Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

During their summers on the lake in the early sixties, before William was able to do much more than paddle in the shallows with a pair of bright orange water-wings attached to his back, Maddy and Jessie, always good friends despite the difference in their ages, often went down to swim at the Neidermeyers'. The Neidermeyers had a float equipped with a diving platform, and it was there that Jessie began to develop the form which won her a place first on her high school swim-team and then on the All-State team in 1971-What she remembered second-best about diving from the board on the Neidermeyers” float (first-for then and for always-was the swoop through the hot summer air toward the blue glitter of the waiting water) was how it felt to come up from the depths, through conflicting layers of warm and cold.

Coming up from her troubled sleep was like that.

First there was a black, roaring confusion that was like being inside a thundercloud. She bumped and yawed her way through it, not having the slightest idea of who she was or when she was, let alone where she was. Then a warmer, calmer layer: she had been caught in the most awful nightmare in all of recorded history (at least in her recorded history), but a nightmare was all it had been, and now it was over. As the surface neared, however, she encountered another chilly layer: an idea that the reality waiting ahead was almost as bad as the nightmare. Maybe worse.

What is it? she asked herself. What could possibly be worse thanwhat I’ve just been through?

She refused to think about that. The answer was within reach, but if it occurred to her, she might decide to flip over and start finning her way back down into the depths again. To do that would be to drown, and while drowning might not be the worst way to step out-not as bad as running your Harley into a rock wall or parachuting into a cat’s cradle of high-voltage wires, for instance-the idea of opening her body to that flat mineral smell, which reminded her simultaneously of copper and oysters, was insupportable. Jessie kept stroking grimly upward, telling herself that she would worry about reality when and if she actually broke the surface.

The last layer she passed through was as warm and fearful as freshly spilled blood: her arms were probably going to be deader than stumps. She just hoped she would be able to command enough movement in them to get the blood flowing again.

Jessie gasped, jerked, and opened her eyes. She hadn’t the slightest idea of how long she had been asleep, and the clock-radio on the bureau, stuck in its own hell of obsessive repetition (twelve-twelve-twelve, it flashed into the darkness, as if time had stopped forever at midnight), was no help. All she knew for sure was that it was full dark and the moon was now shining through the skylight instead of the east window.

Her arms were jumping with a nervous jitter-jive of pins and needles. She usually disliked that feeling intensely, but not now; it was a thousand times better than the muscle cramps she had expected as the price of waking her dead extremities back up. A moment or two later she noticed a spreading dampness beneath her legs and bottom and realized that her previous need to urinate was gone. Her body had taken care of the problem while she slept.

She doubled her fists and cautiously pulled herself up a little, wincing at the pain in her wrists and the deep, Sobbing ache the movement caused in the backs of her hands. Most of that pain’s aresult of trying to slip out of the cuffs, she thought. You got nobody toblame but yourself, sweetheart.

The dog had begun to bark again. Each shrill cry was like a.Splinter pounded into her eardrum, and she realized that sound was what had pulled her up and out of her sleep just as she had been about to dive below the nightmare. The location of the sounds-told her the dog was back outside. She was glad it had left the house, but a little puzzled, as well. Maybe it just hadn’t been comfortable under a roof after spending such a long time outside. That idea made a certain amount of sense… as much as anything else in this situation, anyway.

“Get it together, Jess,” she advised herself in a solemn, sleep-foggy voice, and maybe-just maybe-she was doing that. The panic and the unreasoning shame she’d felt in the dream were departing. The dream itself seemed to be drying out, taking on the curiously desiccated quality of an overexposed photograph. Soon, she realized, it would be gone entirely. Dreams on waking were like the empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems. There had been times when this amnesia-if that was what it was-had struck her as sad. Not now. She had never in her life equated forgetting with mercy so quickly and completely.

And it doesn’t matter, she thought. It was just a dream after all.I mean, all those heads sticking out of heads? Dreams are supposed to hesymbolic, of course-yes, I know-and I suppose there might have beensome symbolism in this one…maybe even some truth. If nothing else,I think that now I understand why I hit Will when he goosed me thatday. Nora Callighan would undoubtedly he thrilled-she’d call it abreakthrough. Probably it is. It doesn’t do a thing about getting me outof this fucking jailhouse jewelry, though, and that’s still my top priority.Does anyone disagree with that?

