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    Misery
    Misery
    Misery
    Ebook478 pages7 hours

    Misery

    By Stephen King

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The #1 New York Times bestseller about a famous novelist held hostage in a remote location by his “number one fan.” One of “Stephen King’s best…genuinely scary” (USA TODAY).

    Bestselling novelist Paul Sheldon thinks he’s finally free of Misery Chastain. In a controversial career move, he’s just killed off the popular protagonist of his beloved romance series in favor of expanding his creative horizons. But such a change doesn’t come without consequences. After a near-fatal car accident in rural Colorado leaves his body broken, Paul finds himself at the mercy of the terrifying rescuer who’s nursing him back to health—his self-proclaimed number one fan, Annie Wilkes. Annie is very upset over what Paul did to Misery and demands that he find a way to bring her back by writing a new novel—his best yet, and one that’s all for her. After all, Paul has all the time in the world to do so as a prisoner in her isolated house...and Annie has some very persuasive and violent methods to get exactly what she wants...

    “King at his best…a winner!” —The New York Times
    “Unadulteratedly terrifying…frightening.” —Publishers Weekly
    “Classic King…full of twists and turns and mounting suspense.” —The Boston Globe
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJan 1, 2016
    ISBN9781501141249
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for Misery

    4/5

    4,840 ratings112 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book is specifically a writer's nightmare. It's about a writer who kills off a character after several books and a whacko fan who holds him hostage to get him to bring the character back to life somehow. It was very tense and at times harrowing. Enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      I’ve been meaning to read Misery for years and just never seemed to get around to it. A couple weeks ago I randomly found a copy at the thrift store and I’m so glad I did. I’m a huge Stephen King fan and Misery was such a great read—I couldn’t put it down until I was done. It was gruesome and horrifying and I loved it so much.
    • 5/5
      Easily the single most gruesome and disturbing book I've ever read.
    • 4/5
      One of the best of Stephen King's works. I enjoyed how far she went with her obsession.
    • 5/5
      I think this is probably one of Kings five best books, and one that doesn't rely on supernatural horror which earns it star just for that.
    • 5/5
      I originally read this book back in High school, my first experience reading King. I loved this book when I first read it & it's remained one of my favorites these past 20 years. Recently I've gotten into reading all the classic and newer King books that I hadn't read before. I had forgotten how much I loved his books, he's such an amazing storyteller! I was curious to see if Misery would still hold up as my all time favorite King after recently reading so many so I decided to re-read it. Surprisingly, it still scared the cheap out of me even though I knew what was coming LOL gotta say, it's still my favorite although now The Shining is a close second ;)
    • 4/5
      It took a little while for me to get into this one, but the pacing wasn't that slow, I think the personalities just took a while to grab my interest. It definitely had some gory moments, and some suspense, some fast-pacing and then drawn-out, and intriguing. I think Dean Koontz usually keeps the pace up, and King likes to shift gears now and then, so I'm a little on the fence about his style. Overall I liked it, it was a creepy story, but a definite humanity to it.
    • 5/5
      Where I got the book: well, I was staying in my niece's old room while I was in England, my sister and her husband being happy empty nesters, and there it was on the shelf. A tattered mmpb with exactly the schlocky cover shown above, its pages yellowed like the teeth of a 100-year-old smoker, smelling faintly of mildew even though the room was dry and pleasant. A used bookstore buy, or a borrow? I have not read Stephen King (except for On Writing) since some time in the 80s when something in The Stand grossed me out so much that I decided to put the book down RIGHT THERE and I was done with King. So I was a little apprehensive about Misery; King, back in the day when I was still reading him, had a way of putting really unpleasant images in my head that stuck with me FOREVER. Was it worth it?I was pleasantly surprised. There's horror in Misery but really very little schlock; what we have here is a thoughtful novel about the writer's craft and the relationship between writer and reader, wrapped up in a scary story that keeps you right where King wants you, with your nose stuck in his book.The plot's pretty simple: Famed novelist Paul Sheldon has found his biggest fan by driving through a snowstorm with one drink too many inside him. He wakes up in Annie Wilkes' remote house with a smashed, broken body to find that he's Annie's prisoner, first of all because she's his biggest fan and then permanently when she finds out he's killed off his heroine, Misery, in his latest book. Oh no, says Annie, that's not right. You have to bring Misery back...Oh my goodness, I couldn't get enough of Annie Wilkes. What a great evil villainess that woman is, all the more so because King gives her the occasional glimpse of humor and likableness. After all, she's a book lover. And she actually makes Paul see the worth in writing the preposterous sagas he both lives off and despises for not being the great literature he feels he ought to write. Misery is REAL for Annie, and in this she speaks for readers everywhere who could care less about great literature, they just want a character they can love and a story they can get lost in. I got lost in the Annie-Paul relationship, a wonderfully delicate balance of power because they both have something the other wants. And the way Annie talks is beyond priceless. I know that woman. She's an American type (seriously, she could be found in no other country) so sharply observed that I found myself chuckling with delight.What King says about writing in this book--about the gotta, bringing it, finding the hole in the paper--is as interesting as his craft memoir On Writing. In fact, often more so. I recommend this book to all writers, and I'm going to acquire my own copy one day because I'll want to read this again. I may read Carrie and The Shining for good measure.
    • 5/5
      creepy - i loved it better than the movie
    • 3/5
      One of his most famous, and creepiest.
    • 5/5
      I thought this book was outstanding. It was slow to begin with but you have to really stick with it.It's about a writer Paul Sheldon who due to very unfortunate circumstances comes across his number one fan who turns out to be a phycopath/crazy nutter.It is one of the best Stephen King books I have read to date and really got my heckles up for the fright factor.I watched the film addaption within the following few days of reading the book and I have to say that the film is no where near as good or frightening as the book.With the way they make re-makes of films these days if they were to make a re-make of Misery they could really go to town on the fright factor as the book was so gory.
