Misery (10 page)

'What do you think?'

    'It looks good,' he said, uttering the biggest lie of his life with perfect ease, and then asked the question to which he already knew the answer. 'What will I write there, do you think?'

    'Oh, but Paul" she said, turning to him, her eyes dancing animatedly in her flushed face. 'I don't
think,
I
know!
You're going to use this typewriter to write a new novel! Your best novel!
Misery's
Retum!'

Misery's Return.
He felt nothing at all. He supposed a man who had just cut his hand off in a power saw might feel this same species of nothing as he stood regarding his spouting wrist with dull surprise.

    'Yes!' Her face shone like a searchlight. Her powerful hands were clasped between her breasts. 'It will be a book just for me, Paul! My payment for nursing you back to health! The one and only copy of the newest
Misery
book! I'll have something no one else in the world has, no matter how much they might want it!
Think
of it!'

   'Annie, Misery is dead.' But already, incredibly, he was thinking,
I could bring her back.
The thought filled him with tired revulsion but no real surprise. After all, a man who could drink from a floor-bucket should be capable of a little directed writing.

  'No she's not,' Annie replied dreamily. 'Even when I was . . . when I was so mad at you, I knew she wasn't really dead. I knew you couldn't really kill her. Because you're
good.'

   'Am I?' he said, and looked at the typewriter. It grinned at him.
We're going to find out just how
good you are, old buddy,
it whispered.

  'Yes!'

  'Annie, I don't know if I can sit in that wheelchair. Last time — '

    'Last time it hurt, you bet it did. And it will hurt next time, too. Maybe even a little more. But there will come a day — and it won't be long, either, although it may seem longer to you than it really is — when it hurts a little less. And a little less. And a little less.'

  'Annie, will you tell me one thing?'

  'Of course, dear!'

  'If I write this story for you — '

  
'Novel!
A nice big one like all the others — maybe even bigger!'

   He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. 'Okay — if I write this novel for you, will you let me go when it's done?'

  For a moment unease slipped cloudily across her face, and then she was looking at him carefully, studiously. 'You speak as though I were keeping you
prisoner,
Paul.'

  He said nothing, only looked at her.

  'I think that by the time you finish, you should be up to the . . . up to the strain of meeting people again,' she said.

  'Is that what you want to hear?'

  'That's what I wanted to hear, yes.'

   'Well, honestly! I knew writers were supposed to have big egos, but I guess I didn't understand that meant ingratitude, too!'

  He went on looking at her and after a moment she looked away, impatient and a little flustered.

  At last he said: 'I'll need all the
Misery
books, if you've got them, because I don't have my concordance.'

  'Of course I have them!' she said. Then: 'What's a concordance?'

  'It's a loose-leaf binder where I have all my
Misery
stuff,' he said. 'Characters and places, mostly, but cross-indexed three or four different ways. Time-lines. Historical stuff . . . '

   He saw she was barely listening. This was the second time she'd shown not the slightest interest in a trick of the trade that would have held a class of would-be writers spellbound. The reason, he thought, was simplicity itself. Annie Wilkes was the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader. She did not want to hear about his concordance and indices because to her Misery and the characters surrounding her were perfectly real. Indices meant nothing to her. If he had spoken of a village census in Little Dunthorpe, she might have shown some interest.

    'I'll make sure you get the books. They're a little dog-eared, but that's a sign a book has been well read and well loved, isn't it?'

'Yes,' he said. No need to lie this time. 'Yes it is.

    'I'm going to study up on book-binding,' she said dreamily. 'I'm going to bind
Misery's Return
myself. Except for my mother's Bible, it will be the only
real
book I own.'

'That's good,' he said, just to say something. He was feeling a little sick to his stomach.

    I'll go out now so you can put on your thinking cap,' she said. 'This is exciting! Don't you think so?'

'Yes, Annie. I sure do.'

   'I'll be in with some breast of chicken and mashed potatoes and peas for you in half an hour. Even a little Jell-O because you've been such a good boy. And I'll make sure you get your pain medication right on time. You can even have an extra pill in the night if you need it. I want to make sure you get your sleep, because you have to go back to work tomorrow. You'll mend faster when you're working, I'll bet!'

She went to the door, paused there for a moment, and then, grotesquely, blew him a kiss.

   The door closed behind her. He did not want to look at the typewriter and for awhile resisted, but at last his eyes rolled helplessly toward it. It sat on the bureau, grinning. Looking at it was a little like looking at an instrument of torture — boot, rack, strappado — which is standing inactive, but only for the moment.

  
I think that by the time you finish, you should be
. . .
up to the strain of meeting people again.

  
Ah, Annie, you were lying to both of us. I knew it, and you did, too. I saw it in your eyes.

  The limited vista now opening before him wag extremely unpleasant: six weeks of life which he would spend suffering with his broken bones and renewing his acquaintance with Misery Chastain, née Carmichael, followed by a hasty interment in the back yard. Or perhaps she would feed his remains to Misery the pig
— that
would have a certain justice, black and gruesome though it might be.

  
Then don't do it. Make her mad. She's like a walking bottle of nitroglycerine as it is. Bounce her
around a little. Make her explode. Better than lying here suffering.

  He tried looking up at the interlocked W's, but all too soon he was looking at the typewriter again. It stood atop the bureau, mute and thick and full of words he did not want to write, grinning with its one missing tooth.

  
I don't think you believe that, old buddy. I think you want to stay alive even if it
does
hurt. If it
means bringing Misery back for an encore, you'll do it. You'll try, anyway — but first you are
going to have to deal with me
. . .
and I don't think I like your face.

  'Makes us even,' Paul croaked.

