electrical gadget. A toaster, or maybe a heating pad.
“I said to Tony, ‘That storm is going south.’ ” She spoke slowly at first, almost groggily, but then her words began to catch up to normal cadence and to fill with normal conversational brightness. But now he was alerted. Everything she said was a little strange, a little offbeat. Listening to Annie was like listening to a song played in the wrong key.
“But he said, ‘It changed its mind.’
“‘Oh poop!’ I said. ‘I better get on my horse and ride.’
“‘I’d stay in town if you can, Miz Wilkes,’ he said. ‘Now they’re saying on the radio that it’s going to be a proper jeezer and nobody is prepared.’
“But of course I had to get back—there’s no one to feed the animals but me. The nearest people are the Roydmans, and they are miles from here. Besides, the Roydmans don’t like me.”
She cast an eye shrewdly on him as she said this last, and when he didn’t reply she tapped the spoon against the rim of the bowl in peremptory fashion.
“Done?”
“Yes, I’m full, thanks. It was very good. Do you have a lot of livestock?”
Because, he was already thinking, if you do, that means you’ve got to have some help. A hired man, at least. “Help” was the operant word. Already that seemed like the operant word, and he had seen she wore no wedding ring.
“Not very much,” she said. “Half a dozen laying hens. Two cows. And Misery.”
He blinked.
She laughed. “You won’t think I’m very nice, naming a sow after the brave and beautiful woman you made up. But that’s her name, and I meant no disrespect.” After a moment’s thought she added: “She’s very friendly.” The woman wrinkled up her nose and for a moment became a sow, even down to the few bristly whiskers that grew on her chin. She made a pig-sound: “Whoink! Whoink! Whuh-Whuh-WHOINK!”
Paul looked at her wide-eyed.
She did not notice; she had gone away again, her gaze dim and musing. Her eyes held no reflection but the lamp on the bed-table, twice reflected, dwelling faintly in each.
At last she gave a faint start and said: “I got about five miles and then the snow started. It came fast—once it starts up here, it always does. I came creeping along, with my lights on, and then I saw your car off the road, overturned.” She looked at him disapprovingly. “You didn’t have your lights on.”
“It took me by surprise,” he said, remembering only at that moment how he had been taken by surprise. He did not yet remember that he had also been quite drunk.
“I stopped,” she said. “If it had been on an upgrade, I might not have. Not very Christian, I know, but there were three inches on the road already, and even with a four-wheel drive you can’t be sure of getting going again once you lose your forward motion. It’s easier just to say to yourself, ‘Oh, they probably got out, caught a ride,’ et cetera, et cetera. But it was on top of the third big hill past the Roydmans’, and it’s flat there for awhile. So I pulled over, and as soon as I got out I heard groaning. That was you, Paul.”
She gave him a strange maternal grin.
For the first time, clearly, the thought surfaced in Paul Sheldon’s mind: I am in trouble here. This woman is not right.
6
She sat beside him where he lay in what might have been a spare bedroom for the next twenty minutes or so and talked. As his body used the soup, the pain in his legs reawakened. He willed himself to concentrate on what she was saying, but was not entirely able to succeed. His mind had bifurcated. On one side he was listening to her tell how she had dragged him from the wreckage of his ’74 Camaro—that was the side where the pain throbbed and ached like a couple of old splintered pilings beginning to wink and flash between the heaves of the withdrawing tide. On the other he could see himself at the Boulderado Hotel, finishing his new novel, which did not—thank God for small favors—feature Misery Chastain.
There were all sorts of reasons for him not to write about Misery, but one loomed above the rest, ironclad and unshakable. Misery—thank God for large favors—was finally dead. She had died five pages from the end of Misery’s Child. Not a dry eye in the house when that had happened, including Paul’s