Misery (31 page)

He imagined her laughing.

   'You fucking
bitch!'
He struck his fist against the side of the door. It hurt, and he pressed the side of his hand against his mouth. He hated the sting of tears, the momentary doubling of his vision when he blinked, but there was no way he could stop it. The panic was yammering more loudly now, asking what was he going to do, what was he going to
do,
for Christ's sake, this might be his last chance —

  
What I'm going to do first is a thorough job of checking this situation out,
he told himself grimly.
If you can stay cool for just awhile longer, that is. Think you can do that, chickenshit?

  He wiped his eyes — crying was not going to get him out, of this — and looked out through the window which made up the top half of the door. It wasn't really just one window but sixteen small panes. He could break the glass in each, but he would have to bust the lathes, too, and that might take hours without a saw — they looked strong. And what then? A kamikaze dive out onto the back porch? A great idea. Maybe he could break his back, and that would take his mind off his legs for awhile. And it wouldn't take long, lying out there in the pelting rain before he died of exposure. That would take care of the whole rotten business.

  
No way. No fucking way. Maybe I'm going to punch out, but I swear to God I'm not going to do
it until I get a chance to show my number-one fan just how much I've enjoyed getting to know her.
And that isn't just a promise — that's a sacred vow.

  The idea of paying Annie back did more to still his panic than any amount of self-scolding had done. A little calmer, he flicked the switch beside the locked door. It turned on an outside light, which came in handy — the last of the daylight had drained away during the time since he had left his room. Annie's driveway was flooded, and her yard was a quagmire of mud, standing water, and gobbets of melting snow. By positioning his wheelchair all the way to the left of the door, he could for the first time see the road which ran by her place, although it was really no big deal — two-lane blacktop between decaying snowbanks, shiny as sealskin and awash with rainwater and snowmelt.

  
Maybe she locked the doors to keep the Roydmans out, but she sure didn't need to lock them to
keep me in. If I got out there in this wheelchair, I'd be bogged to the hubcaps in five seconds.
You're not going anywhere, Paul. Not tonight and probably not for weeks — they'll be a month
into the baseball season before the ground firms up enough for you to get out to the road in this
wheelchair. Unless you want to crash through a window and crawl.

  No — he didn't want to do that. It was too easy to imagine how his shattered bones would feel after ten or fifteen minutes of wriggling through cold puddles and melting snow, like a dying tadpole. And even supposing he could make it out to the road, what were his chances of flagging down a car? The only two he'd ever heard out here, other than Old Bessie, had been El Rancho Grande's Bel Air and the car which had scared the life out of him passing the house on the first occasion he had escaped his 'guest-room'.

  He turned off the outside light and rolled across to the, other door, the one between the refrigerator and the pantry. There were three locks on this one as well, and it didn't even open on the outside — or at least not directly. There was another light-switch beside this door. Paul flicked it and saw a neat shed addition which ran the length of the house on its windward side. At one end was a woodpile and a chopping block with an axe buried in it. At the other was a work-table and tools hung on pegs. To its left there was another door. The bulb out there wasn't terribly bright, but it was bright enough for him to see another police bolt and another two Kreig locks on that door as well.

  
The Roydmans .
.
. everybody
. . .
all out to get me
. . .

  'I don't know about
them
,' he said to the empty kitchen, 'but
I
sure am.'

    Giving up on the doors, he rolled into the pantry. Before he looked at the food stored on the shelves, he looked at the matches. There were two cartons of paper book matches and at least two dozen boxes of Diamond Blue Tips, neatly stacked up.

  For a moment he considered simply lighting the place on fire, began to reject the idea as the most ridiculous yet, and then saw something which made him reconsider it briefly. In here was yet another door, and this one had no locks on it.

   He opened it and saw a set of steep, rickety stairs pitching and yawing their way into the cellar. An almost vicious smell of dampness and rotting vegetables rose from the dark. He heard low squeaking sounds and thought of her saying:
They come into the cellar when it rains. I put down
traps. I have to.