  This time he tried looking out the window, where fresh snow was falling. Soon enough, however, he was looking at the typewriter again with avid repulsed fascination, not even aware of just when his gaze had shifted.

Getting into the chair didn't hurt as much as he had feared, and that was good, because previous experience had shown him that he would hurt
plenty
afterward.

    She set the tray of food down on the bureau, then rolled the wheelchair over to the bed. She helped him to sit up — there was a dull, thudding flare of pain in his pelvic area but it subsided — and then she leaned over, the side of her neck pressing against his shoulder like the neck of a horse. For an instant he could feel the thump of her pulse, and his face twisted in revulsion. Then her right arm was firmly around his back, her left under his buttocks.

    'Try not to move from the knees down while I do this,' she said, and then simply slid him into the chair. She did it with the ease of a woman sliding a book into an empty slot in her bookcase. Yes, she was strong. Even in good shape the outcome of a fight between him and Annie would have been in doubt. As he was now it would be like Wally Cox taking on Boom Boom Mancini.

   She put the board in front of him, 'See how well it fits?' she said, and went to the bureau to get the food.

  'Annie?'

  'Yes.'

  'I wonder if you could turn that typewriter around. So it faces the wall.'

  She frowned. 'Why in the world would you want me to do that?'

  
Because I don't want it grinning at me all night.

  'Old superstition of mine,' he said. 'I always turn my typewriter to the wall before I start writing.' He paused and added: 'Every night while I
am
writing, as a matter of fact.'

   'It's like step on a crack, break your mother's back,' she said. 'I never step on a crack if I can help it.' She turned it around so it grinned at nothing but blank wall. 'Better?'

  'Much.'

  'You are such a
silly,'
she said, and came over and began to feed him.

He dreamed of Annie Wilkes in the court of some fabulous Arabian caliph, conjuring imps and genies from bottles and then flying around the court on a magic carpet. When the carpet banked past him (her hair streamed out behind her; her eyes were as bright and flinty as the eyes of a seacaptain navigating among icebergs), he saw it was woven all in green and white; it made a Colorado license plate.

  
Once upon a time,
Annie was calling.
Once upon a time it came to pass. This happened in the
days when my grandfather's grandfather was a boy. This is the story of how a poor boy. I heard
this from a man who. Once upon a time. Once upon a time.

When he woke up Annie was shaking him and bright morning sun was slanting in the window — the snow had ended.

   'Wake up, sleepyhead!' Annie was almost trilling. 'I've got yogurt and a nice boiled egg for you, and then it will be time for you to begin.'

   He looked at her eager face and felt a strange new emotion — hope. He had dreamed that Annie Wilkes was Scheherazade, her solid body clad in diaphanous robes, her big feet stuffed into pink sequined slippers with curly toes as she rode on her magic carpet and chanted the incantatory phrases which open the doors of the best stories. But of course it wasn't
Annie
that was Scheherazade.
He
was. And if what he wrote was good enough, if she could not bear to kill him until she discovered how it all came out no matter how much or how loudly her animal instincts yelled for her to do it, that she
must
do it . . .

Might he not have a chance?

   He looked past her and saw she had turned the typewriter around before waking him; it grinned resplendently at him with its missing tooth, telling him it was all right to hope and noble to strive, but in the end it was doom alone which would count.

She rolled him over to the window so the sun fell on him for the first time in weeks, and it seemed to him he could feel his pasty-white skin, dotted here and there with minor bedsores, murmur its pleasure and thanks. The windowpanes were edged on the inside with a tracery of frost, and when he held out his hand he could feel a bubble of cold like a dome around the window. The feel of it was both refreshing and somehow nostalgic, like a note from an old friend.

   For the first time in weeks — it felt like years — he was able to look at a geography different from that of his room with its unchanging verities — blue wallpaper, picture of the Arc de Triomphe, the long, long month of February symbolized by the boy sliding downhill on his sled (he thought that his mind would turn to that boy's face and stocking cap each time January became February, even if he lived to see that change of months another fifty times). He looked into this new world as eagerly as he had watched his first movie
Bambi —
as a child.

  The horizon was near; it always was in the Rockies, where longer views of the world were inevitably cut off by uptilted plates of bedrock. The sky was a perfect early-morning blue, innocent of clouds. A carpet of green forest climbed the flank of the nearest mountain. There were perhaps seventy acres of open ground between the house and the edge of the forest — the snow— cover over it was a perfect and blazing white. It was impossible to tell if the land beneath was tilled earth or open meadow. The view of this open square was interrupted by only one building: a neat red barn. When she spoke of her livestock or when he saw her trudging grimly past his window, breaking her breath with the impervious prow of her face, he had imagined a ramshackle outbuilding like an illustration from a child's book of ghost stories — rooftree bowed and sagging from years of snowweight, windows blank and dusty, some broken and blocked with pieces of cardboard, long double doors perhaps off their tracks and swaying outward. This neat and tidy structure with its dark-red paint and neat cream-colored trim looked like the five-car garage of a well-to-do country squire masquerading as a barn. In front of it stood a jeep Cherokee, maybe five years old but obviously well cared for. To one side stood a Fisher plow in a home-made wooden cradle. To attach the plow to the Jeep, she would only need to drive the Jeep carefully up to the cradle so that the hooks on the frame matched the catches on the plow, and throw the locking lever on the dashboard. The perfect vehicle for a woman who lived alone and had no neighbor she could call upon for help (except for those dirty-birdie Roydmans, of course, and Annie probably wouldn't take a plate of pork chops from them if she was dying of starvation). The driveway was neatly plowed, a testament to the fact that she did indeed use the blade, but he could not see the road — the house cut off the view.