Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Her biggest fear had been that the foot of the bed would try to hang up either in the bathroom door or the far corner of the room, making it necessary for her to back and fill like a woman trying to shoehorn a big car into a small parking space. As it turned out, the rightward-tending arc the bed described as she moved it slowly across the room was almost perfect. She only had to make a single mid-course correction, pulling her end of the bed a little farther to the left so she could be sure the other end would clear the bureau. It was while she was doing this-pulling with her head down and her butt out and both arms wrapped tightly around the bedpost-that she suffered her first bout of lightheartedness… only as she lay with her weight against the post, looking like a woman who is so drunk and tired that she can only stand up by pretending to dance cheek-to-cheek with her boyfriend, she thought that darkheadedness would probably be a better way to describe it. The dominant feeling was one of loss-not just of thought and will but of sensory input as well. For one confused moment she was convinced that time had whiplashed, flinging her to a place that was neither Dark Score nor Kashwakamak but some other place entirely, a place that was on the ocean rather than any inland lake. The smell was no longer oysters and pennies but sea-salt. It was the day of the eclipse again, that was the only thing that was the same. She had run into the blackberry tangles to get away from some other man, some other Daddy who wanted to do a lot more than shoot his squirt on the back of her panties. And now he was at the bottom of the well.

Deja vu poured over her like strange water.

Oh Jesus, what is this? she thought, but there was no answer, only that puzzling image again, one she hadn’t thought of since she had returned to the sheet-divided bedroom to change her clothes on the day of the eclipse: a skinny woman in a housedress, her dark hair put up in a bun, a puddle of white fabric beside her.

Whoa, Jessie thought, clutching at the bedpost with her tattered right hand and trying desperately to keep her knees from buckling. Hold on, Jessie-just hold on. Never mind the woman, nevermind the smell, never mind the darkness. Hold on and the darkness willpass.

She did, and it did. The image of the skinny woman kneeling beside her slip and looking at the splintered hole in the old boards went first, and then the darkness began to fade. The bedroom brightened again, gradually taking on its former five o'clock autumn hue. She saw motes of dust dancing in the light slanting in through the lakeside windows, saw her own shadow-legs stretching across the floor. They broke at the knees so that the rest of her shadow could climb the wall. The darkness pulled back, but it left a high sweet buzzing in her ears. When she looked down at her feet she saw they too were coated with blood. She was walking in it, leaving tracks in it.

You’re running out of time, Jessie.

She knew.

Jessie lowered her chest to the headboard again. Getting the bed started was harder this time, but she finally managed it. Two minutes later she was standing next to the bureau she had stared at so long and hopelessly from the other side of the room. A tiny dry smile quivered the corners of her lips. I’m like a woman who’sspent her whole life dreaming of the black sands of Kona and can’t believeit when she’s finally standing on them, she thought. It seems like justanother dream, only maybe a little more real than most, because in thisone your nose itches.

Her nose didn’t itch, but she was looking down at the crumpled snake of Gerald’s tie and the knot was still in it. That last was the sort of detail even the most realistic dreams rarely supplied. Beside the red tie were two small, round-barrelled keys, clearly identical. The handcuff keys.

Jessie raised her right hand and looked at it critically. The third and fourth fingers still hung limply. She wondered briefly just how much nerve-damage she had done to her hand, then dismissed the thought. It might matter later on-as some of the other things she had dismissed for the duration of this gruelling fourthquarter drive downfield might matter later on-but for the time being, nerve-damage to her right hand was no more important to her than the price of hogbelly futures in Omaha. The important thing was that the thumb and first two fingers on that hand were still taking messages. They shook a little, as if expressing shock at the sudden loss of their lifelong neighbors, but they still responded.

Jessie bent her head and spoke to them.

“You have to stop doing that. Later on you can shake like mad, if you want, but right now you have to help me. You have to.” Yes. Because the thought of dropping the keys or knocking them off the bureau after getting this far… that was unthinkable. She stared sternly at her fingers. They didn’t stop trembling, not entirely, but as she watched, their jitters quieted to a barely visible thrumming.

“Okay,” she said softly. “I don’t know if that’s good enough or not, but we’re going to find out.”

At least the keys were the same, which gave her two chances. She found nothing at all strange in the fact that Gerald had brought them both; he was nothing if not methodical. Planning for contingencies, he often said, was the difference between being good and being great. The only contingencies he hadn’t planned on this time were the heart attack and the kick which had provoked it. The result, of course, was that he was neither good nor great, only dead.

