Misery (12 page)

    She smiled, a pulling of the lips that was grotesquely puppet-like, and slipped to his side in her silent white nurse' shoes. Her fingers touched his hair. He flinched. He tried not to but couldn't help it. Her dead-alive smile widened.

  'Although I suspect we may have to put off the actual start of
Misery's Retum
for a day . . . or two . . . perhaps even three. Yes, it may be as long as three days before you are able to sit up again. Because of the pain. Too bad. I had champagne chilling in the fridge. I'll have to put it back in the shed.'

  'Annie, really, I can start if you'll just — '

   'No, Paul.' She moved to the door and then turned, looking at him with that stony face. Only her eyes, those tarnished dimes, were fully alive under the shelf of her brow. 'There is one thought I would like to leave you with. You may think you can fool me, or trick me; I know I look slow and stupid. But I am not stupid, Paul, and I am not slow.' Suddenly her face broke apart. The stony obduracy shattered and what shone through was the countenance of an insanely angry child. For a moment Paul thought the extremity of his terror might kill him. Had he thought he had gained the upper hand? Had he? Could one possibly play Scheherazade when one's captor was insane?

  She rushed across the room at him, thick legs pumping, knees flexing, elbows chopping back and forth in the stale sickroom air like pistons. Her hair bounced and joggled around her face as it came loose from the bobby-pins that held it up. Now her passage was not silent; it was like the tread of Goliath striding into the Valley of Bones. The picture of the Arc de Triomphe cracked affrightedly on the wall.

  
'Geeeee-yahhh!'
she screamed, and brought her fist down on the bunched salt-dome that had been Paul Sheldon's left knee.

    He threw his head back and howled, veins standing out in his neck and on his forehead. Pain burst out from his knee and shrouded him, whitely radiant, in the center of a nova.

    She tore the typewriter off the board and slammed it down on the mantel, lifting its weight of dead metal as he might have lifted an empty cardboard box.

   'So you just sit there,' she said, lips pulled back in that grinning rictus, 'and you think about who is in charge here, and all the things I can do to hurt you if you behave badly or try to trick me. You sit there and you scream if you want to, because no one can hear you. No one stops here because they all know Annie Wilkes is crazy, they all know what she did, even if they did find me innocent.'

  She walked back to the door and turned again, and he screamed again when she did, in anticipation of another bull-like charge, and that made her grin more widely.

    'I'll tell you something else,' she said softly. 'They think I got away with it, and they are right. Think about that, Paul, while I'm in town getting your cockadoodie paper.' She left, slamming the bedroom door hard enough to shake the house. Then there was the click of the lock.

   He leaned back in the chair, shaking all over, trying not to shake because it hurt, not able to help it. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Again and again he saw her flying across the room, again and again he saw her bringing her fist down on the remains of his knee with all the force of an angry drunk hammering on an oak bar, again and again he was swallowed in that terrible blue-white nova of pain.

   'Please, God, please,' he moaned as the Cherokee started outside with a bang and a roar. 'Please, God, please — let me out of this or kill me . . . let me out of this or kill me.' The roar of the engine faded off down the road and God did neither and he was left with his tears and the pain, which was now fully awake and raving through his body.

He thought later that the world, in its unfailing perversity, would probably construe those things which he did next as acts of heroism. And he would probably let them — but in fact what he did was nothing more than a final staggering grab for self-preservation.

  Dimly he seemed to hear some madly enthusiastic sportscaster — Howard Cosell or Warner Wolf or perhaps that all-time crazy Johnny Most — describing the scene, as if his effort to get at her drug supply before the pain killed him was some strange sporting event — a trial substitution for
Monday Night Football,
perhaps. What would you call a sport like that, anyway?
Run for the
Dope?

