Some weeks later, on the first day of summer, the old typewriter lost its 't' as well. Paul thought: I am going to complain. I am not just going to ask for a new typewriter, I am going to demand one. I know she can afford it. Of course he would ask Annie for nothing and certainly would not demand. Once there had been a man who would at least have asked. That man had been in much more pain, but he still would have asked. He had been that man and he supposed he ought to be ashamed, but that man had two big advantages over this one: that man had two feet . . . and two thumbs. Paul sat quietly for a moment, staring at the typewriter, and 56 then simply continued to type. It was better that way — better not to ask, better not to protest. Annie had become too strange. He had known for a long time what she was capable of doing; but these days he couldn't guess what would make her do it. So he continued to work, but after five or six pages the typewriter lost the letter 'e', the most common letter in the English language. Paul could hardly believe it. What shall I do now? he thought, but of course the answer was obvious. He would write by hand. But not now. The hole in the paper - the hole through which Misery and Ian and Geoffrey lived - had closed with a crash. He listened to the sound of the lawnmower outside. Annie had a lawnmower which was like a small tractor. As soon as he thought of Annie he remembered the axe rising and falling, her calm face splashed with his blood. He remembered every word she had spoken, every word he had screamed, every sound and movement. Why couldn't he forget? You're supposed to forget, aren't you? People who have car crashes forget what happened and arc surprised when they wake up in hospital. So why couldn't he forget? Because writers remember everything, Paul, especially the things that hurt. If you point to a writer's scars, he will tell you the story of every small one. From the big ones you get novels. Perhaps memory would heal him. But why should he bother to remember? She had done it, and all the time between then and now had been painful and boring, except when he had worked on his silly book in order to escape feeling pain and being bored. There was no point in remembering, no point in anything. Hut there was. The point was Misery, because Misery kept him alive. As long as he was writing the book Annie let him live. But he wasn't writing the book for Annie; he wasn't writing the hook to please Annie, but to escape from her. And then he realized that as long as he was writing the book he let 57 himself live too. He could have died that day, the day of the axe, but he didn't - and he didn't because he wanted to finish the book! It wasn't just Annie: he wanted to know what happened too. He was a writer, and writers remember everything, so he let himself remember. This time the cloud had been darker, thicker, smoother. There was a feeling not of floating but of sinking. Sometimes thoughts came and sometimes, dimly, he heard Annie's voice. She sounded afraid: 'Drink this, Paul . . . you've got to!' How close had he come to sinking on the day of the axe? He didn't know, but he felt almost no pain during the week after the 'operation', which seemed to show that he was close to death. So did the fear in Annie's voice. He had lain there, hardly breathing. And what brought him out of it, out of the cloud, was Misery. The book was unfinished. Paul didn't know what the ending was going to be and he didn't know how some of the details fitted together. He never knew everything about the novels he wrote; he always waited to find out as eagerly as any reader- And this meant that there were unfinished questions in his mind. Those questions worried him - and so he came out of the cloud to find out what would happen to Misery. He chose to live. She didn't want to let him return to work - not at first. He could see in her eyes that she had been frightened and was still uncertain. She had come closer to killing him than she had intended. She was taking extraordinary care of him - changing the bandages on his stump every eight hours, washing him down. While he was unconscious she also filled in all the 'n's in the typescript. It was as if she was saying to him: You can't think that I'm cruel to you, Paul, when I look after you so well and even write all those 'n's. He was finally able to persuade her that returning to work would help him, not harm him. And she too wanted urgently to 58 know what was going to happen in the book. This was the one thing the two of them in that house shared this crazy interest in Misery's adventures. He had always known he could write good books - books like Fast Cars - and that the Misery books were just a way of making money. But why had he written so many Misery books? Ho had plenty of money. It was - and he almost hated to admit it to himself - because they gave him something his other books did not: the Misery books gave him the excitement of needing to know what would happen in the adventure. He shared this with his millions of readers, who eagerly turned the pages; he shared this with Annie. It was crazy. He was going to die anyway; she was going to kill him. But he still had to write. It was more than just a way of escaping the cruel reality of his situation: he had to find out how the story would end. And it was the best Misery novel he had ever written, just as Annie had said it would be. At first, sitting and typing were extremely painful and he could work only for short periods of time. The pain in his stump would burst into flame and it would flash through his body. But gradually he was able to work more, and he was right: he did regain some strength. He would never be the man he had been in the past, but he did recover some health. One day Annie had come in with some ice-cream. Although he didn't like it, he forced himself to eat it for fear of angering her. There was something about her that day which worried him. It was as if she was pretending to be cheerful. And then she came out with it - the reason for the gift of the ice-cream. She put her spoon down, wiped her chin with the back of her hand and said pleasantly: 'Tell me the rest.' Paul put his own spoon down. 