Misery

from a magazine in New York. He was going to go up to the old hotel and sketch the ruins. His pictures were going to be with an article they were doing. It was a famous old hotel called the Overlook. It burned down ten years ago. The caretaker burned it down. He was crazy. Everybody in town said so. But never mind; he’s dead.
“I let Pomeroy stay here with me.
“We were lovers.” She looked at him with her black eyes burning in her solid yet doughy white face and Paul thought: If Andrew Pomeroy could get it up for you, Annie, he must have been as crazy as the caretaker that burned down the hotel.
“Then I found out that he didn’t really have an assignment to draw pictures of the hotel at all. He was just doing them on his own, hoping to sell them. He wasn’t even sure the magazine was doing an article on the Overlook. I found that out pretty quick! After I did, I sneaked a look at his sketchpad. I felt I had a perfect right to do that. After all, he was eating my food and sleeping in my bed. There were only eight or nine pictures in the whole book and they were terrible.” Her face wrinkled, and for a moment she looked as she had when she had imitated the sound the pig made.
“I could have made better pictures! He came in while I was looking and he got mad. He said I was snooping. I said I didn’t call looking at things in my own house snooping. I said if he was an artist, I was Madame Curie. He started to laugh. He laughed at me. So I… I… “
“You killed him,” Paul said. His voice sounded dim and ancient.
She smiled uneasily at the wall. “Well, I guess it was something like that. I don’t remember very well. Just when he was dead. I remember that. I remember giving him a bath.” He stared at her and felt a sick, soupy horror. The image came to him — Pomeroy’s naked body floating in the downstairs tub like a piece of raw dough, head reclining aslant against the porcelain, open eyes staring up at the ceiling…
“I had to,” she said, lips drawing back a bit from her teeth. “You probably don’t know what the police can do with just one piece of thread, or dirt under someone’s fingernails or even dust in a corpse’s hair! You don’t know but I worked in hospitals all my life and I do know! I do know! I know about for-EN-sics!” She was working herself into one of her patented Annie Wilkes frenzies and he knew he should try and say something which would at least temporarily defuse her, but his mouth seemed numb and useless.
“They’re out to get me, all of them! Do you think they would have listened if I tried to tell them how it was? Do you? Do you? Oh no! They’d probably say something crazy like I made a pass at him and he laughed at me and so I killed him! They’d probably say something like that!” And you know what, Annie? You know what? I think that just might be a little closer to the truth.
“The dirty birdies around here would say anything to get me in trouble or smear my name.” She paused, not quite panting but breathing hard, looking at him hard, as if inviting him to just dare and tell her different. Just you dare!
Then she seemed to get herself under some kind of control and she went on in a calmer voice.
“I washed… well… what was left of him… and his clothes. I knew what to do. It was snowing outside, the first real snow of the year, and they said we’d have a foot by the next morning. I put his clothes in a plastic bag and wrapped the body in sheets and took everything out to that dry wash on Route 9 after dark. I walked about a mile farther down from where your car ended up. I walked until I was in the woods and just dumped everything. You probably think I hid him, but I didn’t. I knew the snow would cover him up, and I thought the spring melt would carry him away if I left him in the stream-bed. And that was what happened, except I had no idea he would go so far. Why, they found his body a whole year after… after he died, and almost twenty-seven miles away. Actually, it would have been better if he hadn’t gone as far as he did, because there are always hikers and bird-watchers in the Grider Preserve. The woods around here are much less travelled.” She smiled.
“And that’s where your car is now, Paul — somewhere between Route 9 and the Grider Wildlife Preserve, somewhere in the woods. It’s far enough in so you can’t see it from the road. I’ve got a spotlight on the side of Old Bessie, and it’s plenty powerful, but the wash is empty all the way into the woods. I guess I’ll go in on foot and check when the water goes down a little, but I’m almost positive it’s safe. Some hunter will find it in two years or five years or seven years, all rusty and with chipmunks nesting in the seats, and by then you will have finished my book and will be back in New York or Los Angeles or wherever it is you decide to go, and I’ll be living my quiet life out here. Maybe we will correspond sometimes.” She smiled mistily — the smile of