“Please, God, please,” he moaned as the Cherokee started outside with a bang and a roar. “Please, God, please - let me out of this or kill me… let me out of this or kill me.” The roar of the engine faded off down the road and God did neither and he was left with his tears and the pain, which was now fully awake and raving through his body.
30
He thought later that the world, in its unfailing perversity, would probably construe those things which he did next as acts of heroism. And he would probably let them - but in fact what he did was nothing more than a final staggering grab for self-preservation.
Dimly he seemed to hear some madly enthusiastic sportscaster - Howard Cosell or Warner Wolf or perhaps that all-time crazy Johnny Most - describing the scene, as if his effort to get at her drug supply before the pain killed him was some strange sporting event - a trial substitution for Monday Night Football, perhaps. What would you call a sport like that, anyway? Run for the Dope?
“I just cannot believe the guts this Sheldon kid is displaying today! the sportscaster in Paul Sheldon's head was enthusing. “I don't believe anyone in Annie Wilkes Stadium - or in the home viewing audience, for that matter - thought he had the sly-test chance of getting that wheelchair moving after the blow he took, but I believe… yes, it is! It's moving! Let's look at the replay!” Sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes. He licked a mixture of salt and tears off his lips. The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.
It was only the thought of the pills, the Novril that she kept somewhere in the house, which got him moving. The locked bedroom door… the possibility the dope might not be in the downstairs bathroom as he had surmised but hidden somewhere… the chance she might come back and catch him… these things mattered not at all, these things were only shadows behind the pain. He would deal with each problem as it came up or he would die. That was all.
Moving caused the band of fire below his waist and in his legs to sink in deeper, cinching his legs like belts studded with hot, inward-pointing spikes. But the chair did move. Very slowly the chair began to move.
He had managed about four feet before realizing he was going to do nothing more useful than roll the wheelchair past the door and into the far comer unless he could turn it.
He grasped the right wheel, shuddering, (think of the pills, think of the relief of the pills) and bore down on it as hard as he could. Rubber squeaked minutely on the wooden floor, the cries of mice. He bore down, once strong and now flabby muscles quivering like jelly, lips peeling back from his gritted teeth, and the wheelchair slowly pivoted.
He grasped both wheels and got the chair moving again. This time he rolled five feet before stopping to straighten himself out. Once he'd done it, he grayed out.
He swam back to reality five minutes later, hearing the dim, goading voice of that sportscaster in his head: “He's trying to get going again! I just cannot be-leeve the guts of this Sheldon kid!” The front of his mind only knew about the pain; it was the back that directed his eyes. He saw it near the door and rolled over to it. He reached down, but the tips of his fingers stopped a clear three inches short of the floor, where one of the two or three bobby-pins that had fallen from her hair as she charged him lay. He bit his lip, unaware of the sweat running down his face and neck and darkening his pajama shirt.
“I don't think he can get that pin, folks - it's been a fan-tas-tic effort, but I'm afraid this is where it all ends.” Well, maybe not.
He let himself slouch to the right in the wheelchair, at first trying to ignore the pain in his right side - pain that felt like an increasing bubble of pressure, something similar to a tooth impaction - and then giving way and screaming. As she said, there was no one to hear him anyway.
The tips of his fingers still hung an inch from the floor, brushing back and forth just above the bobby-pin, and his right hip really felt as if it might simply explode outward in a squirt of some vile white bone-jelly.
Oh God please please help me - He slumped farther in spite of the pain. His fingers brushed the pin but succeeded only in pushing it a quarter of an inch away. Paul slid down in the chair, still slumped to the right, and screamed again at the pain in his lower legs. His eyes were bulging, his mouth was open, his tongue straight down between his teeth like the pull on a window-shade. Little drops of spittle ran from its tip and spatted on the floor.
He pinched the bobby-pin between his fingers… tweezed it… almost lost it… and then it was locked in his fist.
Straightening up brought a fresh slough of pain, and when the act was accomplished he could do no more than sit and pant for awhile, his head tilted as far as the unc Compromising back of the wheelchair would allow, the bobby-pin lying on the board across the chair's arms. For awhile he was quite sure he was going to puke, but that passed.
What are you doing? part of his mind scolded wearily after awhile. Are you waiting for the pain to go away? It won't. She's always quoting her mother, but your own mother had a few sayings, too, didn't she?
Yes. She had.
Sitting there, head thrown back, face shiny with sweat, hair plastered to his forehead, Paul spoke one of them aloud now, almost as an incantation: “There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.” Yeah. So stop waiting, Paulie - the only elf that's going to show up here is that all-time heavyweight, Annie Wilkes.
He got moving again, rolling the wheelchair slowly across to the door. She had locked it, but he believed he might be able to unlock it. Tony Bonasaro, who was now only so many blackened flakes of ash, had been a car-thief. As part of his preparation for writing Fast Cars, Paul had studied the mechanics of car-thievery with a tough old ex-cop named Tom Twyford. Tom had shown him how to hot-wire an ignition, how to use the thin and limber strip of metal car-thieves called Slim Jims to yank the lock on a car door, how to short out a car burglar alarm.
Or, Tom had said on a spring day in New York some two and a half years ago, let's say you don't want to steal a car at all. You got a car, but you're a little low on gas. You got a hose, but the car you pick for the free donation has got a locking gas-cap. Is this a problem? Not if you know what you're doing, because most gas-cap locks are strictly Mickey Mouse. All you really need is a bobby-pin.
It took Paul five endless minutes of backing and filling to get the wheelchair exactly where he wanted it, with the left wheel almost touching the door.
The keyhole was the old-fashioned sort, reminding Paul of John Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland drawings, set in the middle of a tarnished keyplate. He slid down a bit in the wheelchair - giving out a single barking groan - and looked through it. He could see a short hallway leading down to what was clearly the parlor: a dark-red rug on the floor, an old-fashioned divan upholstered in similar material, a lamp with tassels hanging from its shade.
To his left, halfway down the hallway, was a door which stood ajar. Paul's pulsebeat quickened. That was almost surely the downstairs bathroom - he had heard her running enough water in there (including the time she had filled the floor-bucket from which he had enthusiastically drunk), and wasn't it also the place she always came from before giving him his medicine?
He thought it was.
He grasped the bobby-pin. It spilled out of his fingers onto the board and then skittered toward the edge.