    • 5/5
      First words:~ umber whunnyerrnnn umber whunnnnfayunnnThese sounds: even in the haze ~I was looking for a book for the January Horror Challenge (Early modern horror: 1950-1980) and came across Misery in my Kindle collection. Since King wrote this book in 1987, it fell just outside of that Early Modern Horror timeline. However, when I saw it I was reminded that this is a book that I have wanted to read for years (loved the movie ith Kathy Bates and James Cann) and decided to go for it. Not sorry I did! It kept me away from other planned January reads but, oh my, Stephen King writes a good psychological thriller / horror novel. I used to read a lot of his books when I was in my 20’s. I am now in my 60’s. Eventually I got to the point where I was so scared that I had to sleep with the light on and read only in the morning so I would have all the day’s experiences to think about when I went to bed. I then decided that I should not read any more Stephen King and had stayed away from reading horror until a few years ago. Lately, with the LT challenges I have been interested in the genre again. A gruesome, gripping page turner. Once again, I book I could barely put it down. Classified “psychological horror” it is certainly also a “slasher” novel. I repeat, gruesome. If you are squeamish, stay away from this one!I find that Stephen King knows how to pull me into a story. I could feel what Paul (the author kept prisoner) felt. I could feel the madness that Annie Wilkes experienced. I could feel the horror in their interactions. And the suspense! What was going to happen next?I prefer to see a movie first and then read the book. I find that the movie is usually good but the book is always better! If I read the book first and love it, I am often disappointed in the movie rendition. My younger son, on the other hand, prefers to read the book first and then see the movie. He enjoys creating images of the images the author is describing without the influence of the actors, the cinematographer, and the director. Then he can see the movie and enjoy that.I saw the movie many years ago. I don’t remember a lot about it but I do remember how horrifying the whole concept was to me and I remember Kathy Bates’ magnificent, layered portrait of Annie Wilkes. No wonder she won the Oscar for Best Actress that year!As I read the book, of course, I could see nothing but Kathy Bates and James Cann. The other characters from the film were not memorable. I found that having the image of Bates in my mind added to the fear that I experienced as I read it. I seem to be experiencing these horror reads from a different perspective than when I was younger. I understand that thrill-seeking in books and movies allows us human beings to realize a certain sense of accomplishment / satisfaction when we see that we “survived” the horror. I think there is something to be said for my living the horror but knowing that I am safe at home and, really, not at any risk of being in the situation that Paul finds himself in. This is a very disturbing book, and King has said that the book was an elaborate metaphor for his raging cocaine addiction which he conquered in the late 80’s with the help of 12 Step programs.. He has been quoted as saying "Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan."As an addict (flour, sugar and quantities) myself, in a 12 Step Program for Food Addiction, I found that very interesting. I suffer from chronic pain and the lead character in the book also becomes addicted to pain killers. Perhaps all of that explains some of my fascination with this book.And Stephen King is a damn good writer. 4.5 stars
    • 4/5
      Misery - Stephen King ****I saw the film a number of years ago starring the excellent Cathy Bates, so thought I would give the book a try. As usual with King I really enjoyed the book a whole lot more.Paul Sheldon has written about a character called Misery, she has made him a bestseller and a fortune. However he has decided to kill off his creation.....After a car crash he is found by his number one fan, Annie Wilkes, she is not happy with the situation and will do anything to keep Paul writing Misery's tales....Plenty of psychological and horror action in this King offering. I loved it.
    • 5/5
      This brings back great memories from many years ago when I first read the book. I could not stop reading it! It grabbed me and would not let go, what a page turner! I read it so fast the first time I went back to read it again and again and enjoyed it every single time. This is most definitely my favourite King book.
    • 5/5
      Some of my favorite King works have no paranormal elements at all. The horror comes from ordinary people - well almost ordinary. This was the first of King's works I'd read after years of reluctance and putting it off. Boy did I have my eyes opened. All those people saying King is a master were right. This is still my favorite of all his works. Simply delicious.
    • 5/5
      Misery was the second Stephen King book I ever read. This was very shortly after Dolores Claiborne. I came across Misery much the same way I did Dolores Claiborne - through my mother's subscription to the Stephen King Book Club. The big difference here was, my mother knew about me reading Misery. She had already read the novel (her buddy Andrita had loaned her the book when it first came out in 1987), and figured I was of an age (fourteen) where I wouldn't be too terribly scarred by the events of the book. There's nothing sexual about Misery, and for the most part, very little foul language. The violence is rather extreme, but we all know that bad words and intercourse are much worse than chopping people up, right? Anyway, back in the days before the interwebs, the Stephen King Book Club worked like this. They would start your membership by sending you King's newest novel. After that, they'd start sending you his old books in order of publication until a new book came out, and then they would send you the new one. After that, back to the old books. By the time Dolores Claiborne came out, Mom was all the way up to Misery. (By the way, I'm chronicling this nonsense because I will probably forget all this shit in a few years. I don't plan on rereading this man's entire library again before I shuffle off this mortal coil, and I would like to have these reviews to look back upon later in life. My apologies if I'm boring you to death. Where was I...)

      Misery is one of my favorite King novels because it deals with writing and the writing process. And, next to The Shining, it's one of the best denouements he's ever written. I read the book long before I ever saw the movie, and, truth be told, I hated the movie for a long time. Kathy Bates's performance is exceptional, but the differences in the book and the film pissed me off. I didn't like the old sheriff character, and I missed the Lawnboy scene.

      Now here's where shit gets interesting. The book takes place in Sidewinder, Colorado, which is the town nearest the site of the fire-gutted Overlook Hotel. Obvious connection is obvious, right? Well what about the mention of the Beam? Anyone catch that? Here's the exact quote: "And unless his assessment of Annie Wilkes was totally off the beam, that meant she had something even worse in store." Well, there you have it, sports fans. Even Misery comes back to the Dark Tower.

