Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

In New York City, the regulars of the Today program had signed off for another day. On the NBC affiliate which served southern and western Maine, they were replaced first by a local chat-show (a large, motherly woman in a gingham apron showed how easy it was to slow-cook beans in your Crock-pot), then by a game-show where celebrities cracked jokes and contestants uttered loud, orgasmic screams when they won cars and boats and bright red Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners. In the Burlingame home on scenic Kashwakamak Lake, the new widow dozed uneasily in her restraints, and then began to dream once more. It was a nightmare, one made more vivid and somehow more persuasive by the very shallowness of the dreamer’s sleep.

In it Jessie was lying in the dark again, and a man-or a manlike thing-was once more standing across from her in the corner of the room. The man wasn’t her father; the man wasn’t her husband; the man was a stranger, the stranger, the one who haunts all our sickest, most paranoid imaginings and deepest fears. It was the face of a creature Nora Callighan, with her good advice and sweet, practical nature, had never taken into account. This black being could not be conjured away by anything with an ology suffix. It was a cosmic wildcard.

But you do know me, the stranger with the long white face said. It bent down and grasped the handle of its bag. Jessie noted, with no surprise at all, that the handle was a jawbone and the bag itself was made of human skin. The stranger picked it up, flicked the clasps, and opened the lid. Again she saw the bones and the jewels; again it reached its hand into the tangle and began to move it in slow circles, producing those ghastly clickings and clackings and tappings and tappings.

No I don’t, she said. I don’t know who you are, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!

I’m Death, of course, and I’ll be back tonight. Only tonight I think I’ll do a little more than just stand in the corner,, tonight I think I’ll jump out at you, just… like… this !

It leaped forward, dropping the case (bones and pendants and rings and necklaces spilled out toward where Gerald lay sprawled with his mutilated arm pointing toward the hallway door) and shooting out its hands. She saw its fingers ended in dark filthy nails so long they were really claws, and then she shook herself awake with a gasp and a jerk, the handcuff chains swinging and jingling as she made warding-off gestures with her hands. She was whispering the word “No” over and over again in a slurry monotone.

It was a dream! Stop it, Jessie, it was just a dream!

She slowly lowered her hands, letting them dangle limply inside the cuffs once more. Of course it had been-just a variation of the bad dream she’d had last night. It had been realistic, though-Jesus, yes. Far worse, when you got right down to it, than the one of the croquet party, or even the one in which she had recalled the furtive and unhappy interlude with her father during the eclipse. It was passing strange that she had spent so much time this morning thinking about those dreams and so little thinking about the far scarier one. In fact, she really hadn’t thought of the creature with the weirdly long arms and the gruesome souvenir case at all until she’d dozed off and dreamed of him just now.

A snatch of song occurred to her, something from the Latter Psychedelic Age: “Some people call me the space cowboy… yeah… some call me the gangster of love.”

Jessie shuddered. The space cowboy. That was somehow just right. An outsider, someone who had nothing to do with anything, a wildcard, a-

“A stranger,” Jessie whispered, and suddenly remembered the way its cheeks had wrinkled when it began to grin. And once that detail had fallen into place, others began falling into place around it. The gold teeth twinkling far back in the grinning mouth. The pouty, poochy lips. The livid brow and the blade of nose. And there was the case, of course, like something you might expect to see banging against a travelling salesman’s leg as he ran to catch his train-

Stop it, Jessie-stop giving yourself the horrors. Don’t you have enough problems without worrying about the boogeyman?

She most certainly did, but she found that, now that she had begun thinking about the dream, she couldn’t seem to stop. Worse than that was the fact that the more she thought about it, the less dreamlike it became.

What if I was awake? she thought suddenly, and once the idea was articulated, she was horrified to discover some part of her had believed just that all along. It had only been waiting for the rest of her to catch up.

No, oh no, it was just a dream, that’s all-

But what if it wasn’t? What if it wasn’t?

Death, the white-faced stranger agreed. It was Death you saw, I’ll he back tonight, Jessie, And tomorrow night I’ll have your rings in my case with the rest of my pretty things… my souvenirs.

Jessie realized she was shivering violently, as if she had caught a chill. Her wide eyes looked helplessly into the empty corner where the

(space cowboy gangster of love)

had stood, the corner which was now bright with morning sunshine but would be dark with tangles of shadow tonight. Knots of gooseflesh had begun to pop up on her skin. The inescapable truth came again: she was probably going to die here.

Eventually someone will find you, Jessie, but it might take a long time. The first assumption will be that the two of you are off on some wild romantic fling. Why not? Didn’t you and Gerald give every outward appearance of second-decade wedded bliss? It was only the two of you who knew that, at the end, Gerald could get it up with any reliability only if you were handcuffed to the bed, Sort of makes you wonder if someone played a few little games with him on the day of the eclipse, doesn’t it?

“Stop talking,” she muttered. “All of you, stop talking.”

But sooner or later people will get nervous and start hunting for you. It’ll probably be Gerald’s colleagues who actually get the wheels turning, don’t you think? I mean, there are a couple of women in Portland you call friends, but you’ve never really let them inside your life, have you? Acquaintances is really all they are, ladies to have tea with and swap catalogues with. None of them are going to worry much if you drop out of sight for a week or ten days. But Gerald will have appointments, and when be doesn’t show up by Friday noon, I think some of his bullpen buddies will start making phone calls and asking questions. Yes, that’s the way it Will probably start, but I think it’ll probably he the caretaker who actually discovers the bodies, don’t you? I bet he’ll turn his face away while he’s throwing the spare blanket from the closet shelf over you, Jessie. He won’t want to see the way your fingers stick out of the handcuffs, as stiff as pencils and as white as candles. He won’t want to look at your frozen mouth, or the foam long since dried to scales on your lips. Most of all he won’t want to look at the expression of horror in your eyes, so he’ll shift his own eyes to the side while he covers you up.

