Misery (11 page)

  'I see you're admiring my barn, Paul.'

  He looked around, startled. The quick and uncalculated movement awoke his pain from its doze. It snarled dully in what remained of his shins and in the bunched salt-dome that had replaced his left knee. It turned over, needling him from where it lay imprisoned in its cave of bones, and then fell lightly asleep again.

   She had food on a tray. Soft food, invalid food . . . but his stomach growled at the sight of it. As she crossed to him he saw that she was wearing white shoes with crepe soles.

'Yes,' he said. 'It's very handsome.'

   She put the board on the arms of the wheelchair and then put the tray on the board. She pulled a chair over beside him and sat down, watching him as he began to eat.

'Fiddle-de-foof! Handsome is as handsome does, my mother always said. I keep it nice because if I didn't, the neighbors would yap. They are always looking for a way to get at me, or start a rumor about me. So I keep everything nice. Keeping up appearances is very, very important. As far as the barn goes, it really isn't much work, as long as you don't let things pile up. Keeping the snow from breaking in the roof is the oogiest part.'

  
The oogiest part,
he thought.
Save that one for the Annie Wilkes lexicon in your memoirs — if
you ever get a chance to write your memoirs, that is. Along with dirty birdie and fiddle-de-foof
and all the others which I'm sure will come up in time.

   'Two years ago I had Billy Haversham put heat-tapes in the roof. You throw a switch and they get hot and melt the ice. I won't need them much longer
this
winter, though see how it's melting on its own?'

  He had a forkful of egg halfway to his mouth
.
It stopped in midair as he looked out at the barn. There was a row of icicles along the cave. The tips of these icicles were dripping — dripping fast. Each drop sparkled as it fell onto a narrow canal of ice which lay at the base of the barn's side.

   'It's up to forty-five degrees and it's not even nine o'clock!' Annie was going on gaily as Paul imagined the rear bumper of his Camaro surfacing through the rotted snow for the sun to twinkle on. 'Of course it won't last — we've got a hard snap or three ahead of us yet, and probably another big storm as well — but spring is coming, Paul, and my mother always used to say that the hope of spring is like the hope of heaven.'

  He put his fork back down on the plate with the egg still on it.

  'Don't want that last bite? All done?'

   'All done,' he agreed, and in his mind he saw the Roydmans driving up from Sidewinder, saw a bright arrow of light strike Mrs Roydman's face, making her wince and put a shielding hand up
—
What's down there, Ham? . . . Don't tell me I'm crazy, there's something down there! Reflection
damn near burned m'eye out! Back up, I want to take another look.

    'Then I'll just take the tray,' she said, 'and you can get started.' She favored him with a glance that was very warm. 'I just can't tell you how excited I am, Paul.'

   She went out, leaving him to sit in the wheelchair and look at the water running from the icicles which clung to the edge of the barn.

'I'd like some different paper, if you could get it,' he said when she came back to put the typewriter and paper on the board.

  'Different from this?' she asked, tapping the cellophane-wrapped package of Corrasable Bond. 'But this is the most expensive of
all! I asked
when I went into the Paper Patch!'

  'Didn't your mother ever tell you that the most expensive is not always the best?'

  Annie's brow darkened. Her initial defensiveness had been replaced by indignation. Paul guessed her fury would follow.

   'No, she did
not
. What she
told
me, Mister Smart Guy, is that when you
buy
cheap, you
get
cheap.'

   The climate inside her, he had come to discover, was like springtime in the Midwest. She was a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen, and if he had been a farmer observing a sky which looked the way Annie's face looked right now, he would have at once gone to collect his family and herd them into the storm cellar. Her brow was too white. Her nostrils flared regularly, like the nostrils of an animal scenting fire. Her hands had begun to spring limberly open and then snatch closed again, catching air and squashing it.

    His need for her and his vulnerability to her screamed at him to back off, to placate her while there was still time if indeed there still was — as a tribe in one of —those Rider Haggard stories would have placated their goddess when she was angry, by making sacrifice to her effigy.

