Misery Chastain was dead. Paul Sheldon had just killed her — with relief, with joy. Misery had made him rich; she was the heroine of a string of bestsellers. And now he wanted to get on to some real writing. That’s when the car accident happened, and he woke up in pain in a strange bed. But it wasn’t the hospital.
Авторы: King Stephen Edwin
you’ll do it. You’ll try, anyway — but first you are going to have to deal with me… and I don’t think I like your face.
“Makes us even,” Paul croaked.
This time he tried looking out the window, where fresh snow was falling. Soon enough, however, he was looking at the typewriter again with avid repulsed fascination, not even aware of just when his gaze had shifted.
Getting into the chair didn’t hurt as much as he had feared, and that was good, because previous experience had shown him that he would hurt plenty afterward.
She set the tray of food down on the bureau, then rolled the wheelchair over to the bed. She helped him to sit up — there was a dull, thudding flare of pain in his pelvic area but it subsided — and then she leaned over, the side of her neck pressing against his shoulder like the neck of a horse. For an instant he could feel the thump of her pulse, and his face twisted in revulsion. Then her right arm was firmly around his back, her left under his buttocks.
“Try not to move from the knees down while I do this,” she said, and then simply slid him into the chair. She did it with the ease of a woman sliding a book into an empty slot in her bookcase. Yes, she was strong. Even in good shape the outcome of a fight between him and Annie would have been in doubt. As he was now it would be like Wally Cox taking on Boom Boom Mancini.
She put the board in front of him, “See how well it fits?” she said, and went to the bureau to get the food.
“Annie?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if you could turn that typewriter around. So it faces the wall.” She frowned. “Why in the world would you want me to do that?” Because I don’t want it grinning at me all night.
“Old superstition of mine,” he said. “I always turn my typewriter to the wall before I start writing.” He paused and added: “Every night while I am writing, as a matter of fact.”
“It’s like step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” she said. “I never step on a crack if I can help it.” She turned it around so it grinned at nothing but blank wall. “Better?”
“Much.”
“You are such a silly,” she said, and came over and began to feed him.
He dreamed of Annie Wilkes in the court of some fabulous Arabian caliph, conjuring imps and genies from bottles and then flying around the court on a magic carpet. When the carpet banked past him (her hair streamed out behind her; her eyes were as bright and flinty as the eyes of a sea-captain navigating among icebergs), he saw it was woven all in green and white; it made a Colorado license plate.
Once upon a time, Annie was calling. Once upon a time it came to pass. This happened in the days when my grandfather’s grandfather was a boy. This is the story of how a poor boy. I heard this from a man who. Once upon a time. Once upon a time.
When he woke up Annie was shaking him and bright morning sun was slanting in the window — the snow had ended.
“Wake up, sleepyhead!” Annie was almost trilling. “I’ve got yogurt and a nice boiled egg for you, and then it will be time for you to begin.” He looked at her eager face and felt a strange new emotion — hope. He had dreamed that Annie Wilkes was Scheherazade, her solid body clad in diaphanous robes, her big feet stuffed into pink sequined slippers with curly toes as she rode on her magic carpet and chanted the incantatory phrases which open the doors of the best stories. But of course it wasn’t Annie that was Scheherazade. He was. And if what he wrote was good enough, if she could not bear to kill him until she discovered how it all came out no matter how much or how loudly her animal instincts yelled for her to do it, that she must do it…
Might he not have a chance?
He looked past her and saw she had turned the typewriter around before waking him; it grinned resplendently at him with its missing tooth, telling him it was all right to hope and noble to strive, but in the end it was doom alone which would count.
She rolled him over to the window so the sun fell on him for the first time in weeks, and it seemed to him he could feel his pasty-white skin, dotted here and there with minor bedsores, murmur its pleasure and thanks. The windowpanes were edged on the inside with a tracery of frost, and when he held out his hand he could feel a bubble of cold like a dome around the window. The feel of it was both refreshing and somehow nostalgic, like a note from an old
