the gash, shearing through the rest of his leg and burying itself deep in the mattress. Springs boinked and squoinked.
Annie pulled the axe free and tossed it aside. She looked absently at the jetting stump for a moment and then picked up the box of matches. She lit one. Then she picked up the propane torch with the word Bernz-O-matiC on the side and twisted the valve on the side. The torch hissed. Blood poured from the place where he no longer was. Annie held the match delicately under the nozzle of the Bernz-O-matiC. There was a floof! sound. A long yellow flame appeared. Annie adjusted it to a hard blue line of fire.
“Can’t suture,” she said. “No time. Tourniquet’s no good. No central pressure point. Got to
(rinse)
cauterize. ”
She bent. Paul screamed as fire splashed over the raw and bleeding stump. Smoke drifted up. It smelled sweet. He and his first wife had honeymooned on Maui. There had been a luau. This smell reminded him of the smell of the pig when they brought it out of the pit where it had cooked all day. The pig had been on a stick, sagging, black, falling apart.
The pain was screaming. He was screaming.
“Almost over,” she said, and turned the valve, and now the ground sheet caught fire around the stump that was no longer bleeding, the stump that was as black as the pig’s hide had been when they had brought it out of the luau pit—Eileen had turned away but Paul had watched, fascinated, as they pulled off the pig’s crackling skin as easily as you might skim off a sweater after a football game.
“Almost over—”
She turned the torch off. His leg lay in a line of flames with his severed foot wavering beyond it. She bent and now came up with his old friend the yellow floor-bucket. She dumped it over the flames.
He was screaming, screaming. The pain! The goddess! The pain! O Africa!
She stood looking at him, at the darkening, bloody sheet, with vague consternation—her face was the face of a woman who hears on her radio that an earthquake has killed ten thousand people in Pakistan or Turkey.
“You’ll be all right, Paul,” she said, but her voice was suddenly frightened. Her eyes began to dart aimlessly around as they had when it seemed that the fire of his burning book might get out of control. They suddenly fixed on something, almost with relief. “I’ll just get rid of the trash.”
She picked up his foot. Its toes were still spasming. She carried it across the room. By the time she got to the door they had stopped moving. He could see a scar on the instep and remembered how he had gotten that, how he had stepped on a piece of bottle when he was just a kid. Had that been at Revere Beach? Yes, he thought it had been. He remembered he had cried and his father had told him it was just a little cut. His father had told him to stop acting like someone had cut his goddam foot off. Annie paused at the door and looked back at Paul, who shrieked and writhed in the charred and blood-soaked bed, his face a deathly fading white.
“Now you’re hobbled,” she said, “and don’t you blame me. It’s your own fault.”
She went out.
So did Paul.
23
The cloud was back. Paul dived for it, not caring if the cloud meant death instead of unconsciousness this time. He almost hoped it did. Just ... no pain, please. No memories, no pain, no horror, no Annie Wilkes.
He dived for the cloud, dived into the cloud, dimly hearing the sounds of his own shrieks and smelling his own cooked meat.
As his thoughts faded, he thought: Goddess! Kill you! Goddess! Kill you! Goddess!
Then there was nothing but nothing.
III
PAUL
It’s no good. I’ve been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can’t. Writing here is a sort of drug. It’s the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote.... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn’t understand. I mean, it’s vanity. But it seems a sort of magic.... And I just can’t live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
—JOHN FOWLES The Collector
1
CHAPTER 32
“Oh blessed Jesus,” Ia moa ed, a d made a co vulsive moveme t forward. Geoffrey grasped his frie d’s arm. The steady beat of the drums pulsed i