Misery(66)

"But," she said with the air of one returning to business, "we were talking about your car. I have studded tires, Paul, and at my place in the hills I keep a set of 10X tire chains. Early yesterday afternoon I felt ever so much better - I spent most of my time up there on my knees, deep in prayer, and the answer came, as it often does, and it was quite simple, as it often is. What you take to the Lord in prayer, Paul, He giveth back a thousandfold. So I put the chains on and I crept back down here. It was not easy, and I knew I might well have an accident in spite of the studs and the chains. I also knew that there is rarely such a thing as a "minor accident" on those twisty upcountry roads. But I felt easy in my mind, because I felt safe in the will of the Lord."

"That's very uplifting, Annie," Paul croaked.

She gave him a look which was momentarily startled and narrowly suspicious... and then she relaxed and smiled "I've got a present for you, Paul," she said softly, and before he could ask her what it was - he wasn't sure he wanted any sort of present from Annie - she went on: "The roads were terribly icy. I almost went off twice... The second time Old Bessie slid all the way around in a circle and kept right on going downhill while she did it!" Annie laughed cheerily "Then I got stuck in a snowbank - this was around midnight - but a sanding-crew from the Eustice Public Works Department came along and helped me out."

"Bully for the Eustice Public Works Department," Paul said, but what came out was badly slurred - Burry furdah Estice Pulleyqurks Deparrent.

"The two miles in from the county highway, that was the last hard patch. The county highway is Route 9, you know. The road you were on when you had your wreck. They had sanded that one to a fare-thee-well. I stopped where you went off and looked for your car. And I knew what I would have to do if I saw it. Because there would be questions, and I'd be just about the first one they'd ask those questions to for reasons I think you know." I'm way ahead of you, Annie, he thought. I examined this whole scenario three weeks ago.

"One of the reasons I brought you back was because it seemed like more than a coincidence... it seemed moral like the hand of Providence."

"What seemed like the hand of Providence, Annie?" he, managed.

"Your car was wrecked in almost exactly the same spot where I got rid of that Pomeroy creep. The one who said he was an artist." She slapped a hand in contempt, shifted her feet, and there was that wooden clunking sound as one of them brushed some of whatever it was she had down there on the floor.

"I picked him up on my way back from Estes Park. I was there at a ceramics show. I like little ceramic figurines."

"I noticed," Paul said. His voice seemed to come from light-years away. Captain Kirk! There's a voice coming in over the sub-etheric, he thought, and chuckled dimly. That deep part of him - the part the dope couldn't reach - tried to warn him to shut his mouth, just shut it, but what was the sense? She knew. Of course she knows - the Bourka Bee-Goddess knows everything. "I particularly liked the penguin on the block of ice."

"Thank you, Paul... he is cute, isn't he?

"Pomeroy was hitchhiking. He had a pack on his back. He said he was an artist, although I found out later he was nothing but a hippie dope-fiend dirty bird who had been washing dishes in an Estes Park restaurant for the last couple of months. When I told him I had a place in Sidewinder, he said that was a real coincidence. He said he was going to Sidewinder. He said he'd gotten an assignment from a magazine in New York. He was going to go up to the old hotel and sketch the ruins. His pictures were going to be with an article they were doing. It was a famous old hotel called the Overlook. It burned down ten years ago. The caretaker burned it down. He was crazy. Everybody in town said so. But never mind; he's dead.

"I let Pomeroy stay here with me.

"We were lovers." She looked at him with her black eyes burning in her solid yet doughy white face and Paul thought: If Andrew Pomeroy could get it up for you, Annie, he must have been as crazy as the caretaker that burned down the hotel.

"Then I found out that he didn't really have an assignment to draw pictures of the hotel at all. He was just doing them on his own, hoping to sell them. He wasn't even sure the magazine was doing an article on the Overlook. I found that out pretty quick! After I did, I sneaked a look at his sketchpad. I felt I had a perfect right to do that. After all, he was eating my food and sleeping in my bed. There were only eight or nine pictures in the whole book and they were terrible." Her face wrinkled, and for a moment she looked as she had when she had imitated the sound the pig made.

"I could have made better pictures! He came in while I was looking and he got mad. He said I was snooping. I said I didn't call looking at things in my own house snooping. I said if he was an artist, I was Madame Curie. He started to laugh. He laughed at me. So I... I... "

"You killed him," Paul said. His voice sounded dim and ancient.

She smiled uneasily at the wall. "Well, I guess it was something like that. I don't remember very well. Just when he was dead. I remember that. I remember giving him a bath." He stared at her and felt a sick, soupy horror. The image came to him - Pomeroy's naked body floating in the downstairs tub like a piece of raw dough, head reclining aslant against the porcelain, open eyes staring up at the ceiling...

"I had to," she said, lips drawing back a bit from her teeth. "You probably don't know what the police can do with just one piece of thread, or dirt under someone's fingernails or even dust in a corpse's hair! You don't know but I worked in hospitals all my life and I do know! I do know! I know about for-EN-sics!" She was working herself into one of her patented Annie Wilkes frenzies and he knew he should try and say something which would at least temporarily defuse her, but his mouth seemed numb and useless.