Misery (9 page)

  His other deductions might be like houses built on quicksand, but this view of Annie Wilkes seemed to him as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. Because of his researches for
Misery,
he had rather more than a layman's understanding of neurosis and psychosis, and he knew that although a borderline psychotic might have alternating periods of deep depression and almost aggressive cheerfulness and hilarity, the puffed and infected ego underlay all, positive that all eyes were upon him or her, positive that he or she was staffing in a great drama; the outcome was a thing for which untold millions waited with held breath.

    Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought. These lines were predictable because they all stretched in the same direction: from the unstable person to objects, situations, or other persons outside of the subject's field of control (or fantasy: to the neurotic there might be some difference but to the psychotic they were one and the same).

  Annie Wilkes had wanted
Fast Cars
destroyed, and so, to her, there had been only the one copy.

  
Maybe I could have saved the damn thing by telling her there were more. She would have seen
destroying the manuscript was futile. She —

    His breathing, which had been slowing toward sleep, suddenly caught in his throat and his eyes widened.

  Yes, she would have seen it was futile. She would have been forced to acknowledge one of those lines leading to a place beyond her control. The ego would be hurt, squealing —

  
I have such a temper!

  If she had been clearly faced with the fact that she
couldn't
destroy his 'dirty book', might she not have decided to destroy the
creator
of the dirty book instead? After all, there was no copy of Paul Sheldon.

    His heart was beating fast. In the other room the clock began to bong, and overhead he heard her thumping footfalls cross his ceiling. The faint sound of her urinating. The toilet flushing. The heavy pad of her feet as she went back to bed. The creak of the springs.

   His mind suddenly tried to break into a gallop, an overbred trotter trying to break stride. What, if anything, did all this dime-store psychoanalysis mean in terms of his car? About when it was found? What did it mean to
him?

   'Wait a minute,' he whispered in the dark. 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, just hold the phone. Slow down.'

  He put his arm across his eyes again and again conjured up the state trooper with the dark sunglasses and the overlong sideburns.
We've found an overturned car halfway down Humbuggy
Mountain,
the state trooper was saying, and blah-de-blah-de-blah.

Only
this
time Annie doesn't invite him to stay for coffee. This time she isn't going to feel safe until he's out of her house and far down the road. Even in the kitchen, even with two closed doors between them and the guest-room, even with the guest doped to the ears, the trooper might hear a groan.

If his car was found, Annie Wilkes would know she was in trouble, wouldn't she?

   'Yes,' Paul whispered. His legs were beginning to hurt again, but in the dawning horror of this recognition he barely noticed.

    She would be in trouble not because she had taken him to her house, especially if it was closer than Sidewinder (and so Paul believed it to be); for that they would probably give her a medal and a lifetime membership in the Misery Chastain Fan Club (to Paul's endless chagrin there actually was such a thing). The problem
was,
she had taken him to her house and installed him in the guest-room and told no one. No phone-call to the local ambulance service: 'This is Annie up on the Humbuggy Mountain Road and I've got a fellow here, looks a bit like King Kong used him for a trampoline.' The problem was, she had filled him full of dope to which she was certainly not supposed to have access — not if he was even half as hooked as he thought he was. The problem was, she had followed the dope with a weird sort of treatment, sticking needles in his arms, splinting his legs with sawed-off pieces of aluminum crutches. The problem was, Annie Wilkes had been on the stand up there in Denver . . .
and not as a supporting witness, either,
Paul thought.
I'd bet the house and lot on that.

    So she watches the cop go down the road in his spandy-clean cruiser (spandy-clean except for the caked chunks of snow and salt nestled in the wheel-wells and under the bumpers, that is), and she feels safe again . . . but not
too
safe, because now she is like an animal with its wind up.

Way,
way
up.

   The cops will look and look and look, because he is not just good old Joe Blow from Kokomo; he is Paul Sheldon, the literary Zeus from whose brow sprang Misery Chastain, darling of the dump-bins and sweetheart of the supermarkets. Maybe when they don't find him they'll stop looking, or at least look someplace else, but maybe one of the Roydmans saw her going by that night and saw something funny in the back of Old Bessie, something wrapped in a quilt, something vaguely manlike. Even if they hadn't seen a thing, she wouldn't put it past the Roydmans to make up a story to get her in trouble; they didn't like her.

The cops might come back, and next time her house-guest might not be so quiet.

    He remembered her eyes darting around aimlessly when the fire in the barbecue pot was on the verge of getting out of control. He could see her tongue sticking her lips. He could see her walking back and forth, hands clenching and unclenching, peeking every now and then into the guest-room where he lay lost in his cloud. Every now and then she would utter 'Goodness!' to the empty rooms.

  She had stolen a rare bird with beautiful feathers — a rare bird which came from Africa.

  And what would they do if they found out?

   Why, put her up on the stand again, of course. Put her up on the stand again in Denver. And this time she might not walk free.

  He took his arm away from his eyes. He looked at the interlocking W's swaying drunkenly across the ceiling. He didn't need his elbow over his eyes to see the rest. She might hang on to him for a day or a week. It might take a follow-up phone-call or visit to make her decide to get rid of her
rara avis.
But in the end she would do it, just as wild dogs begin to bury their illicit kills after they have been hunted awhile.

   She would give him five pills instead of two, or perhaps smother him with a pillow; perhaps she would simply shoot him. Surely there was a rifle around somewhere — almost everyone living in the high country had one — and that would take care of the problem.

  No — not the gun.

  Too messy.

  Might leave evidence.

    None of that had happened yet because no one had found the car. They might be looking for him in New York or in L.A., but no one was looking for him in Sidewinder, Colorado.

  But in the spring.

  The W's straggled across the ceiling.
Washed. Wiped. Wasted.