Neither Ruth nor Goody replied; the UFO voices were likewise silent. The only response, in fact, came from her stomach, which was sorry as hell all this had happened but still felt compelled to protest the cancellation of supper with a long, low rumble. Funny, in a way… but apt to be less so come tomorrow. By then her thirst would have come raging back, too, and she was under no illusions about how long those last two sips of water would stave it off.

I’ve got to center my concentration-I’ve just got to. The problem isn’tfood, and it isn’t water, either, Right now those things matter as littleas why I punched Will in the mouth at his ninth-birthday party. Theproblem is how I’m-

Her thoughts broke off with the clean snap of a knot exploding in a hot fire. Her eyes, which had been wandering aimlessly across the darkened room, locked on the far corner, where the wind-driven shadows of the pines danced wildly in the nacreous light falling through the skylight.

There was a man standing there.

Terror greater than any she had ever known crept over her. Her bladder, which had in fact relieved only the worst of its discomfort, now voided itself in a painless gush of heat. Jessie hadn’t the slightest idea of that or anything else. Her terror had blown her mind temporarily clean from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. No sound escaped her, not even the smallest squeak; she was as incapable of sound as she was of thought. The muscles of her neck, shoulders, and arms turned to something that felt like warm water and she slid down the headboard until she hung from the handcuffs in a kind of slack swoon. She didn’t black out-didn’t even come close to it-but that mental emptiness and the total physical incapacity which accompanied it were worse than a blackout. When thought did attempt to return, it was at first blocked by a dark, featureless wall of fear.

A man. A man in the corner.

She could see his dark eyes gazing at her with fixed, idiotic attention. She could see the waxy whiteness of his narrow cheeks and high forehead, although the intruder’s actual features were blurred by the diorama of shadows which went flying across them. She could see slumped shoulders and dangling apelike arms which ended in long hands; she sensed feet somewhere in the black triangle of shadow thrown by the bureau, but that was all.

She had no idea how long she lay in that horrible semi-swoon, paralyzed but aware, like a beetle stung by a trapdoor spider. It seemed like a very long time. The seconds dripped by, and she found herself unable to even close her eyes, let alone avert them from her strange guest. Her first terror of him began to abate a little, but what replaced it was somehow worse: horror and an unreasoning, atavistic revulsion. Jessie later thought that the wellspring of these feelings-the most powerful negative emotions she had ever experienced in her life, including those which had swept her only a short time before, as she had watched the stray dog preparing to dine on Gerald-was the creature’s utter stillness. It had crept in here while she slept and now merely stood in the corner, camouflaged by the ceaseless ebb and flow of shadows over its face and body, staring at her with its strangely avid black eyes, eyes so large and rapt they reminded her of the sockets in a skull.

Her visitor only stood there in the corner; merely that and nothing more.

She lay in the handcuffs with her arms stretched above her, feeling like a woman at the bottom of a deep well. Time passed, marked only by the idiot blink of the clock proclaiming it was twelve, twelve, twelve, and at last a coherent thought stole back into her brain, one which seemed both dangerous and vastly comforting.

There’s no one here but you, Jessie. The man you see in the corner is acombination of shadows and imagination-no more than that.

She fought her way back to a sitting position, pulling with her arms, grimacing at the pain in her overtaxed shoulders, pushing with her feet, trying to dig her bare heels into the coverlet, breathing in harsh little blurts of effort… and while doing these things, her eyes never left the hideously elongated shape in the corner.

It’s too tall and too thin to be a real man, Jess-you see that, don’tyou? It’s nothing but wind, shadows, a soupcon of moonlight anda few leftovers from your nightmare, I imagine. Okay?

It almost was. She started to relax. Then, from outside, the dog voiced another hysterical volley of barks. And didn’t the figure in the corner, the figure that was nothing but wind, shadows, and a soupcon of moonlight-didn’t that nonexistent figure turn its head slightly in that direction?

No, surely not. Surely that was just another trick of the wind and the dark and the shadows.

That might well be; in fact she was almost sure that part-the head-turning part-had been an illusion. But the rest of it? The figure itself? She could not quite convince herself that it was all imagination. Surely no figure which looked that much like a man could be just an illusion… could it?