“The doggy’s dinner,” Jessie muttered, once again having no idea at all she was speaking aloud. “Gerald used to be a winner, but now he’s just the doggy’s dinner. Right, Ruth? Right, Punkin?

She tweezed one of the small steel keys between the thumb and forefinger of her sizzling right hand (as she touched the metal, that pervasive feeling that all this was a dream occurred), picked it up, looked at it, then looked at the cuff which enclosed her left wrist. The lock was a small circle pressed into its side; to Jessie it looked like the sort of doorbell a rich person might have at the tradesman’s entrance of the manor house. To open the lock, you simply stuck the hollow barrel of the key into the circle until you heard it click into place, then turned it.

She lowered the key toward the lock, but before she could slip the barrel in, another wave of that peculiar darkheadedness rolled through her mind. She swayed on her feet and found herself once again thinking of Karl Wallenda. Her hand began to shake again.

“Stop that!” she cried fiercely, and jammed the key desperately at the lock. “Stop th-”

The key missed the circle, struck the hard steel beside it instead, and turned in her blood-slicked fingers. She held onto it a second longer, and then it squirted out of her grasp-went greasy, one might have said-and fell to the floor. Now there was only the one key left,. and if she lost that-

You won’t, Punkin said. I swear you won’t. Just go for it before youlose your courage.

She flexed her right arm once, then raised the fingers toward her face. She looked at them, closely. The shakes were abating again, not enough to suit her, but she couldn’t wait. She was afraid she would black out if she did.

She reached out with her faintly trembling hand, and came very close to pushing the remaining key over the edge of the bureau in her first effort to grip it. It was the numbness-the goddam numbness that simply wouldn’t leave her fingers. She took a deep breath, held it, made a fist in spite of the pain and the fresh flow of blood it provoked, then let the air out of her lungs in a long, whistling sigh. She felt a little better. This time she pressed her first finger to the small head of the key and dragged it toward the edge of the bureau instead of trying to pick it up immediately. She didn’t stop until it was sticking out over the edge.

If you drop it, Jessie! the Goodwife moaned. Oh, if you drop thisone, too!

“Shut up, Goody,” Jessie said, and pushed her thumb up against the bottom of the key, creating a pincers. Then, trying not to think at all about what was going to happen to her if this went wrong, she lifted the key and brought it to the cuff. There was a bad run of seconds when she was unable to align the shaking barrel of the key with the lock, and a worse one when the lock itself momentarily doubled… then quadrupled. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, took another deep breath, then popped them open. Now she saw only one lock again, and she jabbed the key into it before her eyes could do any more tricks.

“Okay,” she breathed. “Let’s see.”

She applied clockwise pressure. Nothing happened. Panic tried to jump up into her throat, and then she suddenly remembered the rusty old pickup truck Bill Dunn drove on his caretaking rounds, and the joke sticker on the back bumper: LEFTY LOOSEY, RIGHTY TIGHTY, it said. Above the words was a drawing of a large screw.

“Lefty loosey,” Jessie muttered, and tried turning the key counter-clockwise. For one moment she did not understand that the cuff had popped open; she thought the loud click she heard was the sound of the key breaking off in the lock, and she shrieked, sending a spray of blood from her cut mouth to the top of the dresser. Some of it spattered Gerald’s tie, red on red. Then she saw the notched latch-lock was standing open, and realized she had done it-she had actually done it.

Jessie Burlingame pulled her left hand, a little puffy around the wrist but otherwise unharmed, free of the open cuff, which fell back against the headboard as its mate had done. Then, with an expression of deep, wondering awe, she raised both hands slowly up to her face. She looked from the left to the right and back to the left again. She was unmindful of the fact that the right was covered with blood; it was not blood she was interested in, at least not yet. For the moment she only wanted to make absolutely sure she was really free.

She looked back and forth between her hands for almost thirty seconds, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a Ping-Pong match. Then she drew in a deep breath, cocked her head back, and uttered another high-pitched, drilling shriek. She felt a fresh wave of darkness, big and smooth and vicious, thunder through her, but she ignored it and went on shrieking. It seemed to her that she had no choice; it was either shriek or die. The brittle broken-glass edge of madness in that shriek was unmistakable, but it was still a scream of utter triumph and victory. Two hundred yards away, in the woods at the head of the driveway, the former Prince lifted its head from its muzzle and looked uneasily toward the house.

