Misery(71)

"Can't suture," she said. "No time. Tourniquet's no good. No central pressure point. Got to (rinse) cauterize." She bent. Paul screamed as fire splashed over the raw bleeding stump. Smoke drifted up. It smelled sweet. He and his first wife had honeymooned on Maui. There had been a luau. This smell reminded him of the smell of the pig when they brought it out of the pit where it had cooked all day. The pig had been on a stick, sagging, black, falling apart.

The pain was screaming. He was screaming.

"Almost over," she said, and turned the valve, and now the ground sheet caught fire around the stump that was no longer bleeding, the stump that was as black as the pig's hide had been when they had brought it out of - Eileen had turned away but Paul had watched, fascinated, as they pulled off the pig's crackling skin as easily as you might skim off a sweater after a football game.

"Almost over - " She turned the torch off. His leg lay in a line of flames with his severed foot wavering beyond it. She bent and now came up with his old friend the yellow floor-bucket. She dumped it over the flames.

He was screaming, screaming. The pain! The goddess! The pain! O Africa!

She stood looking at him, at the darkening, bloody sheets with vague consternation - her face was the face of a woman who hears on her radio that an earthquake has killed ten thousand people in Pakistan or Turkey.

"You'll be all right, Paul," she said, but her voice was suddenly frightened. Her eyes began to dart aimlessly around as they had when it seemed that the fire of his burning book might get out of control. They suddenly fixed on something, almost with relief. "I'll just get rid of the trash." She picked up his foot. Its toes were still spasming. She carried it across the room. By the time she got to the door they had stopped moving. He could see a scar on the instep and remembered how he had gotten that, how he had stepped on a piece of bottle when he was just a kid. Had that been at Revere Beach? Yes, he thought it had been. He remembered he had cried and his father had told him it was just a little cut. His father had told him to stop acting like someone had cut his goddam foot off. Annie paused at the door and looked back at Paul, who shrieked and writhed in the charred and blood-soaked bed, his face a deathly fading white.

"Now you're hobbled," she said, "and don't you blame me. It's your own fault." She went out.

So did Paul.

23

The cloud was back. Paul dived for it, not caring if the cloud meant death instead of unconsciousness this time. He almost hoped it did. Just... no pain, please. No memories, no pain, no horror, no Annie Wilkes.

He dived for the cloud, dived into the cloud, dimly hearing the sounds of his own shrieks and smelling his own cooked meat.

As his thoughts faded, he thought: Goddess! Kill you! Goddess! Kill you! Goddess!

Then there was nothing but nothing.

Part III Paul

Chapter 1

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

- John Fowles The Collector

1

CHAPTER 32

"Oh blessed Jesus," Ia moa ed, a d made a co vulsive moveme t forward. Geoffrey grasped his frie d's arm. The steady beat of the drums pulsed i his head like somethi g heard i a killi g delirium. Bees dro ed arou d them, but o e paused; they simply flew past a d i to the cleari g as if draw by a mag et - which, Geoffrey hough sickly, hey

2

Paul picked up the typewriter and shook it. After a tune, a small piece of steel fell out onto the board across the arms of the wheelchair. He picked it up and looked at it.

It was the letter t. The typewriter had just thrown its t.

He thought: I am going to complain to the management. I am going to not just ask for a new typewriter but f**king demand one. She's got the money - I know she does. Maybe it's squirrelled away in fruit-jars under the barn or maybe it's stuffed in the walls at her Laughing Place, but she's got the dough, and t, my God, the second-most-common letter in the English language -!

Of course he would ask Annie for nothing, much less demand. Once there had been a man who would at least have asked. A man who had been in a great deal more pain, a man who had had nothing to hold onto, not even this shitty book. That man would have asked. Hurt or not, that man had had the guts to at least try to stand up to Annie Wilkes.

He had been that man, and he supposed he ought to be ashamed, but that man had had two big advantages over this one: that man had had two feet... and two thumbs.

Paul sat reflectively for a moment, re-read the last line (mentally filling in the omissions), and then simply went back to work.

Better that way.

Better not to ask.

Better not to provoke.

Outside his window, bees buzzed.

It was the first day of summer.

3

had been.

"Let me go!" Ian snarled, and turned on Geoffrey, his right hand curling into a fist. His eyes bulged madly from his livid face, and he seemed totally unaware of who was holding him back from his darling. Geoffrey realized with cold certainty that what they had seen when Hezekiah pulled the protective screen of bushes aside had come very close to driving Ian mad. He still tottered on the brink, and the slightest push would send him over. If that happened he would take Misery with him.