again and again he saw her bringing her fist down on the remains of his knee with all the force of an angry drunk hammering on an oak bar, again and again he was swallowed in that terrible blue-white nova of pain.
“Please, God, please,” he moaned as the Cherokee started outside with a bang and a roar. “Please, God, please—let me out of this or kill me ... let me out of this or kill me.”
The roar of the engine faded off down the road and God did neither and he was left with his tears and the pain, which was now fully awake and raving through his body.
30
He thought later that the world, in its unfailing perversity, would probably construe those things which he did next as acts of heroism. And he would probably let them—but in fact what he did was nothing more than a final staggering grab for self-preservation.
Dimly he seemed to hear some madly enthusiastic sportscaster—Howard Cosell or Warner Wolf or perhaps that all-time crazy Johnny Most—describing the scene, as if his effort to get at her drug supply before the pain killed him was some strange sporting event—a trial substitution for Monday Night Football, perhaps. What would you call a sport like that, anyway? Run for the Dope?
“I just cannot believe the guts this Sheldon kid is displaying today!” the sportscaster in Paul Sheldon’s head was enthusing. “I don’t believe anyone in Annie Wilkes Stadium—or in the home viewing audience, for that matter—thought he had the sly-test chance of getting that wheelchair moving after the blow he took, but I believe ... yes, it is! It’s moving! Let’s look at the replay!”
Sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes. He licked a mixture of salt and tears off his lips. The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.
It was only the thought of the pills, the Novril that she kept somewhere in the house, which got him moving. The locked bedroom door ... the possibility the dope might not be in the downstairs bathroom as he had surmised but hidden somewhere ... the chance she might come back and catch him ... these things mattered not at all, these things were only shadows behind the pain. He would deal with each problem as it came up or he would die. That was all.
Moving caused the band of fire below his waist and in his legs to sink in deeper, cinching his legs like belts studded with hot, inward-pointing spikes. But the chair did move. Very slowly the chair began to move.
He had managed about four feet before realizing he was going to do nothing more useful than roll the wheelchair past the door and into the far corner unless he could turn it.
He grasped the right wheel, shuddering,
(think of the pills, think of the relief of the pills)
and bore down on it as hard as he could. Rubber squeaked minutely on the wooden floor, the cries of mice. He bore down, once strong and now flabby muscles quivering like jelly, lips peeling back from his gritted teeth, and the wheelchair slowly pivoted.
He grasped both wheels and got the chair moving again. This time he rolled five feet before stopping to straighten himself out. Once he’d done it, he grayed out.
He swam back to reality five minutes later, hearing the dim, goading voice of that sportscaster in his head: “He’s trying to get going again! I just cannot be-leeve the guts of this Sheldon kid!”
The front of his mind only knew about the pain; it was the back that directed his eyes. He saw it near the door and rolled over to it. He reached down, but the tips of his fingers stopped a clear three inches short of the floor, where one of the two or three bobbypins that had fallen from her hair as she charged him lay. He bit his lip, unaware of the sweat running down his face and neck and darkening his pajama shirt.
“I don’t think he can get that pin, folks—it’s been a fan-tas-tic effort, but I’m afraid this is where it all ends.”
Well, maybe not.
He let himself slouch to the right in the wheelchair, at first trying to ignore the pain in his right side—pain that