  But there was another part of him, more calculating and less cowed, which reminded him that he could not play the part of Scheherazade if he grew frightened and placatory whenever she stormed. If he did, she would storm all the more.
If you didn't have something she badly wants,
this part of him reasoned,
she would have taken you to the hospital right away or killed you later
on to protect herself from the Roydmans — because for Annie the world is
full
of Roydmans, for
Annie they're lurking behind every bush. And if you don't bell this bitch right now, Paulie my boy,
you may never be able to.

  She was beginning to breathe more rapidly, almost to hyperventilate; the rhythm of her clenching hands was likewise speeding up, and he knew that in a moment she would be beyond him.

  Gathering up the little courage he had left, trying desperately to summon exactly the right note of sharp and yet almost casual irritability, he said: 'And you might as well stop that. Getting mad won't change a thing.'

  She froze as if he had slapped her and looked at him, wounded.

  'Annie,' he said patiently, 'this is no big deal.'

    'It's a trick,' she said. 'You don't want to write my book and so you're making up tricks not to start. I knew you would. Oh boy. But it's not going to work. It — '

  'That's silly,' he said. 'Did I say I wasn't going to start?'

  'No . . . no, but — '

   'That's right. Because I
am
. And if you come here and take a look at something, I'll show you what the problem is. Bring that Webster Pot with you, please.'

  'The what?'

  'Little jar of pens and pencils, ' he said. 'On newspapers, they sometimes call them Webster Pots. After Daniel Webster.' This was a lie he had made up on the spur of the moment, but it had the desired effect — she looked more confused than ever, lost in a specialists' world of which she had not the slightest knowledge. The confusion had diffused (and thus defused) her rage even more; he saw she now didn't even know if she had any
right
to be angry.

  She brought over the jar of pens and pencils and slammed them down on the board and he thought:
Goddam! I won
No — that wasn't right.
Misery
had won.

  
But that isn't right, either. It was Scheherazade. Scheherazade won.

  'What?' she said grumpily.

  'Watch.'

   He opened the package of Corrasable and took out a sheet He took a freshly sharpened pencil and drew a fine on the paper. Then he took a ballpoint pen and drew another line parallel to the first. Then he slid his thumb across the slightly waffled surface of the paper. Both lines blurred smudgily in the direction his thumb was travelling, the pencil-line slightly more than the one he had drawn with the pen.

  'See?'

  'So what?'

  'Ribbon-ink will blur, too,' he said. 'It doesn't blur a much as that pencil-line, but it's worse than the ballpoint-ink line.'

  'Were you going to sit and rub every page with your thumb?'

    'Just the shift of the pages against each other will accomplish plenty of blurring over a period of weeks or ever days,' he said, 'and when a manuscript is in work, it get shifted around a lot. You're always hunting back through to find a name or a date. My God, Annie, one of the first thing you find out in this business is that editors hate reading manuscripts typed on Corrasable Bond almost as much a they hate hand-written manuscripts.'

  'Don't call it that. I hate it when you call it that.'

  He looked at her, honestly puzzled. 'Call what
what?'

  'When you pervert the talent God gave you by calling it a business. I
hate
that.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'You ought to be,' she said stonily. 'You might as well call yourself a whore.'

  
No, Annie,
he thought, suddenly filled with fury.
I'm no whore
. Fast Cars
was about not being a
whore. That's what killing that goddamned bitch Misery was about, now that I think about it. I was
driving to the West Coast to celebrate my liberation from a state of whoredom. What you did was
to pull me out of the wreck when I crashed my car and stick me back in the crib again. Two dollar
straight up, four dollar I take you around the world. And every now and then I see a flicker in your
eyes that tells me a part of you way back inside knows it too. A jury might let you off by reason of
insanity, but not me, Annie. Not this kid.

