He sat bolt upright in bed, ignoring the flare of pain which shot up his legs.

“Annie!” he bawled. “Annie, come in here!” He heard her thump down the stairs two at a time and then run down the hallway. Her eyes were wide and scared when she came in.

“Paul! What's wrong? Are you cramping? Are you - “

“No “he said, but of course he was; his mind was cramping. “No. Annie, I'm sorry if I scared you, but you gotta help 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.

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.

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 a 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 wheel in the other. Do these belong to you? he asked Annie in this dream.

Paul had awakened in a less-than-cheery frame of mind.

Annie, on the other hand, had never been in better spirits than she was during that sunny early-spring week. She cleaned; she cooked ambitious meals (although everything she cooked came out tasting strangely industrial, as if years of eating in hospital cafeterias had somehow corrupted any culinary talent she might once have had); each afternoon she bundled Paul up in a huge blue blanket, jammed a green hunting cap on his head, and rolled him out onto the back porch.

On those occasions he would take Maugham along, but rarely read him - being outside again was too great an experience to allow much concentration on other things. Mostly he just sat, smelling sweet cool air instead of the bedroom's stale indoor smell, sly with sickroom undertones, listened to the drip of the icicles, and watched the cloud-shadows roll slowly and steadily across the melting field. That was somehow best of all.

Annie sang in her on-pitch but queerly tuneless voice. She giggled like a child at the jokes on M*A*S*H* and WKRP, laughing especially hard at the jokes which were mildly off-color (which, in the case of WKRP, was most of them.). She filled in n s tirelessly as Paul finished Chapters 9 and 10.

The morning of the fifteenth dawned windy and dull with clouds, and Annie changed. Perhaps, Paul thought, it was the falling barometer. It was as good an explanation as any.

She did not show up with his medication until nine o'clock, and by then he needed it quite badly - so badly that he had been thinking of going to his stash. There was no breakfast. just the pills. When she came in she was still in her pink quilted housecoat. He noted with deepening misgivings that there were red marks like weals on her cheeks and arms. He also saw gooey splatters of food on the housecoat, and she had only managed to get on one of her slippers. Thud-slush, went Annie's feet as she approached him. Thud-slush, thud-slush, thud-slush. Her hair hung around her face. Her eyes were dull. i “Here.” She threw the pills at him. Her hands were also covered with mixed streaks of goo. Red stuff, brown stuff, sticky white stuff. Paul had no idea what it was. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. The pills hit his chest and bounced into his lap. She turned to go. Thud-slush, thud-slush, thud-slush.

“Annie?” She stopped, not turning around. She looked bigger that way, with her shoulders rounding the pink housecoat, her hair like some battered helmet. She looked like a Piltdown woman staring out of her cave.

“Annie, are you all right?”

“No,” she said indifferently, and turned around. She looked at him with that same dullard's expression as she pinched her lower lip between the thumb and first finger of her right hand. She pulled it out and then twisted it, pinching inward at the same time. Blood first welled between lip and then gushed down her chin. She turned and left without speaking a word, before his stunned mind could persuade itself that he had really seen her do that. She closed the door… and locked it. He heard her thud-slushing her way down the hall to the parlor. He heard the creak of her favorite chair as she sat down. Nothing else. No TV. No singing. No click-clink of silver on crockery. No, she was just sitting there. Just sitting there being not all right.