      In summation: I've come to appreciate the movie for the well-made film that it is, but the book, as per usual, is still leagues better. It's a darker, bloodier creature than its cinematic sister, and that's probably the reason I like it more. No denying it, I'm a gorehound at heart. That hobbling scene, friends and neighbors... *shivers*



    • 5/5
      Misery is the story of a writer named Paul Sheldon whose car upturned in the middle of a blizzard in the remote Colorado mountains and who has been rescued by an ex-nurse named Annie Wilkes. Annie insists she is Paul's biggest fan. Paul is famous for his historical romance novels featuring a heroine named Misery Chastain. His legs are shattered in the car crash and Annie is nursing her favorite author back to health. Soon after his accident and in between a narcotic induced haze, Paul begins to realize that Annie has him hooked on the pain killers and that she is insane. He also realizes they are in the middle of nowhere and that nobody knows where he is.The house becomes a prison for Paul and he soon realizes that Annie is not planning on letting him leave until he writes a new Misery book just for her. I have plenty of unread King books sitting on my bookshelves since I have slight OCD when it comes to his books and I must collect them, even if it will take me a lifetime to read them all, especially the Dark Tower series. So what made me re-read a King book? I loved it so much the first time around. Plain and simple. I found that the second time around was better. I must also mention that the movie version of Misery is one of my favorite King book to film adaptations. I think Paul and Annie were cast perfectly. The film does differ a bit from the novel, but it was well done nonetheless. The novel really showcases Annie's lack of sanity as well as Paul's fear of her. She often 'zones out' while speaking, leaving Paul terrified and waiting for her to come back to reality. "Everything she said was a little strange, a little offbeat. Listening to Annie was like listening to a song played in the wrong key." p.11, MiseryHere you have classic King at his best, this is a great scary story and I found myself unable to put this book down. Misery has been referred to as King's love letter to his fans.There's plenty of horror and nail biting suspense within these pages but there are also glimpses of hope for Paul. I cheered him on as he devised plans on freeing himself from Annie's clutches. The writing in the story is wonderfully descriptive and I felt like I was in the same room with Paul as I read. I wanted him to escape so badly, but I knew the odds were against him. Annie is a psychopath and you see that very early on in the book. King wastes no time beating around the bush here. I think she is one of his best villains. He does a great job at giving this wicked nurse a background story. She's also quirky, using bizarre old fashioned language, words like 'dirty birdie' and 'Mr. Man' when she's angry. There's plenty of OMG and cringe worthy moments in Misery and that is just what I have come to expect from a scary King novel. What made this book even scarier for me is that there's no supernatural forces at work here, no dark magic being used, this is plain and simply realistically terrifying. Technically speaking, in real life a crazy lunatic can hold a person hostage and torture them. I think that's what makes Annie so scary, it seems like someone could really do what she does to Paul.If you are in the mood for a scary suspenseful story that will get under your skin and have you jumping at the slightest sound, look no further than Misery. When I was done reading this book, I wanted to turn to the first page and read it all over again.
    • 5/5
      Excellent.
    • 5/5
      Wow.Misery... a thrilling, dark, claustrophobic, occasionally gross, far-fetched yet believable, page-turner which seems to make a game out of pushing all the right buttons at exactly the right time.Without wanting to spoil anything, Misery is about a writer, Paul Sheldon, who ends up in what turns out to be a pretty bad spot. Think you know what will happen? You don't. Think it can't get any worse for the main character? It does.I get the impression that Stephen King could probably write about anything at all in a way which would make millions want to read it. Though, the guy can certainly construct a plot as well. Misery is more of a situation-drama than anything else, but every drop of juice has been squeezed out of the premise, in a good way. The story is in many ways driven forward by the main character's state of mind. The way his mind develops, and the way in which this is described, is fascinating and scary in equal measure.No, this book hasn't had a profound impact on me, and no, I probably won't be thinking about it a week from now, but wow, it was a great ride. It is the perfect read-in-the-dark-in-the-middle-of-the-night book, and is genuinely one you won't want to put down.
    • 5/5
      Simply put, this was the novel that started me on that long, dark road through the mind of Stephen King. And years later, it is still my favorite.
    • 5/5
      Better than the movie, and in this case that's saying allot. There's a good number of reviews already posted on this one so I'll spare you the details but if you thought the "hobbling scene" in the movie was crazy just wait till you read the book.
    • 5/5
      I'm not sure of the genre on this book. It's Stephen King book so it must be horror, right? But I've always interpreted the term horror to refer to a genre of books where there is some kind of supernatural entity causing people to be, well, horrified. Like a creepy clown who comes out of the storm drains. Or a hotel that's possessed by evil spirits. Or a young girl who can move objects with the power of her mind. In "Misery," the object of fear is a dumpy ex-nurse named Annie, living alone in the Rocky Mountains. She's mentally unbalanced, but she's not possessed by an evil spirit. She doesn't have kinetic powers. But she doesn't need any. She manages to terrorize Paul just fine without any supernatural help.Annie starts off as an angel of mercy, rescuing best selling author Paul Sheldon when he's injured in a car accident on a lonely, snowy road. She's thrilled to have him under her roof, because she is the "Number One Fan" of his series of books about a character named Misery.The only problem is he killed Misery off in the last book so he could work on a more serious, literary novel. Annie insists that Paul write another Misery book, and that this book have a plausible explanation of how she died and came back to life. With both legs broken, Paul is dependent of Annie for everything and struggles to appease her. He sets about writing a new Misery book on Annie's old manual typewriter.I loved how the Misery story progresses. It's written in the same font as an old typewriter that's lost a few keys, with missing letters written in by hand. Stung by bad reviews, and longing to be taken seriously as a writer, Paul finds himself writing for his harshest critic yet. Because Annie will torture and possibly kill him if she doesn't like what she reads.I loved all the observations about writing, how the critics panned his writing, but Paul had the ability to write real page turners, the kind of book you just have to keep reading because you've got to know what happens next.This is by far, my favorite Stephen King novel
    • 4/5
      This book shows why Stephen King is a master. It is not his monsters that are so scary, it is his monstrous people. The fact that he can (and does) make Annie sympathetic, even to her victim, just for a moment is horrifying. An excellent book, a scary book.
    • 5/5
      Completely absorbing page-turner, could not put this down despite my then future-ex-husband's insistence that I turn off the light and come to bed!!The movie casting of Kathy Bates was AMAZING and really surpassed my high expectations. This story permanently altered the way I feel when folks say "I'M YOUR BIGGEST FAN!" Yes, I now NEVER forget that the term "FAN" is short for "FANATIC" thanks to Mr. King and then when Kathy Bates made Misery her own on the big screen. LOVE this tale and YEARN to add a hardcover to my permanent select Library... as well as to Re-read again, of course!!Mr. King set the bar of suspense , horror and terror to all time new heights with MISERY!! Yes love CAN kill you... but what DOESN'T kill you makes you so much stronger!! James Caan was even sexier with the cane & limp ;)
