Misery(10)

Still trying to imagine why the ex-nurse who had taken him prisoner might have once been put on the stand in Denver, Paul drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 3

12

He was in a hospital ward. Great relief swept through him - so great he felt like crying. Something had happened when he was asleep, someone had come, or perhaps Annie had had a change of heart or mind. It didn't matter. He had gone to sleep in the monster-woman's house and had awakened in the hospital.

But surely they would not have put him in a long ward like this? It was as big as an airplane hangar! Identical rows of men (with identical bottles of nutrient hung from identical IV trays beside their beds) filled the place. He sat up and saw that the men themselves were also identical - they were all him. Then, distantly, he heard the clock chime, and understood that it was chiming from beyond the wall of sleep. This was a dream. Sadness replaced the relief.

The door at the far end of the huge ward opened and in came Annie Wilkes - only she was dressed in a long aproned dress and there was a mobcap on her head; she was dressed as Misery Chastain in Misery's Love. Over one arm she held a wicker basket. There was a towel over the contents. She folded the towel back as he watched. She reached in and took out a handful of something and flung it into the face of the first sleeping Paul Sheldon. It was sand, he saw this was Annie Wilkes pretending to be Misery Chastain pretending to be the sandman. Sandwoman.

Then he saw that the first Paul Sheldon's face had turned a ghastly white as soon as the sand struck it and fear jerked him out of the dream and into the bedroom, where Annie Wilkes was standing over him. She was holding the fat paperback of Misery's Child in one hand. Her bookmark suggested she was about three-quarters of the way through.

"You were moaning," she said.

"I had a bad dream."

"What was it about?" The first thing which was not the truth that popped into his head was what he replied: "Africa."

13

She came in late the following morning, her face the color of ashes. He had been dozing, but he came awake at once; jerking up on his elbows.

"Miss Wilkes? Annie? Are you all r - "

"No." Christ, she's had a heart attack, he thought, and there was a moment's alarm which was immediately replaced by joy. Let her have one! A big one! A f**king chest-buster! He would be more than happy to crawl to the telephone, no matter how much it might hurt. He would crawl to the telephone over broken glass, if that was what it took.

And it was a heart attack... but not the right kind.

She came toward him, not quite staggering but rolling, the way a sailor will when he's just gotten off his ship at the enc of a long voyage.

"What - " He tried to shrink away from her, but there was no place to go. There was only the headboard, and behind that, the wall.

"No!" She reached the side of the bed, bumped it, wavered and for a moment seemed on the verge of falling on top of him. Then she just stood there, looking down at him out of her paper-white face, the cords on her neck standing out, one vein pulsing in the center of her forehead. Her hands snapped open, hooked shut into solid rocklike fists, then snapped open again.

"You... you... you dirty bird!"

"What - I don't - " But suddenly he did, and his entire midsection first seemed to turn hollow and then to entirely disappear. He remembered where her bookmark had been last night, three-quarters of the way through. She had finished it. She knew all there was to know. She knew that Misery hadn't been the barren one, after all; it had been Ian. Had she sat there in her as-yet-unseen-by-him parlor with her mouth open and her eyes wide as Misery finally realized the truth and made her decision and sneaked off to Geoffrey? Had her eyes filled with tears when she realized that Misery and Geoffrey, far from having a clandestine affair behind the back of the man they both loved, were giving him the greatest gift they could - a child he would believe to be his own? And had her heart risen up when Misery told Ian she was pregnant and Ian had crushed her to him, tears flowing from his eyes, muttering "My dear, oh, my dear!" over and over again? He was sure, in those few seconds, that all of those things had happened. But instead of weeping with exalted grief as she should have done when Misery expired giving birth to the boy whom Ian and Geoffrey would presumably raise together, she was mad as hell.

"She can't be dead!" Annie Wilkes shrieked at him. Her hands snapped open and hooked closed in a faster and faster rhythm. "Misery Chastain CANNOT BE DEAD!"

"Annie - Annie, please - " There was a glass water-pitcher on the table. She seized it up and brandished it at him. Cold water splashed his face. An ice-cube landed beside his left ear and slid down the pillow into the hollow of his shoulder. In his mind ("So vivid!") he saw her bringing the pitcher down into his face, he saw himself dying of a fractured skull and a massive cerebral hemorrhage in a freezing flood of ice-water while goose-pimples formed on his arms.

She wanted to do it; there was no question of that.

At the very last moment she pivoted away from him at d flung the water-pitcher at the door instead, where it shattered as the soup-bowl had the other day.

She looked back at him and brushed her hair away from her face - two hard little spots of red had now bloomed the white - with the backs of her hands.

"Dirty bird!" she panted. "Oh you dirty birdie, how could you!" He spoke rapidly, urgently, eyes flashing, riveted on her face - he was positive in that moment that his life might depend on what he was able to say in the next twenty seconds.