On his way back through the sitting-room he stopped to pick up the album. He was curious to see photographs of Annie's 40 family and of Annie herself when she was younger. When he opened the album, however, he found that it was full of stories cut from newspapers. The first two pages told of the wedding of Annie's parents and the birth of her elder brother, Paul -- another Paul in her life - and of Annie herself. She was born on I April 1943. She must have hated being an April Fool. The next page contained a report of a fire in a house in Hakersfield, California, in 1954. Five people had died in the fire. Three of them had been the children who lived in the groundfloor apartment, downstairs from the Wilkes family (who had been out of the house at the time). The fire had started because of a cigarette in the cellar. Annie's voice echoed in Paul's mind: God, I hated those children. Paul's blood began to run cold. But she was only eleven years old. That's old enough - old enough to let a candle burn down in the cellar so that the flame could light a pool of petrol. It's an old trick but hard to beat. Maybe she just wanted to frighten them and accidentally did more than that. But she did it, Paul. You know she did it. He turned the page and found a story about the death of Annie's father. He had fallen over a pile of clothes at the top of the stairs in his house and broken his neck. The newspaper called it a 'curious accident'. On the next page a newspaper from Los Angeles, hundreds of miles from Bakersfield, used exactly the same words - a 'curious accident'. This time it was a student nurse who had fallen over a dead cat at the top of the stairs and broken her neck. The name of the person who shared the student's apartment was Annie Wilkes. The year was 1959. Paul felt pure terror rise up in him. The 'accidents' had happened in different places and at different times, and no one had made the connection. Why should they? People were always falling down stairs. 41 Why had she killed them? He seemed to hear Annie's answers in his mind. The answers were absolutely mad, and Paul knew they were right. I killed her because she played the radio late at night; I killed her because she let her boyfriend kiss her too much; I killed her because I caught her cheating; I killed her because she caught me cheating. I killed her to see whether I could. What does it matter? She was just a Miss Clever - so I killed her. The next page of the album showed that Annie had graduated as a nurse and had got a job at St Joseph's Hospital in Pennsylvania. There followed several pages containing short newspaper reports of deaths at the hospital. There was nothing suspicious about any of these deaths. Most of the people were old and had been ill for a long time. Some were young - one was even a child - but they all had serious illnesses or injuries. And what were these reports doing in Annie's album? She had killed them all. The reports were so short that several could fit on a single page of the album - and the album was thick. Again Paul asked the question: Why, Annie? Why kill these people? Again he heard Annie's voice echoing in his mind: Because they were rats in a trap. And he remembered Annie's tears falling on the rat she held in her hand, while she said: 'Poor, poor things.' Over the next few years she had moved from hospital to hospital around the country. The pattern in the album was always the same: first, the list of new hospital staff, with Annie's name among them; then pages of short reports of deaths. In 1978, nine years ago, she had arrived at a hospital in Denver, Colorado. The usual pattern began again with a report of the death of an elderly woman. Then the pattern changed. Instead of reports of deaths there was a report of Annie's marriage to a man called Ralph Dugan, a doctor. There was a photograph of the house they had bought outside Sidewinder in 1979 - this house. Several months had passed without any killings. It was unbelievable, but Annie must have been happy! 42 Then there was a report, from August 1980, of their divorce. It was clear that he had divorced her rather than the other way round. He had understood something about her. Maybe he had seen the cat at the top of the stairs - the one he was supposed to fall over. Annie had torn into this report with a pen as she wrote vicious words across it, so that Paul had difficulty reading it. Annie moved to a hospital in Boulder, Colorado. It was clear that she was very hurt and very angry, because the killings started again, and more often than before: the newspaper reports came every few days. God, how many did she kill? Why did nobody guess? At last, in 1982, Annie made a mistake. She moved to the childbirth department of the hospital. Annie had carefully kept a record of the whole story. Killing new-born babies is different from killing badly injured or seriously ill adults. Babies don't often die and people notice if they do. Parents