    • 4/5
      This is how I got hooked on King. It's a tight novel, no wasted words. It's frankly horrific, his situation and what she does to him. If you are claustrophobic or squeamish then this is the book for you. Almost as good as The Shining... almost.
    • 4/5
      A terrific book...one of his best. And a great film, with an oustanding performance by Kathy Bates.
    • 3/5
      Suspenseful story of an author trapped by a wacko. What I thought might be a self-licking ice cream cone became much fun to listen.
    • 4/5
      After reading ‘The Stand’ while I was still in school I became a huge fan of Stephen King, and read most of his subsequent books up to ‘Thinner’ (published under his pseudonym of Richard Bachman). I am not really sure why I stopped reading him then. Perhaps I become less enamoured of fiction involving the supernatural in general. I had also been a keen reader of science fiction up until my early twenties, though that was another genre I largely left behind. In the last couple of years I have rediscovered Stephen King through his excellent books ‘Mr Mercedes’ and ‘Finders Keepers’, both of which feature Bill Hodges and his posse, and are straight crime novels. The latter of those featured an over enthusiastic literary fan, and the reviews offered a lot of comparisons to King’s ‘Misery’, published almost thirty years earlier. ‘Misery’ is a great book, utterly gripping from the outset, and while the villain of the work is a larger than life character, everything is grounded in the real world. No intrusions from the supernatural, though the horror is still there in the shape of a twisted character driven by obsession and psychosis. The plot is fairly simple but completely captivating. Best-selling novelist Paul Sheldon has just completed his latest novel and celebrates by drinking rather too much champagne and then, ignoring warnings of an impending snowstorm, attempting to drive through the Rockies. The storm takes hold and he skids off the road. Fortunately, he does not hit anyone else, but, less fortunately, he is badly injured in the crash and passes out in the wreckage of his car. The next thing he knows he is in bed with horrific injuries to his legs. His rescuer is former nurse Annie Wilkes who, it turns out, is a huge fan of Sheldon’s books, particularly those featuring his character Misery Chastain, an adventuress in Victorian England. The series of novels featuring Misery has been immensely successful, far outselling Sheldon’s other books. He had, however, come to hate the character, seeing her as a millstone preventing him from the proper exercise of his literary skill, and in the most recent volume he had succeeded in killing her off. As it happens, Annie Wilkes has only just started reading that latest book.Sheldon is unsure why Annie Wilkes has not taken him to hospital, and gradually comes to realise that she has only the most tenuous hold on sanity. This becomes apparent as her disgust at the fate that Sheldon directed towards Misery Chastian, which provokes a dreadful rage which she takes out on Sheldon, withholding the painkillers that she had, thitherto, been dispensing to him. Annie’s fragile grasp on reason becomes increasingly evident, and Sheldon is pitched into a dreadful ordeal as he tries to placate her while wondering how (or even if) he can escape.The book treats a lot of serious issues: mental health, obsession, the art of writing and addiction. Sheldon offers all sorts of insights, presumably channelling King himself, into how he develops a plot, fleshes out characters and constructs a book. He also shows great self-awareness as to his own qualities, and the frustration that his ‘potboilers’ featuring Misery consistently outsell his other, more serious’ works.The book was published in 1987 around the time, as I understand, that King’s family stage a major intervention to address his own addictions (alcohol, various prescription medicines and other illegal drugs). Sheldon proves an interesting vehicle for analysis of these problems – he had already been a drinker and smoker, and owing to the circumstances of his imprisonment by Annie Wiles he can feel himself becoming addicted to the powerful painkiller that she feeds him.The novel is a great success. King maintains the tension throughout, and there is a frightening plausibility about the whole story. I just feel rather sad that I didn’t read it nearly thirty years ago when it first came out.
    • 3/5
      I would like to rate this novel higher because it is very well written (in terms of syntax, symbolism, narrative structure, etc.), but it's just so gruesome. It's not a pleasant read because of this, although it does get you hooked and you won't want to put it down. If you're a fan of horror fiction, then I'd recommend this title. If not, then like me, you might be less than overly enthusiastic about it.
    • 4/5
      Paul Sheldon is a bestselling writer known for his Misery series, which focuses on a woman named Misery and her many adventures. Annie Wilkes is Paul’s number one fan, but she’s also much more. Paul has just been in a terrible car crash near Annie’s home. She was the first person to find Paul, but instead of taking him to the local hospital, she is bringing back her days as a nurse and taking care of Paul in her home. It seems like a plausible plan given that a massive snowstorm was headed to town the day of the accident, but things quickly become clear that Annie has no intentions of taking Paul to receive care anywhere else.Paul has become Annie’s prisoner in her isolated home. Her good fortune in finding Paul has sparked an idea. You see, Paul recently killed off Misery in his books, and Annie isn’t too happy about it. She has ordered Paul to write her a new book and bring Misery back to life. Each time Paul does something Annie doesn’t like, be it in the new book or in real life, she finds a new and horrible way to punish Paul. Annie’s moods change with the wind and Paul has to be on his toes in order to avoid bodily harm. Will Paul ever escape Annie’s grip?MISERY is a compulsive, intense, and downright gory journey into Annie Wilkes kidnaping of Paul Sheldon. Annie is a character who fits the mold of a psychopath and serial killer. The situation with Paul is not entirely new to Annie. While she’s never kept someone captive before, Annie has certainly inflicted pain and ultimately taken the lives of many others. Annie is more than a rapid fan. One of my biggest issues with this book is that there isn’t more backstory on Annie. I loved what King described about her, but I wanted a bit more context on what drove her to become the person she turned out to be. Paul Sheldon is an equally complex character who at first comes off as a bit one-dimensional. Paul is a writer who hates his most popular works and wants to branch out, but in his captive state he must dive back into the life of the characters he that has come to loathe. Ultimately Annie’s torture is not just physical for Paul, but also hold a mental aspect beyond what the physical pain has brought him, as he forces himself to create a new Misery book for Annie.This book also contains an element of a book within a book, as King also includes snippets of the new Misery novel that Paul is writing. At first I enjoyed my look into this book, but the later sections didn’t add anything to the novel for me. I don’t think it’s a series I would read in real life, so perhaps that’s why I ended up drawing away from enjoying those blurbs. The initial dive into the book, however, I thought was brilliant because it gave me a chance to see what Annie was so obsessed with. At the end of the day, despite the minor flaws, MISERY has been a wild ride of reading! I would never want to meet Annie Wilkes in a dark alley or have her find me after a car crash. There are so many memorable scenes from this book, which will stick with me for a long time. I’m looking at you axe scene! I’ll also never get phrases like “dirty birdie” or “cockadoodie” out of my head!

