Misery

20

Before she left she brought him another Pepsi, a box of Ritz crackers, sardines, cheese... and the bedpan.

"If you bring me my manuscript and one of those yellow legal pads, I'll work in longhand," he said. "It will pass the time." She considered, then shook her head regretfully. "I wish you could, Paul. But that would mean leaving at least one light on, and I can't risk it." He thought of being left alone down here in the cellar and felt panic flush his skin again, but just for a moment. Then it went cold. He felt tiny hard goosebumps rising on his skin. He thought of the rats hiding in their holes and runs in the rock walls. Thought of them coming out when the cellar went dark. Thought of them smelling his helplessness, perhaps.

"Don't leave me in the dark, Annie. Please don't do that."

"I have to. If someone noticed a light in my cellar, they might stop to investigate, driveway chain or no driveway chain, note or no note. If I gave you a flashlight, you might try to signal with it. If I gave you a candle, you might try to burn the house do" with it. You see how well I know you?" He hardly dared mention the times he had gotten out of his room, because it always made her furious; now his fear of being left alone down here in the dark drove him to it. "If I had wanted to burn the house down, Annie, I could have done it long before this."

"Things were different then," she said shortly. "I'm sorry you don't like being left in the dark. I'm sorry you have to be. But it's your own fault, so quit being a brat. I've got to go. If you feel like you need that injection, stick it in your leg." She looked at him.

"Or stick it up your ass." She started for the stairs.

"Cover the windows, then!" he yelled after her. "Use some pieces of sheet... or... or... paint them black... or... or... Christ, Annie, the rats! The rats!" She was on the third stair. She paused, looking at him from those dusty-dime eyes. "I haven't time to do any of those things," she said, "and the rats won't bother you, anyway. They may even recognize you for one of their own, Paul. They may adopt you." Annie laughed. She climbed the stairs, laughing harder and harder. There was a click as the lights went out and. Annie went on laughing and he told himself he wouldn't scream, wouldn't beg; that he was past all that. But the damp wildness of the shadows and the boom of her laughter were too much and he shrieked for her not to do this to him, not to leave him, but she only went on laughing and there was a click as the door was shut and her laughter was muted but her laughter was still there, her laughter was on the other side of the door, where there was light, and then the lock clicked, and then another door closed and her laughter was even more muted (but still there), and another lock clicked and a bolt slammed, and her laughter was going away, her laughter was outside, and even after she had started the cruiser up, backed out, put the chain across the driveway, and driven away, he thought he could still hear her. He thought he could still hear her laughing and laughing and laughing.

21

The furnace was a dim bulk in the middle of the room. It looked like an octopus. He thought he would have been able to hear the chiming of the parlor clock if the night had been still, but a strong summer wind had blown up, as it so often did these nights, and there was only time, spreading out forever. He could hear crickets singing just outside the house when the wind dropped... and then, sometime later, he heard the stealthy noises he had been afraid of: the low, momentary scuff-and-scurry of the rats.

Only it wasn't rats he was afraid of, was it? It was the trooper. His so-fucking-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running on full choke. That there was no sense at all in what he was thinking made not a whit of difference in the dark. In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin. He kept seeing the trooper coming back to life - some sort of life - out in the barn, sitting up, the loose hay with which Annie had covered him falling to either side of him and into his lap, his face plowed into bloody senselessness by the mower's blade. Saw him crawling out of the barn and down the driveway to the bulkhead, the torn streamers of his uniform swinging and fluttering. Saw him melting magically through the bulkhead and reintegrating his corpse's body down here. Saw him crawling across the packed dirt floor, and the little noises Paul heard weren't rats but the sounds of his approach, and there was but a single thought in the cooling clay of the trooper's dead brain: You killed me. You opened your mouth and killed me. You threw an ashtray and killed me. You cockadoodie son of a bitch, you murdered my life.

Once Paul felt the trooper's dead fingers slip, tickling, down his cheek, and he screamed loudly, jerking his legs and making them bellow. He brushed frantically at his face and knocked away not fingers but a large spider.

