There aren’t any others. There weren’t that many to begin with, and you’ve researched them all.
She closed her eyes again and for the second time since this nightmare began, she saw the playground behind the old Falmouth Grammar School on Central Avenue. Only this time it wasn’t the image of two little girls balancing on a seesaw that filled her mind; instead she saw one little boy-her brother Will-skinning the cat on the monkey-bars.
She opened her eyes, slumped down, and bent her head to look more closely at the headboard. Skinning the cat meant hanging from a bar, then curling your legs up and over your own shoulders. You finished with a quick little pivot which enabled you to land on your feet again. Will had been so adept at this neat and economical movement that it had looked to Jessie as if he were turning somersaults inside his own hands.
Suppose I could do that? Just skin the cat right over the top of this goddam headboard. Swing over the top and…
“And land on my feet,” she whispered.
For several moments this seemed dangerous but feasible. She would have to move the bed out from the wall, of course-you couldn’t skin the cat if you didn’t have a place to land-but she had an idea she could manage that. Once the bed-shelf was removed (and it would be easy to knock it off its support brackets, unanchored as it was), she would do a backover roll and plant her bare feet against the wall above the top of the headboard. She hadn’t been able to move the bed sideways, but with the wall to push against-
“Same weight, ten times the leverage,” she muttered. “Modern physics at its finest.”
She was reaching for the shelf with her left hand, meaning to tip it up and off the L-brackets when she took another good look at Gerald’s goddam police handcuffs with their suicidally short chains. If he had clipped them onto the bedposts a little higher between the first and second crossboards, say-she might have chanced it; the maneuver would probably have resulted in a pair of broken wrists, but she had reached a point where a pair of broken wrists seemed an entirely acceptable price to pay for escape… after all, they would heal, wouldn’t they? Instead of between the first and second crossboards, however, the cuffs were attached between the second and third, and that was just a little too far down. Any attempt to skin the cat over the headboard would do more than break her wrists; it would result in a pair of shoulders not lust dislocated but actually ripped out of their sockets by her descending weight.
And try moving this goddam bed anywhere with a pair of broken wrists and two dislocated shoulders. Sound like fun?
“No,” she said huskily. “Not too much.”
Let’s cut through it, Jess-you’re stuck here. You can call me the voice Of despair if it makes you feel better, or if it helps you to hold onto your sanity for a little while longer-God knows I’m all for sanity-but what I really am is the voice of truth, and the truth of this situation is that you’re stuck here.
Jessie turned her head sharply to one side, not wanting to hear this self-styled voice of truth, and found she was no more able to shut it out than she had been able to shut out the other ones.
Those are real handcuffs you’re wearing, not the cute little bondage numbers with the padding inside the wristlets and a hidden escape-lever you can push if someone gets carried away and starts going a little too far. You’re for-real locked up, and you don’t happen to be either a fakir from the Mysterious East, capable of twisting your body up like a pretzel, or an escape artist like Harry Houdini or David Copperfield. I’m just telling it the way I see it, okay? And the way I see it, you’re toast.
She suddenly remembered what had happened after her father had left her bedroom on the day of the eclipse-how she had thrown herself on her bed and cried until it had seemed her heart would either break or melt or maybe just seize up for good. And now, as her mouth began to tremble, she looked remarkably as she had then: tired, confused, frightened, and lost. That last most of all.
Jessie began to cry, but after the first few tears, her eyes would produce no more; stricter rationing measures had apparently gone into effect. She cried anyway, fearlessly, her sobs as dry as sandpaper in her throat.
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.
