me into the chair. Mighty fuck! I got it!” The dreaded effword was out before he could help it, but this time it didn’t seem to matter—she was looking at him respectfully, and with not a little awe. Here was the secular version of the Pentecostal fire, burning before her very eyes.
“Of course, Paul.”
She got him into the chair as quickly as she could. She began to roll him toward the window and Paul shook his head impatiently. “This won’t take long,” he said, “but it’s very important.”
“Is it about the book?”
“It is the book. Be quiet. Don’t talk to me.”
Ignoring the typewriter—he never used the typewriter to make notes—he seized one of the ballpoints and quickly covered a single sheet of paper with a scrawl that probably no one but himself could have read.
They WERE related. It was bees and it affected them both the same way because they WERE related. Misery’s an orph. And guess what? The Evelyn-Hyde babe was MISERY’S SISTER! Or maybe half-sister. That would probably work better. Who gets the first hint? Shinny? No. Shinny’s a ninny. Mrs. R. She can go to see Charl. E-H’s mommy and
And now he was struck by an idea of such intense loveliness—in terms of the plot at least—that he looked up, mouth open, eyes wide.
“Paul?” Annie asked anxiously.
“She knew,” Paul whispered. “Of course she did. At least strongly suspected. But—”
He bent to his notes again.
she—Mrs. R.—realizes at once that Mrs. E-H has got to know M. is related to her daught. Same hair or something. Remember E-H’s mom is starting to look like a maj. character. You’ll need to work her up. Mrs. R. starts to realize Mrs. E-H MAY EVEN HAVE KNOWN MISERY WAS BURIED ALIVE!! SHIT ON A SHINGLE! LOVE IT! Suppose the ole lady guessed Misery was a leftover of her fuck-‘em-and-leave-’ em days and
He put the pen down, looked at the paper, then slowly picked the pen up again and scrawled a few more lines.
Three necessary points. 1. How does Mrs. E-H react to Mrs. R’s suspicions? She should be either murderous or puke-up scared. I prefer scared but think A.W. would like murderous, so OK murd.
2. How does Ian get into this?
3. Misery’s amnesia?
Oh, and here’s one to grow on. Does Misery find out her mom lived with the possibility that not just one but two of her daughters had been buried alive rather than speak up?
Why not?
“You could help me back into bed now if you wanted,” Paul said. “If I sounded mad, I’m sorry. I was just excited.”
“That’s all right, Paul.” She still sounded awed.
Since then the work had driven on famously. Annie was right; the story was turning out to be a good deal more gruesome than the other Misery books—the first chapter had not been a fluke but a harbinger. But it was also more richly plotted than any Misery novel since the first, and the characters were more lively. The latter three Misery novels had been little more than straightforward adventure tales with a fair amount of piquantly described sex thrown in to please the ladies. This book, he began to understand, was a gothic novel, and thus was more dependent on plot than on situation. The challenges were constant. It was not just a question of Can You? to begin the book—for the first time in years, it was Can You? almost every day . . . and he was finding he could.
Then the rain came and things changed.
13
From the eighth of April until the fourteenth they enjoyed an unbroken run of fine weather. The sun beamed down from a cloudless sky and temperatures sometimes rose into the mid-sixties. Brown patches began to appear in the field behind Annie’s neat red barn. Paul hid behind his work and tried not to think about his car, the discovery of which was already overdue. His work did not suffer, but his mood did; he felt more and more that he was living in a cloud chamber, breathing an atmosphere thick with uncoalesced electricity. Whenever the Camaro stole into his mind, he immediately called the Brain Police and had the thought led away in handcuffs and leg-irons. Trouble was, the nasty thing had a way of escaping and coming back time after time, in one form or another.
One night he dreamed that Mr. Rancho Grande returned to Annie’s place. He got out of his well-kept Chevrolet Bel Air, holding part of the Camaro’s bumper in one hand and its steering