KING, Stephen - Misery

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Misery.txt

S t e p h e n

KING

MISERY

Hodder & Stoughton

First published in Great Britain in 1987

by Hodder and Stoughton Limited

First New English Library edition 1988

Eighteenth impression 1992

British Library C.I.P.

King, Stephen 1947-

Misery.

I. Title

813'.54[F] PS3561:1483

ISBN 0 450 41739 5

The characters and situations n this book are entirely imaginary and bear no

relation to any real person or actual happenings.

The right of Stephen King to be identified as the author of this work has been

asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or

otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording or any

information storage or retrieval system, without either the prior permission in

writing from the publisher or a licence, permitting restricted copying. In the

United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90

Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.

Printed and bound in Great Britain for Hodder and Stoughton Paperbacks, a division

of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., Mill Road, Dunton Green, Sevenoaks, Kent TNI3 2YA.

(Editorial Office: 47 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP) by Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading,

Berks. Photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting Limited, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.

This is for Stephanie and Jim Leonard,

who know why.

Boy, do they.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Jonathan Cape Ltd.

ATV Music. Lyrics reproduced by permission of the publisher.

'Girls Just Want to Have Fun'. Words and music by Robert Hazard. (c) Heroic Music.

British Publishers: Warner Bros. Music Ltd. Reproduced by kind permission.

renewed 1962 Leo Feist Inc. Rights assigned to SBK Catalogue Partnership. All rights

International copyright secured. Used by permission.

Used by permission.

Six Strings Music and Golden Fleece Music; assigned to Six Strings Music, 1978. All

rights reserved.

goddess

Africa

I'd like to gratefully acknowledge the help of three medical I people who helped me

with the factual material in this book.

They are:

Russ Dorr, PA

Florence Dorr, RN

Janet Ordway, MD and Doctor of Psychiatry

As always, they helped with the things you don't notice. If you see a glaring error,

it's mine.

There is, of course, no such drug as Novril, but there are several codeine-based

drugs similar to it, and, unfortunately, hospital pharmacies and medical practice

dispensaries are sometimes lax in keeping such drugs under tight lock and close

inventory.

The places and characters in this book are fictional.

S.K.

Part I

Annie

'When you look into the abyss, the abyss also

looks into you.'

- Friedrich Nietzsche

umber whunnnn

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yerrrnnn umber whunnnn

fayunnnn

These sounds: even in the haze.

But sometimes the sounds - like the pain - faded, and then there was only the haze.

He remembered darkness solid darkness had come before the haze. Did that mean he was

making progress? Let there be light (even of the hazy variety), and the light was

good, and so on and so on? Had those sounds existed in the darkness? He didn't know

the answers to any of these questions. Did it make sense to ask them? He didn't know

the answer to that one, either

The pain was somewhere below the sounds. The pain was east of the sun and south

of his ears. That was all he did know.

For some length of time that seemed very long (and so was, since the pain and

the stormy haze were the only two things which existed) those sounds were the only

outer reality. He had no idea who he was or where he was and cared to know neither.

He wished he was dead, but through the pain-soaked haze that filled his mind like a

summer storm-cloud, he did not know he wished it.

As time passed, he became aware that there were periods of non-pain, and that

these had a cyclic quality. And for the first time since emerging from the total

blackness which had prologued the haze, he had a thought which existed apart from

whatever his current situation was. This thought was of a broken-off piling which

had jutted from the sand at Revere Beach. His mother and father had taken him to

Revere Beach often when he was a kid, and he had always insisted that they spread

their blanket where he could keep an eye on that piling, which looked to him like

the single jutting fang of a buried monster. He liked to sit and watch the water

come up until it covered the piling. Then, hours later, after the sandwiches and

potato salad had been eaten, after the last few drops of Kool-Aid had been coaxed

from his father's big Thermos, just before his mother said it was time to pack up

and start home, the top of the rotted piling would begin to show again - just a peek

and flash between the incoming waves at first, then more and more. By the time their

trash was stashed in the big drum with KEEP YOUR BEACH CLEAN stencilled on the side,

Paulie's beach-toys picked up

(that's my name Paulie I'm Paulie and tonight ma'll put Johnson's Baby Oil on my

sunburn he thought inside the thunderhead where he now lived)

and the blanket folded again, the piling had almost wholly reappeared, its

blackish, slime-smoothed sides surrounded by sudsy scuds of foam. It was the tide,

his father had tried to explain, but he had always known it was the piling. The tide

came and went; the piling stayed. It was just that sometimes you couldn't see it.

