Misery(53)

This was no dream. Just another day lost in the funhouse with Annie.

Her breath smelled like a corpse decomposing in rotted food.

"Annie?" He straightened up, eyes moving between her and the rat. Outside it was dusk - a strange blue dusk filled with rain. It sheeted against the window. Strong gusts of wind shook the house, making it creak.

Whatever had been wrong with her this morning was worse tonight. Much worse. He realized he was seeing her with all her masks put aside - this was the real Annie, the inside Annie. The flesh of her face, which had previously seemed so fearsomely solid, now hung like lifeless dough. Her eyes were blanks. She had dressed, but her skirt was on inside out. There were more weals on her flesh, more food splattered on her clothes. When she moved, they exhaled too many different aromas for Paul to count. Nearly one whole arm of her cardigan sweater was soaked with a half-dried substance that smelled like gravy.

She held up the trap. "They come into the cellar when it rains." The pinned rat squeaked feebly, and snapped at the air. Its black eyes, infinitely more lively than those of its captor, rolled. "I put down traps. I have to. I smear the trip-plates with bacon grease. I always catch eight or nine. Sometimes I find others - " She blanked then. Blanked for nearly three minutes, holding the rat in the air, a perfect case of waxy catatonia. Paul stared at her, stared at the rat as it squeaked and struggled, and realized that he had actually believed that things could get no worse. Untrue. Un-f*cking true.

At last, as he had begun to think she had just sailed off into oblivion forever with no fuss or fanfare, she lowered the trap and went on as if she had never stopped speaking.

" - drowned in the corners. Poor things." She looked down at the rat and a tear fell onto its matted fur.

"Poor poor things." She closed one of her strong hands around the rat and pulled back the spring with the other. It lashed in her hand, head twisting as it tried to bite her. Its squeals were thin and terrible. Paul pressed the heel of a palm against his wincing mouth.

"How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do. We think we know so much, but we really don't know any more than a rat in a trap - a rat with a broken back that thinks it still wants to live." The hand holding the rat became a fist. Her eyes never lost that blank, distant cast. Paul wanted to look away and could not. Tendons began to stand out on her inner arm. Blood ran from the rat's mouth in an abrupt thin stream. Paul heard its bones break, and then the thick pads of her fingers punched into its body, disappearing up to the first knuckle. Blood pattered on the floor. The creature's dulling eyes bulged.

She tossed the body into the corner and wiped her hand indifferently on the sheet, leaving long red smears.

"Now it's at peace." She shrugged, then laughed. "I'll get my gun, Paul, shall I? Maybe the next world is better. For rats and people both - not that there's much difference between the two."

"Not until I finish," he said, trying to enunciate each word carefully. This was difficult, because he felt as if someone had shot his mouth full of Novocain. He had seen her low before, but he'd seen nothing like this; he wondered if she'd ever had a low as low as this before. This was how depressives got just before shooting all the members of their families, themselves last; it was the psychotic despair of the woman who dresses her children in their best, takes them out for ice-cream, walks them down to the nearest bridge, lifts one into the crook of each arm, and jumps over the side. Depressives kill themselves. Psychotics, rocked in the poison cradles of their own egos, want to do everyone handy a favor and take them along.

I'm closer to death than I've ever been in my life, he thought, because she means it. The bitch means it.

"Misery?" she asked, almost as if she had never heard the word before - but there had been a momentary fugitive sparkle in her eyes, hadn't there? He thought so.

"Misery, yes." He thought desperately about how he should go on. Every possible approach seemed mined. "I agree that the world is a pretty crappy place most of the time," he said, and then added inanely: "Especially when it rains." Oh, you idiot, stop babbling!

"I mean, I've been in a lot of pain these last few weeks, and - "

"Pain?" She looked at him with sallow, sunken contempt. "You don't know what pain is. You don't have the slightest idea, Paul."

"No... I suppose not. Not compared to you."

"That's right."

"But - I want to finish this book. I want to see how it all turns out." He paused. "And I'd like you to stick around and see, too. A person might as well not write a book at all, if there's no one around to read it. Do you get me?" He lay there looking at that terrible stone face, heart thumping.

"Annie? Do you get me?"

"Yes... " She sighed. "I do want to know how it comes out. That's the only thing left in the world that I still want, I suppose." Slowly, apparently unaware of what she was doing, she began to suck the rat's blood from her fingers. Paul jammed his teeth together and grimly told himself he" would not vomit, would not, would not. "It's like waiting for the end of one of those chapter-plays." She looked around suddenly, the blood on her mouth like lipstick.

"Let me offer again, Paul. I can get my gun. I can end all of this for both of us. You are not a stupid man. You know I can never let you leave here. You've known that for some time, haven't you?" Don't let your eyes waver. If she sees your eyes waver, she'll; kill you right now.