Misery(20)

"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.

"What do you think?"

"It looks good," he said, uttering the biggest lie of his life with perfect ease, and then asked the question to which he already knew the answer. "What will I write there, do you think?"

"Oh, but Paul" she said, turning to him, her eyes dancing animatedly in her flushed face. "I don't think, I know! You're going to use this typewriter to write a new novel! Your best novel! Misery's Retum!"

24

Misery's Return. He felt nothing at all. He supposed a man who had just cut his hand off in a power saw might feel this same species of nothing as he stood regarding his spouting wrist with dull surprise.

"Yes!" Her face shone like a searchlight. Her powerful hands were clasped between her br**sts. "It will be a book just for me, Paul! My payment for nursing you back to health! The one and only copy of the newest Misery book! I'll have something no one else in the world has, no matter how much they might want it! Think of it!"

"Annie, Misery is dead." But already, incredibly, he was thinking, I could bring her back. The thought filled him with tired revulsion but no real surprise. After all, a man who could drink from a floor-bucket should be capable of a little directed writing.

"No she's not," Annie replied dreamily. "Even when I was... when I was so mad at you, I knew she wasn't really dead. I knew you couldn't really kill her. Because you're good."

"Am I?" he said, and looked at the typewriter. It grinned at him. We're going to find out just how good you are, old buddy, it whispered.

"Yes!"

"Annie, I don't know if I can sit in that wheelchair. Last time - "

"Last time it hurt, you bet it did. And it will hurt next time, too. Maybe even a little more. But there will come a day - and it won't be long, either, although it may seem longer to you than it really is - when it hurts a little less. And a little less. And a little less."

"Annie, will you tell me one thing?"

"Of course, dear!"

"If I write this story for you - "

"Novel! A nice big one like all the others - maybe even bigger!" He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. "Okay - if I write this novel for you, will you let me go when it's done?" For a moment unease slipped cloudily across her face, and then she was looking at him carefully, studiously. "You speak as though I were keeping you prisoner, Paul." He said nothing, only looked at her.

"I think that by the time you finish, you should be up to the... up to the strain of meeting people again," she said.

"Is that what you want to hear?"

"That's what I wanted to hear, yes."

"Well, honestly! I knew writers were supposed to have big egos, but I guess I didn't understand that meant ingratitude, too!" He went on looking at her and after a moment she looked away, impatient and a little flustered.

At last he said: "I'll need all the Misery books, if you've got them, because I don't have my concordance."

"Of course I have them!" she said. Then: "What's a concordance?"

"It's a loose-leaf binder where I have all my Misery stuff," he said. "Characters and places, mostly, but cross-indexed three or four different ways. Time-lines. Historical stuff... " He saw she was barely listening. This was the second time she'd shown not the slightest interest in a trick of the trade that would have held a class of would-be writers spellbound. The reason, he thought, was simplicity itself. Annie Wilkes was the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader. She did not want to hear about his concordance and indices because to her Misery and the characters surrounding her were perfectly real. Indices meant nothing to her. If he had spoken of a village census in Little Dunthorpe, she might have shown some interest.

"I'll make sure you get the books. They're a little dog-eared, but that's a sign a book has been well read and well loved, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said. No need to lie this time. "Yes it is.

"I'm going to study up on book-binding," she said dreamily. "I'm going to bind Misery's Return myself. Except for my mother's Bible, it will be the only real book I own."