Without the piling, there was no tide.

This memory circled and circled, maddening, like a sluggish fly. He groped for

whatever it might mean, but for a long time the sounds interrupted.

fayunnnn

red everrrrrythinggg

umberrrrr whunnnn

Sometimes the sounds stopped. Sometimes he stopped.

His first really clear memory of this now, the now outside the storm-haze, was

of stopping, of being suddenly aware he just couldn't pull another breath, and that

was all right, that was good, that was in fact just peachy-keen; he could take a

certain level of pain but enough was enough and he was glad to be getting out of the

game.

Then there was a mouth clamped over his, a mouth which was unmistakably a

woman's mouth in spite of its hard spitless lips, and the wind from this woman's

mouth blew into his own mouth and down his throat, puffing his lungs, and when the

lips were pulled back he smelled his warder for the first time, smelled her on the

outrush of the breath she had forced into him the way a man might force a part of

himself into an unwilling woman, a dreadful mixed stench of vanilla cookies and

chocolate ice-cream and chicken gravy and peanut-butter fudge.

He heard a voice screaming, 'Breathe, goddammit! Breathe, Paul!'

The lips clamped down again. The breath blew down his throat again. Blew down it

like the dank suck of wind which follows a fast subway train, pulling sheets of

newspaper and candy-wrappers after it, and the lips were withdrawal, and he thought

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For Christ's sake don't let any of it out through your nose but he couldn't help it

and oh that stink, that stink that fucking STINK.

'Breathe, goddam you!' the unseen voice shrieked, and he thought I will,

anything, please just don't do that anymore, don't infect me anymore, and he tried,

but before he could really get started her lips were clamped over his again, lips as

dry and dead as strips of salted leather, and she raped him full of her air again.

When she took her lips away this time he did not let her breath out but pushed

it and whooped in a gigantic breath of his own. Shoved it out. Waited for his unseen

chest to go up again on its own, as it had been doing his whole life without any

help from him. When it didn't, he gave another giant whooping gasp, and then he was

breathing again on his own, and doing it as fast as he could to flush the smell and

taste of her out of him.

Normal air had never tasted so fine.

He began to fade back into the haze again, but before the dimming world was gone

entirely, he heard the woman's voice mutter: 'Whew! That was a close one!'

Not close enough, he thought, and fell asleep.

He dreamed of the piling, so real he felt he could almost reach out and slide

his palm over its green-black fissured curve.

When he came back to his former state of semi-consciousness, he was able to make

the connection between the piling and his current situation - it seemed to float

into his hand. The pain wasn't tidal. That was the lesson of the dream which was

really a memory. The pain only appeared to come and go. The pain was like the

piling, sometimes covered and sometimes visible, but always there. When the pain

wasn't harrying him through the deep stone grayness of his cloud, he was dumbly

grateful, but he was no longer fooled - it was still there, waiting to return. And

there was not just one piling but two; the pain was the pilings, and part of him

knew for a long time before most of his mind had knowledge of knowing that the

shattered pilings were his own shattered legs.

But it was still a long time before he was finally able to break the dried scum

of saliva that had glued his lips together and croak out 'Where am I?' to the woman

who sat by his bed with a book in her hands. The name of the man who had written the

book was Paul Sheldon. He recognized it as his own with no surprise.

'Sidewinder, Colorado,' she said when he was finally able to ask the question.

'My name is Annie Wilkes. And I am - '

'I know,' he said. 'You're my number-one fan.'

'Yes,' she said, smiling. 'That's just what I am.'

Darkness. Then the pain and the haze. Then the awareness that, although the pain was

constant, it was sometimes buried by an uneasy compromise which he supposed was

relief. The first real memory: stopping, and being raped back into life by the

woman's stinking breath.

