Gerald’s Game

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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

At last she began to get herself under some kind of control again. She did this, absurdly enough, by reciting Nora Callighan’s little mantra.

“One is for feet,” she said, her dry voice cracking and wavering in the empty bedroom, “ten little toes, cute little piggies, all in a row. Two is for legs, lovely and long, three is my sex, where everything’s wrong.”

She pushed steadily on, reciting the couplets she could remember, skipping the ones she couldn’t, keeping her eyes closed. She went through the whole thing half a dozen times. She was aware that her heartbeat was slowing down and the worst of her terror was once more draining away, but she had no conscious awareness of the radical change she had made in at least one of Nora’s jangly little couplets.

After the sixth repetition she opened her eyes and looked about the room like a woman who has just awakened from a short, restful nap. She avoided the corner by the bureau, however. She didn’t want to look at the earring again, and she most certainly didn’t want to look at the footprint.

Jessie? The voice was very soft, very tentative. Jessie thought it was the voice of the Goodwife, now drained of both its shrill ardor and its feverish denial. Jessie, can I say something?

“No,” she responded immediately in her harsh dust-in-the-cracks voice. “Take a hike. I want to be done with all you bitches.”

Please, Jessie. Please listen to me.

She closed her eyes and found she could actually see that part of her personality she had come to call Goody Burlingame. Goody was still in the stocks, but now she raised her head-an act that couldn’t have been easy with the cruel wooden restraint pressing into the back of her neck. Her hair fell away from her face momentarily, and Jessie was surprised to see not the Goodwife but a young girl.

Yeah, but she’s still me, Jessie thought, and almost laughed. If this wasn’t a case of comic-book psychology, she didn’t know what was. She had just been thinking about Nora, and one of Nora’s favorite hobbyhorses was about how people had to care for “the child inside.” Nora claimed that the most common reason for unhappiness was failure to feed and nurture that interior child.

Jessie had nodded solemnly at all this, keeping her belief that the idea was mostly sentimental Aquarian/New Age slop to herself. She had liked Nora, after all, and although she thought Nora had held onto a few too many sets of mental love-beads from the late sixties and early seventies, she was clearly seeing Nora’s “child inside” now, and that seemed perfectly all right. Jessie supposed that the concept might even have some symbolic validity, and under the circumstances, the stocks made a hell of an apt image, didn’t they? The person in them was the Goodwife-in-waiting, the Ruth-in-waiting, the Jessie-in-waiting. She was the little girl her father had called Punkin.

“So talk,” Jessie said. Her eyes were still closed, and a combination of stress, hunger, and thirst had combined to make the vision of the girl in the stocks almost exquisitely real. Now she could see the words for sexual exticement written on a sheet of vellum nailed above the girl’s head. The words were written in candy-pink Peppermint Yum-Yum lipstick, of course.

Nor was her imagination done yet. Next to Punkin was another set of stocks, with another girl in them. This one was perhaps seventeen, and fat. Her complexion was blotched with pimples. Behind the prisoners, a town common appeared, and after a moment Jessie could see a few cows grazing on it. Someone was ringing a bell-over the next hill, it sounded like- with monotonous regularity, as if the ringer intended to keep it up all day… or at least until the cows came home.

You’re losing your mind, Jess, she thought faintly, and she supposed this was true but unimportant. She might even count it among her blessings before much longer. She pushed the thought away and turned her attention back to the girl in the stocks. As she did, she found her exasperation had been replaced by tenderness and anger. This version of Jessie Mahout was older than the one who had been molested during the eclipse, but not much older-twelve, perhaps, fourteen at the outside. At her age she had no business being in stocks on the town common for any crime, but sexual enticement? Sexual enticement, for heaven’s sake? What kind of bad joke was that? How could people be so cruel? So willfully blind?

What do you want to tell me, Punkin?

Only that it’s real, the girl in the stocks said. Her face was pale with pain, but her eyes were grave and concerned and lucid. It’s real, you know it is, and it will be back tonight. I think that this time it will do more than just look. You have to get out of the handcuffs before the sun goes down, Jessie. You have to be out of this house before it comes back.

Once again she wanted to cry, but there were no tears; there was nothing but that dry, sandpapery sting.

I can’t! she cried. I’ve tried everything! I can’t get out on my own!

You forget one thing, the girl in the stocks told her. I don’t know if it’s important or not, but it might be.

What?

The girl turned her hands over inside the holes which held them, exposing her clean pink palms. He said there were two kinds, remember? M-17 and F- 23. You almost remembered yesterday, I think. He wanted F-23s, but they don’t make many and they’re hard to get, so he had to settle for two pairs Of M-17s. You do remember, don’t you? He told you all about it on the day he brought the handcuffs home.

She opened her eyes and looked at the cuff which enclosed her right wrist. Yes, he certainly had told her all about it; had, in fact, babbled like a coke addict on a two-pipe high, beginning with a late-morning call from the office. He’d wanted to know if the house was empty-he could never remember which days the housekeeper had off-and when she assured him it was, he had asked her to slip into something comfortable. “Something that’s almost there” was the way he’d put it. She remembered being intrigued. Even over the phone, Gerald had sounded ready to blow a fuse, and she had suspected he was thinking kinky. That was all right with her; they were closing in on their forties, and if Gerald wanted to experiment a little, she was willing enough to accommodate him.

He had arrived in record time (he must have left all three miles of the 295 city bypass smoking behind him, she thought), and what Jessie remembered best about that day was how he had gone bustling about the bedroom, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling. Sex wasn’t the first thing that came to her mind when she thought of Gerald (in a word-association test, security would probably have popped out first), but that day the two things had been all but interchangeable. Certainly sex had been the only thing on his mind; Jessie believed his usually polite attorney’s pecker would have ripped the fly out of his gabardine slacks if he’d been any slower getting them off.

Once they and the shorts beneath had been discarded, he had slowed down a little, ceremoniously opening the Adidas sneaker box he’d brought upstairs with him. He brought out the two sets of handcuffs which had been inside and held them up for her inspection. A pulse had been fluttering in his throat, a flickery little movement almost as fast as a hummingbird’s