Misery

Chapter 7

31

He had a bad - no, not just bad; terrible, horrible - moment when it seemed the wheelchair was not going to fit. It was no more than two inches too wide, but that was two inches too much. She brought it in collapsed, that's why you thought it was a shopping cart at first, his mind informed him drearily.

In the end he was able to squeeze through - barely - by positioning himself squarely in the doorway and then leaning forward enough to grab the jambs of the door in his hands. The axle-caps of the wheels squalled against the wood, but he was able to get through.

After he did, he grayed out again.

32

He voice called him out of his daze. He opened his eyes and saw she was pointing a shotgun at him. Her eyes glittered furiously. Spit shone on her teeth.

"If you want your freedom so badly, Paul," Annie said, "I'll be happy to grant it to you." She pulled back both hammers.

33

He jerked, expecting the shotgun blast. But she wasn't there, of course; his mind had already recognized the dream.

Not a dream - a warning. She could come back anytime. Anytime at all.

The quality of the light fanning through the half-open bathroom door had changed, grown brighter. It looked like moonlight. He wished the clock would chime and tell him just how close to right he was, but the clock was obstinately silent.

She stayed away fifty hours before.

So she did. And she might stay away eighty this time. Or you might hear that Cherokee pulling in five seconds from now. In case you didn't know it, friend, the Weather Bureau can post tornado warnings, but when it comes to telling exactly when and where they'll touch down, they don't know f**k-all.

"True enough," he said, and rolled the wheelchair down to the bathroom. Looking in, he saw an austere room floored with hexagonal white tiles. A bathtub with rusty fans spreading below the faucets stood on clawed feet. Beside it was a linen closet. Across from the tub was a sink. Over the sink was a medicine cabinet.

The floor-bucket was in the tub - he could see its plastic top.

The hall was wide enough for him to swing the chair around and face the door, but now his arms were trembling with exhaustion. He had been a puny kid and so he had tried to take reasonably good care of himself as an adult, but his muscles were now the muscles of an invalid and the puny kid was back, as if all that time spent doing laps and jogging and working out on the Nautilus machine had only been a dream.

At least this doorway was wider - not much, but enough to make his passage less hair-raising. Paul bumped over the lintel, and then the chair's hard rubber wheels rolled smoothly over the tiles. He smelled something sour that he automatically associated with hospitals - Lysol, maybe. There was no toilet in here, but he had already suspected that - the only flushing sounds came from upstairs, and now that he thought of it, one of those upstairs flushes always followed his use of the bedpan. Here there was only the tub, the basin, and the linen closet with its door standing open.

He gazed briefly at the neat piles of blue towels and washcloths - he was familiar with both from the sponge-baths she had given him - and then turned his attention to the medicine cabinet over the washstand.

It was out of reach.

No matter how much he strained, it was a good nine inches above the tips of his fingers. He could see this but reached anyway, unable to believe Fate or God or Whoever could be so cruel. He looked like an outfielder reaching desperately for a home-run ball he had absolutely no chance of catching.

Paul made a wounded, baffled noise, lowered his hand, and then leaned back, panting. The gray cloud lowered. He willed it away and looked around for something he could use to open the medicine cabinet's door and saw an O-Cedar mop leaning stiffly in the corner on a long blue pole.

You going to use that? Really? Well, I guess you could. Pry open the medicine cabinet door and then just knock a bunch of stuff out into the basin. But the bottles will break and even if there are no bottles, fat chance, everyone has at least a bottle of Listerine or Scope or something in their medicine cabinet, you have no way of putting back what you knock down. So when she comes back and sees the mess, what then?

"I'll tell her it was Misery," he croaked. "I'll tell her she dropped by looking for a tonic to bring her back from the dead." Then he burst into tears... but even through the tears his eyes were conning the room, looking for something, anything, inspiration, a break, just a f**king br - He was looking into the linen closet again, and his rapid breath suddenly stopped. His eyes widened.

His first cursory glance had taken in the shelves with their stacks of folded sheets and pillow-cases and washcloths and towels. Now he looked at the floor and on the floor were a number of square cardboard cartons. Some were labelled UPJOHN. Some were labelled LILY. Some were labelled CAM PHARMACEUTICALS.

He turned the wheelchair roughly, hurting himself, not caring.

Please God don't let it be her cache of extra shampoo or her tampons or pictures of her dear old sainted mother or - He fumbled for one of the boxes, dragged it out, and opened the flaps. No shampoo, no Avon samples. Far from it. There was a wild jumble of drugs in the carton, most of them in small boxes marked SAMPLES. At the bottom a few pills and capsules, different colors, rolled around loose. Some, like Motrim and Lopressor, the hypertension drug his father had taken during the last three years of his life, he knew. Others he had never heard of.

"Novril," he muttered, raking wildly through the box while sweat ran down his face and his legs pounded and throbbed. "Novril, where's the f**king Novril?" No Novril. He pushed the flaps of the carton closed and shoved it back into the linen closet, making only a token effort to replace it in the same place it had been. Should be all right, the place looked like a goddam junk-heap - Leaning far to his left, he was able to snag a second carton. He opened it and was hardly able to credit what he was seeing.

