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R Y Visit our shop: Mrs Roman D. You got a funny idea of just, Mr Paul Sheldon. Yeah, he supposed he would get through it, if the goddam typewriter held together. Annie laid the three pages of typescript on the night-table beside him and he waited to see what she would say about them. The hypothetical old prude might have run screaming from the sight of Misery, but her screams would have been caused by terror and revulsion rather then outraged propriety. Annie had become a goddess, a thing that was half woman and half Lawnboy, a weird female centaur. I keep them right next to the freezer compartment, and that keeps them as cold as you can get them without freezing them.she said so. He thought he could still hear her laughing and laughing and laughing. Her eyes searched his face. In short, a pose. Now, however, the sun was out again and the sky was brilliant once more. The door at the far end of the huge ward opened and in came Annie Wilkes ? only she was dressed in a long aproned dress and there was a mobcap on her head; she was dressed as Misery Chastain in Misery's Love. The first real memory: stopping, and being raped back into life by the woman's stinking breath. It would be nice to believe he had performed heroically, but he supposed it was only that escape thing again, because the pain had been really dreadful. The door at the far end of the huge ward opened and in came Annie Wilkes ? only she was dressed in a long aproned dress and there was a mobcap on her head; she was dressed as Misery Chastain in Misery's Love. The piece of paper was still in her hand, and every now and then she would shake it in front of her own nose as if in self-chastisement. He had been dozing peacefully enough in front of his own fire with a book in his lap when Colter came, waking him up. "She looked at him with her black eyes burning in her solid yet doughy white face and Paul thought: If Andrew Pomeroy could get it up for you, Annie, he must have been as crazy as the caretaker that burned down the hotel. He looked to Paul like a man trying very hard to scratch that one itch you can never quite reach. Miss Saint James shared an off-campus apartment on Delorme Street with a sister nursing student, Anne Wilkes, of Bakersfield. It seemed possible that Kushner might have stumbled across the growing, distilling, or stockpiling of one of these substances quite by accident during his search for signs of the tenderfoot writer. The limited vista now opening before him wag extremely unpleasant: six weeks of life which he would spend suffering with his broken bones and renewing his acquaintance with Misery Chastain, n?e Carmichael, followed by a hasty interment in the back yard. They had the run of the house ? and they would be attracted by all the oogy stuff Annie had left around. Now she stood beside the car, shaking her finger at his closed window, and again Paul could dimly hear her voice: " ? think you are so-so-so smaa-aart! Impossible to tell what they were, of course, but in his imagination (your MIND your CREATIVITY that is all I meant) he could see her pushing bales of hay out of the loft with the heel of her boot, could see them tumbling to the barn floor. He guessed that some of this hoarding was a simple nod to the realities of her situation: she was a woman alone living in the high country, where a person might reasonably expect to spend a certain period ? maybe only a day, but sometimes as long as a week or even two ? cut off from the rest of the world. these things mattered not at all, these things were only shadows behind the pain When the playwright got his hero into an impossible jam, this chair decked with flowers came down from overhead. She came two or three hesitant steps closer yet, and observed a hand reaching from the earth of a fresh grave, the fingers frozen in a hideous gesture of supplication. There was something big and black pistol-gripped in one hand and for one wild moment Paul thought it was a tear-gas gun. If the people after your hide had found this book, Annie, you would have been in jail or some asylum ? until the end of time. They even sent down a coupler ladies from the bleedin»London Psychic Society to look inter that "un! There was a snap as the pin broke in two, the part in the lock falling in, and he had a dull moment to consider his failure before he saw that the door was slowly swinging open with the tongue of the lock sticking out of the plate like a steel finger. |