  He slammed the door shut in a hurry. A drop of sweat trickled down from his temple and ran, stinging, into the corner of his right eye. He knuckled it away. Knowing that door must lead to the cellar and seeing that there were no locks on it had made the idea of torching the place seem momentarily more rational — he could maybe shelter there. But the stairs were too steep, the possibility of being burned alive if Annie's flaming house collapsed into the cellar-hole before the Sidewinder fire engines could get here was too real, and the rats down there . . . the sound of the rats was somehow the worst.

  
How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do.

   'Africa,' Paul said, and didn't hear himself say it. He began to look at the cans and bags of food in the pantry, trying to assess what he could take with the least chance of raising her suspicions next time she came out here. Part of him understood exactly what this assessment meant: he had given up the idea of escape.

  
Only for the time being,
his troubled mind protested.

  
No,
a deeper voice responded implacably.
Forever, Paul. Forever.

  'I will never give up,' he whispered. 'Do you hear me?
Never.'

Oh no?
the voice of the cynic whispered sardonically. Well . . .
we'll see, won't we?
Yes. They would see.

Annie's larder looked more like a survivalist's bomb shelter than a pantry. He guessed that some of this hoarding was a simple nod to the realities of her situation: she was a woman alone living in the high country, where a person might reasonably expect to spend a certain period — maybe only a day, but sometimes as long as a week or even two — cut off from the rest of the world. Probably even those cockadoodie Roydmans had a pantry that would make a homeowner from another part of the country raise his or her brows . . . but he doubted if the cockadoodie Roydmans or anyone else up here had anything which came close to what he was now looking at. This was no pantry; this was a goddam supermarket. He supposed there was a certain symbolism in Annie's pantry — the ranks of goods had something to say about the murkiness of the borderline between the Sovereign State of Reality and the People's Republic of Paranoia. In his current situation, however, such niceties hardly seemed worth examination. Fuck the symbolism. Go for the food.

    Yes, but be careful. It wasn't just a matter of what she might miss. He must take no more than he could reasonably hope to hide if she came back suddenly . . . and how else did he
think
she would come? Her phone was dead and he somehow doubted if Annie would send him a telegram or Flowers by Wire. But in the end what she might miss in here or find in his room hardly mattered. After all, he had to eat. He was hooked on that, too.

  Sardines. There were lots of sardines in those flat rectangular cans with the key under the paper. Good. He would have some of those. Tins of deviled ham. No keys, but he could open a couple of cans in her kitchen, and eat those first Bury the empties deep in her own overflowing garbage There was an open package of Sun-Maid raisins containing smaller boxes, which the ad-copy on the torn cellophane wrapper called 'mini-snacks'. Paul added four of the mini-snacks to the growing stash in his lap, plus single-serving boxes of Corn Flakes and Wheaties. He noted there were no single-serving boxes of pre-sweetened cereals. If there had been, Annie had chowed them down on her last binge.

    On a higher shelf was a pile of Slim Jims, as neatly stacked as the kindling in Annie's shed. He took four, trying not to disturb the pyramidal structure of the pile, and ate one of them greedily, relishing the salty taste and the grease. He tucked the wrapping into his underwear for later disposal.

   His legs were beginning to hurt. He decided that if he, wasn't going to escape or burn the house down, he ought go on back to his room. An anticlimax, but things could worse. He could take a couple of pills and then write until he got drowsy. Then he could go to sleep. He doubted if she would be back tonight; far from abating, the storm was gaining strength. The idea of writing quietly and then sleeping with the knowledge that he was perfectly alone, that Annie was not going to burst in with some wild idea or even wilder demand, held great appeal, anticlimax or not.

  He reversed out of the pantry, pausing to turn off the light, reminding himself that he must

  
(rinse)

   put everything back in order as he made his retreat. If he ran out of food before she came back, he could always return for more

   but he must not forget how careful he must be. It would not do to forget the simple fact that he was risking his life every time he left his room. Forgetting that would not do at all.