care as well. And Annie had started to kill even healthy babies. They must have all seemed to her to be 'poor, poor things' by now - now that she was even crazier than before. Five babies died between January and March 1982. A hospital investigation found nothing suspicious in their deaths - which was not surprising, thought Paul, since Annie was the chief nurse of the department and was probably doing the investigation herself. Another baby had died in April. Two in May. Then at the beginning of June there was a newspaper report with the heading: NURSE WILKES QUESTIONED ON BABY DEATHS. The police were reported as saying that she was not under arrest and they were not accusing her of anything: they were just questioning her. And the next day: NURSE WILKES RELEASED. She had got away with it. How? Paul couldn't imagine, but she had got away with it. Now, he thought, she will move to another hospital in another town. But no: she was too insane for that now. 43 The Boulder News, 2 July: THE HORROR CONTINUES: THPEE MORE BABIES DIE. Pages and pages of the album contained reports of Annie's arrest and trial. Annie had also included a selection of letters from the citizens of Boulder that had been printed in the newspaper?. It was clear that she had chosen the most vicious of the letters - those which reminded her that everyone was against her and that it was their fault. The newspapers began to call her 'the Dragon Lady'. But there was not enough evidence. On 16 December the huge heading in the paper read: DRAGON LADY INNOCENT! There were plenty more pages in the album, but few of them had been used. Annie had kept any further reports that she had seen about the baby deaths, but there were no more killings until 1984. The Sidewinder Gazette had reported in November of that year the discovery of the body of a young man called Andrew Pomeroy. What was left of his body - some bits had been cut off with an axe - had been found in a stream bed quite a few miles from the town. How far from here? Paul wondered. He turned the page and looked at the last report in the album. For a moment his breath stopped: it was about him! The report was only two weeks old. It had been cut out from Newsweek and told how 'famous novelist Paul Sheldon, last seen seven weeks ago in Boulder, Colorado' was missing. The reporter had interviewed Paul's agent, but she had not been worried, probably because she thought Paul was staying with a woman he had met! Well, that was true, thought Paul. He put the album down carefully so that Annie would not see that it had been moved. He felt sick and close to tears. Outside, the wind suddenly blew heavy rain against the house and Paul jumped in fear. An hour later, full of Novril, the wind seemed comforting rather than frightening. He was thinking: So there's no way out. You can't escape, and Superman's too busy making films in Hollywood. But there's one thing you can do. Can you, Paul? Can you do it? The only way out of this was to kill her. Yes, I can. CH A PTER FIFTEEN The storm continued throughout the next day. The following night the clouds blew away and the temperature dropped. All the world outside froze solid. The roads were pure ice. Annie couldn't come back that day even if she was ready to. And that was too bad for the animals. He could hear the cows complaining in the barn: Annie hadn't milked them and they were in pain. As the days passed he heard no more noises from them. Paul's routine was easy. During the daytime he ate food which Annie would not miss from the kitchen. She had stored hundreds of cans of food, and it was easy for Paul to take a few cans from here and a few from there so that Annie would not notice. So he had enough to eat, he took his tablets regularly, slept and wrote his novel; in the evenings he played 'Can You?' with ideas about killing Annie. A lot of ideas came to him, but most of them were impossible or too complicated. This was no game, this was his life. It would have to be something simple. In the end he went to the kitchen and chose the longest, sharpest butcher's knife he could find. On the way back into his room he stopped to rub at the new marks he was making on the door-frame. The marks were clearer than before. But it doesn't matter, he thought, because as soon as she returns, the first time she comes into my room . . . He pushed the knife under the mattress. When Annie came back he was gong to ask her for a drink of water. She would bend over to give it to him and then he would stab her in the throat. Nothing complicated. Paul closed his eyes and went to sleep. When Annie's car came whispering into the farm at four o'clock that morning, with its engine and its lights switched off, he did not move. It was only when he felt the sting of the syringe in his arm and woke to see her face close to his that he knew she was back. 45 He saw the syringe in her hand and understood that it hadn't been a bee: she had given him an injection.