    Book preview

    Misery - Stephen King

    I

    ANNIE

    When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

    —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

    1

    umber whunnnn

    yerrrnnn umber whunnnn

    fayunnnn

    These sounds: even in the haze.

    2

    But sometimes the sounds—like the pain—faded, and then there was only the haze. He remembered darkness: solid darkness had come before the haze. Did that mean he was making progress? Let there be light (even of the hazy variety), and the light was good, and so on and so on? Had those sounds existed in the darkness? He didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. Did it make sense to ask them? He didn’t know the answer to that one, either.

    The pain was somewhere below the sounds. The pain was east of the sun and south of his ears. That was all he did know.

    For some length of time that seemed very long (and so was, since the pain and the stormy haze were the only two things which existed) those sounds were the only outer reality. He had no idea who he was or where he was and cared to know neither. He wished he was dead, but through the pain-soaked haze that filled his mind like a summer storm-cloud, he did not know he wished it.

    As time passed, he became aware that there were periods of nonpain, and that these had a cyclic quality. And for the first time since emerging from the total blackness which had prologued the haze, he had a thought which existed apart from whatever his current situation was. This thought was of a broken-off piling which had jutted from the sand at Revere Beach. His mother and father had taken him to Revere Beach often when he was a kid, and he had always insisted that they spread their blanket where he could keep an eye on that piling, which looked to him like the single jutting fang of a buried monster. He liked to sit and watch the water come up until it covered the piling. Then, hours later, after the sandwiches and potato salad had been eaten, after the last few drops of Kool-Aid had been coaxed from his father’s big thermos, just before his mother said it was time to pack up and start home, the top of the rotted piling would begin to show again—just a peek and flash between the incoming waves at first, then more and more. By the time their trash was stashed in the big drum with KEEP YOUR BEACH CLEAN stencilled on the side, Paulie’s beach-toys picked up

    (that’s my name Paulie I’m Paulie and tonight ma’ll put Johnson’s Baby Oil on my sunburn he thought inside the thunderhead where he now lived)

    and the blanket folded again, the piling had almost wholly reappeared, its blackish, slime-smoothed sides surrounded by sudsy scuds of foam. It was the tide, his father had tried to explain, but he had always known it was the piling. The tide came and went; the piling stayed. It was just that sometimes you couldn’t see it. Without the piling, there was no tide.

    This memory circled and circled, maddening, like a sluggish fly. He groped for whatever it might mean, but for a long time the sounds interrupted.

    fayunnnn

    red everrrrrythinggg

    umberrrrr whunnnn

    Sometimes the sounds stopped. Sometimes he stopped.

    His first really clear memory of this now, the now outside the storm-haze, was of stopping, of being suddenly aware he just couldn’t pull another breath, and that was all right, that was good, that was in fact just peachy-keen; he could take a certain level of pain but enough was enough and he was glad to be getting out of the game.

    Then there was a mouth clamped over his, a mouth which was unmistakably a woman’s mouth in spite of its hard spitless lips, and the wind from this woman’s mouth blew into his own mouth and down his throat, puffing his lungs, and when the lips were pulled back he smelled his warder for the first time, smelled her on the outrush of the breath she had forced into him the way a man might force a part of himself into an unwilling woman, a dreadful mixed stench of vanilla cookies and chocolate ice-cream and chicken gravy and peanut-butter fudge.

    He heard a voice screaming, "Breathe, goddammit! Breathe, Paul!"

    The lips clamped down again. The breath blew down his throat again. Blew down it like the dank suck of wind which follows a fast subway train, pulling sheets of newspaper and candy-wrappers after it, and the lips were withdrawn, and he thought For Christ’s sake don’t let any of it out through your nose but he couldn’t help it and oh that stink, that stink that fucking STINK.

    Breathe, goddam you! the unseen voice shrieked, and he thought I will, anything, please just don’t do that anymore, don’t infect me anymore, and he tried, but before he could really get started her lips were clamped over his again, lips as dry and dead as strips of salted leather, and she raped him full of her air again.

    When she took her lips away this time he did not let her breath out but pushed it and whooped in a gigantic breath of his own. Shoved it out. Waited for his unseen chest to go up again on its own, as it had been doing his whole life without any help from him. When it didn’t, he gave another giant whooping gasp, and then he was breathing again on his own, and doing it as fast as he could to flush the smell and taste of her out of him.