Goodwife Burlingame spoke up suddenly, and although her voice was fearful, there was no hysteria in it, at least not yet; oddly, it was the Ruth part of her which had suffered the most extreme horror at the idea she might not be alone in the room, and it was the Ruth part that was still close to gibbering.

If that thing’s not real, Goody said, why did the dog leave in thefirst place? I don’t think it would have done that without a very goodreason, do you?

Yet she understood that Goody was deeply frightened just the same, and yearning for some explanation of the dog’s departure that didn’t include the shape Jessie either saw or thought she saw standing in the corner. Goody was begging her to say that her original idea, that the dog had left simply because it no longer felt comfortable in the house, was much more likely. Or maybe, she thought, it had left for the oldest reason of all: it had smelled another stray, this one a bitch in heat. She supposed it was even possible that the dog had been spooked by some noise-a branch knocking against an upstairs window, say. She liked that one the best, because it suggested a kind of rough justice: that the dog had also been spooked by some imaginary intruder, and its barks were intended to frighten this nonexistent newcomer away from its pariah’s supper.

Yes, say any of those things, Goody suddenly begged her, and evenif you can’t believe any of them yourself, make me believe them,

But she didn’t think she could do that, and the reason was standing in the corner beside the bureau. There was someone there. It wasn’t a hallucination, it wasn’t a combination of winddriven shadows and her own imagination, it wasn’t a holdover from her dream, a momentary phantom glimpsed in the perceptual no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking. It was a

(monster it’s a monster a boogeymonster come to eat me up)

man, not a monster but a man, standing there motionlessly and watching her while the wind gusted, making the house creak and the shadows dance across its strange, half-glimpsed face.

This time the thought-Monster! Boogeymonster!-rose from the lower levels of her mind to the more brightly lit stage of her consciousness. She denied it again, but she could feel her terror returning, just the same. The creature on the far side of the room might be a man, but even if it was, she was becoming more and more sure that there was something very wrong with its face. If only she could see it better!

You wouldn’t want to, a whispery, ominous UFO voice advised her.

But I have to talk to it-have to establish contact, Jessie thought, and immediately responded to herself in a nervous, scolding voice that felt like Ruth and Goody mixed together: Don’t think of it asan it, Jessie-think of it as a he. Think of it as a man, someone who’smaybe been lost in the woods, someone who’s as scared as you are.

Good advice, perhaps, but Jessie found she couldn’t think of the figure in the corner as a he, any more than she was able to think of the stray as a he. Nor did she think the creature in the shadows was either lost or frightened. What she felt coming from the corner were long, slow waves of malevolence.

That’s stupid! Talk to it, Jessie! Talk to him!

She tried to clear her throat and discovered there was nothing to clear-it was as dry as a desert and as smooth as a soapstone. Now she could feel her heart pounding in her chest, its beat very light, very fast, very irregular.

The wind gusted. The shadows blew white-and-black patterns across the walls and the ceiling, making her feel like a woman trapped inside a kaleidoscope for the colorblind. For just a moment she thought she saw a nose-thin and long and white-below those black, motionless eyes.

“Who-”

At first she could manage only that one tiny whisper which couldn’t have been heard on the far side of the bed, let alone across the room. She stopped, licked her lips, and tried again. She was aware that her hands were clamped into painfully tight balls, and she forced her fingers to loosen.

“Who are you?” Still a whisper, but a little better than before.

The figure didn’t answer, only stood there with its narrow white hands dangling by its knees, and Jessie thought: Its knees? Knees? Not possible, Jess-when a person’s hands are hanging at his sides, theystop at the upper thighs.

Ruth responded, her voice so hushed and fearful Jessie almost didn’t recognize it. A normal person’s hands stop at the upper thighs,isn’t that what you mean? But do you think a normal person would creepinto someone’s house in the middle of the night, then just stand in thecorner, watching, when he finds the lady of the manor chained to the bed? Just stand there and nothing more?

Then it did move one leg… or perhaps it was only the distracting motion of the shadows again, this time picked up by the lower quadrant of her vision. The combination of shadows and moonlight and wind lent a terrible ambiguity to this entire episode, and again Jessie found herself doubting the visitor’s reality. The possibility that she was still sleeping occurred to her, that her dream of Will’s birthday party had simply veered off in some strange new direction… but she didn’t really believe it. She was awake, all right.

