Misery(45)

"Well," he said mildly, " you won't have to kill me, Annie. I want to go on. So why don't I get at it?"

"All right," she said. She brought the pages to him, put them on the board, and then stepped back quickly.

"Would you like to read it as I go along?" he asked.

Annie smiled. "Yes! It would be almost like the chapter-plays, when I was a kid!"

"Well, I can't promise a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter," he said. "It just doesn't work that way."

"It will for me," she said fervently. "I'd want to know what was going to happen in Chapter 18 even if I7 ended with Misery and Ian and Geoffrey sitting in armchairs on the porch, reading newspapers. I'm already wild to know what's going to happen next - don't tell me!" she added sharply, as if Paul had offered to do this.

"Well, I generally don't show my work until it's all done," he said, and then smiled at her. "But since this is a special situation, I'll be happy to let you read it chapter by chapter." And so began the thousand and one nights of Paul Sheldon, he thought. "But I wonder if you'd do something for me?"

"What?"

"Fill in these damned n's," he said.

She smiled at him radiantly. "It would be an honor. I'll leave you alone now." She went back to the door, hesitated there, and turned back. Then, with a deep and almost painful timidity, she offered the only editorial suggestion she ever made to him. "Maybe it was a bee." He had already dropped his gaze to the sheet of paper in the typewriter; he was looking for the hole. He wanted to get Misery back to Mrs Ramage's cottage before he knocked off, and he looked back up at Annie with carefully disguised impatience. "I beg pardon?"

"A bee," she said, and he saw a blush creeping up her neck and over her cheeks. Soon even her ears were glowing. "One person in every dozen is allergic to bee-venom. I saw lots of cases of it before... before I retired from service as an R.N. The allergy can show in lots of different ways. Sometimes a sting can cause a comatose condition which is... is similar to what people used to call... uh... catalepsy." Now she was so red she was almost purple.

Paul held the idea up briefly in his mind and then tossed it on the scrap-heap. A bee could have been the cause of Miss Evelyn-Hyde's unfortunate live burial; it even made sense, since it had happened in mid-spring; in the garden, to boot. But he had already decided that credibility depended on the two live burials" being related somehow, and Misery had succumbed in her bedroom. The fact that late fall was hardly bee-season was not really the problem. The problem was the rarity of the cataleptic reaction. He thought Constant Reader would not swallow two unrelated women in neighboring townships being buried alive six months apart as a result of bee-stings.

Yet he could not tell Annie that, and not just because it might rile her up. He could not tell her because it would hurt her badly, and in spite of all the pain she had afforded him, he found he could not hurt her in that way. He had been hurt that way himself.

He fell back on that most common writers'-workshop euphemism: "It's got possibilities, all right. I'll drop it into the hopper, Annie, but I've already got some ideas in mind. It may not fit."

"Oh, I know that - you're the writer, not me. just forget I said anything. I'm sorry."

"Don't be s - " But she was gone, her heavy tread almost running down the hallway to the parlor. He was looking at an empty space. His eyes dropped - then widened.

On either side of the doorway, about eight inches up from the floor, was a black mark - they had been left, he understood at once, by the hubs of the wheelchair when he forced it through. So far she hadn't noticed them. It had been almost a week, and her failure to notice was a small miracle. But soon - tomorrow, perhaps even this afternoon she would be in to vacuum, and then she would.

She would.

Paul managed very little during the rest of the day. The hole in the paper had disappeared.

8

The following morning Paul was sitting up in bed, propped on a pile of pillows, drinking a cup of coffee, and eyeing those marks on the sides of the door with the guilty eye of a murderer who has just seen some bloody item of clothing of which he somehow neglected to dispose. Suddenly Annie came rushing into the room, her eyes wide and bulging. She held a dustcloth in one hand. In the other, incredibly, she held a pair of handcuffs.

"What - " It was all he had time for. She seized him with panicky strength and pulled him into an upright sitting position. Pain - the worst in days - bellowed through his legs, and he screamed. The coffee cup flew out of his hand and shattered on the floor. Things keep breaking in here, he thought, and then: She saw the marks. Of course. Probably a long time ago. That was the only way he could account for this bizarre behavior - she had seen the marks after all, and this was the beginning of some new and spectacular punishment.

"Shut up, stupid," she hissed, and then his hands were pinned behind him, and just as he heard the click of the handcuffs, he also heard a car turning into the driveway.

He opened his mouth, meaning to speak or perhaps scream again, and she stuffed the rag into it before he could do either. There was some ghastly dead taste on the rag. Pledge, he supposed, or Endust, or something like that.

"Make no sound," she said, leaning over him with one hand on either side of his head, strands of her hair tickling his cheeks and forehead. "I warn you, Paul. If whoever that is hears something - or even if I hear something and think he might have heard something - I will kill him, or them, then you, then myself." She stood up. Her eyes were bulging. There was sweat on her face and dried egg-yolk on her lips.