    Normal air had never tasted so fine.

    He began to fade back into the haze again, but before the dimming world was gone entirely, he heard the woman’s voice mutter: Whew! That was a close one!

    Not close enough, he thought, and fell asleep.

    He dreamed of the piling, so real he felt he could almost reach out and slide his palm over its green-black fissured curve.

    When he came back to his former state of semiconsciousness, he was able to make the connection between the piling and his current situation—it seemed to float into his hand. The pain wasn’t tidal. That was the lesson of the dream which was really a memory. The pain only appeared to come and go. The pain was like the piling, sometimes covered and sometimes visible, but always there. When the pain wasn’t harrying him through the deep stone grayness of his cloud, he was dumbly grateful, but he was no longer fooled—it was still there, waiting to return. And there was not just one piling but two; the pain was the pilings, and part of him knew for a long time before most of his mind had knowledge of knowing that the shattered pilings were his own shattered legs.

    But it was still a long time before he was finally able to break the dried scum of saliva that had glued his lips together and croak out Where am I? to the woman who sat by his bed with a book in her hands. The name of the man who had written the book was Paul Sheldon. He recognized it as his own with no surprise.

    Sidewinder, Colorado, she said when he was finally able to ask the question. My name is Annie Wilkes. And I am—

    I know, he said. You’re my number-one fan.

    Yes, she said, smiling. That’s just what I am.

    3

    Darkness. Then the pain and the haze. Then the awareness that, although the pain was constant, it was sometimes buried by an uneasy compromise which he supposed was relief. The first real memory: stopping, and being raped back into life by the woman’s stinking breath.

    Next real memory: her fingers pushing something into his mouth at regular intervals, something like Contac capsules, only since there was no water they only sat in his mouth and when they melted there was an incredibly bitter taste that was a little like the taste of aspirin. It would have been good to spit that bitter taste out, but he knew better than to do it. Because it was that bitter taste which brought the high tide in over the piling

    (PILINGS it’s PILINGS there are TWO okay there are two fine now just hush just you know hush shhhhhh)

    and made it seem gone for awhile.

    These things all came at widely spaced intervals, but then, as the pain itself began not to recede but to erode (as that Revere Beach piling must itself have eroded, he thought, because nothing is forever—although the child he had been would have scoffed at such heresy), outside things began to impinge more rapidly until the objective world, with all its freight of memory, experience, and prejudice, had pretty much re-established itself. He was Paul Sheldon, who wrote novels of two kinds, good ones and best-sellers. He had been married and divorced twice. He smoked too much (or had before all this, whatever all this was). Something very bad had happened to him but he was still alive. That dark-gray cloud began to dissipate faster and faster. It would be yet awhile before his number-one fan brought him the old clacking Royal with the grinning gapped mouth and the Ducky Daddles voice, but Paul understood long before then that he was in a hell of a jam.

    4

    That prescient part of his mind saw her before he knew he was seeing her, and must surely have understood her before he knew he was understanding her—why else did he associate such dour, ominous images with her? Whenever she came into the room he thought of the graven images worshipped by superstitious African tribes in the novels of H. Rider Haggard, and stones, and doom.

    The image of Annie Wilkes as an African idol out of She or King Solomon’s Mines was both ludicrous and queerly apt. She was a big woman who, other than the large but unwelcoming swell of her bosom under the gray cardigan sweater she always wore, seemed to have no feminine curves at all—there was no defined roundness of hip or buttock or even calf below the endless succession of wool skirts she wore in the house (she retired to her unseen bedroom to put on jeans before doing her outside chores). Her body was big but not generous. There was a feeling about her of clots and roadblocks rather than welcoming orifices or even open spaces, areas of hiatus.

    Most of all she gave him a disturbing sense of solidity, as if she might not have any blood vessels or even internal organs; as if she might be only solid Annie Wilkes from side to side and top to bottom. He felt more and more convinced that her eyes, which appeared to move, were actually just painted on, and they moved no more than the eyes of portraits which appear to follow you to wherever you move in the room where they hang. It seemed to him that if he made the first two fingers of his hand into a V and attempted to poke them up her nostrils, they might go less than an eighth of an inch before encountering a solid (if slightly yielding) obstruction; that even her gray cardigan and frumpy house skirts and faded outside-work jeans were part of that solid fibrous unchannelled body. So his feeling that she was like an idol in a perfervid novel was not really surprising at all. Like an idol, she gave only one thing: a feeling of unease deepening steadily toward terror. Like an idol, she took everything else.

    No, wait, that wasn’t quite fair. She did give something else. She gave him the pills that brought the tide in over the pilings.

    The pills were the tide; Annie Wilkes was the lunar presence which pulled them into his mouth like jetsam on a wave. She brought him two every six hours, first announcing her presence only as a pair of fingers poking into his mouth (and soon enough he learned to suck eagerly at those poking fingers in spite of the bitter taste), later appearing in her cardigan sweater and one of her half-dozen skirts, usually with a paperback copy of one of his novels tucked under her arm. At night she appeared to him in a fuzzy pink robe, her face shiny with some sort of cream (he could have named the main ingredient easily enough even though he had never seen the bottle from which she tipped it; the sheepy smell of the lanolin was strong and proclamatory), snaking him out of his frowzy, dream-thick sleep with the pills nestled in her hand and the poxy moon nestled in the window over one of her solid shoulders.

    After awhile—after his alarm had become too great to be ignored—he was able to find out what she was feeding him. It was a pain-killer with a heavy codeine base called Novril. The reason she had to bring him the bedpan so infrequently was not only because he was on a diet consisting entirely of liquids and gelatines (earlier, when he was in the cloud, she had fed him intravenously), but also because Novril had a tendency to cause constipation in patients taking it. Another side-effect, a rather more serious one, was respiratory depression in sensitive patients. Paul was not particularly sensitive, even though he had been a heavy smoker for nearly eighteen years, but his breathing had stopped nonetheless on at least one occasion (there might have been others, in the haze, that he did not remember). That was the time she gave him mouth-to-mouth. It might have just been one of those things which happened, but he later came to suspect she had nearly killed him with an accidental overdose. She didn’t know as much about what she was doing as she believed she did. That was only one of the things about Annie that scared him.