Whether or not the leg actually did move (or even if there was a leg), Jessie’s gaze was momentarily drawn downward. She thought she saw some black object sitting on the floor between the creature’s feet. It was impossible to tell what it might be because the bureau’s shadow rendered that the darkest part of the room, but her mind suddenly returned to that afternoon, when she had been trying to persuade Gerald that she really meant what she was saying. The only sounds had been the wind, the banging door, the barking dog, the loon, and…

The thing sitting on the floor between her visitor’s feet was a chainsaw.

Jessie was instantly sure of this. Her visitor had been using it earlier, but not to cut firewood. It was people he had been cutting up, and the dog had run because it had smelled the approach of this madman, who had come up the lake path swinging his blood-spattered Stihl saw in one gloved hand-

Stop it! Goody shouted angrily. Stop this foolishness right thisminute and get a grip on yourself!

But she discovered she couldn’t stop it, because this was no dream and also because she had become increasingly sure that the figure standing in the corner, as silent as Frankenstein’s monster before the lightning-bolts, was real. But even if it was, it hadn’t spent the afternoon turning people into pork-chops with a chainsaw. Of course not-that was nothing but a movie-inspired variation of the simple, gruesome summer-camp tales that seemed so funny when you were gathered around the fire,-roasting marshmallows with the rest of the girls, and so awful later on, when you lay shivering in your sleeping-bag, believing that each snapping twig signalled the approach of the Lakeview Man, that legendary brain-blasted survivor of the Korean War.

The thing standing in the corner wasn’t the Lakeview Man, and it wasn’t a chainsaw murderer, either. There was something on the floor (at least she was pretty sure there was), and Jessie supposed it could be a chainsaw, but it could also be a suitcase… a backpack… a salesman’s sample case…

Or my imagination.

Yes. Even though she was looking right at it, whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t rule out the possibility of imagination. Yet in some perverse way this only reinforced the idea that the creature itself was real, and it was becoming harder and harder to dismiss the feeling of malevolence which came crawling out of the tangle of black shadows and powdery moonlight like a constant low snarl.

It hates me, she thought. Whatever it is, it hates me. It must. Whyelse would it just stand there and not help me?

She looked back up at that half-seen face, at the eyes which seemed to glitter with such feverish avidity in their round black sockets, and she began to weep.

“Please, is someone there?” Her voice was humble, choked with tears. “If there is, won’t you please help me? Do you see these handcuffs? The keys are right there beside you, on top of the bureau…”

Nothing. No movement. No response. It only stood there-if it was there at all, that was-looking out at her from behind its feral mask of shadows.

“If you didn’t want me to tell anyone I saw you, I wouldn’t,” she tried again. Her voice wavered, blurred, swooped and slid. “I sure wouldn’t! And I’d be so… so grateful…”

It watched her.

Only that and nothing more.

Jessie felt the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. “You’re scaring me, you know,” she said. “Won’t you say something? Can’t you talk? If you’re really there, can’t you please talk to me?”

A thin, terrible hysteria seized her then and flew away with some valuable, irreplaceable part of her caught firmly in its scrawny talons. She wept and pleaded with the fearful figure standing motionless in the corner of the bedroom; she remained conscious throughout but sometimes wavered into that curious blank place reserved for those whose terror has become so great it approaches rapture. She would hear herself asking the figure in a hoarse, weepy voice to please let her out of the handcuffs, to please oh please oh please let her out of the handcuffs, and then she would drop back into that weird blank spot. She knew her mouth was still moving because she could feel it. She could also hear the sounds that were coming out of it, but while she was in the blank place, these sounds were not words but only loose blabbering torrents of sound. She could also hear the wind blowing and the dog barking, aware but not knowing, hearing but not understanding, losing everything in her horror of the half-seen shape, the awful visitor, the uninvited guest. She could not cease her contemplation of its narrow, misshapen head, its white cheeks, its slumped shoulders… but more and more it was the creature’s hands to which her eyes were drawn: those dangling, long-fingered hands that ended much farther down on the legs than normal hands had any right to do. Some unknown length of time would pass in this blank fashion (twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock on the bureau reported; no help there) and then she would come back a little, would start thinking thoughts instead of experiencing only an endless rush of incoherent images, would start hearing her lips speaking words instead of just babbling sounds. But she had moved on while she was in that blank space; her words now had nothing to do with the handcuffs or the keys on the bureau. What she heard instead was the thin, screamy whisper of a woman reduced to begging for an answer… any answer.

