Gerald’s Game

The dog stared down the hall, its eyes sparkling with a mad mixture of fear and desire, its snout wrinkled backward like a rumpled throw-rug, its long upper lip rising and falling in a nervous, spasmodic sneer that revealed its teeth in small white winks. A stream of anxious urine squirted from it and patterned on the floor, marking the front hall-and thus the whole house-as the dog’s territory. This sound was too small and too brief for even Jessie’s straining ears to catch.

What it smelled was blood. The scent was both strong and wrong. In the end, the dog’s extreme hunger tipped the scales; it must eat soon or die. The former Prince began to walk slowly down the hall toward the bedroom. The smell grew stronger as it went. It was blood, all right, but it was the wrong blood. It was the blood of a master. Nevertheless, that smell, one far too rich and compelling to deny, had gotten into its small, desperate brain. The dog kept walking, and as it neared the bedroom door, it began to growl.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jessie heard the click of the dog’s nails and understood it was indeed still in the house, and coming this way. She began to scream. She knew this was probably the worst thing a person could do-it went against all the advice she’d ever heard about never showing a potentially dangerous animal that you were afraid-but she couldn’t help it. She had too good an idea of what was drawing the stray toward the bedroom.

She pulled her legs up, using the handcuffs to yank herself back against the headboard at the same time. Her eyes never left the door to the hallway as she did this. Now she could hear the dog growling. The sound made her bowels feel loose and hot and liquid.

It halted in the doorway. Here the shadows had already begun to gather, and to Jessie the dog was only a vague shape low to the floor-not a big one, but no toy poodle or Chihuahua, either. Two orange-yellow crescents of reflected sunlight marked its eyes.

“Go away!” Jessie screamed at it. “Go away! Get out! You’re…you’re not welcome here!” That was a ridiculous thing to say… but under the circumstances, what wasn’t? I’ll be asking it to fetch methe keys from the top of the bureau before you know it, she thought.

There was movement from the hindquarters of the shadowy shape in the doorway: it had begun to wag its tail. In some sentimental girl’s novel, this probably would have meant the stray had confused the voice of the woman on the bed with the voice of some beloved but long-lost master. Jessie knew better. Dogs didn’t just wag their tails when they were happy; they-like cats-also wagged them when they were indecisive, still trying to evaluate a situation. The dog had barely flinched at the sound of her voice, but it didn’t quite trust the dim room, either. Not yet, at least.

The former Prince had yet to learn about guns, but it had learned a good many other hard lessons in the six weeks or so since the last day of August. That was when Mr Charles Sutlin, a lawyer from Braintree, Massachusetts, had turned it out in the woods to die rather than take it back home and pay a combined state and town dog-tax of seventy dollars. Seventy dollars for a pooch which was nothing but a Heinz Fifty-seven was a pretty tall set of tickets, in Charles Sutlin’s opinion. A little too tall. He had bought a motor-sailer for himself only that June, granted, a purchase that was well up in the five-figure range, and you could claim there was some fucked-up thinking going on if you compared the price of the boat and the price of the dog-tax-of course you could, anybody could, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was that the motor-sailer had been a planned purchase. That particular acquisition had been on the old Sutlin drawing-board for two years or more. The dog, on the other band, was just a spur-of-the-moment buy at a roadside vegetable stand in Harlow. He never would have bought it if his daughter hadn’t been with him and fallen in love with the pup. “That one, Daddy!” she’d said, pointing. “The one with the white spot on his nose-the one that’s standing all by himself like a little prince.” So he’d bought her the pup-no one ever said he didn’t know how to make his little girl happy-but seventy bucks (maybe as much as a hundred if Prince was classified as a Class B, Larger Dog) was serious dough when you were talking about a mutt that had come without a single piece of paperwork. Too much dough, Mr Charles Sutlin had decided as the time to close up the cottage on the lake for another year began to approach. Taking it back to Braintree in the back seat of the Saab would also be a pain in the ass-it would shed everywhere, might even puke or take a shit on the carpeting. He could buy it a Vari Kennel, he supposed, but those little beauts started at $29.95 and worked up from there. A dog like Prince wouldn’t be happy in a kennel, anyway. He would be happier running wild, with the whole north woods for his kingdom. Yes, Sutlin had told himself on that last day of August as he parked on a deserted stretch of Bay Lane and then coaxed the dog out of the back seat. Old Prince had the heart of a happy wanderer-you only had to take a good close look at him to see that. Sutlin wasn’t a stupid man and part of him knew this was self-serving bullshit, but part of him was also exalted by the idea of it, and as he got back into his car and drove off, leaving Prince standing at the side of the road and looking after him, he was whistling the theme from Born Free, occasionally bursting into a snatch of the lyrics: “Booorn freeee… to follow your heaaaart!” He had slept well that night, not sparing a thought for Prince (soon to be the former Prince), who spent the same night curled up beneath a fallen tree, shivering and wakeful and hungry, whining with fear each time an owl hooted or an animal moved in the woods.

Now the dog Charles Sutlin had turned out to the theme of Born Free stood in the doorway of the master bedroom of the Burlingame summer home (the Sutlin cottage was on the far side of the take and the two families had never met, although they had exchanged casual nods at the town boat-dock over the last three or four summers). Its head was down, its eyes were wide, and its hackles were up. It was unaware of its own steady growl; all of its concentration was focused on the room. It understood in some deep, instinctual way that the blood-smell would soon overwhelm all caution. Before that happened, it must assure itself as completely as it could that this was not a trap. It didn’t want to be caught by masters with hard, hurtful feet, or by those who picked up hard pieces of the ground and threw them.

