der Valk than Paul had given him credit for at the time. And this had caused another memory to resurface: finishing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at the age of twelve on a hot summer day, going to the refrigerator for a cold glass of lemonade . . . and then suddenly changing direction and speeding up from an amble to an all-out bolt which had ended in the bathroom. There he had leaned over the toilet and vomited.
Paul suddenly remembered other examples of this odd mania: the way people had mobbed the Baltimore docks each month when the packet bearing the new installment of Mr. Dickens’s Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist was due (some had drowned, but this did not discourage the others); the old woman of a hundred and five who had declared she would live until Mr. Galsworthy finished The Forsyte Saga—and who had died less than an hour after having the final page of the final volume read to her; the young mountain climber hospitalized with a supposedly fatal case of hypothermia whose friends had read The Lord of the Rings to him nonstop, around the clock, until he came out of his coma; hundreds of other such incidents.
Every “best-selling” writer of fiction would, he supposed, have his own personal example or examples of radical reader involvement with the make-believe worlds the writer creates . . . examples of the Scheherazade complex, Paul thought now, half-dreaming as the sound of Annie’s mower ebbed and flowed at some great echoing distance. He remembered getting two letters suggesting Misery theme parks, on the order of Disney World or Great Adventure. One of these letters had included a crude blueprint. But the blue-ribbon winner (at least until Annie Wilkes had entered his life) had been Mrs. Roman D. Sandpiper III, of Ink Beach, Florida. Mrs. Roman D. Sandpiper, whose given name was Virginia, had turned an upstairs room of her home into Misery’s Parlor. She included Polaroids of Misery’s Spinning Wheel, Misery’s Escritoire (complete with a half-completed bread-and-butter note to Mr. Faverey, saying she would be in attendance at the School Hall Recitation on 20th Nov. inst.—done in what Paul thought was an eerily apt hand for his heroine, not a round and flowing ladies’ script but a half-feminine copperplate), Misery’s Couch, Misery’s Sampler (Let Love Instruct You; Do Not Presume to Instruct Love), etc., etc. The furnishings, Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper’s letter said, were all genuine, not reproductions, and while Paul could not tell for sure, he guessed that it was the truth. If so, this expensive bit of make-believe must have cost Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper thousands of dollars. Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper hastened to assure him that she was not using his character to make money, nor did she have any plans in that direction—heaven forbid!—but she did want him to see the pictures, and to tell her what she had wrong (which, she was sure, must be a great deal). Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper also hoped for his opinion. Looking at these pictures had given him a feeling which was strange yet eerily intangible—it had been like looking at photographs of his own imagination, and he knew that from that moment on, whenever he tried to imagine Misery’s little combination parlor and study, Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper’s Polaroids would leap immediately into his mind, obscuring imagination with their cheery but one-dimensional concreteness. Tell her what was wrong? That was madness. From now on he would be the one to wonder about that. He had written back, a brief note of congratulations and admiration—a note which hinted not at all at certain questions concerning Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper which had crossed his mind: how tightly wrapped was she? for instance—and had received another letter in return, with a fresh slew of Polaroids. Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper’s first communication had consisted of a two-page handwritten letter and seven Polaroids. This second consisted of a ten-page handwritten letter and forty Polaroids. The letter was an exhaustive (and ultimately exhausting) manual of where Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper had found each piece, how much she had paid, and the restoration processes involved. Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper told him that she had found a man named McKibbon who owned an old squirrel-rifle, and had gotten him to put the bullet-hole in the wall by the chair—while she could not swear to the historical accuracy of the gun, Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”)