Darvon. Darvocet. Darvon Compound. Morphose and Morphose Complex. Librium. Valium. And Novril. Dozens and dozens and dozens of sample boxes. Lovely boxes. Dear boxes. O lovely dear sainted boxes. He clawed one open and saw - the capsules she gave him every six hours, enclosed in their little blisters.

NOT TO BE DISPENSED WITHOUT PHYSICIAN'S PRESCRIPTION, the box said.

"Oh dear Jesus, the doctor is in!" Paul sobbed. He tore the cellophane apart with his teeth and chewed up three of the capsules, barely aware of the bruisingly bitter taste. He halted, stared at the five that were left encased in their mutilated cellophane sheet, and gobbled a fourth.

He looked around quickly, chin down on his breastbone, eyes crafty and frightened. Although he knew it was too soon to be feeling any relief, he did feel it - having the pills, it seemed, was even more important than taking the pills. It was as if he had been given control of the moon and the tides - or had just reached up and taken it. It was a huge thought, awesome... and yet also frightening, with undertones of guilt and blasphemy.

If she comes back now - "All right - okay. I get the message." He looked into the carton, trying to calculate how many of the sample boxes he might be able to take without her realizing a little mouse named Paul Sheldon had been nibbling away at the supply.

He giggled at this, a shrill, relieved sound, and he realized the medication wasn't just working on his legs. He had gotten his fix, if you wanted to be perfectly vulgar about it.

Get moving, idiot. You have no time to enjoy being stoned.

He took five of the boxes - a total of thirty capsules. He had to restrain himself from taking more. He stirred the remaining boxes and bottles around, hoping the result would look no more or less helter-skelter than it had when he first peered into the box. He refolded the flaps and slipped the box back into the linen closet.

A car was coming.

He straightened up, eyes wide. His hands dropped to the arms of the wheelchair and gripped them with panicky tightness. If it was Annie, he was screwed and that was the end of it. He would never be able to maneuver this balky, oversized thing back to the bedroom in time. Maybe he could whack her once with the O-Cedar mop or something before she wrung his neck like a chicken.

He sat in the wheelchair with the sample boxes of Novril in his lap and his broken legs stuck stiffly out in front of him and waited for the car to pass or turn in.

The sound swelled endlessly... then began to diminish.

Okay. Do you need a more graphic warning, Paul-baby?

As a matter of fact, he did not. He took a final glance at the cartons. They looked to him about as they had when he had first seen them - although he had been looking at them through a haze of pain and could not be completely sure but he knew that the piles of boxes might not be as random as they had looked, oh, not at all. She had the heightened awareness of the deep neurotic, and might have had the position of each box carefully memorized. She might take one casual glance in here and immediately realize in some arcane way what had happened. This knowledge did not bring fear but a sense of resignation - he had needed the medication, and he had somehow managed to escape his room and get it. If there were consequences, punishment, he could face them with at least the understanding that he could have done nothing but what he had done. And of all she had done to him, this resignation was surely a symptom of the worst - she had turned him into a pain-racked animal with no moral options at all.

He slowly backed the wheelchair across the bathroom, glancing behind himself occasionally to make sure he wasn't wandering off-course. Before, such a movement would have made him scream with pain, but now the pain was disappearing under a beautiful glassiness.

He rolled into the hall and then stopped as a terrible thought struck him: if the bathroom floor had been slightly damp, or even a bit dirty - He stared at it, and for a moment the idea that he must have left tracks on those clean white tiles was so persuasive that he actually saw them. He shook his head and looked again. No tracks. But the door was open farther than it had been. He rolled forward, swung the wheelchair slightly to the right so he could lean over and grab the knob, and pulled the door half-closed. He eyed it, then pulled it a bit closer to the jamb. There. That looked right.

He was reaching for the wheels, meaning to pivot the chair so he could roll back to his room, when he realized he was pointed more or less toward the living room, and the living room was where most people kept their telephone and - Light bursting in his mind like a flare over a foggy meadow.

"Hello, Sidewinder Police Station, Officer Humbuggy speaking."

"Listen to me, Officer Humbuggy. Listen very carefully and don't interrupt, because I don't know how much time I have. My name is Paul Sheldon. I'm calling you from Annie Wilkes's house. I've been her prisoner here for at least two weeks, maybe as long as a month. I - "

"Annie Wilkes!"

"Get out here tight away. Send an ambulance. And for Christ's sake get here before she gets back.

"Before she gets back," Paul moaned. "Oh yeah " Far out." What makes you think she even has a phone? Who have you ever heard her call? Who would she call? Her good friends the Roydmans?

Just because she doesn't have anyone to chatter with all day doesn't mean she is incapable of understanding that accidents can happen; she could fall downstairs and break an arm or a leg, the barn might catch on fire - How many times have you heard this supposed telephone ring?

So now there's a requirement? Your phone has to ring at least once a day or Mountain Bell comes and takes it out? Besides, I haven't even been conscious most of the time.