The movement ended the uneasy truce with the pain in his legs and the drug-need in his nerves, but it also diffused his terror a little. His night vision was coming on strong now, he could see better, and that was a help. Not that there was much to look at - the furnace, the remains of a coal-pile, a table with a bunch of shadowy cans and implements lying on it and to his right, up a way from where be was propped... what was that shape? The one next to the shelves? He knew that shape. Something about it that made it a bad shape. It stood on three legs. Its top was rounded. It looked like one of Wells's death-machines in The War Of the Worlds, only in miniature. Paul puzzled over this, dozed a little, woke, looked again, and thought: Of course, I should have known from the first. It is a death-machine. And if anyone on Earth's a Martian, it's Annie-fuckin-Wilkes. It's her barbecue pot. It's the crematorium where she made me burn Fast Cars.

He shifted a little because his ass was going to sleep, and moaned. Pain in his legs - particularly in the bunched remains of his left knee - and pain in his pelvis as well. That! probably meant he was in for a really bad night, because his" pelvis had gotten pretty quiet over the last two months.

He felt for the hypo, picked it up, then put it back. A very light dose, she had said. Best to save it for later, then. He heard a light shuffle-scuffle and looked quickly in the corner, expecting to see the trooper crawling toward him, one brown eye peering from the hash of his face. If not for you I could be home watching TV now with my hand on my wife's leg.

No cop. A dim shape which was maybe just imagination but was more likely a rat. Paul willed himself to relax.

Oh what a long night this was going to be.

22

He dozed a little and woke up slumped far over to the left with his head hung down like a drunk in an alley. He straightened up and his legs cursed him roundly. He used the bedpan and it hurt to piss and he realized with some dismay that a urinary infection was probably setting in. He was so vulnerable now. So f**king vulnerable to everything. He put the urinal aside and picked up the hypo again.

A light dose of scopolamine, she said - well, maybe so. Or maybe she loaded it with a hot shot of something. The sort of stuff she used on folks like Ernie Gonyar and "Queenie" Beaulifant.

Then he smiled a little. Would that really be so bad? The answer was a resounding HELL, NO! It would be good. The pilings would disappear forever. No more low tide. Forever.

With that thought in mind he found the pulse in his left thigh, and though he had never injected himself in his life, he did it efficiently now, even eagerly.

23

He did not die and he did not sleep. The pain went away and he drifted, feeling almost untethered from his body, a balloon of thought drifting at the end of a long string.

You were also Scheherazade to yourself, he thought, and looked at the barbecue pot. He thought of Martian deathrays, burning London in fire.

He thought suddenly of a song, a disco tune, something by a group called the Trammps: Burn, baby, burn, burn the mother down...

Something flickered.

Some idea.

Burn the mother down...

Paul Sheldon slept.

24

When he woke up the cellar was filled with the ashy light of dawn. A very large rat sat on the tray Annie had left him, nibbling cheese with its tail neatly curled around its body.

Paul screamed, jerked, then screamed again as pain flowed up his legs. The rat fled.

She had left him some capsules. He knew that the Novril wouldn't take care of the pain, but it was better than nothing.

Besides, pain or no pain, it's time for the old morning fix, right, Paul?

He washed two of the caps down with Pepsi and then leaned back, feeling the dull throb in his kidneys. He was growing something down there, all right. Great.

Martians, he thought. Martian death-machines He looked toward the barbecue pot, expecting it to look like a barbecue pot in the morning light: a barbecue pot and nothing else. He was surprised to find it still looked to him like one of Wells's striding machines of destruction.

You had an idea - what was it?

The song came back, the one by the Trammps: Burn, baby, burn, burn the mother down!

Yeah? And just what mother is that? She wouldn't even leave you a candle. You couldn't light a fart.

Up came a message from the boys in the sweatshop.

You don't need to burn anything now. Or here.

What the f**k are we talking about, guys? Could you let me in on - Then it came, it came at once, the way all the really ideas came, rounded and smooth and utterly persuasive in its baleful perfection.

Burn the mother down...

He looked at the barbecue pot, expecting the pain of what he had done - what she had made him do - to return. It did, but it was dull and faint; the pain in his kidneys was worse. What had she said yesterday? All I ever did was... talk you out of a bad book you'd written and into the best one you ever wrote...

Maybe there was a queer sort of truth in that. Maybe he had wildly overestimated just how good Fast Cars had been.

That's just your mind trying to heal itself, part of him whispered. If you ever get out of this, you'll work yourself around in much the same fashion to thinking you never needed your left foot anyway - hell, five less nails to clip. And they do wonders with prosthetics these days. No, Paul, one was a damned good book and the other was a damned good foot. Let's not kid ourselves.