'I beg your pardon?' 'Tell me the rest of the story. I can't wait.' He ought to have guessed that this would happen, 'I can't do that,' he said. Her face had darkened immediately. 'Why not?' 59 'Because I'm a bad storyteller.' She ate the rest of her ice-cream in five huge mouthfuls. Paul's teeth ached just from watching her. Then she put her dish down and looked at him angrily, not as if he was the great Paul Sheldon, her hero, but as if he was someone who had dared to criticize the great Paul Sheldon. 'If you're a bad storyteller, how have you written so many books - books which have sold millions and millions of copies?' 'I didn't say I was a bad story-writer. I think I'm good at that, in fact. But I'm a useless story-teller.' 'You're just making up a stupid excuse.' Now her hands were closed into fists, tight against the sides of her skirt. He found that he didn't really care that she was angry. He was frightened of being hurt again, but part of him didn't care what happened. 'It's not an excuse,' he said. 'The two things are quite different. People who tell stories usually can't write stories. If you think writers are any good at talking you ought to watch some poor fool of a novelist being interviewed on TV. Apart from that, I never quite know what the ending of one of my stories is going to be. I only really know when I've written it.' 'Well, I don't want to wait,' she said like a spoiled child. 'I brought you some nice ice-cream, and at least you could tell me a few things. All right, you needn't tell me the whole story, but Annie fired some questions at Paul about the book, but Paul shook his head to show that he wouldn't tell, She became even blacker, but her voice was soft. 'You're making me very angry. You know that, don't you, Paul?' 'Of course I know it, but I can't help it.' 'I could make you tell,' she said, but she knew she couldn't. She could hurt him so that he said a lot of things, but she couldn't make him tell a story whose ending he didn't know. The blackness was beginning to disappear from her face. She was fighting an impossible fight. 'Annie, I'm not being selfish. I'm not telling you because I 60 really want you to like the story. If I try to tell you it'll come out wrong, and then you won't like it and you won't want the book any more.' And then what will happen to me? 'But does Hezekiah really know about Misery's father? You could at least tell me that.' 'Do you want the novel or do you want a bedtime story?' he asked. 'Don't you dare be so sarcastic with me!' she shouted. 'Then don't pretend that you don't understand what I'm saying,' he shouted back. She pulled back from him in surprise and the last of the blackness disappeared from her face. He had skated on thin ice that time. He had expected her to get angry or depressed, but instead they had returned to the old routine: Paul wrote and Annie read what he wrote each day and filled in the missing letters. But in fact he had made her angry. Her anger stayed just below the surface, however, so he was never aware of it - at least not until a week later, when he had complained about the typewriter, about the missing 'n'. 'Well, if it bothers you so much I'll have to give you something to stop you thinking about that stupid "n",' Annie said. She left the room and he heard her in the kitchen, looking for something in the drawers. She was cursing in her peculiar way about 'stupid' this and 'dirty' that. Ten minutes later she came in with the syringe, the bottle of dark liquid and an electric knife. Paul immediately began to scream. Anne tested the knife and Paul again begged and promised to be good. He twisted and turned in his wheelchair. 'Stay still,' she ordered, 'or I'll use this knife on your throat.' He stayed still while she poured the liquid on his thumb and on the blade of the knife. She switched the knife on and bent over him, concentrating on her work. As the blade hit into the flesh between his thumb and finger she told him - in a voice which suggested that this was going to hurt her more than it was going to hurt him - that she loved him. 61 She had cut his thumb off in the morning, and then that night she had hurried into his room, carrying a cake and singing 'Happy Birthday to You'. It wasn't his birthday. There were candles ail over the cake, in no order. There, in the exact centre of the cake, like an extra big candle, had been his thumb - his now-grey thumb - with the nail a little rough because he sometimes chewed it when he was thinking, if you promise to be good, she had told him, you can have a piece of cake, but you won't have to eat any of the special candle. So he had promised to be good - and so he wasn't going to complain that the typewriter had now lost its 't' and its 'e' as well. Paul was nearly asleep, sitting in his wheelchair by the window, listening to the steady sound of the lawnmower's engine and remembering. He jumped and wondered what had woken him up. At first he didn't believe what he saw out of the window coming into Annie's farm; he thought he must really be asleep. It was a police car.