Doesn't matter. If she misses them one more time, she misses them for good.
He put the knife on the night-table, hoisted himself into bed, then slid it under the mattress. When Annie came back he was going to ask her for a nice cold glass of water, and when she leaned over to give it to him he was going to plunge the knife into her throat.
Nothing fancy.
Paul closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep, and when the Cherokee came whispering back into the driveway that morning at four o'clock with both its engine and its lights shut off, he did not stir. Until he felt the sting of the hypo sliding into his arm and woke to see her face leaning over his, he hadn't the slightest idea she was back.
21
At first he thought he was dreaming about his own book, that the dark was the dream-dark of the caves behind the huge stone head of the Bourka Bee-Goddess and the sting was that of a bee - "Paul?" He muttered something that meant nothing - something that meant only get out of here, dream voice, get gone.
"Paul." That was no dreamvoice; it was Annie's voice.
He forced his eyes open. Yes, it was her, and for a moment his panic grew even stronger. Then it simply seeped away, like fluid running down a partly clogged drain.
What the hell -?
He was totally disoriented. She was standing there in the shadows as if she had never been away, wearing one of her woolly skirts and frumpy sweaters; he saw the needle in her hand and understood it hadn't been a sting but an injection. What the f**k - either way it was the same thing. He had been gotten by the goddess. But what had she -?
That bright panic tried to come again, and once again it hit a dead circuit. All he could feel was a kind of academic surprise. That, and some intellectual curiosity about where she had come from, and why now. He tried to lift his hands and they came up a little... but only a little. It felt as if there were invisible weights dangling from them. They dropped back onto the sheet with little dull thumps.
Doesn't matter what she shot me up with. It's like what you write on the last page of a book. It's THE END.
The thought brought no fear. Instead he felt a kind of calm euphoria.
At least she's tried to make it kind... to make it...
"Ah, there you are!" Annie said, and added with lumbering coquettishness: "I see you, Paul... those blue eyes. Did I ever tell you what lovely blue eyes you have? But I suppose other women have - women who were much prettier than I am, and much bolder about their affections, as well." Came back. Came creeping in the night and killed me, hypo or bee-sting, no difference, and so much for the knife under the bed. All I am now is the latest number in Annie's considerable body-count. And then, as the numbing euphoria of the injection began to spread, he thought almost with humor: Some lousy Scheherazade I turned out to be.
He thought that in a moment sleep would return - a more final sleep - but it did not. He saw her slip the hypo into the pocket of her skirt and then she sat down on the bed... not where she usually sat, however; she sat on its foot and for a moment he saw only her solid, impervious back as she bent over, as if to check on something. He heard a wooden thunk, a metallic clunk, and then a shaking sound he had heard some place before. After a moment he placed it. Take the matches, Paul.
Diamond Blue Tips. He didn't know what else she might have there at the foot of the bed, but one of them was a box of Diamond Blue Tip matches.
Annie turned to him and smiled again. Whatever else might have happened, her apocalyptic depression had passed. She brushed an errant lock of hair back behind her ear with a girlish gesture. It went oddly with the lock's dull dirty half-shine.
Dull dirty half-shine oh boy you gotta remember that one that one ain't half-bad oh boy I am stoned now, all the past was prologue to this shit hey baby this here is the mainline oh f**k I'm tucked but this is crystal top-end shit this is going out on a mile-high wave in a f**king Rolls this is - "What do you want first, Paul?" she asked. "The good news or the bad news?"
"Good news first." He managed a big foolish grin. "Guess the bad news is that this is THE END, huh? Guess you didn't like the book so great, huh? Too bad I tried. It was even working. I was just starting to... you know... starting to drive on it." She looked at him reproachfully. "I love the book, Paul. I told you that, and I never lie. I love it so much I don't want to read any more until the very end. I'm sorry to have to make you fill in the n's yourself, but... it's like peeking." His big foolish grin stretched even wider; he thought soon it would meet in the back, tie a lover's knot there, and most of his poor old bean would just topple off. Maybe it would land in the bedpan beside the bed. In some deep, dim part of his mind where the dope hadn't yet reached, alarm bells were going off. She loved the book, which meant she didn't mean to kill him. Whatever was going on, she didn't mean to kill him. And unless his assessment of Annie Wilkes was totally off the beam, that meant she had something even worse in store.
Now the light in the room did not look dull; it looked marvellously pure, marvellously full of its own gray and eldritch charm; he could imagine cranes half-glimpsed in gunmetal mist standing in one-legged silence beside upland lakes in that light, could imagine the mica flecks in rocks jutting from spring grasses in upland meadows shining with the shaggy glow of glazed window-glass in that light, could imagine elves shucking their busy selves off to work in lines under the dew-soaked leaves of early ivy in that light...
Oh BOY are you stoned, Paul thought, and giggled faintly.
Annie smiled in return. "The good news," she said, "is that your car is gone. I've been very worried about your car, Paul. I knew it would take a storm like this to get rid of it and maybe even that wouldn't do the trick. The spring run-off got rid of that Pomeroy dirty bird, but a car is ever so much heavier than a man, isn't it? Even a man as full of cockadoodie as he was. But the storm and the run-off combined was enough to do the trick. Your car is gone. That's the good news."