Misery (49 page)

Authors: Stephen King

Tags: #Fiction

BOOK: Misery

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Goliath now gestured toward the house. Annie shrugged and shook her head. David said something. After a moment she nodded and led them up the path to the kitchen door. Paul heard the screen's hinges squeak, and then they were in. The sound of so many footfalls out there was Tightening, almost a profanation.

'What time was it when he came by?' Goliath asked — it
had
to be Goliath. He had a rumbling Midwestern voice, roughened by cigarettes.

Around four, Annie said. Give or take. She had just finished mowing the grass and she didn't wear a watch. It had been devilish hot; she remembered that well enough.

'How long did he stay, Mrs Wilkes? David asked.

'It's
Miss
Wilkes, if you don't mind.'

'Excuse me.'

Annie said she couldn't reckon on how long for sure, only it hadn't been long. Five minutes, maybe.

'He showed you a picture?'

Yes, Annie said, that was why he came. Paul marvelled at how composed she sounded, how pleasant.

'And had you seen the man in the picture?'

Annie said certainly, he was Paul Sheldon, she knew that right away. 'I have all his books,' she said. 'I like them very much. That disappointed Officer Kushner. He said if that was the case, he guessed I probably knew what I was talking about. He looked very discouraged. He also looked very hot.'

'Yeah, it was a hot day, all right,' Goliath said, and Paul was alarmed by how much closer his voice was. In the parlor? Yes, almost certainly in the parlor. Big or not, the guy moved like a goddamned lynx. When Annie responded, her own voice was closer. The cops had moved into the parlor. She was following. She hadn't asked them, but they had gone in there anyway. Looking the place over.

Although her pet writer was now less than thirty—five feet away, Annie's voice remained composed. She had asked if he would like to come in for an iced coffee; he said he couldn't. So she had asked if he'd like to take along a cold bottle of —

'Please don't break that,' Annie interrupted herself, her voice sharpening. 'I like my things, and some of them are quite fragile.'

'Sorry, ma'am.' That had to be David, his voice low and whispery, both humble and a little startled. That tone coming from a cop would have been amusing under other circumstances, but these were not other circumstances and Paul was not amused. He sat stiffly, hearing the small sound of something being set carefully back down (the penguin on his block of ice, perhaps), his hands clasped tightly on the arms of the wheelchair. He imagined her fiddling with the shoulderbag. He waited for one of the cops — Goliath, probably — to ask her just what the hell it was she had in there.

Then the shooting would start.

'What were you saying?' David asked.

'That I asked him if he'd like to take along a cold Pepsi from the fridge because it was such a hot day. I keep them right next to the freezer compartment, and that keeps them as cold as you can get them without freezing them. He said that would be very kind. He was a very polite boy. Why did they let such a young boy out alone, do you know?'

'Did he drink the soda here?' David asked, ignoring her question. His voice was closer still. He had crossed the parlor. Paul didn't have to close his eyes to imagine him standing there, looking down the short hall which passed the little downstairs bathroom and ended in the closed guestroom door. Paul sat tight and upright, a pulse beating rapidly in his scrawny throat.

'No,' Annie said, as composed as ever. 'He took it along. He said he had to keep rolling.'

'What's down there?' Goliath asked. There was a double thud of booted heels, the sound slightly hollow, as he stepped off the parlor carpet and onto the bare boards of the hallway.

'A bath and a spare bedroom. I sometimes sleep there when it's very hot. Have a look, if you like, but I promise you I don't have your trooper tied to the bed.'

'No, ma'am, I'm sure you don't,' David said, and, amazingly, their footfalls and voices began to fade toward the kitchen again. 'Did he seem excited about anything while he was here?'

'Not at all,' Annie said. 'Just hot and discouraged.' Paul was beginning to breathe again.

'Preoccupied about anything?'

'No.'

'Did he say where he was going next?'