    He discovered three things almost simultaneously, about ten days after having emerged from the dark cloud. The first was that Annie Wilkes had a great deal of Novril (she had, in fact, a great many drugs of all kinds). The second was that he was hooked on Novril. The third was that Annie Wilkes was dangerously crazy.

    5

    The darkness had prologued the pain and the storm-cloud; he began to remember what had prologued the darkness as she told him what had happened to him. This was shortly after he had asked the traditional when-the-sleeper-wakes question and she had told him he was in the little town of Sidewinder, Colorado. In addition she told him that she had read each of his eight novels at least twice, and had read her very favorites, the Misery novels, four, five, maybe six times. She only wished he would write them faster. She said she had hardly been able to believe that her patient was really that Paul Sheldon even after checking the ID in his wallet.

    "Where is my wallet, by the way?" he asked.

    I’ve kept it safe for you, she said. Her smile suddenly collapsed into a narrow watchfulness he didn’t like much—it was like discovering a deep crevasse almost obscured by summer flowers in the midst of a smiling, jocund meadow. "Did you think I’d steal something out of it?"

    No, of course not. It’s just that— It’s just that the rest of my life is in it, he thought. My life outside this room. Outside the pain. Outside the way time seems to stretch out like the long pink string of bubble-gum a kid pulls out of his mouth when he’s bored. Because that’s how it is in the last hour or so before the pills come.

    "Just what, Mister Man?" she persisted, and he saw with alarm that the narrow look was growing blacker and blacker. The crevasse was spreading, as if an earthquake was going on behind her brow. He could hear the steady, keen whine of the wind outside, and he had a sudden image of her picking him up and throwing him over her solid shoulder, where he would lie like a burlap sack slung over a stone wall, and taking him outside, and heaving him into a snowdrift. He would freeze to death, but before he did, his legs would throb and scream.

    It’s just that my father always told me to keep my eye on my wallet, he said, astonished by how easily this lie came out. His father had made a career out of not noticing Paul any more than he absolutely had to, and had, so far as Paul could remember, offered him only a single piece of advice in his entire life. On Paul’s fourteenth birthday his father had given him a Red Devil condom in a foil envelope. Put that in your wallet, Roger Sheldon said, and if you ever get excited while you’re making out at the drive-in, take a second between excited enough to want to and too excited to care and slip that on. Too many bastards in the world already, and I don’t want to see you going in the Army at sixteen.

    Now Paul went on: I guess he told me to keep my eye on my wallet so many times that it’s stuck inside for good. If I offended you, I’m truly sorry.

    She relaxed. Smiled. The crevasse closed. Summer flowers nodded cheerfully once again. He thought of pushing his hand through that smile and encountering nothing but flexible darkness. No offense taken. It’s in a safe place. Wait—I’ve got something for you.

    She left and returned with a steaming bowl of soup. There were vegetables floating in it. He was not able to eat much, but he ate more than he thought at first he could. She seemed pleased. It was while he ate the soup that she told him what had happened, and he remembered it all as she told him, and he supposed it was good to know how you happened to end up with your legs shattered, but the manner by which he was coming to this knowledge was disquieting—it was as if he was a character in a story or a play, a character whose history is not recounted like history but created like fiction.

    She had gone into Sidewinder in the four-wheel drive to get feed for the livestock and a few groceries… also to check out the paperbacks at Wilson’s Drug Center—that had been the Wednesday that was almost two weeks ago now, and the new paperbacks always came in on Tuesday.

    "I was actually thinking of you, she said, spooning soup into his mouth and then professionally wiping away a dribble from the corner with a napkin. That’s what makes it such a remarkable coincidence, don’t you see? I was hoping Misery’s Child would finally be out in paperback, but no such luck."

    A storm had been on the way, she said, but until noon that day the weather forecasters had been confidently claiming it would veer south, toward New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristos.

    Yes, he said, remembering as he said it: They said it would turn. That’s why I went in the first place. He tried to shift his legs. The result was an awful bolt of pain, and he groaned.

    Don’t do that, she said. If you get those legs of yours talking, Paul, they won’t shut up… and I can’t give you any more pills for two hours. I’m giving you too much as it is.

    Why aren’t I in the hospital? This was clearly the question that wanted asking, but he wasn’t sure it was a question either of them wanted asked. Not yet, anyway.

    When I got to the feed store, Tony Roberts told me I better step on it if I was going to get back here before the storm hit, and I said—

    "How far are we from this town?" he asked.

    A ways, she said vaguely, looking off toward the window. There was a queer interval of silence, and Paul was frightened by what he saw on her face, because what he saw was nothing; the black nothing of a crevasse folded into an alpine meadow, a blackness where no flowers grew and into which the drop might be long. It was the face of a woman who has come momentarily untethered from all of the vital positions and landmarks of her life, a woman who has forgotten not only the memory she was in the process of recounting but memory itself. He had once toured a mental asylum—this was years ago, when he had been researching Misery, the first of the four books which had been his main source of income over the last eight years—and he had seen this look… or, more precisely, this unlook. The word which defined it was catatonia, but what frightened him had no such precise word—it was, rather, a vague comparison: in that moment he thought that her thoughts had become much as he had imagined her physical self: solid, fibrous, unchannelled, with no places of hiatus.

    Then, slowly, her face cleared. Thoughts seemed to flow back into it. Then he realized flowing was just a tiny bit wrong. She wasn’t filling up, like a pond or a tidal pool; she was warming up. Yes… she is warming up, like some small 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 own—only the dew falling from his ocularies had been the result of hysterical laughter.

