It was surprisingly easy to start writing about Misery again. It had been a long time and these were hardly ideal circumstances; but Misery's word was cheap, and returning to it felt like putting on an old, familiar glove. Annie put down the first three pages of the new typescript. 'What do you think?' Paul asked. 'It's not right,' she said. 'What do you mean? Don't you like it?' 'Oh, yes, I love it. When Ian kissed her . . . And it was very sweet of you to name the baby after me.' Clever, he thought. Not sweet, hut maybe clever. 'Then why is it not right?' 'Because you cheated,' she explained. 'The doctor comes, when he couldn't have conic. At the end of Misery's Child Geoffrey rode to fetch the doctor, but his horse fell and broke a leg, and Geoffrey broke his shoulder and lay in the rain all night until the morning, when that boy found him. And by then Misery was dead. Do you see?' 'Yes.' How am I going to please her? How can I bring Misery back to life without cheating? 'When I was a child,' Annie was saying, 'I used to go to the cinema every week. We lived in Bakersfield, California. They used to show short films and at the end the hero - Rocket Man or somebody - was always in trouble. Perhaps the criminals had tied him to a chair in a burning house, or he was unconscious in an aeroplane. The hero always escaped, but you had to wait until the next week to find out exactly what happened. I loved those films. If I was bored, or if I was looking after those horrible children downstairs, I used to try to guess what happened next. God, I hated those children. Anyway, sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong. That didn't matter, as long as the hero escaped in a fair way.' Paul tried to stop himself laughing at the picture in his mind of young Annie Wilkes in the cinema. 20 'Are you all right, Paul? Are you going to sneeze? Anyway, what I'm saying is that the way the hero escaped was often unlikely, but always fair. Then one week Rocket Man was in a car. He was tied up and the car had no brakes. He didn't have any special equipment. We saw him in the film struggling to get free; we saw him still struggling while the car went off the edge of a mountain and burst into flames. I spent the whole week trying to guess what would happen, but I couldn't. How could he escape? It was really exciting. I was the first in the queue at the cinema the next week. And what do you think happened, Paul?' Paul didn't know the answer to her question, but she was right, of course, He had cheated. And the writing had been wooden, too. 'The story always started by showing the ending from last week. So we saw Rocket Man in the car again, but this time, just before the car reached the edge, the side-door flew open and Rocket Man fell out on to the road. Then the car went over the edge. All the other children in the cinema were cheering because Rocket Man was safe, but I wasn't cheering. No! I stood up and shouted, "This is wrong! Are you all stupid? This isn't what happened last week! They cheated!" I went on and on, and then the manager ct the cinema came and asked me to leave. "All right. I'll leave," I told him, "and I'm never corning back, because this is just a dirty cheat."' She looked at Paul, and Paul saw clear murder in her eyes. Although she was being childish, the unfairness she felt was absolutely real for her. 'The car went over the edge and he was still in it. Do you understand that, Paul? Do you understand?' She jumped up and Paul thought she was going to hurt him because he was another writer who had cheated in his story. 'Do you?' She seized the front of his shirt and pulled him forward so that their faces were almost touching. 'Yes, Annie, yes, I do.' 27 She stared at him with that angry, black stare. She must have seen in his eyes that he was telling the truth, because she let go of him, quietened down and sat back in her chair. Then you know what to do,' she said, and left the room. How could he bring Misery back to life? When he was a child he used to play a game called 'Can Your?' with a group of other children. An adult would start a story about a man called Careless Corrigan. Within a few sentences Careless Corrigan would be in a hopeless situation - surrounded by hungry lions perhaps. Then the adult would pass the story on to one of the children. He would say, 'Daniel, can you?' And then Daniel - or one of the other children - had to start the story again within ten seconds or he had failed. Once Daniel had told his story, explaining how Careless Corrigan escaped from the lions, the adult asked the other question: 'Did he?' And if most of the children put their hands in the air and agreed that Careless Corrigan did - that what Daniel had said was all right - then Daniel was allowed to stay in the game. The rules of the game were exactly the same as Annie's rules. The story didn't have to be likely, but it did have to be fair. As a child, Paul had always been good at the game. So can you, Paul? Yes, I can. I'm a writer. I live and earn money because I can. I have homes in New York and Los Angeles because I can. There are plenty of people who ran write better than I can, but when the question is 'Did he?', sometimes only a few hands go up for those people. Hut the hands go up for me, or for Misery, which is the same thing I suppose. Can I? Yes, you bet 1 an, I can't mend ears or taps, I can't he an electrician; but if you want me to take you away, to frighten you, to make you cry or make you smile, then yes, I can. Two hours later Annie came and stood at the entrance to his room. She stood for a long time, watching him work. He was typing fast and he didn't even notice her standing there. He was too busy dreaming Misery back to life. When he was working well a hole seemed to open in the paper in front of him; he 28 would fall through the hole into the world of Misery Chastain and her lovers.