Next real memory: her fingers pushing something into his mouth at regular

intervals, something like Contac capsules, only since there was no water they only

sat in his mouth and when they melted there was an incredibly bitter taste that was

a little like the taste of aspirin. It would have been good to spit that bitter

taste out, but he knew better than to do it. Because it was that bitter taste which

brought the high tide in over the piling.

(PILINGS its PILINGS there are TWO okay there are two fine now just hush just

you know hush shhhhhh)

and made it seem gone for awhile.

These things all came at widely spaced intervals, but then as the pain itself

began not to recede but to erode (as that Revere Beach piling must itself have

eroded, he thought, because nothing is forever - although the child he had been

would have scoffed at such heresy), outside things began to impinge more rapidly

until the objective world, with all its freight of memory, experience, and

prejudice, had pretty much re-established itself. He was Paul Sheldon, who wrote

novels of two kinds, good ones and best-sellers. He had been married and divorced

twice. He smoked too much (or had before all this, whatever 'all this' was).

Something very bad had happened to him but he was still alive. That dark-gray cloud

began to dissipate faster and faster. It would be yet awhile before his number-one

fan brought him the old clacking Royal with the grinning gapped mouth and the Ducky

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Daddles voice, but Paul understood long before then that he was in a hell of a jam.

That prescient part of his mind saw her before he knew he was seeing her, and must

surely have understood her before he knew he was understanding her - why else did he

associate such dour, ominous images with her? Whenever she came into the room he

thought of the graven images worshipped by superstitious African tribes in the

novels of H. Rider Haggard, and stones, and doom.

The image of Annie Wilkes as an African idol out of She or King Solomon's Mines

was both ludicrous and queerly apt. She was a big woman who, other than the large

but unwelconiing swell of her bosom under the gray cardigan sweater she always wore,

seemed to have no feminine curves at all - there was no defined roundness of hip or

buttock or even calf below the endless succession of wool skirts she wore in the

house (she retired to her unseen bedroom to put on jeans before doing her outside

chores). Her body was big but not generous. There was a feeling about her of clots

and roadblocks rather than welcoming orifices or even open spaces, areas of hiatus.

Most of all she gave him a disturbing sense of solidity, as if she might not

have any blood vessels or even internal organs; as if she might be only solid Annie

Wilkes from side to side and top to bottom. He felt more and more convinced that her

eyes, which appeared to move, were actually just painted on, and they moved no more

than the eyes of portraits which appear to follow you to wherever you move in the

room where they hang. It seemed to him that if he made the first two fingers of his

hand into a V and attempted to poke them up her nostrils, they might go less than an

eighth of an inch before encountering a solid (if slightly yielding) obstruction;

that even her gray cardigan and frumpy house skirts and faded outside-work jeans

were part of that solid fibrous unchannelled body. So his feeling that she was like

an idol in a perfervid novel was not really surprising at all. Like an idol, she

gave only one thing: a feeling of unease deepening steadily toward terror. Like an

idol, she took everything else.

No, wait, that wasn't quite fair. She did give something else. She gave him the

pills that brought the tide in over the pilings.

The pills were the tide; Annie Wilkes was the lunar presence which pulled them

into his mouth like jetsam on a wave. She brought him two every six hours, first

announcing her presence only as a pair of fingers poking into his mouth (and soon

enough he learned to suck eagerly at those poking fingers in spite of the bitter

taste), later appearing in her cardigan sweater and one of her half-dozen skirts,

usually with a paperback copy of one of his novels tucked under her arm. At night

she appeared to him in a fuzzy pink robe, her face shiny with some sort of cream (he

could have named the main ingredient easily enough even though he had never seen the

bottle from which she tipped it; the sheepy smell of the lanolin was strong and

proclamatory), shaking him out of his frowzy, dream-thick sleep with the pills

nestled in her hand and the poxy moon nestled in the window over one of her solid

shoulders.