You're pushing your luck. You're pushing your luck and you know it.

Yes. He knew it, but the thought of that telephone, the imagined sensation of the cool black plastic under his fingers, the click of the rotary dial or the single booping sound as he touch-toned 0 - these were seductions too great to resist.

He worked the wheelchair around until it was directly facing the parlor, and then he rolled down to it.

The place smelled musty, unaired, obscurely tired. Although the curtains guarding the bow windows were only half-drawn, affording a lovely view of the mountains, the room seemed too dark - because its colors were too dark, he thought. Dark red predominated, as if someone had spilled a great deal of venous blood in here.

Over the mantel was a tinted photograph portrait of a forbidding woman with tiny eyes buried in a fleshy face. The rosebud mouth was pursed. The photograph, enclosed in a rococo frame of gold gilt, was the size of the President's photograph in the lobby of a big-city post office. Paul did not need a notarised statement telegram to tell him that this was Annie's sainted mother.

He rolled farther into the room. The left side of the wheelchair struck a small occasional table covered with ceramic gewgaws. They chattered together and one of them - a ceramic penguin sitting on a ceramic ice-block - fell off the side.

Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed it. The gesture was almost casual... and then reaction set in. He held the penguin tightly in his curled fist, trying to will the shakes away. You caught it, no sweat, besides, there's a rug on the floor, probably wouldn't have broken anyway - But if it HAD! his mind screamed back. If it HAD! Please, you have to go back to your room before you leave something... a track...

No. Not yet. Not yet, no matter how frightened he was. Because this had cost him too much. If there was a payoff, he was going to have it.

He looked around the room, which was stuffed with heavy graceless furniture. It should have been dominated by the bow windows and the gorgeous view of the Rockies beyond them but was instead dominated by the picture of that fleshy woman imprisoned in the ghastly glaring frame with its twists and curlicues and frozen gilded swags.

On a table at the far end of the couch, where she would sit to watch TV, was a plain dialer telephone.

Gently, hardly daring to breathe, he put the ceramic penguin (NOW MY TALE IS TOLD! the legend on the block of ice read) back on the knickknack table and rolled across the room toward the phone.

There was an occasional table in front of the sofa; he gave it a wide berth. On it was a spray of dried flowers in an ugly green vase, and the whole thing looked topheavy, ready to tip over if he so much as brushed it.

No cars coming outside - only the sound of the wind.

He grasped the handset of the phone in one hand and slowly picked it up.

A queer predestinate sense of failure filled his mind even before he got the handset to his ear and heard the nothing. He replaced the receiver slowly, a line from an old Roger Miller song occurring to him and seeming to make a certain senseless sense: No phone, no pool, no pets... I ain't got no cigarettes...

He traced the phone cord with his eye, saw the small square module on the baseboard, saw that the jack was plugged into it. Everything looked in perfect working order.

Like the barn, with its heat-tapes.

Keeping up appearances is very, very important.

He closed his eyes and saw Annie removing the jack and squeezing Elmer's Glue into the hole in the module. Saw her replacing the jack in the dead-white glue, where it would harden and freeze forever. The phone company would have no idea that anything was wrong unless someone attempted to call her and reported the line out of service, but no one called Annie, did they? She would receive regular monthly bills on her dead line and she would pay them promptly, but the phone was only stage dressing, part of her never-ending battle to keep up appearances, like the neat barn with its fresh red paint and cream trim and heat-tapes to melt the winter ice. Had she castrated the phone in case of just such an expedition as this? Had she foreseen the possibility that he might get out of the room? He doubted it. The phone - the working phone - would have gotten on her nerves long before he came. She would have lain awake at night, looking up at the ceiling of her bedroom, listening to the high-country whine of the wind, imagining the people who must be thinking of her with either dislike or outright malevolence - all the world's Roydmans - people who might, any of them, at any time, take a notion to call her on the telephone and scream: You did it, Annie! They took you all the way to Denver, and we know you did it! They don't take you all the way to Denver if you're innocent! She would have asked for and gotten an unlisted number, of course - anyone tried for and acquitted of some major crime (and if it had been Denver, it had been major) would have done that - but even an unlisted number would not comfort a deep neurotic like Annie Wilkes for long. They were all in league against her, they could get the number if they wanted, probably the lawyers who had been against her would be glad to pass it out to anyone who asked for it, and people would ask, oh yes - for she would see the world as a dark place full of moving human masses like seas, a malevolent universe surrounding a single small stage upon which a single savagely bright pinspot illuminated... only her. So best to eradicate the phone, silence it, as she would silence him if she knew he had gotten even this far.

Panic burst shrilly up in his mind, telling him that he had to get out of here and back into his room, hide the pills somewhere, return to his place by the window so that when she returned she would see no difference, no difference at all, and this time he agreed with the voice. He agreed wholeheartedly. He backed carefully away from the phone, and when he gained the room's one reasonably clear area, he began the laborious job of turning the wheelchair around, careful not to bump the occasional table as he did so.

He had nearly finished the turn when he heard an approaching car and knew, simply knew it was her, returning from town.