitcher down into his face, he saw himself dying of a fractured skull and a massive cerebral hemorrhage in a freezing flood of ice-water while goose-pimples formed on his arms.
She wanted to do it; there was no question of that.
At the very last moment she pivoted away from him at d flung the water-pitcher at the door instead, where it shattered as the soup-bowl had the other day.
She looked back at him and brushed her hair away from her face - two hard little spots of red had now bloomed the white - with the backs of her hands.
“Dirty bird!” she panted. “Oh you dirty birdie, how could you!” He spoke rapidly, urgently, eyes flashing, riveted on her face - he was positive in that moment that his life might depend on what he was able to say in the next twenty seconds.
“Annie, in 1871 women frequently died in childbirth. Misery gave her life for her husband and her best friend and her child. The spirit of Misery will always - “
“I don't want her spirit!” she screamed, hooking her fingers into claws and shaking them at him, as if she would tear his eyes out. “I want her! You killed her! You murdered her!” Her hands snapped shut into fists again and she drove them down like pistons, one on either side of his head. They punched deep into the pillow and he bounced like a ragdoll. His legs flared and he cried out.
“I didn't kill her!” he screamed.
She froze, staring at him with that narrow black expression that look of crevasse.
“Of course not,” she said, bitterly sarcastic. “And if you didn't, Paul Sheldon, who did?”
“No one,” he said more quietly. “She just died.” Ultimately he knew this to be the truth. If Misery Chastain had been a real person, he knew he might very well have been called upon “to aid the police in their inquiries”, as the euphemism went. After all, he had a motive - he had hated her. Ever since the third book, he had hated her. For April Fools” Day four years ago he'd had a small booklet privately printed and had sent it to a dozen close acquaintances. It had been called Misery's Hobby. In it Misery spent a cheerful country weekend boffing Growler, Ian's Irish Setter.
He might have murdered her… but he hadn't. In the end, in spite of his having grown to despise her, Misery's death had been something of a surprise to him. He had remained true enough to himself for art to imitate life however feebly - to the very end of Misery's hackneyed adventures. She had died a mostly unexpected death. His cheerful capering had in no way changed the fact.
“You lie,” Annie whispered. “I thought you were good, but you are not good. You are just a lying old dirty birdie.”
“She slipped away, that's all. Sometimes that happens. It was like life, when someone just - “ She overturned the table by the bed. The one shallow drawer spilled out. His wristwatch and pocket-change spilled out with it. He hadn't even known they were in. there. He cringed back from her.
“You must think I was born yesterday,” she said. Her lips drew back from her teeth. “In my job I saw dozens of people die - hundreds, now that I think about it. Sometimes they go screaming and sometimes they go in their sleep - they just slip away, the way you said, sure.
“But characters in stories DO NOT just slip away! God takes us when He thinks it's time and a writer is God to the people in a story, he made them up just like God made us up and no one can get hold of God to make Him explain, all right, okay, but as far as Misery goes I'll tell you one thing you dirty bird, I'll tell you that God just happens to have a couple of broken legs and God just happens to be in MY house eating MY food and… and…
She went blank then. She straightened up with her hands hanging limply by her sides, looking at the wall where an old photograph of the Arc de Triomphe was hung. She stood there and Paul lay in his bed with round marks in the pillow beside his ears and looked at her. He could hear the water which had been in the pitcher dripping on the floor, and it came to him that he could commit murder. This was a question which had occurred to him from time to time, strictly academic, of course, only now it wasn't and he had the answer. If she hadn't thrown the pitcher, he would have shattered it on the floor himself and tried to shove one of the broken pieces of glass into her throat while she stood there, as inert as an umbrella-stand.
He looked down into the spillage from the drawer, but there was only the change, a pen, a comb, and his watch. No wallet. More important, no Swiss Army knife.
She came back a little at a time, and the anger, at least, was gone. She looked down at him sadly.
“I think I better go now. I don't think I better be around you for awhile. I don't think it's… wise.”
“Go? Where?”
“It doesn't matter. A place I know. If I stay here, I'II do something unwise. I need to think. Goodbye, Paul.” She strode across the room.
“Will you be back to give me my medication?” he asked, alarmed.
She grasped the doorknob and pulled the door shut without answering. For the first time he heard the rattle of a key.
He heard her footsteps going off down the hall; he winced as she cried out angrily - words he couldn't understand and something else fell and shattered. A door slammed. An engine cranked over and then started up. The low, crunching squeal of tires turning on packed snow. Now the motor-sound began to go away. It dwindled to a snore and then to a drone and was finally gone.
He was alone.
Alone in Annie Wilkes's house, locked in this room. Locked in this bed. The distance between here and Denver was like… well, like the distance between the Boston Zoo and Africa.
He lay in bed looking at the ceiling, his throat dry and his heart beating fast.
After awhile the parlor clock chimed noon and the tide began to go out.
14
Fifty-one hours.
He knew just how long because of the pen, the Flair Fine-Liner he had been carrying in his pocket at the time of the crash. He had been able to reach down and snag it. Every time the clock chimed he made a mark on his arm - four vertical marks and then a diagonal slash to seal the quintet. When she came back there were ten groups of five and one extra. The little groups, neat at first, grew increasingly jagged as his hands began to tremble. He didn't believe he had missed a single hour. He had dozed, but never really slept. The chiming of the clock woke him each time the hour came around.
After awhile he began to feel hunger and thirst - even through the pain. It became something like a horse race. At first King of Pain was far in the lead and I Got the Hungries was some twelve furlongs back. Pretty Thirsty was nearly lost in the dust. Then, around sun-up on the day after she had left, I Got the Hungries actually gave King of Pain a brief run for his money.
He had spent much of the night alternately dozing and waking in a cold sweat, sure he was dying. After awhile he began to hope he was dying. Anything to be out of it. He'd never had any idea how bad hurting could get. The pilings grew and grew. He could see the barnacles which encrusted them, could see pale drowned things lying limply in the clefts of the wood. They were the lucky things. For them the hurting was over. Around three he had lapsed into a bout of useless screaming.
By noon of the second day - Hour Twenty-Four - he realize that, as bad as the pain in his legs and pelvis was, something else was also making him hurt. It was withdrawal. Call this horse Junkie's Revenge, if you wanted. He needed the capsules in more ways than one.
He thought of trying to get out of bed, but the thought of the thump and the drop and the accompanying escalation of pain constantly deterred him. He could imagine all too well ('So vivid!”) how it would feel. He might have tried anyway, but she had locked the door. What could he do besides crawl across to it, snail-like, and lie there?
In desperation he pushed back the blankets with his hands for the first time, hoping against hope that it wasn't as bad as the shapes the blankets made seemed to suggest it was. It wasn't as bad; it was worse. He stared with horror at what he had become below the knees. In his mind he heard the voice of Ronald Reagan in King's Raw, shrieking “Where's the rest of me?” The rest of him was here, and he might get out of this; the prospects for doing so seemed ever more remote, but he supposed it was technically possible… but he might well never walk again - and surely not until each of his legs had been rebroken, perhaps in several places, and pinned with steel, and mercilessly overhauled, and subjected to half a hundred shriekingly painful indignities.
She had splinted them - of course he had known that, felt the rigid ungiving shapes, but until now he had not known what she had done it with. The lower parts of both legs were circled with slim
