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
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.” She smiled, a pulling of the lips that was grotesquely puppet-like, and slipped to his side in her silent white nurse” shoes. Her fingers touched his hair. He flinched. He tried not to but couldn’t help it. Her dead-alive smile widened.
“Although I suspect we may have to put off the actual start of Misery’s Retum for a day… or two… perhaps even three. Yes, it may be as long as three days before you are able to sit up again. Because of the pain. Too bad. I had champagne chilling in the fridge. I’ll have to put it back in the shed.”
“Annie, really, I can start if you’ll just — “
“No, Paul.” She moved to the door and then turned, looking at him with that stony face. Only her eyes, those tarnished dimes, were fully alive under the shelf of her brow. “There is one thought I would like to leave you with. You may think you can fool me, or trick me; I know I look slow and stupid. But I am not stupid, Paul, and I am not slow.” Suddenly her face broke apart. The stony obduracy shattered and what shone through was the countenance of an insanely angry child. For a moment Paul thought the extremity of his terror might kill him. Had he thought he had gained the upper hand? Had he? Could one possibly play Scheherazade when one’s captor was insane?
She rushed across the room at him, thick legs pumping, knees flexing, elbows chopping back and forth in the stale sickroom air like pistons. Her hair bounced and joggled around her face as it came loose from the bobby-pins that held it up. Now her passage was not silent; it was like the tread of Goliath striding into the Valley of Bones. The picture of the Arc de Triomphe cracked affrightedly on the wall.
“Geeeee-yahhh!” she screamed, and brought her fist down on the bunched salt-dome that had been Paul Sheldon’s left knee.
He threw his head back and howled, veins standing out in his neck and on his forehead. Pain burst out from his knee and shrouded him, whitely radiant, in the center of a nova.
She tore the typewriter off the board and slammed it down on the mantel, lifting its weight of dead metal as he might have lifted an empty cardboard box.
“So you just sit there,” she said, lips pulled back in that grinning rictus, “and you think about who is in charge here, and all the things I can do to hurt you if you behave badly or try to trick me. You sit there and you scream if you want to, because no one can hear you. No one stops here because they all know Annie Wilkes is crazy, they all know what she did, even if they did find me innocent.” She walked back to the door and turned again, and he screamed again when she did, in anticipation of another bull-like charge, and that made her grin more widely.
“I’ll tell you something else,” she said softly. “They think I got away with it, and they are right. Think about that, Paul, while I’m in town getting your cockadoodie paper.” She left, slamming the bedroom door hard enough to shake the house. Then there was the click of the lock.
He leaned back in the chair, shaking all over, trying not to shake because it hurt, not able to help it. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Again and again he saw her flying across the room, again and again he saw her bringing her fist down on the remains of his knee with all the force of an angry drunk hammering on an oak bar, again
