'Well?' he asked several days later, when she interrupted him. 'Is it fair?' Annie sat on his bed, holding the first six chapters of the typescript. She looked a bit pale. 'Of course,' she said, as if they both already knew the answer - which he supposed they did. 'It's not only fair, it's also good. Exciting.' 'Shall I go on?' he asked. 'I'll kill you if you don't!' she replied, smiling a little. Paul didn't smile back. This common remark would once have seemed ordinary to him; when Annie Wilkes said it, it didn't seem ordinary at all. 'You won't have to kill me, Annie,' he said. 'I want to go on. So why don't you leave me to write?' 'All right,' she said. She stood up and quickly dropped the typescript on his table, and then moved away. It was as if she was afraid of being burned by him. She was thinking of him now as the famous author, the one who could capture her in the pages of his books and burn her with the heat which his words made. 'Would you like to read it as I write it?' he asked. Annie smiled. 'Yes! It would be almost like those films when 1 was young.' 'I don't usually show my work before it's all finished,' he said, 'but this is a special situation, so I'd be glad to show it to you chapter by chapter.' And so began the thousand and one nights of Paul Sheldon, he thought. 'But will you do something for me?' 'What?' 'Fill in all those "n"s,' he said. 29 She smiled at him with real warmth. 'That would make me very proud,' she said. 'I'll leave you alone now.' But it was too late: her interruption closed the hole in the paper for the rest of the day. Early the next morning Paul was sitting up in bed with his pillows piled up behind him, drinking a cup of coffee and looking at those marks on the sides of the door. Suddenly Annie rushed into the room, her eyes wide with fear. In one hand she held a piece of cloth; in the other, some rope. 'What -?' It was all he had time to say. She seized him with frightened strength and pulled him forward. Pain - the worst for days - ran through his legs, and he screamed. The coffee cup flew out of his hand and broke on the floor. His first thought was that she had seen the marks on the door and now she was going to punish him. 'Shut up, stupid!' she whispered urgently. She tied his hands behind him with the rope, and just then he heard the sound of a car turning off the road and towards her house. He opened his mouth to say something and she pushed the cloth into it. It tasted foul. 'Keep completely quiet,' she said with her head close to his. 'I warn you, Paul. If whoever this is hears something - or even if I hear something and think he might have heard something - I will kill him, then you, then myself.' She ran out of the room and Paul heard her putting on her coat and boots. Through the window he saw an old Chevrolet stop and an elderly man get out. Paul guessed that he was here on town business, because he could think of no other reason for anyone to come. The man looked like a local official, too. Paul had often imagined someone coming to the house. In his mind there were several versions of what happened, but one thing was the same in every version: the visit shortened Paul's life. 30 Annie hurried out of the house to meet the man. Why not invite him inside, Annie? thought Paul, trying not to choke on the cloth. Why don't you show him what you keep inside the house? The man pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and gave it to Annie. He seemed to be apologizing. She looked quickly at the paper and began to speak. Paul couldn't hear what she was saying, but he could see the clouds of mist which formed in the cold air in front of her mouth. She was talking fast and waving her finger in the man's face. She led the man a little way from his car, so that Paul could no longer see them, only their shadows. He realized that she had done it on purpose: if he couldn't see the man, then the man couldn't see him. The shadows stayed there for five minutes. Once Paul heard Annie's voice; she was shouting angrily, although he couldn't hear the actual words. They were five long minutes for Paul: the cloth in his mouth was making him feel sick. Then the man was walking back to his car, with Annie behind him. She was still taking. He turned to say something before getting into the car, and Paul could see some emotion on his face. It wasn't quite anger: he was disgusted. It was obvious that he thought she was crazy. The whole town probably regarded her as crazy and he didn't like having the job of visiting her. But you don't know the extent of her madness, do you? thought Paul. If you did, you wouldn't turn your back on her. Now the man got into the car and started to reverse towards Annie's gate. Annie had to shout even louder so that he could hear her over the noise of the engine, and Paul heard her words too: 'You think you're so clever, don't you? You think you're such a big wheel, helping the world to turn round. Well, I'll tell you something. Mister Big Wheel. Little dogs go to the toilet all over big wheels. What do you think about that?' When the man had driven away, Annie rushed back into the house. She shut the front door with a loud bang and Paul knew 31 that she was extremely angry. He was frightened that her anger with the man would become anger with him. She came into his room and began to walk around, waving the piece of paper in her hand. 