“What are you?” she sobbed. “A man? A devil? What in God’sname are you?”

The wind gusted.

The door banged.

Before her, the figure’s face seemed to change… seemed to wrinkle upward in a grin. There was something horribly familiar about that grin, and Jessie felt the core of her sanity, which had borne this assault with remarkable strength until now, at last begin to waver.

“Daddy?” she whispered. “Daddy, is that you?”

Don’t be silly! the Goodwife cried, but Jessie could now feel even that sustaining voice wavering toward hysteria. Don’t be agoose, Jessie! Your father has been dead since 1980!”

Instead of helping, it made things worse. Much worse. Tom Mahout had been interred in the family crypt in Falmouth, and that was less than a hundred miles from here. jessie’s burning, terrified mind insisted upon showing her a hunched figure, its clothes and rotted shoes caked with blue-green mold, slinking across moon-drenched fields and hurrying through tracts of scruffy woods between suburban housing developments; she saw gravity working on the decayed muscles of its arms as it came, gradually stretching them until the hands were swinging beside the knees. It was her father. It was the man who had delighted her with rides on his shoulders at three, who had comforted her at the age of six when a capering circus clown frightened her into tears, who had told her bedtime stories until she was eight-old enough, he said, to read them on her own. Her father, who had cobbled together homemade filters on the afternoon of the eclipse and held her on his lap as the moment of totality approached, her father who had said, Don’t worryabout anything…don’t worry, and don’t look around. But she had thought maybe he was worried, because his voice had been all thick and shaky, hardly like his usual voice at all.

In the corner, the thing’s grin seemed to widen and suddenly the room was filled with that smell, that flat smell that was half-metallic and half-organic; a smell that reminded her of oysters in cream, and how your hand smelled after you’d been clutching a fistful of pennies, and the way the air smelled just before a thunderstorm.

“Daddy, is it you?” she asked the shadowy thing in the corner, and from somewhere came the distant cry of the loon. Jessie could feel the tears trickling slowly down her cheeks. And now something exceedingly odd was happening, something she never would have expected in a thousand years. As she became increasingly sure that it was her father, that it was Tom Mahout standing in the corner, twelve years gone in death or not, her terror began to leave her. She had drawn her legs up, but now she let them slip back down and fall open. As she did, a fragment of her dream recurred-DADDY’s LITTLE GIRL printed across her breasts in Peppermint Yum-Yum lipstick.

“All right, go ahead,” she told the shape. Her voice was a little hoarse but otherwise steady. “It’s why you came back, isn’t it? So go ahead. How could I stop you, anyway? Just promise you’ll unlockme afterward. That you’ll unlock me and let me go.'.

The figure made no response of any kind. It only stood within its surreal jackstraws of moonlight and shadow, grinning at her. And as the seconds passed (twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock on the bureau said, seeming to suggest that the whole idea of time passing was an illusion, that time had in fact frozen solid), Jessie thought that perhaps she had been right in the first place, that there was really no one in here with her at all. She had begun to feel like a weathervane in the grip of those prankish, contradictory gusts of wind that sometimes blow just before a severe thunderstorm or a tornado.

Your father cannot come back from the dead, Goodwife Burlingame said in a voice that strove to be firm and failed miserably. Still, Jessie saluted her effort. Come hell or high water, the Goodwife stayed right in there and kept pitching. This isn’t a horror movie oran episode of The Twilight Zone, Jess; this is real life.

But another part of her-a part which was perhaps the home of those few voices inside which were the real UFOS, not just the wiretaps her subconscious had patched into her conscious mind at some point-insisted that there was a darker truth here, something that trailed from the heels of logic like an irrational (and perhaps supernatural) shadow. This voice insisted that things changed in the dark. Things especially changed in the dark, it said, when a person was alone. When that happened, the locks fell off the cage which held the imagination, and anything-any things-might be set free.

