is going out on a mile-high wave in a fucking Rolls this is—
“What do you want first, Paul?” she asked. “The good news or the bad news?”
“Good news first.” He managed a big foolish grin. “Guess the bad news is that this is THE END, huh? Guess you didn’t like the book so great, huh? Too bad ... I tried. It was even working. I was just starting to ... you know ... starting to drive on it.”
She looked at him reproachfully. “I love the book, Paul. I told you that, and I never lie. I love it so much I don’t want to read any more until the very end. I’m sorry to have to make you fill in the n’s yourself, but ... it’s like peeking.”
His big foolish grin stretched even wider; he thought soon it would meet in the back, tie a lover’s knot there, and most of his poor old bean would just topple off. Maybe it would land in the bedpan beside the bed. In some deep, dim part of his mind where the dope hadn’t yet reached, alarm bells were going off. She loved the book, which meant she didn’t mean to kill him. Whatever was going on, she didn’t mean to kill him. And unless his assessment of Annie Wilkes was totally off the beam, that meant she had something even worse in store.
Now the light in the room did not look dull; it looked marvellously pure, marvellously full of its own gray and eldritch charm; he could imagine cranes half-glimpsed in gunmetal mist standing in one-legged silence beside upland lakes in that light, could imagine the mica flecks in rocks jutting from spring grasses in upland meadows shining with the shaggy glow of glazed window-glass in that light, could imagine elves shucking their busy selves off to work in lines under the dew-soaked leaves of early ivy in that light....
Oh BOY are you stoned, Paul thought, and giggled faintly.
Annie smiled in return. “The good news,” she said, “is that your car is gone. I’ve been very worried about your car, Paul. I knew it would take a storm like this to get rid of it, and maybe even that wouldn’t do the trick. The spring run-off got rid of that Pomeroy dirty bird, but a car is ever so much heavier than a man, isn’t it? Even a man as full of cockadoodie as he was. But the storm and the run-off combined was enough to do the trick. Your car is gone. That’s the good news.”
“What ...” More faint alarm bells. Pomeroy ... he knew that name, but couldn’t think exactly how he knew it. Then it came to him. Pomeroy. The late great Andrew Pomeroy, twenty-three, of Cold Stream Harbor, New York. Found in the Grider Wildlife Preserve, wherever that was.
“Now Paul,” she said, in the prim voice he knew so well. “No need to be coy. I know you know who Andy Pomeroy was, because I know you’ve read my book. I suppose that I sort of hoped you would read it, you know; otherwise, why would I have left it out? But I made sure, you know—I make sure of everything. And sure enough, the threads were broken.”
“The threads,” he said faintly.
“Oh yes. I read once about a way you’re supposed to find out for sure if someone has been snooping around in your drawers. You tape a very fine thread across each one, and if you come back and find one broken, why you know, don’t you? You know someone’s been snooping. You see how easy it is?”
“Yes, Annie.” He was listening, but what he really wanted to do was trip out on the marvellous quality of the light.
Again she bent over to check whatever it was she had at the foot of the bed; again he heard a faint dull clunk/ clank, wood thumping against some metallic object, and then she turned back, brushing absently at her hair again.
“I did that with my book—only I didn’t really use threads, you know; I used hairs from my own head. I put them across the thickness of the book in three different places and when I came in this morning—very early, creeping like a little mousie so I wouldn’t wake you up—all three threads were broken, so I knew you had been looking at my book.” She paused, and smiled. It was, for Annie, a very winning smile, yet it had an unpleasant quality he could not quite