Read Online Misery by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page B

the bucket of water into the barbecue pot. There was a monstrous hissing and a plume of steam. The smell was wet and awful, charred and yet somehow creamy.
        When she left he managed to get up on his elbow one final time. He looked into the barbecue pot and saw something that looked like a charred lump of log floating in a brackish pond.
      After awhile, Annie Wilkes came back.
      Incredibly, she was humming.
      She sat him up and pushed capsules into his mouth.
      He swallowed them and lay back, thinking: I'm going to kill her.

    20

    'Eat,' she said from far away, and he felt stinging pain. He opened his eyes and saw her sitting beside him — for the first time he was actually on a level with her, facing her. He realized with bleary, distant surprise that for the first time in untold eons he was sitting, too . . . actually sitting up.
       Who gives a shit? he thought, and let his eyes slip shut again. The tide was in. The pilings were covered. The tide had finally come in and the next time it went out it might go out forever and so he was going to ride the waves while there were waves left to ride, he could think about sitting up later . . .
       'Eat!' she said again, and this was followed by a recurrence of pain. It buzzed against the left side of his head, making him whine and try to pull away.
      'Eat, Paul! You've got to come out of it enough to eat or . . . '
      Zzzzzing! His earlobe. She was pinching it.
      "Kay,' he muttered. " Kay! Don't yank it off, for God's sake.'
        He forced his eyes open, Each lid felt as if it had a cement block dangling from it. Immediately the spoon was in his mouth, dumping hot soup down his throat. He swallowed to keep from drowning.
       Suddenly, out of nowhere — the most amazing comeback this announcer has ever seen, ladies and gentlemen! — I Got the Hungries came bursting into view. It was as if that first spoonful of soup had awakened his gut from a hypnotic trance. He took the rest as fast as she could spoon it into his mouth, seeming to grow more rather than less hungry as he slurped and swallowed.
        He had a vague memory of her wheeling out the sinister, smoking barbecue and then wheeling in something which, in his drugged and fading state, he had thought might be a shopping cart. The idea had caused him to feel neither surprise nor wonder; he was visiting with Annie Wilkes, after all. Barbecues, shopping carts; maybe tomorrow a parking meter or a nuclear warhead. When you lived in the funhouse, the laff riot just never stopped.
      He had drifted off, but now he realized that the shopping cart had been a folded-up wheelchair. He was sitting in it, his sprinted legs stuck stiffly out in front of him, his pelvic area feeling uncomfortably swollen and not very happy with the new position.
       She put me in it while I was conked out, he thought. Lifted me. Dead weight. Christ she must be strong.
        'Finished!' she said. 'I'm pleased to see how well you took that soup, Paul. I believe you are going to mend. We will not say "Good as new" — alas, no — but if we don't have any more of these . . . these contretemps . . . I believe you'll mend just fine. Now I'm going to change your nasty old bed, and when that's done I'm going to change nasty old you, and then, if you're not having too much pain and still feel hungry, I am going to let you have some toast.'
       'Thank you, Annie,' he said humbly, and thought: Your throat. If I can, I'll give you a chance to lick your lips and say 'Goodness!' But only once, Annie.
    Only once.

    21

    Four hours later he was back in bed and he would have burned all his books for even a single Novril. Sitting hadn't bothered him a bit while he was doing it — not with enough shit in his bloodstream to have put half the Prussian Army to steep — but now it felt as if a swarm of bees had been loosed in the lower half of his body.
       He screamed very loudly — the food must have done something