  'A good point,' he said. 'Now, going back to the subject of the paper — '

  'I'll get you your cockadoodie paper,' she said sullenly. 'Just tell me what to get and I'll get it.'

  'As long as you understand I'm on your side — '

  'Don't make me laugh. No one has been on my side since my mother died twenty years ago.'

   'Believe what you want, then,' he said. 'If you're so insecure you can't believe I'm grateful to you for saving my life, that's your problem.'

    He was watching her shrewdly, and again saw a flicker of uncertainty, of wanting to believe, in her eyes. Good. Very good. He looked at her with all the sincerity he could muster, and again in his mind he imagined shoving a chunk of glass into her throat, once and forever letting out the blood that serviced her crazy brain.

   'At least you should be able to believe that I am on the
book's
side. You spoke of binding it. I assume that you meant binding the manuscript? The typed pages?'

'Of course that's what I meant.'

  
Yes, you bet. Because if you took the manuscript to a printer, it might raise questions. You may
be naive about the world of books and publishing, but not that naive. Paul Sheldon is missing, and
your printer might remember receiving a book-length manuscript concerning itself with Paul
Sheldon's most famous character right around the time the man himself disappeared, mightn't he?
And he'd certainly remember the instructions — instructions so queer any printer would remember
them. One printed copy of a novel-length manuscript.

  
Just one.

  
'What did she look like, officer? Well, she was a big woman. Looked sort of like a stone idol in a
H. Rider Haggard story. Just a minute, I've got her name and address here in the files
. . . J
ust let
me look up the carbons of the invoices .
. . '

   'Nothing wrong with the idea, either,' he said. 'A bound manuscript can be damned handsome. Looks like a good folio edition. But a book should last a long time, Annie, and if I write this one on Corrasable, you're going to have nothing but a bunch of blank papers in ten years or so. Unless, of course, you just put it on the shelf.'

   But she wouldn't want that, would she? Christ, no. She'd want to take it down every day, maybe every few hours. Take it down and gloat over it.

  An odd stony look had come onto her face. He did not like this mulishness, this almost ostentatious look of obduracy. It made him nervous. He could calculate her rage, but there was something in this new expression which was as opaque as it was childish.

  'You don't have to talk anymore,' she said. 'I already told you I'll get you your paper. What kind?'

  'In this business-supply store you go to — '

  'The Paper Patch.'

  'Yes, the Paper Patch. You tell them you'd like two reams — a ream is a package of five hundred sheets — '

  'I know that. I'm not stupid, Paul.'

    'I know you're not,' he said, becoming more nervous still. The pain had begun to mutter up and down his legs again, and it was speaking even more —loudly from the area of his pelvis — he had been sitting up for nearly an hour, and the dislocation down there was complaining about it.

  
Keep cool, for God's sake — don't lose everything you've gained!

  
But have I gained anything? Or is it only wishful thinking?

  
'
Ask for two reams of white long-grain mimeo. Hammermill Bond is a good brand; so is Triad Modem. Two reams of mimeo will cost less than this one package of Corrasable, and it should be enough to do the whole job, write and rewrite.'

  'I'll go right now,' she said, getting up suddenly.

  He looked at her, alarmed, understanding that she meant to leave him without his medication again, and sitting up this time, as well. Sitting already hurt; the pain would be monstrous by the time she got back, even if she hurried.

   'You don't have to do that,' he said, speaking fast. 'The Corrasable is good enough to start with — after all, I'll have to rewrite anyway — '

    'Only a silly person would try to start a good work with a bad tool.' She took the package of Corrasable Bond, then snatched the sheet with the two smudged lines and crumpled it into a ball. She tossed both into the wastebasket and turned back to him. That stony, obdurate look covered her face like a mask. Her eyes glittered like tarnished dimes.

    'I'm going to town now,' she said. 'I know you want to get started as soon as you can, since you're
on my side — '
she spoke these last words with intense, smoking sarcasm (and, Paul believed, more self-hate than she would ever know) 'and so I'm not even going to take time to put you back in your bed.'