'I owe them five hundred dollars' tax, he says. I haven't been paying the tax on my house, he says. Dirty tax! Dirty lawyers! I hate lawyers!' Paul choked and tried to speak through the cloth, but she didn't seem to notice. She was in a world of her own. 'Five hundred and six dollars!' she shouted. 'And they send someone out here to visit when they know I don't want anyone here. I told them. Now he says they'll take my house away from me if I don't pay soon.' She absent-mindedly pulled the piece of cloth from his mouth and Paul swallowed great mouthfuls of air in relief, trying not to be sick. 'My hands . . .' he gasped. 'What? Oh, yes. Sometimes you're such a baby.' She pulled him forward again - which hurt again - and untied his hands. 'I pay my taxes,' she protested. 'I just . . . this time I just . . . You've been keeping me so busy.' You forgot, didn't you, Annie? You try to make everything seem normal, but you forgot. This is the first time you've forgotten anything this big, isn't it? In fact, Annie, you're getting worse, aren't you? You're starting to get a little worse every day. Your blank periods are getting longer and happening more often. Mad people can usually manage their lives, and sometimes - as I think you know - they get away with some very nasty actions. But there's a border between manageable madness and unmanageable madness, and you're getting closer to it every day . . . and part of you knows it. Paul had a brilliant idea. 'I owe you my life,' he said, 'and I'm just a nuisance to you. I've got about four hundred dollars in my wallet. I want you to have it.' 'Oh, Paul. I couldn't.' She was looking at him in confusion and pleasure. Paul smiled and tried to look as sincere as possible. 'It's yours,' he said, 'You saved two lives, you know - Misery's as well as 32 mine. And you showed me that I was going wrong, writing other kinds of books. Four hundred dollars is nothing for all that. If you don't take the money you'll make me feel bad.' 'Well, if you say so . . . All right,' she said, with a shy smile. 'They all hate me, you know. They're all against me, Paul.' 'So you must pay their dirty taxes today," Paul said. 'That'll show them. I bet there arc other people in the town - the Roydmans, for example - who haven't paid their taxes for years. They're just trying to make you go, Annie.' 'Yes, I'll pay their stupid taxes,' she said. 'That'll teach them a lesson. I'll stay here and spit in their eyes!' She went and fetched his wallet. The money was still in it, but everything which showed that it belonged to Paul Sheldon had gone. He remembered going to the bank and taking the money out. The man who had done that had felt good. He had just finished Fast Cars and was feeling younger than his age. I lis legs were not useless sticks. He gave Annie the money and she bent over and kissed him on the lips. He smelled the foul smell which came from the rotten places inside her. 'I love you,' she said. 'Would you put me in the wheelchair?' he said. 'I want to write.' 'Of course, my dear,' she replied. Then she left to go to town. While she was out Paul unlocked the door - he now had four hairpins under the mattress, next to the tablets - and tried to clean the marks on the door-frame. Three weeks passed. Although there were times when he felt close to tears. Paul was on the whole curiously happy. He was enjoying writing the book. Usually the most he could write was two or three pages a day, but he was sometimes writing twelve pages of Misery's Return in a day! He was living such a regular and healthy life. Annie was cooking him three meals a day. He wasn't drinking any alcohol or smoking cigarettes; he suffered from none of his usual headaches. He woke up in the morning, ate breakfast, worked, had lunch, slept for a while, worked 33 again, ate again and then slept like a baby all night long. There was nothing else for him to do - nothing to interrupt the routine. Ideas for the book were flooding into his mind. Can you? Yes, I can. Then the rain came, and everything changed.