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
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 fucking 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 fucking 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
