It was surprisingly easy to start writing about Misery again. It had been a long time and these were hardly ideal circumstances; but Misery's word was cheap, and returning to it felt like putting on an old, familiar glove. Annie put down the first three pages of the new typescript. 'What do you think?' Paul asked. 'It's not right,' she said. 'What do you mean? Don't you like it?' 'Oh, yes, I love it. When Ian kissed her . . . And it was very sweet of you to name the baby after me.' Clever, he thought. Not sweet, hut maybe clever. 'Then why is it not right?' 'Because you cheated,' she explained. 'The doctor comes, when he couldn't have conic. At the end of Misery's Child Geoffrey rode to fetch the doctor, but his horse fell and broke a leg, and Geoffrey broke his shoulder and lay in the rain all night until the morning, when that boy found him. And by then Misery was dead. Do you see?' 'Yes.' How am I going to please her? How can I bring Misery back to life without cheating? 'When I was a child,' Annie was saying, 'I used to go to the cinema every week. We lived in Bakersfield, California. They used to show short films and at the end the hero - Rocket Man or somebody - was always in trouble. Perhaps the criminals had tied him to a chair in a burning house, or he was unconscious in an aeroplane. The hero always escaped, but you had to wait until the next week to find out exactly what happened. I loved those films. If I was bored, or if I was looking after those horrible children downstairs, I used to try to guess what happened next. God, I hated those children. Anyway, sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong. That didn't matter, as long as the hero escaped in a fair way.' Paul tried to stop himself laughing at the picture in his mind of young Annie Wilkes in the cinema. 20 'Are you all right, Paul? Are you going to sneeze? Anyway, what I'm saying is that the way the hero escaped was often unlikely, but always fair. Then one week Rocket Man was in a car. He was tied up and the car had no brakes. He didn't have any special equipment. We saw him in the film struggling to get free; we saw him still struggling while the car went off the edge of a mountain and burst into flames. I spent the whole week trying to guess what would happen, but I couldn't. How could he escape? It was really exciting. I was the first in the queue at the cinema the next week. And what do you think happened, Paul?' Paul didn't know the answer to her question, but she was right, of course, He had cheated. And the writing had been wooden, too. 'The story always started by showing the ending from last week. So we saw Rocket Man in the car again, but this time, just before the car reached the edge, the side-door flew open and Rocket Man fell out on to the road. Then the car went over the edge. All the other children in the cinema were cheering because Rocket Man was safe, but I wasn't cheering. No! I stood up and shouted, "This is wrong! Are you all s............