Misery (8 page)

  'Goodness!' she said again, holding the bucket of water and looking around, trying to decide where to throw it or it needed to be thrown at all. Her lips were trembling and wet with spit. As Paul watched, her tongue darted out and slicked them afresh. 'Goodness! Goodness!' It seemed to be all she could say.

    Even caught in the squeezing vise of his pain, Paul felt an instant of intense pleasure — this was what Annie Wilkes looked like when she was frightened. It was a look he could come to love.

  Another page wafted up, this one still running with little tendrils of low blue fire, and that decided her. With another 'Goodness!' she carefully poured the bucket of water into the barbecue pot. There was a monstrous hissing and a plume of steam. The smell was wet and awful, charred and yet somehow creamy.

    When she left he managed to get up on his elbow one final time. He looked into the barbecue pot and saw something that looked like a charred lump of log floating in a brackish pond.

  After awhile, Annie Wilkes came back.

  Incredibly, she was humming.

  She sat him up and pushed capsules into his mouth.

  He swallowed them and lay back, thinking:
I'm going to kill her.

'Eat,' she said from far away, and he felt stinging pain. He opened his eyes and saw her sitting beside him — for the first time he was actually on a level with her, facing her. He realized with bleary, distant surprise that for the first time in untold eons he was sitting, too . . . actually sitting up.

  
Who gives a shit?
he thought, and let his eyes slip shut again. The tide was in. The pilings were covered. The tide had finally come in and the next time it went out it might go out forever and so he was going to ride the waves while there were waves left to ride, he could think about sitting up later . . .

  
'Eat!'
she said again, and this was followed by a recurrence of pain. It buzzed against the left side of his head, making him whine and try to pull away.

  'Eat, Paul! You've got to come out of it enough to eat or . . . '

  Zzzzzing! His earlobe. She was pinching it.

  "Kay,' he muttered. "
Kay!
Don't yank it off, for God's sake.'

    He forced his eyes open, Each lid felt as if it had a cement block dangling from it. Immediately the spoon was in his mouth, dumping hot soup down his throat. He swallowed to keep from drowning.

   Suddenly, out of nowhere —
the most amazing comeback this announcer has ever seen, ladies
and gentlemen! —
I Got the Hungries came bursting into view. It was as if that first spoonful of soup had awakened his gut from a hypnotic trance. He took the rest as fast as she could spoon it into his mouth, seeming to grow more rather than less hungry as he slurped and swallowed.

    He had a vague memory of her wheeling out the sinister, smoking barbecue and then wheeling in something which, in his drugged and fading state, he had thought might be a shopping cart. The idea had caused him to feel neither surprise nor wonder; he
was
visiting with Annie Wilkes, after all. Barbecues, shopping carts; maybe tomorrow a parking meter or a nuclear warhead. When you lived in the funhouse, the laff riot just never stopped.

  He had drifted off, but now he realized that the shopping cart had been a folded-up wheelchair. He was sitting in it, his sprinted legs stuck stiffly out in front of him, his pelvic area feeling uncomfortably swollen and not very happy with the new position.

  
She put me in it while I was conked out,
he thought.
Lifted me. Dead weight. Christ she must be
strong.

    'Finished!' she said. 'I'm pleased to see how well you took that soup, Paul. I believe you are going to mend. We will not say "Good as new" — alas, no — but if we don't have any more of these . . . these
contretemps
. . . I believe you'll mend just fine. Now I'm going to change your nasty old bed, and when that's done I'm going to change nasty old
you,
and then, if you're not having too much pain and still feel hungry, I am going to let you have some toast.'

   'Thank you, Annie,' he said humbly, and thought: Your
throat. If I can, I'll give you a chance to
lick your lips and say 'Goodness!' But only once, Annie.

Four hours later he was back in bed and he would have burned
all
his books for even a single Novril. Sitting hadn't bothered him a bit while he was doing it — not with enough shit in his bloodstream to have put half the Prussian Army to steep — but now it felt as if a swarm of bees had been loosed in the lower half of his body.

   He screamed very loudly — the food must have done
something
for him, because he could not remember being able to scream so loudly since he had emerged from the dark cloud.

   He sensed her standing just outside the bedroom door in the hallway for a long time before she actually came in, immobile, turned off, unplugged, gazing blankly at no more than the doorknob or perhaps the pattern of lines on her own hands.

  'Here.' She gave him his medication — two capsules this time.

  He swallowed them, holding her wrist to steady the glass.

  'I bought you two presents in town,' she said, getting up.

  'Did you?' he croaked.

  She pointed at the wheelchair which brooded in the corner with its steel leg-rests stuck stiffly out.

  'I'll show you the other one tomorrow. Now get some sleep, Paul.'

But for a long time no sleep came. He floated on the dope and thought about the situation he was in. It seemed a little easier now. It was easier to think about than the book which he had created and then uncreated.

  Things . . . isolated things like pieces of cloth which may be pieced together to make a quilt.

  They were miles from the neighbors who, Annie said, didn't like her. What was the name? Boynton. No,
Roydman.
That was it. Roydman. And how far from town? Not too far, surely. He was in a circle whose diameter might be as small as fifteen miles, or as large as forty-five. Annie Wilkes's house was in that circle, and the Roydmans', and downtown Sidewinder, however pitifully small that might be. . . .

  
And my car. My Camaro's somewhere in that circle, too. Did the police find it?

   He thought not. He was a well-known person; if a car had been found with tags registered in his name, a little elementary checking would have shown he had been in Boulder and had then dropped out of sight. The discovery of his wrecked and empty car would have prompted a search, stories on the news . . .

  
She never watches the news on IV, never listens to the radio at all — unless she's got one with
an earplug, or phones.

