'Well?' he asked several days later, when she interrupted him. 'Is it fair?'

Annie sat on his bed, holding the first six chapters of the typescript. She looked a bit pale.

'Of course,' she said, as if they both already knew the answer - which he supposed they did. 'It's not only fair, it's also good. Exciting.'

'Shall I go on?' he asked.

'I'll kill you if you don't!' she replied, smiling a little. Paul didn't smile back. This common remark would once have seemed ordinary to him; when Annie Wilkes said it, it didn't seem ordinary at all.

'You won't have to kill me, Annie,' he said. 'I want to go on. So why don't you leave me to write?'

'All right,' she said. She stood up and quickly dropped the typescript on his table, and then moved away. It was as if she was afraid of being burned by him. She was thinking of him now as the famous author, the one who could capture her in the pages of his books and burn her with the heat which his words made.

'Would you like to read it as I write it?' he asked.

Annie smiled. 'Yes! It would be almost like those films when I was young.'

'I don't usually show my work before it's all finished,' he said, 'but this is a special situation, so I'd be glad to show it to you chapter by chapter.' And so began the thousand and one nights of Paul Sheldon, he thought. 'But will you do something for me?'

'What?'

'Fill in all those "n" s,' he said.

She smiled at him with real warmth. 'That would make me very proud,' she said. 'I'll leave you alone now.'

But it was too late: her interruption closed the hole in the paper for the rest of the day.

Early the next morning Paul was sitting up in bed with his pillows piled up behind him, drinking a cup of coffee and looking at those marks on the sides of the door. Suddenly Annie rushed into the room, her eyes wide with fear. In one hand she held a piece of cloth; in the other, some rope.

'What -?'

It was all he had time to say. She seized him with frightened strength and pulled him forward. Pain - the worst for days - ran through his legs, and he screamed. The coffee cup flew out of his hand and broke on the floor. His first thought was that she had seen the marks on the door and now she was going to punish him.

'Shut up, stupid!' she whispered urgently. She tied his hands behind him with the rope, and just then he heard the sound of a car turning off the road and towards her house.

He opened his mouth to say something and she pushed the cloth into it. It tasted foul.