After awhile - after his alarm had become too great to be ignored - he was able

to find out what she was feeding him. It was a pain-killer with a heavy codeine base

called Novril. The reason she had to bring him the bedpan so infrequently was not

only because he was on a diet consisting entirely of liquids and gelatines (earlier,

when he was in the cloud, she had fed him intravenously), but also because Novril

had a tendency to cause constipation in patients taking it. Another side-effect, a

rather more serious one, was respiratory depression in sensitive patients. Paul was

not particularly sensitive, even though he had been a heavy smoker for nearly

eighteen years, but his breathing had stopped nonetheless on at least one occasion

(there might have been others, in the haze, that he did not remember). That was the

time she gave him mouth-to-mouth. It might have just been one of those things which

happened, but he later came to suspect she had nearly killed him with an accidental

overdose. She didn't know as much about what she was doing as she believed she did.

That was only one of the things about Annie that scared him.

He discovered three things almost simultaneously, about ten days after having

emerged from the dark cloud. The first was that Annie Wilkes had a great deal of

Novril (she had in fact, a great many drugs of all kinds). The second was that he

was hooked on Novril. The third was that Annie Wilkes was dangerously crazy.

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The darkness had prologued the pain and the storm-cloud; he began to remember what

had prologued the darkness as she told him what had happened to him. This was

shortly, after he had asked the traditional when-the-sleeper-wakes question and she

had told him he was in the little town of Sidewinder, Colorado. In addition she told

him that she had read each of his eight novels at least twice, and had read her very

favorites, the Misery novels, four, five, maybe six times. She only wished he would

write them faster. She said she had hardly been able to believe that her patient was

really that Paul Sheldon even after checking the ID in his wallet.

'Where is my wallet, by the way?' he asked.

'I've kept it safe for you,' she said. Her smile suddenly collapsed into a

narrow watchfulness he didn't like much - it was like discovering a deep crevasse

almost obscured by summer flowers in the midst of a smiling, jocund meadow. 'Did you

think I'd steal something out of it?'

'No, of course not. It's just that - ' It's just that the rest of my life is in

it, he thought. My life outside this room. Outside the pain. Outside the way time

seems to stretch out like the long pink string of bubble-gum a kid pulls out of his

mouth when he's bored. Because that's how it is in the last hour or so before the

pills come.

'Just what, Mister Man?' she persisted, and he saw with alarm that the narrow

look was growing blacker and blacker. The crevasse was spreading, as if an

earthquake was going on behind her brow. He could hear the steady, keen whine of the

wind outside, and he had a sudden image of her picking him up and throwing him over

her solid shoulder, where he would lie like a burlap sack slung over a stone wall,

and taking him outside, and heaving him into a snowdrift. He would freeze to death,

but before he did, his legs would throb and scream.

'It's just that my father always told me to keep my eye on my wallet,' he said,

astonished by how easily this lie came out. His father had made a career out of not

noticing Paul any more than he absolutely had to, and had, so far as Paul could

remember, offered him only a single piece of advice in his entire life. On Paul's

fourteenth birthday his father had given him a Red Devil condom in a foil envelope.

'Put that in your wallet,' Roger Sheldon said, 'and if you ever get excited while

you're making out at the drive-in, take a second between excited enough to want to

and too excited to care and slip that on. Too many bastards in the world already,

and I don't want to see you going in the Army at sixteen.'

Now Paul went on: 'I guess he told me to keep my eye on my wallet so many times

that it's stuck inside for good. If I offended you, I'm truly sorry.'

She relaxed. Smiled. The crevasse closed. Summer flowers nodded cheerfully once

again. He thought of pushing his hand through that smile and encountering nothing

but flexible darkness. 'No offense taken. It's in a safe place. Wait - I've got

something for you.'

She left and returned with a steaming bowl of soup. There were vegetables

floating in it. He was not able to eat much but he ate more than he thought at first

he could. She seemed pleased. It was while he ate the soup that she told him what

had happened, and he remembered it all as she told him and he supposed it was good

to know how you happened to end up with your legs shattered, but the manner by which

he was coming to this knowledge was disquieting - it was as if he was a character in

a story or a play, a character whose history is not recounted like history but

created like fiction.

