Misery(64)

During the days he diverted himself with this pleasant foolishness. In the evenings he sat quietly, listening to the pig squeal and thinking about how he would kill the Dragon Lady.

Playing Can You? in real life was quite different from playing it in a cross-legged circle as a kid or doing it in front of a typewriter as a grown-up, he discovered. When it was just a game (and even if they gave you money for it, a game was still all it was), you could think up some pretty wild things and make them seem believable - the connection between Misery Chastain and Miss Charlotte Evelyn-Hyde, for instance (they had turned out to be half-sisters; Misery would later discover her father down there in Africa hanging out with the Bourka Bee-People). In real life, however, the arcane had a way of losing its power.

Not that Paul didn't try. There were all those drugs in the downstairs bathroom - surely there was some way he could use them to put her out of the way, wasn't there? Or to at least render her helpless long enough so he could do it? Take the Novril. Enough of that shit and he wouldn't even have to put her out of the way. She would float off on her own.

That's a very good idea, Paul. I tell you what to do. You just get a whole bunch of those capsules and stick them all through a pint of her ice-cream. She'll just think they're pistachio nuts and gobble them right down.

No, of course that wouldn't work. Nor could he pull a cutie like opening the capsules and mixing the powder into some pre-softened ice-cream. He had tasted it and knew. Novril in the raw was fabulously bitter. It was a taste she would recognize at once in the midst of the expected sweetness... and then woe is you, Paulie. Woe to the max.

In a story it would have been a pretty good idea. In real life, however, it simply did not make it. He wasn't sure he would have taken the chance even if the white powder inside the capsules had been almost or completely tasteless. It wasn't safe enough, it wasn't sure enough. This was no game; it was his life.

Other ideas passed through his mind and were rejected even more quickly. One was suspending something (the typewriter came immediately to mind) over the door so she would be killed or knocked unconscious when she came in. Another was running a tripwire across the stairway. But the problem was the same as the old Novril-in-the-ice-cream trick: in both cases neither was sure enough. He found himself literally unable to think of what might happen to him if he tried to assassinate her and failed.

As dark came down on that second night, Misery's squealing went on as monotonously as ever - the pig sounded like an unlatched door with rusty hinges squealing in the wind - but Bossie No. 1 abruptly fell silent. Paul wondered uneasily if perhaps the poor animal's udder had burst, resulting in death by exsanguination. For a moment his imagination so vivid!

tried to present him with a picture of the cow lying dead in a puddle of mixed milk and blood, and he quickly willed it away. He told himself not to be such a numbnuts - cows didn't die that way. But the voice doing the telling lacked conviction. He had no idea if they did or not. And, besides, it wasn't the cow that was his problem, was it?

All your fancy ideas come down to one thing - you want to kill her by remote control, you don't want her blood on your hands. You're like a man who loves nothing better than a thick steak but wouldn't last an hour in a slaughterhouse. But listen, Paulie, and get it straight: you must face reality at this point in your life if at no other. Nothing fancy. No curlicues. Right?

Right.

He rolled back into the kitchen and opened drawers until he found the knives. He selected the longest butcher-knife and went back to his room, pausing to rub away the hub-marks on the sides of the doorway. The signs of his passage were nevertheless becoming clearer.

Doesn't matter. If she misses them one more time, she misses them for good.

He put the knife on the night-table, hoisted himself into bed, then slid it under the mattress. When Annie came back he was going to ask her for a nice cold glass of water, and when she leaned over to give it to him he was going to plunge the knife into her throat.

Nothing fancy.

Paul closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep, and when the Cherokee came whispering back into the driveway that morning at four o'clock with both its engine and its lights shut off, he did not stir. Until he felt the sting of the hypo sliding into his arm and woke to see her face leaning over his, he hadn't the slightest idea she was back.

21

At first he thought he was dreaming about his own book, that the dark was the dream-dark of the caves behind the huge stone head of the Bourka Bee-Goddess and the sting was that of a bee - "Paul?" He muttered something that meant nothing - something that meant only get out of here, dream voice, get gone.

"Paul." That was no dreamvoice; it was Annie's voice.

He forced his eyes open. Yes, it was her, and for a moment his panic grew even stronger. Then it simply seeped away, like fluid running down a partly clogged drain.

What the hell -?

He was totally disoriented. She was standing there in the shadows as if she had never been away, wearing one of her woolly skirts and frumpy sweaters; he saw the needle in her hand and understood it hadn't been a sting but an injection. What the f**k - either way it was the same thing. He had been gotten by the goddess. But what had she -?

That bright panic tried to come again, and once again it hit a dead circuit. All he could feel was a kind of academic surprise. That, and some intellectual curiosity about where she had come from, and why now. He tried to lift his hands and they came up a little... but only a little. It felt as if there were invisible weights dangling from them. They dropped back onto the sheet with little dull thumps.