Misery

Misery
He fried to turn over, as if he could get away from her, but his broken legs and drugged body refused to obey. Annie poured some of the liquid on to his left ankle and some more onto the blade of the axe. 'There won't be much pain, Paul. It won't be bad.' It's no good screaming - no one can hear. And if you think things arc as bad as they can get, just listen to the 'morse'. Paul Sheldonis a world-famous writer. On his way to deliver the typewritten pages of his latest book, he has an accident on a snow-covered road. When he wakes up, he's in bed . . . But it's not a hospital bed. And though the woman who saved him is one of his greatest admirers, she's also dangerously insane. And in her lonely country house, she has Paul, his legs badly broken and in extreme pain, completelyin her power. When she learns what he has just done to Misery Chastain, her favourite character from his books, Paul knows he's in trouble, deep trouble. The one thing you don't do with Annic Wilkes is make her angry. She knows how to cause pain. The only question is, how much can a man stand? Stephen King is probably the most popular author now writing. There are over 150 million copies of hisnovels in print and he makes $2 million a month from his books and the films of his books. He was born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, USA and became a full-time writer after his first novel, Carrie (1973), was sold for $400,000. Many of King's books have been made into films. The screen version of Misery was one of the most popular films of 1990. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for playing Annie Wilkes. JamesCaan played Paul Sheldon. You tan also read Stephen King's The breathing Method and The Body in Penguin Readers.

To

the teacher:

CHAPTER ONE

In addition to all the language forms of Levels One to Five, which are used again at this level of the series, the main verb forms and tenses used at Level Six are: • future perfect verbs, passives with continuous or perfect aspects and the'third' conditional with continuous forms • modal verbs: needn't and needn't have (to express absence of necessity), would (to describe habitual past actions), should and should have (to express probability or failed expectation), may have and might have (to express possibility) could have and Would have (to express past, unfulfilled possibility or likelihood). Also used are: • non-defining relativeclauses. Specific attention is paid to vocabulary development in the Vocabulary Work exercises at the end of the book. These exercises are aimed at training students to enlarge their vocabulary systematically through intelligent reading and effective use of a dictionary.

To

the

student:

Dictionary Words: • As you read this book, you will find that some words are in darker black ink thanthe others on the page. Look them up in your dictionary, if you do not already know them, or try to guess the meaning of the words first, and then look them up later, to check.

Memory was slow to return. At first there was only pain. The pain was total, everywhere, so that there was no room for memory. Then he remembered that before the pain there was a cloud. He could let himself go into thatcloud and there would be no pain. He needed only to stop breathing. It was so easy. Breathing only brought pain, anyway. But the peace of the cloud was spoiled by the voice. The voice - which was a woman's voice - said, 'Breathe! You must breathe, Paul!' Something hit his chest hard, and then foul breath was forced into his mouth by unseen lips. The lips were dry and the breath smellcd of thestale wind in the tunnel of an underground railway; it smelled of old dust and dirt. He began to breathe again so that the lips would not return with their foul breath. Along with the pain, there were sounds. When the pain covered the shore of Ins mind, like a high tide, the sounds had no meaning: 'Bree! Ooo mus bree Pul!' When the tide went out, the sounds became words. Me already knew that...