Although the cops almost surely missed it, Paul's own practiced ear sensed the minutest of hesitations — there could be a trap here, a snare which might spring at once or after a short delay. No, she said at last, although he had headed west, so she assumed he must have gone toward Springer's Road and the few farms out that way.

'Thank you, ma'am, for your cooperation,' David said. 'We may have to check back with you.'

'All right,' Annie said. 'Feel free. I don't see much company these days.'

'Would you mind if we looked 'm your barn?' Goliath asked abruptly.

'Not at all. Just be sure to say howdy when you go in.'

'Howdy to who, ma'am?' David asked.

'Why, to Misery,' Annie said. 'My pig.'

She stood in the doorway looking at him fixedly — so fixedly that his face began to feel warm and he supposed he was blushing. The two cops had left fifteen minutes ago.

'You see something green?' he asked finally.

'Why didn't you holler?' Both cops had tipped their hats to her as they got in their cruiser, but neither had smiled, and there had been a look in their eyes Paul had been able to see even from the narrow angle afforded by the corner of his window. They knew who she was, all right. 'I kept expecting you to holler. They would have fallen on me like an avalanche.'

'Maybe. Maybe not.'

'But why didn't you?'

'Annie, if you spend your whole life thinking the worst thing you can imagine is going to happen, you have to be wrong some of the time.'

'Don't be smart with me!'
He saw that beneath her assumed impassivity she was deeply confused. His silence did not fit well into her view of all existence as a sort of Big-Time Wrestling match: Honest Annie
vs.
that all-time, double-ugly tag-team of The Cockadoodie Brats.

'Who's being smart? I told you I was going to keep my mouth shut and I did. I want to finish my book in relative peace. And I want to finish it for you.'

She looked at him uncertainly, wanting to believe, afraid to believe . . . and ultimately believing anyway. And she was right to believe, because he was telling the truth.

'Get busy, then,' she said softly. 'Get busy right away. You saw the way they looked at me.'

For the next two days life went on just as it had before Duane Kushner; it was almost possible to believe Duane Kushner had never happened at all. Paul wrote almost constantly. He had given the typewriter up for the nonce. Annie put it on the mantel below the picture of the Arc de Triomphe without comment. He filled three legal pads in those two days. There was only one left. When he had filled that one, he would move on to the steno pads. She sharpened his half-dozen Berol Black Warrior pencils, he wrote them dull, and Annie sharpened them again. They shrank steadily as he sat in the sun by the window, bent over, sometimes scratching absently with the great toe of his right foot at the air where the sole of his left foot had been, looking through the hole in the paper. It had yawned wide open again, and the book rushed toward its climax the way the best ones did, as if on a rocket sled. He saw everything with perfect clarity — three groups all hellbent for Misery in the crenellated passages behind the idol's forehead, two wanting to kill her, the third — consisting of Ian, Geoffrey, and Hezekiah — trying to save her . . . while below, the village of the Bourkas burned and the survivors massed at the one point of egress — the idol's left ear — to massacre
anyone
who happened to stagger out alive.

This hypnotic state of absorption was rudely shaken but not broken when, on the third day after the visit of David and Goliath, a cream-colored Ford station wagon with
KTKA / Grand Junction
written on the side pulled into Annie's driveway. The back was full of video equipment.

'Oh God!' Paul said, frozen somewhere between humor, amazement, and horror. 'What's
this
fuck-a-row?'

The wagon had barely stopped before one of the rear doors flew open and a guy dressed in combat-fatigue pants and a Deadhead tee-shirt leaped out. There was something big and black pistol-gripped in one hand and for one wild moment Paul thought it was a tear-gas gun. Then he raised it to his shoulder, and swept it toward the house, and Paul saw it was a minicam. A pretty young woman was getting out of the front passenger seat, fluffing her blow-dried hair and pausing for one final appraising look at her makeup in the outside rear-view mirror before joining her camera-man.

The eye of the outside world, which had slipped away from the Dragon Lady these last few years, had now returned with a vengeance.