  'I just cannot believe the guts this Sheldon kid is displaying today! the sportscaster in Paul Sheldon's head was enthusing. 'I don't believe anyone in Annie Wilkes Stadium — or in the home viewing audience, for that matter — thought he had the sly-test
chance
of getting that wheelchair moving after the blow he took, but I believe . . . yes, it is! It's moving! Let's look at the replay!'

   Sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes. He licked a mixture of salt and tears off his lips. The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought:
There
comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain
the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.

    It was only the thought of the pills, the Novril that she kept somewhere in the house, which got him moving. The locked bedroom door . . . the possibility the dope might not be in the downstairs bathroom as he had surmised but hidden somewhere . . . the chance she might come back and catch him . . . these things mattered not at all, these things were only shadows behind the pain. He would deal with each problem as it came up or he would die. That was all.

    Moving caused the band of fire below his waist and in his legs to sink in deeper, cinching his legs like belts studded with hot, inward-pointing spikes. But the chair did move. Very slowly the chair began to move.

   He had managed about four feet before realizing he was going to do nothing more useful than roll the wheelchair past the door and into the far comer unless he could turn it.

  He grasped the right wheel, shuddering,

  
(think of the pills, think of the relief of the pills)

    and bore down on it as hard as he could. Rubber squeaked minutely on the wooden floor, the cries of mice. He bore down, once strong and now flabby muscles quivering like jelly, lips peeling back from his gritted teeth, and the wheelchair slowly pivoted.

  He grasped both wheels and got the chair moving again. This time he rolled five feet before stopping to straighten himself out. Once he'd done it, he grayed out.

    He swam back to reality five minutes later, hearing the dim, goading voice of that sportscaster in his head: 'He's trying to get going again! I just cannot be
leeve
the guts of this Sheldon kid!'

   The front of his mind only knew about the pain; it was the back that directed his eyes. He saw it near the door and rolled over to it. He reached down, but the tips of his fingers stopped a clear three inches short of the floor, where one of the two or three bobby-pins that had fallen from her hair as she charged him lay. He bit his lip, unaware of the sweat running down his face and neck and darkening his pajama shirt.

   'I don't think he can get that pin, folks — it's been a fan
tas
tic effort, but I'm afraid this is where it all ends.'

Well, maybe not.

    He let himself slouch to the right in the wheelchair, at first trying to ignore the pain in his right side — pain that felt like an increasing bubble of pressure, something similar to a tooth impaction — and then giving way and screaming. As she said, there was no one to hear him anyway.

   The tips of his fingers still hung an inch from the floor, brushing back and forth just above the bobby-pin, and his right hip really felt as if it might simply explode outward in a squirt of some vile white bone-jelly.

  
Oh God please please help me —

  He slumped farther in spite of the pain. His fingers brushed the pin but succeeded only in pushing it a quarter of an inch away. Paul slid down in the chair, still slumped to the right, and screamed again at the pain in his lower legs. His eyes were bulging, his mouth was open, his tongue straight down between his teeth like the pull on a window-shade. Little drops of spittle ran from its tip and spatted on the floor.

   He pinched the bobby-pin between his fingers . . . tweezed it . . . almost lost it . . . and then it was locked in his fist.

  Straightening up brought a fresh slough of pain, and when the act was accomplished he could do no more than sit and pant for awhile, his head tilted as far as the unc Compromising back of the wheelchair would allow, the bobby-pin lying on the board across the chair's arms. For awhile he was quite sure he was going to puke, but that passed.

  
What are you doing?
part of his mind scolded wearily after awhile.
Are you waiting for the pain
to go away? It won't. She's always quoting her mother, but your own mother had a few sayings,
too, didn't she?

  Yes. She had.

  Sitting there, head thrown back, face shiny with sweat, hair plastered to his forehead, Paul spoke one of them aloud now, almost as an incantation: 'There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.'

  
Yeah. So stop waiting, Paulie — the only elf that's going to show up here is that all-time
heavyweight, Annie Wilkes.

