Misery

2 Now I must rinse she said, and this is how it rinses out: 3 None after Wicks
and McKnight carried him from Annie's house on a makeshift litter, Paul
Sheldon was dividing his time between Doctors Hospital in Queens and a
new apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. His legs had been re-broken.
His left was still in a cast from the knee down. He would walk with a limp
for the rest of his life the doctors told him, but he would walk, and eventually
he would walk without pain. His limp would have been deeper and more
pronounced if he had been walking on his own foot instead of a custom-made
prosthesis. In an ironic sort of way, Annie had done him a favor.

He was drinking too much and not writing at all. His dreams were bad. When
he got out of the elevator on the ninth floor one afternoon in May, he was for
a change thinking not of Annie but of the bulky package tucked clumsily under
his arm — it contained two bound galleys of Misery's Return. His publishers
had put the book on a very fast track, and considering the world-wide
headlines generated by the bizarre circumstances under which the novel had
been written, that was hardly surprising. Hastings House had ordered an
unprecedented first printing of a million copies. “And that's only the
beginning,” Charlie Merrill, his editor, had told him at lunch that day — the
lunch from which Paul was now returning with his bound galleys. “This book
is going to outsell everything in the world, my friend. We all just ought to be
down on our knees thanking God that the story in the book is almost as good
as the story behind the book.” Paul didn't know if that was true, and didn't
really care anymore. He only wanted to get it behind him and find the next
book . . . but as dry days became dry weeks became dry months, he had
begun to wonder if there ever would be a next book.

Charlie was begging him for a nonfiction account of his ordeal. That book, he
said, would outsell even Misery's Return. Would, in fact, outsell Iacocca.
When Paul asked”, him, out of idle curiosity, what he thought the paperbacks
rights for such a book might fetch, Charlie brushed his long hair away from
his forehead, lit a Camel, and said: “I believe we could set a floor at ten
million dollars and then conduct one hell of an auction.” He did not bat an
eye when he said it; after a moment or two Paul realized he either was
serious or thought he was.

But there was no way he could write such a book, not yet, probably not ever.
His job was writing novels. He could write the account Charlie wanted, but
to do so would be tantamount to admitting to himself that he would never
write another novel.

And the joke is, it would be a novel, he almost said to Charlie Merrill . . .
and then held back at the last moment. The joke was, Charlie wouldn't care.

It would start out as fact, and then I'd begin to tart it up . . . just a little at first
. . .then a little more . . . then a little more. Not to make myself look better
(although I probably would) and not to make Annie look worse (she
couldn't). Simply to create that roundness. I don't want to fictionalize myself.
Writing may be masturbatory, but God forbid it should be an act off
autocannibalism. His apartment was 9-E, farthest from the elevator, and
today the corridor looked two miles long. He began to stump his way grimly
down to it, a t-shaped walking-stick in each hand. Clack . . . clack

. . . clack . . . clack. God, he hated that sound.

His legs ached sickeningly and he yearned for Novril. Sometimes he thought
it would be worth being back with Annie just to have the dope. The doctors
had weaned him from it; The booze was his substitute, and when he got
inside he was going to have a double bourbon. Then he would look at the
blank screen of his word processor for awhile. What fun. Paul Sheldon's
fifteen-thousand-dollar paperweight.

Clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack.

Now to get the key out of his pocket without dropping either the manila
envelope containing the bound galleys or the sticks. He propped the sticks
against the wall. While he was doing that, the galleys dropped out from under
his arm and fell to the rug. The envelope split open.

“Shit!” he growled, and then the sticks fell over with a clatter, adding to the
fun. Paul closed his eyes, swaying unsteadily on his twisted, aching legs,
waiting to see if he was going to get mad or cry. He hoped he would get mad.
He didn't want to cry out here in the hall, but he might. He had. His legs hurt
all the time and he wanted his dope, not the heavy-duty aspirin they gave him

at the hospital dispensary. He wanted his good dope, his Annie-dope. And oh
he was so tired all the time. What he needed to prop him up were not those
shitty sticks but his make-believe games and stories. They were the good
dope, the never-fail fix, but they had all fled. It seemed playtime was finally
over.

This is what it's like after the end, he thought, opening the door and tottering
into the apartment. This is why no one ever writes it. It's too fucking dreary.
She should have died after I stuffed her head full of blank paper and busted
pages, and I should have died then, too. At that moment if at no other we
really were like characters in one of Annie's chapter-plays — no grays, only
blacks and whites, good and bad. I was Geoffrey and she was the Bourka
Bee-Goddess. This . . . well, I've heard of denouement, but this is ridiculous.
Never mind the mess back there on the floor. Drinkypoo first, pick-uppy-poo
second. First be a Don't-Be and then be a — He stopped. He had time to
realize the apartment was to dark. And there was a smell. He knew that smell
a deadly mixture of dirt and face-powder.

Annie rose up from behind the sofa like a white ghost dressed in a nurse's
uniform and cap. The axe was in her hand and she was screaming: Time to
rinse, Paul! Time to rinse!

He shrieked, tried to turn on his bad legs. She leaped the sofa with clumsy
strength, looking like an albino frog. Her starched uniform rustled briskly.
The first sweep of the axe did no more than knock the wind from him — this
was really what he thought until he landed on the carpet smelling his own
blood. He looked down and saw he was cut nearly in half.