Yet a deeper part of him suspected that to think that way was kidding himself.

Not kidding yourself, Paul. Tell the goddam truth. Lying to yourself. A guy who makes up stories, a guy like that is lying to everyone, so that guy can't ever lie to himself. It's funny, but it's also the truth. Once you start that shit, you might as well just cover up your typewriter and start studying for a broker's license or something, because you're down the toilet.

So what was the truth? The truth, should you insist, was that the increasing dismissal of his work in the critical press as that of a "popular writer" (which was, as he understood it, one step - a small one - above that of a "hack") had hurt him quite badly. It didn't jibe with his self-image as a Serious Writer who was only churning out these shitty romances in order to subsidize his (flourish of trumpets, please!) REAL WORK! Had he hated Misery? Had he really? If so, why had it been so easy to slip back into her world? No, more than easy; blissful, like slipping into a warm bath with a good book by one hand and a cold beer by the other. Perhaps all he had hated was the fact that her face on the dust jackets had overshadowed his in his author photographs, not allowing the critics to see that they were dealing with a young Mailer or Cheever here - that they were dealing with a heavyweight here. As a result, hadn't his "serious fiction" become steadily more self-conscious, a sort of scream? Look at me! Look how good this is! Hey, guys! This stuff has got a sliding perspective! This stuff has got stream-of-consciousness interludes! This is my REAL WORK, you ass**les! Don't you DARE turn away from me! Don't you DARE, you cockadoodie brats! Don't you DARE turn away from my REAL WORK! Don't you DARE, or I'll - What? What would he do? Cut off their feet? Saw off their thumbs?

Paul was seized by a sudden fit of shivering. He had to urinate. He grabbed the bedpan and finally managed, although it hurt worse than before. He moaned while he was pissing, and continued moaning for a long while after it was done.

Finally, mercifully, the Novril began to kick in - a little and he drowsed.

He looked at the barbecue pot with heavy-lidded eyes.

How would you feel if she made you burn Misery's Return? the interior voice whispered, and he jumped a little. Drifting away, he realized that it would hurt, yes, it would hurt terribly, it would make the pain he had felt when Fast Cars went up in smoke look like the pain of this kidney infection compared with what he had felt when she brought the axe down, cutting off his foot, exercising editorial authority over his body.

He also realized that wasn't the real question.

The real question was how it would make Annie feel.

There was a table near the barbecue pot. There were maybe half a dozen jars and cans on it.

One was a can of charcoal lighter fluid.

What if Annie was the one screaming in pain? Are you curious about how that might sound? Are you curious at all? The proverb says revenge is a dish best eaten cold, but Ronson Fast-Lite had yet to be invented when they made that one up.

Paul thought: Burn the mother down, and fell asleep. There was a little smile on his pale and fading face.

25

When Annie arrived back at quarter of three that afternoon, her normally frizzy hair flattened around her head in the shape of the helmet she had been wearing, she was in a silent mood that seemed to indicate tiredness and reflection rather than depression. When Paul asked her if everything had gone all right, she nodded.

"Yes, I think so. I had some trouble starting the bike, or I would have been back an hour ago. The plugs were dirty. How are your legs, Paul? Do you want another shot before I take you upstairs?" After almost twenty hours in the dampness, his legs felt as if someone had studded them with rusty nails. He wanted a shot very badly, but not down here. That would not do at all.

"I think I'm all right." She turned her back to him and squatted. "All right, grab on. But remember what I said about choke-holds and things like that. I'm very tired, and I don't think I'd react very well to funny jokes."

"I seem to be all out of jokes."

"Good." She lifted him with a moist grunt, and Paul had to bite back a scream of agony. She walked across the floor toward the stairs, her head turned slightly, and he realized she was - or might be - looking at the can-littered table. Her glance was short, seemingly casual, but to Paul it seemed to go on for a very long time, and he was sure she would realize the can of lighter fluid was no longer there. It was stuffed down the back of his underpants instead. Long months after his earlier depredations, he had finally summoned up the courage to steal something else... and if her hands slipped up his legs as she climbed the stairs, she was going to grab, more than a handful of his skinny ass.

Then she glanced away from the table with no change of expression, and his relief was so great that the thudding, shifting ascent up the stairs to the pantry was almost bearable. She kept up a very good poker face when she wanted to, but he thought - hoped - that he had fooled her.

That this time he had really fooled her.