Paul rolled backward quickly, hoping he had been in time.

Well, if you want to know for sure, just check the six o'clock news,
he thought, and then had to raise both hands to his mouth to plug up the giggles.

The screen door banged open and shut.

'Get the hell out of here!' Annie screamed. 'Get the hell off my land!'

Dimly: 'Ms Wilkes, if we could have just a few — '

'You can have a couple of loads of double-ought buck up your cockadoodie
bumhole
if you don't get out of here!'

'Ms Wilkes, I'm Glenna Roberts from KTKA — '

'I don't care if you're John O. Jesus Johnnycake Christ from the planet Mars! Get off my land
or you're DEAD!'

'But — '

KAPOW!

Oh Annie oh my Jesus Annie killed that stupid broad —

He rolled back and peeked through the window. He had no choice — he had to see. Relief gusted through him. Annie had fired into the air. That seemed to have done quite well. Glenna Roberts was diving head-first into the KTKA newsmobile. The camera-man swung his lens toward Annie, Annie swung her shotgun toward the camera-man; the camera-man, deciding he wanted to live to see the Grateful Dead again more than he wanted to roll tape on the Dragon Lady, immediately dropped into the back seat again. The wagon was reversing down the driveway before he got his door all the way closed.

Annie stood watching them go, the rifle held in one hand, and then she came slowly back into the house. He heard the clack as she put the rifle on the table. She came down to Paul's room. She looked worse than he had ever seen her, her face haggard and pate, her eyes darting constantly.

'They're back,' she whispered.

'Take it easy.'

'I knew all those brats would come back. And now they have.'

'They're gone, Annie. You made them go.'

'They never go. Someone told them that cop was at Dragon Lady's house before he disappeared. So here they are.'

'Annie — '

'You know what they want?' she demanded.

'Of course. I've dealt with the press. They want the same two things they always want — for you to fuck up while the tape's running and for someone else to buy the martinis when Happy Hour rolls around. But, Annie, you've got: to settle d— ' I

'This
is what they want,' she said, and raised one hooked hand to her forehead. She pulled down suddenly, sharply, opening four bloody furrows. Blood ran into her eyebrows, down her cheeks, along either side of her nose.

'Annie! Stop it!'

'And this!' She slapped herself across the left cheek with her left hand, hard enough to leave an imprint. 'And
this
!' The right cheek, even harder, hard enough to make droplets of blood fly from the fingernail gouges.

'STOP it!'
he screamed.

'It's what they want!'
she screamed back. She raised her hands to her forehead and pressed them against the wounds, blotting them. She held her bloody palms out toward him for a moment. Then she plodded out of the room.

After a long, long time, Paul began to write again. It went slowly at first — the image of Annie pulling those furrows into her skin kept intruding — and he thought it was going to be no good, he had just better pack it in for the day, when the story caught him and he fell through the hole in the paper again.

As always these days, he went with a sense of blessed relief

More police came the next day: local yokels this time. With them was a skinny man carrying a case which could only contain a steno machine. Annie stood in the driveway with them, listening, her face expressionless. Then she led them into the kitchen.

Paul sat quietly, a steno pad of his own on his lap (he had finished the last legal pad the previous evening), and listened to Annie's voice as she made a statement which consisted of all the things she had told David and Goliath four days ago. This, Paul thought, was nothing more than blatant harassment. He was amused and appalled to find himself feeling a little sorry for Annie Wilkes

The Sidewinder cop who asked most of the questions began by telling Annie she could have a lawyer present if she wanted. Annie declined and simply re-told her story. Paul could detect no deviations.

They were in the kitchen for half an hour. Near the end one of them asked how she had come by the ugly-looking scratches on her forehead.

'I did it in the night,' she said. 'I had a bad dream.'

'What was that?' the cop asked.

'I dreamed that people remembered me after all this time and started coming out here again,' Annie said.

When they were gone, Annie came to his room. Her face was doughy and distant and ill.

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