She had gone into Sidewinder in the four-wheel drive to get feed for the

livestock and a few groceries . . . also to check out the paperbacks at Wilson's

Drug Center - that had been the Wednesday that was almost two weeks ago now, and the

new paperbacks always came in on Tuesday.

'I was actually thinking of you,' she said, spooning soup into his mouth and

then professionally wiping away a dribble, from the comer with a napkin. 'That's

what makes it such a remarkable coincidence, don't you see? I was hoping Misery's

Child would finally be out in paperback, but no such luck.'

A storm had been on the way, she said, but until noon that day the weather

forecasters had been confidently claiming it would veer south, toward New Mexico and

the Sangre di Cristos.

'Yes,' he said, remembering as he said it: 'They said it would turn. That's why

I went in the first place.' He tried to shift his legs. The result was an awful bolt

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of pain, and he groaned.

'Don't do that,' she said. 'If you get those legs of yours talking, Paul, they

won't shut up . . . and I can't give you any more pills for two hours. I'm giving

you too much as it is.'

Why aren't I in the hospital? This was clearly the question that wanted asking,

but he wasn't sure it was a question either of them wanted asked. Not yet, anyway.

When I got to the feed store, Tony Roberts told me I better step on it if I was

going to get back here before the storm hit, and I said - '

'How far are we from this town?' he asked.

'A ways,' she said vaguely, looking off toward the window. There was a queer

interval of silence, and Paul was frightened by what he saw on her face, because

what he saw was nothing; the black nothing of a crevasse folded into an alpine

meadow, a blackness where no flowers grew and into which the drop might be long. It

was the face of a woman who has come momentarily untethered from all of the vital

positions and landmarks of her life, a woman who has forgotten not only the memory

she was in the process of recounting but memory itself. He had once toured a mental

asylum - this was years ago, when he had been researching Misery, the first of the

four books which had been his main source of income over the last eight years - and

he had seen this look . . . or, more precisely, this unlook. The word which defined

it was catatonia, but what frightened him had no such precise word - it was, rather,

a vague comparison: in that moment he thought that her thoughts had become much as

he had imagined her physical self: solid, fibrous, unchannelled, with no places of

hiatus.

Then, slowly, her face cleared. Thoughts seemed to flow back into it. Then he

realized flowing was just a tiny bit wrong. She wasn't filling up, like a pond or a

tidal pool; she was warming up. Yes . . . she is warming up, like some small

electrical gadget. A toaster, or maybe a heating pad.

'I said to Tony, "That storm is going south."' She spoke slowly at first, almost

groggily, but then her words began to catch up to normal cadence and to fill with

normal conversational brightness. But now he was alerted. Everything she said was a

little strange, a little offbeat. Listening to Annie was like listening to a song

played in the wrong key.

'But he said, "It changed its mind."

"'Oh poop!" I said. "I better get on my horse and ride."

'"I'd stay in town if you can, Miz Wilkes," he said. "Now they're saying on the

radio that it's going to be a proper jeezer and nobody is prepared."

'But of course I had to get back - there's no one to feed the animals but me.

The nearest people are the Roydmans, and they are miles from here. Besides, the

Roydmans don't like me.'

She cast an eye shrewdly on him as she said this last, and when he didn't reply

she tapped the spoon against the rim of the bowl in peremptory fashion.

'Done?'

'Yes, I'm full, thanks. It was very good. Do you have a lot of livestock?'

Because, he was already thinking, if you do, that means you've got to have some

help. A hired man, at least. 'Help' was the operant word. Already that seemed like

the operant word, and he had seen she wore no wedding ring.

'Not very much,' she said. 'Half a dozen laying hens. Two cows. And Misery.'

He blinked.

She laughed. 'You won't think I'm very nice, naming a sow after the brave and

beautiful woman you made up. But that's her name, and I meant no disrespect.' After

a moment's thought she added: 'She's very friendly.' The woman wrinkled up her nose

and for a moment became a sow, even down to the few bristly whiskers that grew on

her chin. She made a pig-sound: 'Whoink! Whoink! Whuh-Whuh-WHOINK!'

Paul looked at her wide-eyed.

She did not notice; she had gone away again, her gaze dim and musing. Her eyes

held no reflection but the lamp on the bed-table, twice reflected, dwelling faintly

in each.