It can be your Daddy, this essentially alien part of her whispered, and with a chill of fear Jessie recognized it as the voice of madness and reason mingled together. It can be, never doubt it. People arealmost always safe from ghosts and ghouls and the living dead in daylight, and they’re usually safe from them at night if they’re with others,hut when a person is alone in the dark, all bets are off.Men and women alone in the dark are like open doors, Jessie, and if they call out or screamfor help, who knows what dread things may answer? Who knows whatsome men and women have seen in the hour of their solitary deaths? Is itso hard to believe that some of them may have died of fear, no matterwhat the words on the death certificates say?

“I don’t believe that,” she said in a blurry, wavering voice. She spoke louder, striving for a firmness she didn’t feel. “You’re not my father! I don’t think you’re anyone! I think you’re only made of moonlight!”

As if in answer, the figure bent forward in a kind of mocking bow, and for one moment its face-a face which seemed too real to doubt-slipped out of the shadows. Jessie uttered a rusty shriek as the pallid rays falling through the skylight painted its features with tawdry carnival gilt. It wasn’t her father; compared with the evil and the lunacy she saw in the face of her visitor, she would have welcomed her father, even after twelve years in a cold coffin. Red-rimmed, hideously sparkling eyes regarded her from deep eye-sockets wrapped in wrinkles. Thin lips twitched upward in a dry grin, revealing discolored molars and jagged canines which seemed almost as long as the stray dog’s fangs.

One of its white hands lifted the object she had half-seen and half-intuited sitting by its feet in the darkness. At first she thought it had taken Gerald’s briefcase from the little room he used as a study down here, but when the creature lifted the box-shaped thing into the light, she saw it was a lot bigger than Gerald’s briefcase and much older. It looked like the sort of old-fashioned sample case travelling salesmen had once carried.

“Please,” she whispered in a strengthless, wheezing little voice. “Whatever you are, please don’t hurt me. You don’t have to let me go if you don’t want to, that’s all right, but please don’t hurt me.

Its grin grew, and she saw tiny twinkles far back in its mouth-her visitor apparently had gold teeth or gold fillings in there, just like Gerald. It seemed to laugh soundlessly, as if gratified by her terror. Then its long fingers were unsnapping the catches of its bag

(I am dreaming, I think, now it does feel like a dream, oh thankGod it does)

and holding it open to her. The case was full of bones and jewelry. She saw finger-bones and rings and teeth and bracelets and ulnae and pendants; she saw a diamond big enough to choke a rhino, glittering milky trapezoids of moonlight from within the stiff, delicate curves of an infant’s ribcage. She saw these things and wanted them to be a dream, yes, wanted them to be, but if it was, it was like no dream she’d ever had before. It was the situation-handcuffed to the bed while a half-seen maniac silently showed off his treasures-that was dreamlike. The feeling, however…

The feeling was reality. There was no getting around it. Thefeeling was reality.

The thing standing in the corner held the open case out for her inspection, one hand supporting the bottom. It plunged its other hand into the tangle of bones and jewelry and stirred it, producing a tenebrous click and rustle that sounded like dirt-clogged castanets. It stared at her as it did this, and somehow unformed features of its strange face wrinkled upward in amusement, its mouth gawping in that silent grin, its slumped shoulders rising and falling in strangled chums of laughter.

No! Jessie screamed, but no sound came out.

Suddenly she felt someone-most likely the Goodwife, and boy, had she ever underestimated the intestinal fortitude of that lady-running for the switches which governed the circuitbreakers in her head. Goody had seen tendrils of smoke starting to seep out through the cracks in the closed doors of those panels, had understood what they meant, and was making a final, desperate effort to shut down the machinery before the motors overheated and the bearings froze.

The grinning figure across the room reached deeper into the case and held out a handful of bones and gold to Jessie in the moonlight.

There was an intolerably bright flash inside her head and then the lights went out. She did not faint prettily, like the heroine in a florid stage play, but was snapped brutally backward like a condemned murderer who has been strapped into the hotseat and has just gotten his first jolt of the juice. All the same it was an end to the horror, and for the time being that was enough. Jessie Burlingame went into the darkness without a murmur of protest.