She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off her hands, couldn’t seem to stop shrieking. She had never felt anything remotely like what she was feeling now, and some distant part of her thought: If sexwas even half this good, people would be doing it on every streetcorner they just wouldn’t be able to help themselves.

Then she ran out of breath and swayed backward. She grabbed for the headboard, but a moment too late-she lost her balance and spilled onto the bedroom floor. As she went down, Jessie realized that part of her had been expecting the handcuff chains to snub her before she fell. Pretty funny, when you thought about it.

She struck the open wound on the inside of her wrist as she landed. Pain. lit up her right arm like the lights on a Christmas tree and this time when she screamed it was all pain. She bit it off quickly when she felt herself drifting away from consciousness again. She opened her eyes and stared into her husband’s torn face. Gerald looked back at her with an expression of endless, glazed surprise-This wasn’t supposed to happen to me, I’m a lawyer with myname on the door. Then the fly which had been washing its front legs on his upper lip disappeared up one of his nostrils and Jessie turned her head so quickly she thumped it on the floorboards and saw stars. When she opened her eyes this time, she was looking up at the headboard, with its gaudy drips and tunnels of blood. Had she been standing way up there only a few seconds ago? She was pretty sure she had been, but it was hard to believe-from here, the fucking bed looked approximately as tall as the Chrysler Building.

Get moving, Jess! It was Punkin, once more yelling in that urgent, annoying voice of hers. For someone with such a sweet little face, Punkin could certainly be a bitch when she set her mind to it.

“Not a bitch,” she said, letting her eyes slip closed. A small, dreamy smile touched the corners of her mouth. “A squeaky wheel.”

Get moving, damn it!

Can’t. Need a little rest first.

If you don’t get moving right away, you can rest forever! Now shag Your fat ass!

That got to her. “Nothing fat about it, Miss Smartmouth,” she muttered pettishly, and tried to struggle to her feet. It took only two efforts (the second thwarted by another of those paralyzing cramps across her diaphragm) to convince her that getting up was, at least for the time being, a bad idea. And doing so would actually create more problems than it would solve, because she needed to get into the bathroom, and the foot of the bed now lay across the doorway like a roadblock.

Jessie went under the bed, moving with a gliding, swimming motion that was almost graceful, blowing a few errant dust bunnies out of her way as she went. They drifted off like small gray tumbleweeds. For some reason the dust bunnies made her think of the woman in her vision again-the woman kneeling in the blackberry tangles with her slip in a white pile beside her. She slid into the gloom of the bathroom and a new smell smote her nostrils: the dark, mossy smell of water. Water dripping from the tub faucets; water dripping from the shower head; water dripping from the washbasin taps. She could even smell the peculiar waiting-to-be mildew odor of a damp towel in the basket behind the door. Water, water, everywhere, and every drop to drink. Her throat shrank dryly inside her neck, seeming to cry out, and she became aware that she was actually touching water-a small puddle from the leaky pipe under the sink, the one the plumber never seemed to get to no matter how many times he was asked. Gasping, Jessie pulled herself over to the puddle, dropped her head, and began to lick the linoleum. The taste of the water was indescribable, the silky feel of it on her lips and tongue beyond all dreams of sweet sensuousness.

The only problem was that there wasn’t enough. That enchantingly dank, enchantingly green smell was all around her, but the puddle below the sink was gone and her thirst wasn’t slaked but only awake. That smell, the smell of shady springs and old hidden wellheads, did what even Punkin’s voice hadn’t been able to it got Jessie on her feet again.

She used the edge of the sink to haul herself up. She caught just a glimpse of an eight-hundred-year-old woman looking out of the mirror at her, and then she twisted the basin tap marked C. Fresh water-all the water in the world-came gushing out. She tried to voice that triumphant shriek again, but this time managed nothing but a harsh susurrant whisper. She bent over the basin, her mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a fish, and lunged into that mossy wellhead perfume. It was also the bland mineral smell which had so haunted her over all the years since her father had molested her during the eclipse, but now it was all right; now it was not the smell of fear and shame but of life. Jessie inhaled it, then coughed it out joyously again as she shoved her open mouth into the water jetting from the tap. She drank until a powerful but painless cramp caused her to heave it all back up again. It came still cool from its short visit in her stomach and sprayed the mirror with pink droplets. Then she gasped in several breaths and tried again.

The second time the water stayed down.