At last she gave a faint start and said: 'I got about five miles and then the

snow started. It came fast - once it starts up here, it always does. I came creeping

along, with my lights on, and then I saw your car off the road, overturned.' She

looked at him disapprovingly. 'You didn't have your lights on.'

'It took me by surprise,' he said, remembering only at that moment how he had

been taken by surprise. He did not yet remember that he had also been quite drunk.

'I stopped,' she said. 'If it had been on an upgrade, I might not have. Not very

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Christian, I know, but there were three inches on the road already, and even with a

four-wheel drive you can't be sure of getting going again once you lost your forward

motion. It's easier just to say to yourself, "Oh they probably got out, caught a

ride," et cetera, et cetera. But it was on top of the third big hill past the

Roydmans' and it's flat there for awhile. So I pulled over, and as soon as I got out

I heard groaning. That was you, Paul.'

She gave him a strange maternal grin.

For the first time, clearly, the thought surfaced in Paul Sheldon's mind: I am

in trouble here. This woman is not right.

She sat beside him where he lay in what might have been a spare bedroom for the next

twenty minutes or so and talked. As his body used the soup, the pain in his legs

reawakened. He willed himself to concentrate on what she was saying, but was not

entirely able to succeed. His mind had bifurcated. On one side he was listening to

her tell how she had dragged him from the wreckage of his '74 Camaro - that was the

side where the pain throbbed and ached like a couple of old splintered pilings

beginning to wink and flash between the heaves of the withdrawing tide. On the other

he could see himself at the Boulderado Hotel, finishing his new novel, which did not

- thank God for small favors - feature Miser Chastain.

There were all sorts of reasons for him not to write about Misery, but one

loomed above the rest, ironclad and unshakable. Misery - thank God for large favors

- was finally dead. She had died five pages from the end of Misery's Child. Not a

dry eye in the house when that had happened, including Paul's own - only the dew

falling from his ocularies had been the result of hysterical laughter.

Finishing the new book, a contemporary novel about a car-thief, he had

remembered typing the final sentence of Misery's Child: 'So Ian and Geoffrey left

the Little Dunthorpe churchyard together, supporting themselves in their sorrow,

determined to find their lives again.' While writing this line he had been giggling

so madly it had been hard to strike the correct keys - he had to go back several

times. Thank God for good old IBM CorrectTape. He had written THE END below and then

had gone capering about the room - this same room in the Boulderado Hotel - and

screaming Free at last! Free at last! Great God Almighty, I'm free at last! The

silly bitch finally bought the farm!

The new novel was called Fast Cars, and he hadn't laughed when it was done. He

just sat there in front of the typewriter for a moment, thinking You may have just

won next year's American Book Award, my friend. And then he had picked up -

' - a little bruise on your right temple, but that didn't look like anything. It

was your legs. . . . I could see right away, even with the light starting to fade,

that your legs weren't - '

- the telephone and called room service for a bottle of Dom Pérignon. He

remembered waiting for it to come, walking back and forth in the room where he had

finished all of his books since 1974; he remembered tipping the waiter with a

fifty-dollar bill and asking him if he had heard a weather forecast; he remembered

the pleased, flustered, grinning waiter telling him that the storm currently heading

their way was supposed to slide off to the south, toward New Mexico; he remembered

the chill feel of the bottle, the discreet sound of the cork as he eased it free; he

remembered the dry, acerbic-acidic taste of the first glass and opening his travel

bag and looking at his plane ticket back to New York; he remembered suddenly, on the

spur of the moment, deciding -

' - that I better get you home right away! It was a struggle getting you to the

truck, but I'm a big woman - as you may have noticed - and I had a pile of blankets

in the back. I got you in and wrapped you up, and even then, with the light fading

and all, I thought you looked familiar! I thought maybe - '

- he would get the old Camaro out of the parking garage and just drive west

instead of getting on the plane. What the hell was there in New York, anyway? The

townhouse, empty, bleak, unwelcoming, possibly burgled. Screw it! he thought,

drinking more champagne. Go west, young man, go west! The idea had been crazy enough

to make sense. Take nothing but a change of clothes and his -

' - bag I found. I put that in, too, but there wasn't anything else I could see

and I was scared you might die on me or something so I fired up Old Bessie and I got

your - '

