Read Misery for Free Online Page B

Sheldon, and she —
    'She's my number-one fan,' Paul muttered, and put an arm over his eyes.
        An awful memory bloomed there in the dark: his mother had taken him to the Boston Zoo, and he had been looking at a great big bird. It had the most beautiful feathers — red and purple and royal blue — that he had ever seen . . . and the saddest eyes. He had asked his mother where the bird came from and when she said Africa he had understood it was doomed to die in the cage where it lived, far away from wherever God had meant it to be, and he cried and his mother bought him an ice-cream cone and for awhile he had stopped crying and then he remembered and started again and so she had taken him home, telling him as they rode the trolley back to Lynn that he was a bawl-baby and a sissy.
      Its feathers. Its eyes.
      The throbbing in his legs began to cycle up.
       No. No, no.
        He pressed the crook of his elbow more tightly against his eyes. From the barn he could hear spaced thudding noises. Impossible to tell what they were, of course, but in his imagination
    (your MIND your CREATIVITY that is all I meant)
        he could see her pushing bales of hay out of the loft with the heel of her boot, could see them tumbling to the barn floor.
       Africa. That bird came from Africa. From —
      Then, cutting cleanly through this like a sharp knife, came her agitated, almost-screaming voice: Do you think that when they put me up there on the stand in Den —
      Up on the stand. When they put me up on the stand in Denver.
      D o you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God?
       ('I don't know where he gets it.')
       I do.
       ('He's ALWAYS writing things like this down.')
       State your name.
       ('Nobody on my side of the family had an imagination like his.')
       Annie Wilkes.
       ('So vivid!')
       My name is Annie Wilkes.
      He willed her to say more; she would not.
       'Come on,' he muttered, his arm over his eyes — this was the way he thought best, the way he imagined best. His mother liked to tell Mrs Mulvaney on the other side of the fence what a marvellous imagination he had, so vivid, and what wonderful little stories he was always writing down (except, of course, when she was calling him a sissy and a bawl-baby). 'Come on, come on, come on.'
        He could see the courtroom in Denver, could see Annie Wilkes on the stand, not wearing jeans now but a rusty purple-black dress and an awful hat. He could see that the courtroom was crowded with spectators, that the judge, vas bald and wearing glasses. The judge had a white moustache. There was a birthmark beneath the white moustache. The white moustache covered most of it but not quite all.
       Annie Wilkes.
       (He read at just three! Can you imagine!')
       That spirit of . . . of fan-love . . .
       ('He's always writing things down, making things up.')
       Now I must rinse.
       (Africa. That bird came from')
      'Come on ,' he whispered, but could get no further. The bailiff asked her to state her name, and over and over again she said it was Annie Wilkes, but she said no more; she sat there with her fibrous solid ominous body displacing air and said her name over and over again but no more than that.
       Still trying to imagine why the ex-nurse who had taken him prisoner might have once been put on the stand in Denver, Paul drifted off to sleep.

    12

    He was in a hospital ward. Great relief swept through him — so great he felt like crying. Something had happened when he was asleep, someone had come, or perhaps Annie had had a change of heart or mind. It didn't matter. He had gone to sleep in the monster-woman's house and had awakened in the hospital.
        But surely they would not have put him in a long ward like this? It was as big as an airplane hangar! Identical rows of men (with identical bottles of nutrient hung from identical IV trays beside their beds) filled