This time it was Hezekiah who grabbed Ian, but the bushes rustled again and Geoffrey looked into the clearing, his breath momentarily catching in his throat, as a bit of fabric may catch on a thorn - he felt like a man who must walk up a rocky hill with a load of decayed and dangerously volatile explosives in his arms. One sting, he thought. Just one and it's all over for her “No, boss mussun”,” Hezekiah was saying with a kind of terrified patience. “It like d'utha boss be sayin”… if you go out dere, de bees wake up from dey dream. And if de bees wake, it doan matter for her if she be dine of one sting or one-de-one t'ousan” sting. If de bees wake up from dey dream we all die, but she die firs” and de mos” horrible.” Little by little Ian relaxed between the two men, one of them black, the other white. His head turned toward the clearing with dreadful reluctance, as if he did not wish to look and yet could not forbear to.

“Then what are we to do? What are we ft do for my poor darling?” I don't know came to Geoffrey's lips, and in his own state of terrible distress, he was barely able to bite them back. Not for the first time it occurred to him that Ian's possession of the woman Geoffrey loved just as dearly (if secretly) allowed Ian to indulge in an odd sort of selfishness and an almost womanly hysteria that Geoffrey himself must forgo; after all, to the rest of the world he was only Misery's friend.

Yes, just her friend, he thought with half-hysterical irony, and then his own eyes were drawn back to the clearing. To his friend.

Misery wore not a stitch of clothing, yet Geoffrey thought that even the most prudish church-thrice-a-week village biddy could not have faulted her for indecency. The hypothetical old prude might have run screaming from the sight of Misery, but her screams would have been caused by terror and revulsion rather then outraged propriety. Misery wore not a stitch of clothing, but she was far from naked.

She was dressed in bees. From the tips of her toes to the crown of her chestnut hair, she was dressed in bees. She seemed almost to be wearing some strange nun's habit - strange because it moved and undulated across the swells of her breasts and hips even though there was not even a ghost of a breeze. Likewise, her face seemed encased in a wimple of almost Mohammedan modesty - only her blue eye peered our of the mask of bees which crawled sluggishy over her face, hiding mouth and nose and chin and brows. More bees, giant Africa browns, the most poisonous and bad-tempered bees in all the world, crawled back and forth over the steel bracelet's before joining the living gloves on Misery's hands.

As Geoffrey watched, more and more bees flew into the clearing from all points of the compass - yet it was clear to him, even in his current distraction, that most of them were coming from the west, where the great dark stone face of the goddess loomed.

The drums pulsed their steady rhythm, in it's way as much a soporific as the sleepy drone of the bees. But Geoffrey knew how deceptive that sleepiness was, had seen what happened to the Baroness, and only thanked God that Ian had been spared that… and the sound of that sleepy hum suddenly rising to a furious buzz-saw squeal… a sound which had at first muffled and then drowned the woman's agonized dying screams. She had been a vain and foolish creature, dangerous as well - she had almost gotten them killed when she had freed Stringfellow's bushmaster - but silly or not, foolish or not, dangerous or not, no man or women deserved to die like that.

In his mind Geoffrey echoed Ian's question: What are we going to do? What are we to do for our poor darling?

Hezekiah said: “Nothing can do now, boss - but she is in no danger. As long as de drums dey beat, de bees will sleep. And Mis'wess, she is goan sleep, too.

Now the bees covered her in a thick and moving blanket; her eyes, open but unseeing, seemed to be receding into a living cave of crawling, stumbling, droning bees.

“And if the drums stop?” Geoffrey asked in a low almost strengthless voice, and just then, the drums did.

For a mom h hr of h m

4

Paul looked unbelievingly at the last line, then picked the Royal up - he had gone on lifting it like some weird barbell when she was out of the room, God knew why - and shook it again. The keys clittered, and then another chunk of metal fell out on the board which served as his desk.

Outside he could hear the roaring sound of Annie's bright-blue riding lawnmower - she was around front, giving the grass a good trim so those cockadoodie Roydmans wouldn't have anything to talk about in town.

He set the typewriter down, then rocked it up so he could fish out this new surprise. He looked at it in the strong late afternoon sunlight slanting in through the window. His expression of disbelief never altered.

Printed in raised and slightly ink-stained metal on the head of the key was:

E

e

Just to add to the fun, the old Royal had now thrown the most frequently used letter in the English language.

Paul looked at the calendar. The picture was of a flowered meadow and the month said May, but Paul kept his own dates now on a piece of scrap paper, and according to his home-made calendar it was June 21.

Roll out those lazy hazy crazy days of summer, he though sourly, and threw the key-hammer in the general direction of the wastebasket.

Well, what do I do now? he thought, but of course he knew what came next. Longhand. That was what came next.

But not now. Although he had been tearing along like house afire a few seconds ago, anxious to get Ian, Geoffrey, and the ever-amusing Hezekiah caught in the Bourkas ambush so that the entire party could be transported to the caves behind the face of the idol for the rousing finale, he was suddenly tired. The hole in the paper had closed with an adamant bang.

Tomorrow.

He would go to longhand tomorrow.

Fuck longhand. Complain to the management, Paul.

But he would do no such thing. Annie had gotten to too weird.

He listened to the monotonous snarl of the riding lawnmower, saw her shadow, and, as so often happened when he thought of how weird Annie was getting, his mind recalled the image of the axe rising, then falling; the image of her horrid impassive deadly face splattered with his blood. I was clear. Every word she had spoken, every word he had screamed, the squeal of the axe pulling away from the severed bone, the blood on the wall. All crystal-clear. And, as he also so often did, he tried to block this memory; and found himself a second too late.

Because the crucial plot-twist of Fast Cars concerned Tony Bonasaro's near-fatal crack-up in his last desperate effort to escape the police (and this led to the epilogue, which consisted of the bruising interrogation conducted by the late Lieutenant Gray's partner in Tony's hospital room), Paul had interviewed a number of crash victims. He had heard the same thing time and time again. It came in different wrappers, but it always boiled down to the same thing: I remember getting into the car, and I remember waking up here. Everything else is a blank.

Why couldn't that have happened to him Because writers remember everything, Paul. Especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels, not amnesia. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar.

Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Who had said that? Thomas Szasz? William Faulkner? Cyndi Lauper?

But that last name brought its own association, a painful and unhappy one under these circumstances: a memory of Cyndi Lauper hiccuping her way cheerfully through “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” that was so clear it was almost auditory: Oh daddy dear, you're still number one / But girls, they wanna have fuh-un / Oh when the workin day is done / Girls just wanna have fun.