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- manuscript of Fast Cars and hit the road to Vegas or Reno or maybe even the

City of the Angels. He remembered the idea had also seemed a bit silly at first - a

trip the kid of twenty-four he had been when he had sold his first novel might have

taken, but not one for a man two years past his fortieth birthday. A few more

glasses of champagne and the idea no longer seemed silly at all. It seemed, in fact,

almost noble. A kind of Grand Odyssey to Somewhere, a way to reacquaint himself with

reality after the fictional terrain of the novel. So he had gone -

' - out like a light! I was sure you were going to die. . . . I mean, I was

sure! So I slipped your wallet out of your back pocket, and I looked at your

driver's license and I saw the name, Paul Sheldon, and I thought, "Oh, that must be

a coincidence," but the picture on the license also looked like you, and then I got

so scared I had to sit down at the kitchen table. I thought at first that I was

going to faint. After awhile I started thinking maybe the picture was just a

coincidence, too - those driver's-license photos really don't look like anybody -

but then I found your Writers' Guild card, and one from PEN, and I knew you were - '

- in trouble when the snow started coming down, but long before that he had

stopped in the Boulderado bar and tipped George twenty bucks to provide him with a

second bottle of Dom, and he had drunk it rolling up I-70 into the Rockies under a

sky the color of gunmetal, and somewhere east of the Eisenhower Tunnel he had

diverted from the turnpike because the roads were bare and dry, the storm was

sliding off to the south, what the hay, and also the goddam tunnel made him nervous.

He had been playing an old Bo Diddley tape on the cassette machine under the dash

and never turned on the radio until the Camaro started to seriously slip and slide

and he began to realize that this wasn't just a passing upcountry flurry but the

real thing. The storm was maybe not sliding off to the south after all; the storm

was maybe coming right at him and he was maybe in a bucket of trouble

(the way you are in trouble now)

but he had been just drunk enough to think he could drive his way out of it. So

instead of stopping in Cana and inquiring about shelter, he had driven on. He could

remember the afternoon turning into a dull-gray chromium lens. He could remember the

champagne beginning to wear off. He could remember leaning forward to get his

cigarettes off the dashboard and that was when the last skid began and he tried to

ride it out but it kept getting worse; he could remember a heavy dull thump and then

the world's up and down had swapped places. He had -

' - screamed! And when I heard you screaming, I knew that you would live. Dying

men rarely scream. They haven't the energy. I know. I decided I would make you live.

So I got some of my pain medication and made you take it. Then you went to sleep.

When you woke up and started to scream again, I gave you some more. You ran a fever

for awhile, but I knocked that out, too. I gave you Keflex. You had one or two close

calls, but that's all over now. I promise.' She got up. And now it's time you

rested, Paul. You've got to get your strength back.'

'My legs hurt.'

'Yes, I'm sure they do. In an hour you can have some medication.'

'Now. Please.' It shamed him to beg, but he could not help it. The tide had gone

out and the splintered pilings stood bare, jaggedly real, things which could neither

be avoided nor dealt with.

'In an hour.' Firmly. She moved toward the door with the spoon and the soup-bowl

in one hand.

'Wait!'

She turned back, looking at him with ail expression both stern and loving. He

did not like the expression. Didn't like it at all.

'Two weeks since you pulled me out?'

She looked vague again, and annoyed. He would come to know that her grasp of

time was not good. 'Something like that.'

'I was unconscious.

'Almost all the time.'

'What did I eat?'

She considered him.

'IV,' she said briefly.

'IV?' he said, and she mistook his stunned surprise for ignorance.

'I fed you intravenously,' she said. 'Through tubes. That's what those marks on

your arms are.' She looked at him with eyes that were suddenly flat and considering.

'You owe me your life, Paul. I hope you'll remember that. I hope you'll keep that in

mind.'

Page 9

Misery.txt

Then she left.

The hour passed. Somehow and finally, the hour passed.