“Rinse!” she shrieked, and there went his right hand.

“Rinse!” she shrieked again, and his left was gone; he crawled toward the
open door on the jetting stumps of his wrists, and incredibly the galleys were
still there, the bound galleys Charlie had given him at lunch in Mr Lee's,
sliding the manila envelope to him across gleaming white napery while
Muzak drifted down from overhead speakers.

“Annie you can read it now!” he tried to scream, but only got out Annie you
before his head flew off and rolled to the wall. His last dimming glimpse of

the world was his own collapsing body and Annie's white shoes stand
astride it: Goddess, he thought, and died. 4 Scenario: An outline or synopsis.
A plot outline.

— Webster's New Collegiate

Writer: One who writes, esp. as an occupation.

— Webster's New Collegiate

Make-believe: Pretense or pretend.

— Webster's New Collegiate

5 Paulie, Can You?

6 Yes; of course he could. “The writer's scenano was that Annie was still
alive, although he understood this was only make-believe.”

7 He really did go to lunch with Charlie Merrill. All the conversation was
the same. Only when he let himself into his apartment he knew it was the
cleaning woman who had pulled the drapes, and although he fell down and
had to smother a scream of fright when Annie rose up like Cain from behind
the sofa, it was just the cat, a cross-eyed Siamese named Dumpster he had
gotten last month at the pound.

There was no Annie because Annie had not been a goddess at all, only a
crazy lady who had hurt Paul for reasons of her own. Annie had managed to
pull most of the paper out of her mouth and throat and had gotten out through
Paul's window while Paul was sleeping the sleep of drugs. She had gotten to
the barn and had collapsed there. She was dead when Wicks and McKnight
found her, but not of strangulation. She had actually died of the fractured skull
she had received when she struck the mantel, and she had struck the mantel
because she had tripped. So in a way she had been killed by the very
typewriter Paul had hated so much.

But she'd had plans for him, all right. Not even the axe would suffice this
time. They had found her outside of Misery the pig's stall, with one hand

wrapped around the handle of her chainsaw.

That was all in the past, though. Annie Wilkes was in her grave. But like
Misery Chastain, she rested there uneasily. In his dreams and waking
fantasies, he dug her up again and again. You couldn't kill the goddess.
Temporarily dope her with bourbon, maybe, but that was all. He went to the
bar, looked at the bottle, then looked back at where his galleys and walking
sticks lay. He gave the bottle a goodbye look and worked his way back to his
stuff. 8 Rinse.

9 Half an hour later he was sitting in front of the blank screen, thinking he had
to be a glutton for punishment. He had taken the aspirin instead of the drink,
but that didn't change what was going to happen now; he was going to sit here
for fifteen minutes or maybe half an hour, looking at nothing but a cursor
flashing in darkness; then he was going to turn the machine off and have that
drink. Except . . .

Except he had seen something funny on the way home from lunch with
Charlie, and it had given him an idea. Not a big one. Just a small one. After
all, it had only been a small incident. Just a kid pushing a shopping cart up
48th Street, that was all, but there had been a cage in the cart, and in it had
been a rather large furry animal which Paul at first thought was a cat. A
closer look had shown him a wide white stripe up the cat's back.

“Sonny,” he said, “is that a skunk?”

“Yeah,” the kid said, and pushed the shopping cart along a little faster. You
didn't stop for long conversations with people in the city, especially weird-
looking guys with bags the size of Samsonite two-suiters under their eyes
who were lurching along on metal walking-sticks. The kid turned the corner
and was gone.

Paul went on, wanting to take a cab, but he was supposed to walk at least a
mile every day and this was his mile and it hurt like hell and to take his mind
off the mile he started wondering where that kid had come from, where the
shopping cart had come from, and most of all where the skunk had come
from.

He heard a noise behind him and turned from the blank screen to see Annie
coming out of the kitchen dressed in jeans and a red flannel logger's shirt, the
chainsaw in her hands. He closed his eyes, opened them, saw the same old
nothing, and was suddenly angry. He turned back to the word processor and
wrote fast, almost bludgeoning the keys:

-1-The kid heard a sound in the back of the building and although the thought
of rats crossed his mind, he turned the corner anyway — it was too early to
go home because school didn't let out for another hour and a half and he had
gone truant at lunch.

What he saw crouched back against the all in a dusty shaft of sunlight was not
a rat but a great big black cat with the bushiest tail he had ever seen.

10 He stopped, heart suddenly pounding.

Paulie, Can You?

This was a question which he did not dare answer. He bent over the
keyboard again, and after a moment began to hit the keys . . . but more gently
now.

11 It wasn't a cat. Eddie Desmond had lived in New York City all his life,
but he had been to the Bronx Zoo, and Christ, there were picture-books
weren't there? He knew what that thing was, although he hadn't the slightest
idea how such a thing could have gotten into this deserted East 105th Street
tenement, but the long white stripe down its back was a dead give-away. It
was a skunk. Eddie started slowly toward it, feet gritting in the plaster dust
12 He could. He could.

So, in gratitude and in terror, he did. The hole opened and Paul stared
through at what was there, unaware that his fingers were picking up speed,
unaware that his aching legs were in the same city but fifty blocks away,
unaware that he was weeping as he wrote.

Lovell, Maine: September 23rd 1984 / Bangor, Maine: October 7th 1986:
Now my tale is told.

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