   It was all a little like the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story — the one that didn't bark. His car hadn't been found because the cops hadn't come. If it
had
been found, they would have checked everyone in his hypothetical circle, wouldn't they?

And just how many people could there be in such a circle, here close to the top of the Western Slope? The Roydmans, Annie Wilkes, maybe ten or twelve others?

And just because it hadn't been found so far didn't mean it wouldn't be found.

    His vivid imagination (which he had not gotten from anyone on his
mother's
side of the family) now took over. The cop was tall, handsome in a cold way, his sideburns perhaps a bit longer than regulation. He was wearing dark sunglasses in which the person being questioned would see his own face in duplicate. His voice had a flat Midwestern twang.

  
We've found an overturned car halfway down Humbuggy Mountain which belongs to a famous
writer named Paul Sheldon. There's some blood on the seats and the dashboard, but no sign of
him. Must have crawled out, may even have wandered away in a daze —

  That was a laugh, considering the state of his legs, but of course they would not know what injuries he might have sustained. They would only assume that, if he was not here, he must have been strong enough to get at least a little way. The course of their deductions was not apt to lead to such an unlikely possibility as kidnapping, at least not at first, and probably never.

  
Do you remember seeing anyone on the road the day of the storm? Tall man, forty-two years
old, sandy hair? Probably wearing blue jeans and a checked flannel shirt and a parka? Might
have looked sort of bunged up? Hell, might not even have known who he was?

  Annie would give the cop coffee in the kitchen; Annie would be mindful that all the doors between there and the spare bedroom should be closed. In case he should groan.

  
Why, no, officer — I didn't see a soul. In fact, I came back from town just as quick as I could
chase when Tony Roberts told me that bad old storm wasn't turning south after all.

   The cop, setting down the coffee cup and getting up:
Well, if you should see anyone fitting the
description, ma'am, I hope you'll get in touch with us just as fast as you can. He's quite a famous
Person. Been in
People
magazine. Some other ones, too.

  
I certainly will, officer!

  And away he would go.

   Maybe something like that had
already
happened and he just didn't know about it. Maybe his imaginary cop's actual counterpart or counterparts had visited Annie while he was doped out. God knew he spent enough time doped out. More thought convinced him it was unlikely. He
wasn't
Joe Blow from Kokomo, just some transient blowing through. He had been in
People
(first best-seller) and
Us
(first divorce); there had been a question about him one Sunday in Walter Scott's
Personality Parade.
There would have been rechecks, maybe by phone, probably by the cops themselves. When a celebrity — even a quasi-celebrity like a writer disappeared, the heat came on.

  
You're only guessing, man.

  Maybe guessing, maybe deducing. Either way it was better than just lying here and doing nothing.

  What about guardrails?

   He tried to remember and couldn't. He could only remember reaching for his cigarettes, then the amazing way the ground and the sky had switched places, then darkness. But again, deduction (or educated guesswork, if you wanted to be snotty) made it easier to believe there had been none. Smashed guardrails and snapped guywires would have alerted roadcrews. So what exactly
had
happened?

   He had lost control at a place where there wasn't much of a drop, that was what — just enough grade to allow the car to flip over in space. If the drop had been steeper, there would have been guardrails. If the drop had been steeper, Annie Wilkes would have found it difficult or impossible to get to him, let alone drag him back to the road by herself.

So where was his car? Buried in the snow, of course.

   Paul put his arm over his eyes and saw a town plow coming up the road where he has crashed only two hours earlier. The plow is a dim orange blob in the driving snow near the end of this day. The man driving is bundled to the eyes; on his head he wears an old-fashioned trainman's cap of blue-and-white pillowtick. To his right, at the bottom of a shallow slope which will, not far from here, deepen into a more typical upcountry gorge, lies Paul Sheldon's Camaro, with the faded blue HART FOR PRESIDENT sticker on the rear bumper just about the brightest thing down there. The guy driving the plow doesn't see the car; bumper sticker is too faded to catch his eye. The wing-plows block most of his side-vision, and besides, it's almost dark and he's beat. He just wants to finish this last run so he can turn the plow over to his relief and get a hot cup of joe.

    He sweeps past, the plow spurning cloudy snow into the gully. The Camaro, already drifted to the windows, is now buried to the roof-line. Later, in the deepest part of a stormy twilight when even the things directly in front of you look unreal, the second-shift man drives by, headed in the opposite direction, and entombs it.

   Paul opened his eyes and looked at the plaster ceiling. There was a fine series of hairline cracks up there that seemed to make a trio of interlocked W's. He had become very familiar with them over the endless run of days he had lain here since coming out of the cloud, and now he traced them again, idly thinking of w words such as
wicked
and
wretched
and
witchlike
and
wriggling.

  Yes.

  Could have been that way. Could have been.

  Had she thought of what might happen when his car was found?

  She
might
have. She was nuts, but being nuts didn't make her stupid.

Yet it had never crossed her mind that he might have a duplicate of
Fast Cars.

  Images of the blackened pages floating up, the flames, the sounds, the smell of the uncreation — he gritted his teeth against the images and tried to shut his mind away from them;
vivid
was not always
good.

  
No, you didn't, but nine out of ten writers would have — at least they would if they were getting
paid as much as you have been for even the non-Misery books. She never even
thought of
it.

  
She's not a
writer.

  
Neither is she stupid, as I think we have both agreed. I think that she is filled with herself — she
does not just have a large ego but one which is positively grandiose. Burning it seemed to her the
proper thing to do, and the idea that her concept of the proper thing to do might be short-circuited
by something so piddling as a bank Xerox machine and a couple of rolls of quarters
. . . that
blip
just never crossed her screen, my friend.