“Go away!” Jessie tried to shout, but her voice came out sounding weak and trembly. She wasn’t going to make the dog go away by shouting at it; the bastard somehow knew she couldn’t get up off the bed and hurt it.

This can’t be happening, she thought. How could it be, when justthree hours ago I was in the passenger seat of the Mercedes with my seatbeltaround me, listening to the Rainmakers on the tape player and remindingmyself to see what was playing at the Mountain Valley Cinemas, just incase we did decide to spend the night? How can my husband be dead whenwe were singing along with Bob Walkenhorst? “One more summer,” wesang, one more chance, one more stab at romance.” We both know all thewords to that one, because it’s a great one, and that being the case, howcan Gerald possibly he dead? How can things have possibly gotten fromthere to here? Sorry, folks, hut this just has to he a dream. It’s much tooabsurd for reality.

The stray began to advance slowly into the room, legs stiff with caution, tail drooping, eyes wide and black, lips peeled back to reveal a full complement of teeth. About such concepts as absurdity it knew nothing.

The former Prince, with whom the eight-year-old Catherine Sutlin had once romped joyfully (at least until she’d gotten a Cabbage Patch doll named Marnie for her birthday and temporarily lost some of her interest), was part Lab and part collie… a mixed breed, but a long way from being a mongrel. When Sutlin had turned it out on Bay Lane at the end of August, it had weighed eighty pounds and its coat had been glossy and sleek with health, a not unattractive mixture of brown and black (with a distinctive white collie bib on the chest and undersnout). It now weighed a bare forty pounds, and a hand passed down its side would have felt each straining rib, not to mention the rapid, feverish beat of its heart. Its coat was dull and bedraggled and full of burdocks. A half-healed pink scar, souvenir of a panicky scramble under a barbed wire fence, zigzagged down one haunch, and a few porcupine quills stuck out of its muzzle like crooked whiskers. It had found the porker lying dead under a log about ten days ago, but had given up on it after the first noseful of quills. It had been hungry but not yet desperate.

Now it was both. Its last meal had been a few maggoty scraps nosed out of a discarded garbage bag in a ditch running beside Route 117, and that had been two days ago. The dog which had quickly learned to bring Catherine Sutlin a red rubber ball when she rolled it across the living-room floor or into the hall was now quite literally starving on its feet.

Yes, but here-right here, on the floor, within sight!-were pounds and pounds of fresh meat, and fat, and bones filled with sweet marrow. It was like a gift from the God of Strays.

The onetime darling of Catherine Sutlin continued to advance on the corpse of Gerald Burlingame.

CHAPTER EIGHT

This isn’t going to happen, Jessie told herself. No way it can, so justrelax.

She went on telling herself this right up to the moment when the upper half of the stray’s body was cut off from her view by the left side of the bed. Its tail began to wag harder than ever, and then there was a sound she recognized-the sound of a dog drinking from a puddle on a hot summer day. Except it wasn’t quite like that. This sound was rougher, somehow, not so much the sound of lapping as of licking. Jessie stared at the rapidly wagging tail, and her mind suddenly showed her what was hidden from her eyes by the angle of the bed. This homeless stray with its burdock-tangled fur and its weary, wary eyes was licking the blood out of her husband’s thinning hair.

“NO!” She lifted her buttocks off the bed and swung her legs around to the left. “GET AWAY FROM HIM! JUST GET AWAY!” She kicked out, and one of her heels brushed across the raised knobs of the dog’s spine.

It pulled back instantly and raised its muzzle, its eyes so wide they showed delicate rings of white. Its teeth parted, and in the fading afternoon light the cobweb-thin strands of saliva stretched between its upper and lower incisors looked like threads of spun gold. It lunged forward at her bare foot. Jessie yanked it back with a scream, feeling the hot mist of the dog’s breath on her skin but saving her toes. She curled her legs under her again without being aware that she was doing it, without hearing the cries of outrage from the muscles in her overstrained shoulders, without feeling her joints roll reluctantly in their bony beds.

The dog looked at her a moment longer, continuing to snarl, threatening her with its eyes. Let’s have an understanding, lady, the eyes said. You do your thing and I’ll do mine. That’s the understanding.Sound okay to you? It better, because if you get in my way, I’m going tofuck you up. Besides, he’s dead-you know it as well as I do, and why should he go to waste when I’m starving? You’d do the same, I doubt ifyou see that now, but I believe you may come around to my way of thinkingon the subject, and sooner than you think.

“GET OUT!” she screamed. Now she sat on her heels with her arms stretched out to either side, looking more like Fay Wray on the sacrificial jungle altar than ever. Her posture-head up, breasts thrust outward, shoulders thrown so far back they were white with strain at their furthest points, deep triangular hollows of shadow at the base of her neck-was that of an exceptionally hot pin-up in a girlie magazine. The obligatory pout of sultry invitation was missing, however; the expression on her face was that of a woman who stands very near the borderline between the country of the sane and that of the mad. “GET OUT OF HERE!”

The dog continued to took up at her and snarl for a few moments. Then, when it had apparently assured itself that the kick wouldn’t be repeated, it dismissed her and lowered its head again. There was no lapping or licking this time. Jessie heard a loud smacking sound instead. It reminded her of the enthusiastic kisses her brother Will used to place on Gramma Joan’s cheek when they went to visit.

The growling continued for a few seconds, but it was now oddly muffled, as if someone had slipped a pillowcase over the stray’s head. From her new sitting position, with her hair almost brushing the bottom of the shelf over her head, Jessie could see one of Gerald’s plump feet as well as his right arm and hand. The foot was shaking back and forth, as if Gerald were bopping a little to some jivey piece of music-'One More Summer” by the Rainmakers, for instance.