Misery(69)

"I told you - "

"How many times?" Her voice was rising. "Tell the truth!"

"I am! Three times!"

"How many times, God damn it?" In spite of the cruiser-load of dope she'd shot into him, Paul began to be frightened.

At least if she does something to me it can't hurt too much... and she wants me to finish the book... she said so...

"You're treating me like a fool." He noticed how shiny her skin was, like some sort of polymer plastic stretched tightly over stone. There seemed to be no pores at all in that face.

"Annie, I swear - "

"Oh, liars can swear! Liars love to swear! Well, go ahead and treat me like a fool, if that's what you want. That's fine. Goody-goody for you. Treat a woman who isn't a fool as if she were, and that woman always comes out ahead. Let me tell you, Paul - I've stretched thread and strands of hair from my own head all over this house and have found many of them snapped later on. Snapped or entirely gone... just disappeared... poof! Not just on my scrapbook but in this hallway and across my dresser drawers upstairs... in the shed... all over." Annie, how could I possibly get out in the shed with all those locks on the kitchen door? he wanted to ask, but she gave him no time, only plunged on.

"Now you go right ahead and keep telling me it was only three times, Mister Smart Guy, and I'll tell you who the fool is." He stared at her, groggy but appalled. He didn't know how to answer her. It was so paranoid... so crazy...

My God, he thought, suddenly forgetting the shed, upstairs? Did she say UPSTAIRS?

"Annie, how in God's name could I get upstairs?"

"Oh, RIGHT!" she cried, her voice cracking. "Oh, SURE! I came in here a few days ago and you'd managed to get into your wheelchair all by yourself! If you could do that, you could get upstairs! You could crawl!"

"Yes, on my broken legs and my shattered knee," he said.

Again that black look of crevasse; the batty darkness under the meadow. Annie Wilkes was gone. The Bourka Bee-Goddess was here.

"You don't want to be smart to me, Paul," she whispered.

"Well, Annie, one of us has to at least try, and you're not doing a very good job. If you'd just try to see how cr - "

"How many times?"

"Three."

"The first time to get medication."

"Yes. Novril capsules."

"And the second time to get food."

"That's right."

"The third time it was to fill up the pitcher."

"Yes. Annie, I'm so dizzy "You filled it in the bathroom up the hall."

"Yes - "

"Once for medication, once for food, and once for water."

"Yes, I told you!" He tried to yell, but what came out was a strengthless croak.

She reached into her skirt pocket again and brought out the butcher knife. Its keen blade glimmered in the brightening morning light. She suddenly twisted to the left and threw the knife. She threw it with the deadly, half-casual grace of a carnival performer. It stuck, quivering, in the plaster below the picture of the Arc de Triomphe.

"I investigated under your mattress a little before I gave you your pre-op shot. I expected to find capsules; the knife was a complete surprise. I almost cut myself. But you didn't put it there, did you?" He didn't reply. His mind was spinning and diving like an out-of-control amusement-park ride. Pre-op shot? Was that what she had said? Pre-op? He was suddenly, utterly sure that she meant to pull the knife from the wall and castrate him with it.

"No, you didn't put it there. You went out once for medication, once for food, and once for water. This knife must have... why, it must have floated in here and slid under there all by itself. Yes, that's what must have happened!" Annie shrieked derisive laughter.

PRE-OP??? Dear God, is that what she said?

"Damn you!" she cried. "God damn you! How many times?"

"All right! All right! I got the knife when I went after the water! I confess! If you think that means I was out any number of times, go on and fill in the blank! If you want it to be five times, it was five. If you want it to be twenty, or fifty, or a hundred, that's what it was. I'll admit it. However many times you think, Annie, that's how many times I was out." For a moment, in his anger and dopey befuddlement, he had lost sight of the hazy, frightening concept inherent in that phrase pre-op shot. He wanted to tell her so much, wanted to tell her even though he knew that a ravening paranoid like Annie would reject what was so obvious. It had been damp; Scotch tape did not like the damp; in many cases her Ludlumesque little traps had undoubtedly just peeled off and floated away on some random draft. And the rats. With a lot of water in the cellar and the mistress of the manor gone, he had heard them in the walls. Of course. They had the run of the house - and they would be attracted by all the oogy stuff Annie had left around. The rats were probably the gremlins who had broken most of Annie's threads. But she would only push such ideas away. In her mind, he was almost ready to run the New York Marathon.

"Annie... Annie, what did you mean when you said you gave me a pre-op shot?" But Annie was still fixated on the other matter. "I say it was seven," she said softly. "At least seven. Was it seven?"

"If you want it to be seven, it was seven. What did you mean when you said - "