He lay in bed, sweating and shivering at the same time. From the other room came

first the sounds of Hawkeye and Hot Lips and then the disc jockeys on WKRP, that

wild and crazy Cincinnati radio station. An announcer's voice came on, extolled

Ginsu knives, gave an 800 number, and informed those Colorado watchers who had

simply been panting for a good set of Ginsu knives that Operators Were Standing By.

Paul Sheldon was also Standing By.

She reappeared promptly when the clock in the other room struck eight, with two

capsules and a glass of water.

He hoisted himself eagerly on his elbows as she sat on the bed.

'I finally got your new book two days ago,' she told him. Ice tinkled in the

glass. It was a maddening sound. 'Misery's Child. I love it . . . It's as good as

all the rest. Better! The best!'

'Thank you,' he managed. He could feel the sweat standing out on his forehead.

'Please my legs very painful . . . '

'I knew she would marry Ian,' she said, smiling dreamily, and I believe Geoffrey

and Ian will become friends again, eventually. Do they?' But immediately she said:

'No, don't tell! I want to find out for myself. I'm making it last. It always seems

so long before there is another one.'

The pain throbbed in his legs and made a deep steel circlet around his crotch.

He had touched himself down there, and he thought his pelvis was intact, but it felt

twisted and weird. Below his knees it felt as if nothing was intact. He didn't want

to look. He could see the twisted, lumpy shapes outlined in the bedclothes, and that

was enough.

'Please? Miss Wilkes? The pain - '

'Call me Annie. All my friends do.'

She gave him the glass. It was cool and beaded with moisture. She kept the

capsules. The capsules in her hand were the tide. She was the moon, and she had

brought the tide which would cover the pilings. She brought them toward his mouth,

which he immediately dropped open . . . and then she withdrew them.

'I took the liberty of looking in your little bag. You don't mind, do you?'

'No. No, of course not. The medicine - '

The beads of sweat on his forehead felt alternately hot and cold. Was he going

to scream? He thought perhaps he was.

'I see there is a manuscript in there,' she said. She held the capsules in her

right hand, which she now slowly tilted. They fell into her left hand. His eyes

followed them. 'It's called Fast Cars. Not a Misery novel, I know that.' She looked

at him with faint disapproval - but, as before, it was mixed with love. It was a

maternal look. 'No cars in the nineteenth century, fast or otherwise!' She tittered

at this small joke. 'I also took the liberty of glancing through it . . . You don't

mind, do you?'

'Please,' he moaned. 'No, but please - '

Her left hand tilted. The capsules rolled, hesitated, and then fell back into

her right hand with a minute clicking sound.

'And if I read it? You wouldn't mind if I read it?'

'No - ' His bones were shattered, his legs filled with festering shards of

broken glass. 'No . . .'He made something he hoped was a smile. 'No, of course not.'

'Because I would never presume to do such a thing without your permission,' she

said earnestly. 'I respect you too much. In fact, Paul, I love you.' She crimsoned

suddenly and alarmingly. One of the capsules dropped from her hand to the coverlet.

Paul snatched at it, but she was quicker. He moaned, but she did not notice; after

grabbing the capsule she went vague again, looking toward the window. 'Your mind,'

she said, 'Your creativity, That is all I meant'

In desperation, because it was the only thing he could think of, he said: 'I

know. You're my number-one fan.' She did not just warm up this time; she lit up.

'That's it!' she cried. 'That's it exactly! And you wouldn't mind if I read it in

that spirit, would you? That spirit of . . . of fan-love? Even though I don't like

your other books as well as the Misery stories?'

'No,' he said, and closed his eyes. No, tum the pages of the manuscript into

Page 10

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Misery.txtStephenKINGMISERYHodder&StoughtonCopyright(c)1987byStephenKingFirstpublishedinGreatBritainin1987byHodderandStoughtonLimitedFirstNewEnglishLibraryedition1988Eighteenthimpression1992BritishLibraryC.I.P.King,Stephen1947-Misery.I.Title813'.54[F]PS3561:1483ISBN0450417395Thecharactersandsituatio...

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KING, Stephen - Misery

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