RebeccaPaul is stuck in a real life torture chamber, and he can’t seem to get away! Annie Wilkes has him locked down tighter than Fort Knox. Jerking awake out of a terrible dream, he realizes that the present is just as bad as the dream. However, he is determined to find some medication, something to get him through the pain. As he works his way out of his room, he squeezes the wheelchair out the door, and down the hall. Trying to maintain the level of clean and leave no trace, he inches his way through the quiet house. While the silence is deafening, the blood in his ears is pounding away. As he makes his way into the bathroom, he looks around for the medications that have to be kept somewhere. He strikes gold in the bottom of the closet – an entire box filled with all sorts of different medicines. Now he must decide how many he can squirrel away without Annie noticing anything has been taken or moved.
Hearing the car approach the house, he races his wheelchair back to the bedroom, hoping against hope. Hoping that everything looks the same as it did when she left, and that he can get back to the room, door locked and into the bed before she reappears. Slowly, quietly, he rolls across the floor, and eases himself back into the same position she had left him, hoping that she would not notice anything amiss. As the door swings open, he realizes that he has forgotten something – the pile of medications in his lap. How could he have forgotten they were there? Now he must try and hide them before Annie sees what he has been up to while she was gone, and suffer the massive consequences of her anger.
With that crisis averted, he can get down to the writing, bringing his hated character Misery back from the dead. How does one revive a character that one detests so much. Even though his life hangs in the balance with the telling his story, he knows he must drag it out as long as he can. Slowly the story of Misery begins to take shape, while Annie looks on and reads through what he accomplishes. Time begins to move again, and the story starts to fall into place.
But Annie is fixing to hit another episode, and this one will leave Paul reeling and wondering what will happen next…
This week we are reading pages 89 (pick up at section 32)-187 (stop right above the 17th section)
Questions:
- Paul is doing his best to buy time. With the invention of the novel that Annie wants, do you think he will be successful?
- Do you think he enjoys writing this new novel despite the situation?
- Annie seems to have a lot of underlying issues. What do you think she is fully capable of, based on what we have seen so far?