    Finishing the new book, a contemporary novel about a car-thief, he had remembered typing the final sentence of Misery’s Child: So Ian and Geoffrey left the Little Dunthorpe churchyard together, supporting themselves in their sorrow, determined to find their lives again. While writing this line he had been giggling so madly it had been hard to strike the correct keys—he had to go back several times. Thank God for good old IBM CorrectTape. He had written THE END below and then had gone capering about the room—this same room in the Boulderado Hotel—and screaming Free at last! Free at last! Great God Almighty, I’m free at last! The silly bitch finally bought the farm!

    The new novel was called Fast Cars, and he hadn’t laughed when it was done. He just sat there in front of the typewriter for a moment, thinking You may have just won next year’s American Book Award, my friend. And then he had picked up—

    —a little bruise on your right temple, but that didn’t look like anything. It was your legs…. I could see right away, even with the light starting to fade, that your legs weren’t—

    —the telephone and called room service for a bottle of Dom Pérignon. He remembered waiting for it to come, walking back and forth in the room where he had finished all of his books since 1974; he remembered tipping the waiter with a fifty-dollar bill and asking him if he had heard a weather forecast; he remembered the pleased, flustered, grinning waiter telling him that the storm currently heading their way was supposed to slide off to the south, toward New Mexico; he remembered the chill feel of the bottle, the discreet sound of the cork as he eased it free; he remembered the dry, acerbic-acidic taste of the first glass and opening his travel bag and looking at his plane ticket to New York; he remembered suddenly, on the spur of the moment, deciding—

    "—that I better get you home right away! It was a struggle getting you to the truck, but I’m a big woman—as you may have noticed—and I had a pile of blankets in the back. I got you in and wrapped you up, and even then, with the light fading and all, I thought you looked familiar! I thought maybe—"

    —he would get the old Camaro out of the parking garage and just drive west instead of getting on the plane. What the hell was there in New York, anyway? The townhouse, empty, bleak, unwelcoming, possibly burgled. Screw it! he thought, drinking more champagne. Go west, young man, go west! The idea had been crazy enough to make sense. Take nothing but a change of clothes and his—

    —bag I found. I put that in, too, but there wasn’t anything else I could see and I was scared you might die on me or something so I fired up Old Bessie and I got your—

    —manuscript of Fast Cars and hit the road to Vegas or Reno or maybe even the City of the Angels. He remembered the idea had also seemed a bit silly at first—a trip the kid of twenty-four he had been when he had sold his first novel might have taken, but not one for a man two years past his fortieth birthday. A few more glasses of champagne and the idea no longer seemed silly at all. It seemed, in fact, almost noble. A kind of Grand Odyssey to Somewhere, a way to reacquaint himself with reality after the fictional terrain of the novel. So he had gone—

    "—out like a light! I was sure you were going to die…. I mean, I was sure! So I slipped your wallet out of your back pocket, and I looked at your driver’s license and I saw the name, Paul Sheldon, and I thought, ‘Oh, that must be a coincidence,’ but the picture on the license also looked like you, and then I got so scared I had to sit down at the kitchen table. I thought at first that I was going to faint. After awhile I started thinking maybe the picture was just a coincidence, too—those driver’s-license photos really don’t look like anybody—but then I found your Writers’ Guild card, and one from PEN, and I knew you were—"

    —in trouble when the snow started coming down, but long before that he had stopped in the Boulderado bar and tipped George twenty bucks to provide him with a second bottle of Dom, and he had drunk it rolling up I-70 into the Rockies under a sky the color of gunmetal, and somewhere east of the Eisenhower Tunnel he had diverted from the turnpike because the roads were bare and dry, the storm was sliding off to the south, what the hay, and also the goddam tunnel made him nervous. He had been playing an old Bo Diddley tape on the cassette machine under the dash and never turned on the radio until the Camaro started to seriously slip and slide and he began to realize that this wasn’t just a passing upcountry flurry but the real thing. The storm was maybe not sliding off to the south after all; the storm was maybe coming right at him and he was maybe in a bucket of trouble

    (the way you are in trouble now)

    but he had been just drunk enough to think he could drive his way out of it. So instead of stopping in Cana and inquiring about shelter, he had driven on. He could remember the afternoon turning into a dull-gray chromium lens. He could remember the champagne beginning to wear off. He could remember leaning forward to get his cigarettes off the dashboard and that was when the last skid began and he tried to ride it out but it kept getting worse; he could remember a heavy dull thump and then the world’s up and down had swapped places. He had—

    "—screamed! And when I heard you screaming, I knew that you would live. Dying men rarely scream. They haven’t the energy. I know. I decided I would make you live. So I got some of my pain medication and made you take it. Then you went to sleep. When you woke up and started to scream again, I gave you some more. You ran a fever for awhile, but I knocked that out, too. I gave you Keflex. You had one or two close calls, but that’s all over now. I promise. She got up. And now it’s time you rested, Paul. You’ve got to get your strength back."

    My legs hurt.

    Yes, I’m sure they do. In an hour you can have some medication.

    Now. Please. It shamed him to beg, but he could not help it. The tide had gone out and the splintered pilings stood bare, jaggedly real, things which could neither be avoided nor dealt with.

    In an hour. Firmly. She moved toward the door with the spoon and the soup-bowl in one hand.

    Wait!

    She turned back, looking at him with an expression both stern and loving. He did not like the expression. Didn’t like it at all.

    Two weeks since you pulled me out?

    She looked vague again, and annoyed. He would come to know that her grasp of time was not good. Something like that.

    I was unconscious?

    Almost all the time.

    What did I eat?

    She considered him.

    IV, she said briefly.

    IV? he said, and she mistook his stunned surprise for ignorance.

    I fed you intravenously, she said. Through tubes. That’s what those marks on your arms are. She looked at him with eyes that were suddenly flat and considering. "You owe me your life, Paul. I hope you’ll remember that.

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