Free Misery by Stephen King Page B

right. I didn't.
      Images of the blackened pages floating up, the flames, the sounds, the smell of the uncreation — he gritted his teeth against the images and tried to shut his mind away from them; vivid was not always good.
       No, you didn't, but nine out of ten writers would have — at least they would if they were getting paid as much as you have been for even the non-Misery books. She never even thought of it.
       She's not a writer.
       Neither is she stupid, as I think we have both agreed. I think that she is filled with herself — she does not just have a large ego but one which is positively grandiose. Burning it seemed to her the proper thing to do, and the idea that her concept of the proper thing to do might be short-circuited by something so piddling as a bank Xerox machine and a couple of rolls of quarters . . . that blip just never crossed her screen, my friend.
      His other deductions might be like houses built on quicksand, but this view of Annie Wilkes seemed to him as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. Because of his researches for Misery, he had rather more than a layman's understanding of neurosis and psychosis, and he knew that although a borderline psychotic might have alternating periods of deep depression and almost aggressive cheerfulness and hilarity, the puffed and infected ego underlay all, positive that all eyes were upon him or her, positive that he or she was staffing in a great drama; the outcome was a thing for which untold millions waited with held breath.
        Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought. These lines were predictable because they all stretched in the same direction: from the unstable person to objects, situations, or other persons outside of the subject's field of control (or fantasy: to the neurotic there might be some difference but to the psychotic they were one and the same).
      Annie Wilkes had wanted Fast Cars destroyed, and so, to her, there had been only the one copy.
       Maybe I could have saved the damn thing by telling her there were more. She would have seen destroying the manuscript was futile. She —
        His breathing, which had been slowing toward sleep, suddenly caught in his throat and his eyes widened.
      Yes, she would have seen it was futile. She would have been forced to acknowledge one of those lines leading to a place beyond her control. The ego would be hurt, squealing —
       I have such a temper!
      If she had been clearly faced with the fact that she couldn't destroy his 'dirty book', might she not have decided to destroy the creator of the dirty book instead? After all, there was no copy of Paul Sheldon.
        His heart was beating fast. In the other room the clock began to bong, and overhead he heard her thumping footfalls cross his ceiling. The faint sound of her urinating. The toilet flushing. The heavy pad of her feet as she went back to bed. The creak of the springs.
    You won't make me mad again, will you?
       His mind suddenly tried to break into a gallop, an overbred trotter trying to break stride. What, if anything, did all this dime-store psychoanalysis mean in terms of his car? About when it was found? What did it mean to him?
       'Wait a minute,' he whispered in the dark. 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, just hold the phone. Slow down.'
      He put his arm across his eyes again and again conjured up the state trooper with the dark sunglasses and the overlong sideburns. We've found an overturned car halfway down Humbuggy Mountain, the state trooper was saying, and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
    Only this time Annie doesn't invite him to stay for coffee. This time she isn't going to feel safe until he's out of her house and far down the road. Even in the kitchen, even with two closed doors between them and the guest-room, even with the guest doped to the ears, the trooper might hear a groan.
    If his car was found, Annie Wilkes would know she was in trouble, wouldn't she?
       'Yes,' Paul whispered.