Misery(96)

She didn't smile. "How much longer?" He hesitated, looked at the pile of typescript with the ragged stack of handwritten pages on top, then back at Annie. "Two days," he said. "Maybe three."

"The next time they come they'll have the search warrant," she said, and left before he could reply.

34

She came in that evening around quarter of twelve and said: "You should have been in bed an hour ago, Paul." He looked up, startled out of the story's deep dream Geoffrey - who had turned out to be very much the hero of this one - had just come face to face with the hideous queen bee, whom he would have to battle to the death for Misery's life.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I'll turn in after awhile. Sometimes you get it down or it gets away." He shook his hand, which was sore and throbbing. A large hard growth, half callus and half blister, had risen on the inside of his index finger, where the pencil pressed most firmly. He had pills, and they would take away the pain, but they would also blur his thoughts.

"You think it's good, don't you?" she asked softly. "Really good. You're not doing it just for me anymore, are you?"

"Oh no," he said. For a moment he trembled on the edge of saying something more - of saying, It was never for you, Annie, or all the other people out there who sign their letters "Your number-one fan." The minute you start to write all those people are at the other end of the galaxy, or something. It was never for my ex-wives, or my mother, or for my father. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.

But it would be unwise to say such a thing to her.

He wrote until dawn was coming up in the east and then fell into bed and slept for four hours. His dreams were confused and unpleasant. In one of them Annie's father was climbing a long flight of stairs. He had a basket of what appeared to be newspaper clippings in his arms. Paul tried; to cry out to him, to warn him, but every time he opened his mouth nothing came out but a neatly reasoned paragraph of narration - although this paragraph was different each time he tried to scream, it always opened the same way: "One day, about a week later... " And now came Annie Wilkes, screaming, rushing down the hall, hands out-stretched to give her father the killing push... only her screams were becoming weird buzzing noises, and her body was rippling and humping and changing under her skirt and cardigan sweater, because Annie was changing into a bee.

35

No one official came by the following day, but lots of i unofficial people showed up. Designated Gawkers. One of the cars was full of teenagers. When they turned into the driveway to reverse direction, Annie rushed out and screamed at them to get off her land before she shot them for the dirty dogs they were.

"Fuck off, Dragon Lady!" one of them shouted.

"Where'd you bury him?" another yelled as the car backed out in a boil of dust.

A third threw a beer-bottle. As the car roared away, Paul could make out a bumper sticker pasted to the rear window. SUPPORT THE SIDEWINDER BLUE DEVILS, it read.

An hour later he saw Annie stalk grimly past his window, drawing on a pair of work-gloves as she headed for the barn. She came back some time later with the chain. She had taken the time to interlace its stout steel loops with barbed wire. When this prickly knitting was padlocked across the driveway, she reached into her breast pocket, and took out some red pieces of cloth. These she tied to several of the links to aid visibility.

"It won't keep the cops out," she said when she finally came in, "but it'll keep the rest of the brats away."

"Yes."

"Your hand... it looks swollen."

"Yes."

"I hate to be a cockadoodie pest, Paul, but... "

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow? Really?" She brightened at once.

"Yes, I think so. Probably around six."

"Paul, that's wonderful! Shall I start reading now, or - "

"I'd prefer that you wait."

"Then I will." That tender, melting look had crept into her eyes again. He had come to hate her most of all when she looked that way. "I love you, Paul. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes," he said. "I know." And bent over his pad again.

Chapter 5

36

That evening she brought him his Keflex pill - his urinary infection was improving, but very slowly - and a bucket of ice. She laid a neatly folded towel beside it and left without saying a word.

Paul put his pencil aside - he had to use the fingers of his left hand to unbend the fingers of his right - and slipped his hand into the ice. He left it there until it was almost completely numb. When he took it out, the swelling seemed to have gone down a little. He wrapped the towel around it and sat, looking out into the darkness, until it began to tingle. He put the towel aside, flexed the hand for awhile (the first few times made him grimace with pain, but then the hand began to limber up), and started to write again.

At dawn he rolled slowly over to his bed, lurched in, and was asleep at once. He dreamed he was lost in a snowstorm, only it wasn't snow; it was flying pages which filled the world, destroying direction, and each page was covered with typing, and all the n's and t's and e's were missing, and he understood that if he was still alive when the blizzard ended, he would have to fill them all in himself, by hand, deciphering words that were barely there.