    He got moving again, rolling the wheelchair slowly across to the door. She had locked it, but he believed he might be able to unlock it. Tony Bonasaro, who was now only so many blackened flakes of ash, had been a car-thief. As part of his preparation for writing
Fast Cars,
Paul had studied the mechanics of car-thievery with a tough old ex-cop named Tom Twyford. Tom had shown him how to hot-wire an ignition, how to use the thin and limber strip of metal car-thieves called Slim Jims to yank the lock on a car door, how to short out a car burglar alarm.

   Or, Tom had said on a spring day in New York some two and a half years ago,
let's say you
don't want to steal a car at all. You got a car, but you're a little low on gas. You got a hose, but the
car you pick for the free donation has got a locking gas-cap. Is this a problem? Not if you know
what you're doing, because most gas-cap locks are strictly Mickey Mouse. All you really need is a
bobby-pin.

  It took Paul five endless minutes of backing and filling to get the wheelchair exactly where he wanted it, with the left wheel almost touching the door.

   The keyhole was the old-fashioned sort, reminding Paul of John Tenniel's
Alice in Wonderland
drawings, set in the middle of a tarnished keyplate. He slid down a bit in the wheelchair — giving out a single barking groan — and looked through it. He could see a short hallway leading down to what was clearly the parlor: a dark-red rug on the floor, an old-fashioned divan upholstered in similar material, a lamp with tassels hanging from its shade.

   To his left, halfway down the hallway, was a door which stood ajar. Paul's pulsebeat quickened. That was almost surely the downstairs bathroom — he had heard her running enough water in there (including the time she had filled the floor—bucket from which he had enthusiastically drunk), and wasn't it also the place she always came from before giving him his medicine?

He thought it was.

   He grasped the bobby-pin. It spilled out of his fingers onto the board and then skittered toward the edge.

  
'No!'
he cried hoarsely, and clapped a hand over it just before it could fall. He clasped it in one fist and then grayed out again.

    Although he had no way of telling for sure, he thought he was out longer this second time. The pain — except for the excruciating agony of his left knee — seemed to have abated a tiny bit. The bobby-pin was on the board across the arms of the wheelchair. This time he flexed the fingers of his right hand several times before picking it up.

  
Now,
he thought, unbending it and holding it in his right hand.
You will not shake. Hold that
thought. YOU WILL NOT SHAKE.

  He reached across his body with the pin and slipped it into the keyhole, listening as the sportscaster in his mind

  
(so vivid!)

  described the action.

  Sweat ran steadily down his face like oil. He listened . . . but even more, he
felt.

  
The tumbler in a cheap lock is nothing but a rocker,
Tom Twyford had said, seesawing his hand to demonstrate.
You want to turn a rocking chair over? Easiest thing in the world, tight? Just grab
the rockers and flip the mother right over
. . .
nothing to it. And that's all you got to do with a lock
like this. Slide the tumbler up and then open the gas-cap quick, before it can snap back.

  He had the tumbler twice, but both times the bobby-pin slipped off and the tumbler snapped back before he could do more than begin to move it. The bobby-pin was starting to bend. He thought that it would break after another two or three tries.

   'Please God,' he said, sliding it in again. 'Please God, what do you say? Just a little break for the kid, that's all I'm asking.'

    ('Folks, Sheldon has performed heroically today, but this has got to be his last shot. The crowd has fallen silent . . .')

    He closed his eyes, the sportscaster's voice fading as he listened avidly to the minute rattle of the pin in the lock. Now! Here was resistance! The tumbler! He could see it lying in there like the curved foot of a rocking chair, pressing the tongue of the lock, holding it in place, holding him in place.

  
It's strictly Mickey Mouse, Paul. Just stay cool.

  When you hurt this badly, it was hard to stay cool.

    He grasped the doorknob with his left hand, reaching under his right arm to do it, and began to apply gentle pressure to the bobby-pin. A little more . . . a little more . . .