    The throbbing in his legs was more insistent; the next time the clock bonged she would come, but he was almost afraid she would read his thoughts on his face, like the bare premise of a story too gruesome to write. His eyes drifted left. There was a calendar on the wall. It showed a boy riding a sled down a hill. It was February according to the calendar, but if his calculations were right it was already early March. Annie Wilkes had just forgotten to turn the page.

  How long before the melting snows revealed his Camaro with its New York plates and its registration in the glove compartment proclaiming the owner to be Paul Sheldon? How long before that trooper called on her, or until she read it in the paper? How long until the spring melt?

  Six weeks? Five?

  
That could be the length of my life,
Paul thought, and began shuddering. By then his legs were fully awake, and it was not until she had come in and given him another dose of medicine that he was able to fall asleep.

The next evening she brought him the Royal. It was an e model from an era when such things as electric typewriters, color TVs, and touch-tone telephones were only science fiction. It was as black and as proper as a pair of high-button shoes. Glass panels were set into the sides, revealing the machine's levers, springs, ratchets, and rods. A steel return lever, dull with disuse, jutted to one side like a hitchhiker's thumb. The roller was dusty, its hard rubber scarred and pitted. The letters ROYAL ran across the front of the machine in a semicircle. Grunting, she set it down on the foot of the bed between his legs after holding it up for his inspection for a moment.

  He stared at it.

  Was it grinning?

  Christ, it
looked
like it was.

    Anyway, it already looked like trouble. The ribbon was a faded two-tone, red over black. He had forgotten there were such ribbons. The sight of this one called up no pleasant nostalgia.

  'Well?' She was smiling eagerly. 'What do you think?'

  'It's nice!' he said at once. 'A real antique.'

    Her smile clouded. 'I didn't buy it for an antique. I bought it for second-hand.
Good
secondhand.'

   He responded with immediate glibness. 'Hey! There ain't no such
thing
as an antique typewriter — not when you come right down to it. A good typewriter lasts damn near forever. These old office babies are
tanks!'

    If he could have reached it he would have patted it. If he could have reached it he would have
kissed
it.

Her smile returned. His heartbeat slowed a little.

   'I got it at Used News. Isn't that a silly name for a store? But Nancy Dartmonger, the lady who runs it, is a silly woman.' Annie darkened a little, but he saw at once that she was not darkening at
him
— the survival instinct, he was discovering, might
be
only instinct in itself, but it created some really amazing shortcuts to empathy. He found himself becoming more attuned to her moods, her cycles; he listened to her tick as if she were a wounded clock.

  'As well as silly, she's bad. Dartmonger! Her name ought to be
Whoremonger.
Divorced twice and now she's living with
a bartender.
That's why when you said it was an antique — '

  'It looks fine,' he said.

  She paused a long moment and then said, as if confessing: 'It has a missing n.'

  'Does it?'

  'Yes — see?'

  She tilted the typewriter up so he could peer at the banked semicircle of keys and see the missing striker like a missing molar in a mouthful of teeth worn but otherwise complete.

  'I see.'

   She set it back down. The bed rocked a little. Paul guessed the typewriter might weigh as much as fifty pounds. It had come from a time when there were no alloys, no plastics . . . also no six figure book advances, no movie tie-in editions, no
USA Today, no Entertainment Tonight,
no celebrities doing ads for credit cards or vodka.

  The Royal grinned at him, promising trouble.

  'She wanted forty-five dollars but gave me five Because of the missing n.' She offered him a crafty smile. No fool she, it said.

   He smiled back. The tide was in. That made both smiling and lying easy.
'Gave
it to you? You mean you didn't dicker?'

Annie preened a little. 'I told her n was an important letter,' she allowed.

   'Well good for you!
Damn!
' Here was a new discovery. Sycophancy was easy once you got the hang of it.

  Her smile grew sly, inviting him to share a delicious secret.

  'I told her n was one of the letters in my favorite writer's name.'

  'It's
two
of the letters in my favorite
nurse's
name.'

Her smile became a glow. Incredibly, a blush rose in her solid cheeks.
That's what it would look
like,
he thought, if
you built a furnace inside the mouth of one of those idols in the H. Rider
Haggard stories. That is what it would look like at night.
'You
fooler!'
she simpered.

'I'm not!' he said. 'Not at all.'

  'Well!' She looked off for a moment, not blank but just pleased, a little flustered, taking a moment to gather her thoughts. Paul could have taken some pleasure in the way this was going if not for the weight of the typewriter, as solid as the woman and also damaged; it sat there grinning with its missing tooth, promising trouble.

  'The wheelchair was much more expensive,' she said. 'Ostomy supplies have gone right out of
sight
since I —' She broke off, frowned, cleared her throat. Then she looked back at him, smiling. 'But it's time you began sitting up, and I don't begrudge the cost one tiny bit. And of course you can't type lying down, can you?'

  'No . . . '

  'I've got a board . . . I cut it to size . . . and paper . . . wait!'

    She dashed from the room like a girl, leaving Paul and the typewriter to regard each other. His grin disappeared the moment her back was turned. The Royal's never varied. He supposed later that he had pretty well known what all this was about, just as he supposed he had known what the typewriter would sound like, how it would clack through its grin like that old comic-strip character Ducky Daddles.

   She came back with a package of Corrasable Bond in shrink-wrap and a board about three feet wide by four feet long.

   'Look!' She put the board on the arms of the wheelchair that stood by his bed like some solemn skeletal visitor. Already he could see the ghost of himself behind that board, pent in like a prisoner.

    She put the typewriter on the board, facing the ghost, and put the package of Corrasable Bond — the paper he hated most in all the world because of the way the type blurred when the pages were shuffled together — beside it. She had now created a kind of cripple's study.