As he was rolling across the parlor, the scrapbook under the coffee table caught his eye again. MEMORY LANE. It was as big as a folio Shakespeare play and as thick as a family Bible.

  Curious, he picked it up and opened it.

  On the first page was a single column of newsprint, headed WILKES-BERRYMAN NUPTIALS. There was a picture of a pale gent with a narrow face and a woman with dark eyes and a pursy mouth. Paul glanced from the newspaper photo to the portrait over the mantel. No question. The woman identified in the clipping as Crysilda Berryman
(Now there's a name worthy
of a
Misery
novel,
he thought) was Annie's mother. Neatly written in black ink below the clipping was:
Bakersfield Journal, May 30th, 1938.

  Page two was a birth announcement: Paul Emery Wilkes, born in Bakersfield Receiving Hospital, May 12th, 1939. Father, Carl Wilkes; mother, Crysilda Wilkes. The name of Annie's older brother gave him a start. He must have been the one with whom she had gone to the movies and seen the chapter-plays. Her brother had been Paul, too.

  Page three announced the birth of Anne Marie Wilkes, d.o.b. April 1st, 1943. Which made Annie just past her forty-fourth birthday. The fact that she had been born on April Fools' Day did not escape Paul.

  Outside, the wind gusted. Rain tore against the house.

  Fascinated, his pain temporarily forgotten, Paul turned the page.

   The next clipping was from page one of the
Bakersfield Journal
. The photo showed a fireman on a ladder, silhouetted against a background of flames billowing from the window of a frame building.

FIVE DIE IN APARTMENT HOUSE FIRE

    Five persons, four of them members of the same family, died in the early hours of Wednesday morning, victims of a smoky three-alarm fire in a Bakersfield apartment house on Watch Hill Avenue. Three of the dead were children — Paul Krenmitz, 8, Frederick Krenmitz, 6, and Alison Krenmitz, 3. The fourth was their father, Adrian Krenmitz, 41. Mr Krenmitz rescued the surviving Krenmitz child, Laurene Krenmitz, who is eighteen months old. According to Mrs Jessica Krenmitz, her husband put the youngest of their four children in her arms and told her, 'I'll be back with the others in a minute or two. Pray for us.' 'I never saw him again,' she said.

   The fifth victim, Irving Thalman, 58, was a bachelor who lived on the top floor of the building. The third-floor apartment was vacant at the time of the fire. The Carl Wilkes family, at first listed as missing, left the building Tuesday night because of a water leak in the kitchen.

   'I weep for Mrs Krenmitz and her loss,' Crysilda Wilkes told a
Journal
reporter, 'but I thank God for sparing my husband and my own two children.'

  Centralia Fire Chief Michael O'Whunn said that the fire began in the apartment building's basement. When asked about the possibility of arson, he said: 'It's more likely that a wino crept into the basement, had a few drinks, and accidentally started the fire with a cigarette. He probably ran instead of trying to put the fire out and five people died. I hope we catch up with the bum.' When asked about leads, O'Whunn said, 'The police have several, and they are following them up hard and fast, I can tell you.'

Same neat black ink below the clipping.
October 28th 1954.

   Paul looked up. He was totally still, but a pulse beat rapidly in his throat. His bowels felt loose and hot.

  
Little brats.

  
Three of the dead were children.

  
Mrs Krenmitz's four brats downstairs.

  
Oh no, oh Christ, no.

  
I used to hate those little brats.

  
She was just a kid! Not even in the house!

  
She was eleven. Old enough and bright enough, maybe, to spill some kerosene around a cheap
liquor bottle, then light a candle, and put the candle in the middle of the kerosene. Maybe she
didn't even think it would work. Maybe she thought the kerosene would evaporate before the
candle burned all the way down. Maybe she thought they'd get out alive
. . .
only wanted to scare
them into moving. But she did it, Paul, she fucking
did
it, and you know it.