Jessie moved her head from side to side in a slow, hopeless gesture of negation.

Bill will call the police and they’ll show up with the forensics unit and the County Coroner. They’ll all stand around the bed smoking cigars (Doug Rowe, undoubtedly wearing his awful white trenchcoat, will be standing outside with his film-crew, Of course), and when the coroner pulls off the blanket, they’ll wince. Yes-I think even the most hardened of them are going to wince a little, and some of them may actually leave the room. Their buddies will razz them about it later. And the ones who stay will nod and tell each other that the person on the bed died hard. “You only have to look at her to see that,” they’ll say. But they won’t know the half of it. They won’t know that the real reasons your eyes are staring and your mouth is frozen in a scream is because of what you saw at the end. What you saw coming out of the dark. Your father may have been your first lover, Jessie, but your last is going to be the stranger with the long white face and the travelling bag made out of human skin.

“Oh please, can’t you quit?” Jessie moaned. “No more voices, please, no more voices.”

But this voice wouldn’t stop; wouldn’t even acknowledge her It just went on and on, whispering directly into her mind from someplace far down on her brain-stem. Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.

They’ll take you to Augusta and the State Medical Examiner will cut you open so he can inventory your guts. That’s the rule in cases of unattended or questionable death, and yours is going to be both. He’ll have a peek at what’s left of your last meal-the salami-and-cheese sub from Amato’s in Gorham-and take a little section of brain to look at under his microscope, and in the end he’ll call it death by misadventure. “The lady and gentleman were playing an ordinarily harmless game,” he’ll say, “only the gentleman had the had taste to have a heart attack at a critical moment and the woman was left to… well, it’s best not to go into it. Best not to even think about it any more than is strictly necessary. Suffice it to say that the lady died hard-you only have to took at her to see that.” That’s how it’s going to shake out, Jess. Maybe someone will notice your wedding ring is gone, but they won’t hunt for it long, if at all. Nor will the ME notice that one of your bones-an unimportant one, the third phalange in your right foot, let’s say-is gone. But we’ll know, won’t we, Jessie? In fact, we know already. We’ll know that it took them. The cosmic stranger; the space cowboy. We’ll know-

Jessie drove her head back against the headboard hard enough to send a school of big white fish exploding across her field of vision. It hurt-it hurt a lot-but the mind-voice cut out like a radio in a power-failure, and that made it worth it.

“There,” she said. “And if you start up again, I’ll do that again. I’m not kidding, either. I’m tired of listening to-”

Now it was her own voice, speaking unselfconsciously aloud in the empty room, that cut out like a radio in a power-failure. As the spots before her eyes began to fade, she saw the morning sunlight glinting off something which lay about eighteen inches beyond Gerald’s outstretched hand. It was a small white object with a narrow thread of gold twisting up through the center, making it look like the yin-yang symbol. At first Jessie thought it was a finger-ring, but it was really too small for that. Not a finger-ring but a pearl earring. It had dropped to the floor while her visitor had been stirring the contents of its case around, showing them off to her.

“No,” she whispered. “No, not possible.”

But it was there, glinting in the morning sunshine and every bit as real as the dead man who seemed almost to be pointing at it: a pearl earring spliced with a delicate glint of gold.

It’s one of mine! It spilled out of my jewelry box, it’s been there since the summer, and I’m just noticing it now!

Except that she only owned one set of pearl earrings, they had no gold highlights, and they were back in Portland, anyway.

Except that the men from Skip’s had been in to wax the floors the week after Labor Day, and if there had been an earring left on the floor, one of them would have picked it up and put it either on the bureau or in his own pocket.

Except there was something else, too.

No there’s not. There’s not, and don’t you dare say there is.

It was just beyond the orphan earring.

Even if there was, I wouldn’t look at it.

Except she couldn’t not look at it. Her eyes moved past the earring of their own accord and fixed on the floor just inside the door to the front hall. There was a little spot of dried blood there, but it wasn’t the blood which had caught her attention. The blood belonged to Gerald. The blood was all right. It was the footprint beside it that worried her.

If there was a track there, it was there before!

Much as Jessie wished she could believe that, the track had not been there before. Yesterday there hadn’t been a single scuff on this floor, let alone a foot-track. Nor had she or Gerald left the one she was looking at. That was a shoe-shaped ring of dried mud, probably from the overgrown path that meandered along the shore of the lake for a mile or so before cutting back into the woods and heading south, toward Motton.

Someone had been in the bedroom with her last night after all, it seemed.

As this thought settled inexorably into Jessie’s overstrained mind, she began to scream. Outside, on the back stoop, the stray lifted its scuffed, scratched muzzle from its paws for a moment. It cocked its good ear. Then it lost interest and lowered its head again. It wasn’t as if the noise were being made by anything dangerous, after all; it was only the bitchmaster. Besides, the smell of the dark thing which had come in the night was on her now. It was one the stray was very familiar with. It was the smell of death.

The former Prince closed its eyes and went back to sleep.