Gerald’s Game

when the thing with the suitcase of bones arrived. Worse, she might still be alive.

Besides, her visitor had cut the line. She had no way of knowing this… but her heart knew it just the same. If she went through all the rigamarole of moving the chair and plugging the t-connector back in, the phone would still be dead, just like the one in the kitchen and the one in the front hall.

And what’s the big deal, anyway? she told her voices. I’m planningto drive out to the main road, that’s all. Compared to performingimpromptu surgery with a water-glass and pushing a double bed across the room while losing a pint of blood, it’ll be a breeze. The Mercedes isa good car, and it’s a straight shot up the driveway. I’ll putter out toRoute 117 at ten miles an hour, and if I feel too weak to drive all theway to Dakin’s Store once I make the highway, I’ll just pull across theroad, put on the four-way flashers, and lay on the horn when I see someonecoming. No reason why that shouldn’t work, with the roadflat and openfor a mile and a half in either direction. The big thing about the car isthe locks. Once I’m in it, there’ll be doors I can lock. It won’t be able toget in.

It, Ruth tried to sneer, but Jessie thought she sounded scared-yes, even her.

That’s right, she returned. You were the one who always used to tellme I ought to put my head on hold more often and follow my heart,weren’t you? You bet you were, And do you know what my heart saysnow, Ruth? It says that the Mercedes is the only chance I have. And ifyou want to laugh at that, go right ahead…but my mind is made up.

Ruth apparently did not want to laugh. Ruth had fallen silent.

Gerald handed me the car-keys just before he got out of the car, so hecould reach into the back seat and get his briefcase. He did do that, didn’the? Please God, let my memory of that he right.

Jessie slipped her hand into the left pocket of her skirt and found only a couple of Kleenex. She reached down with her right hand, pressed it gingerly against the outside of that pocket, and let out a sigh of relief as she felt the familiar bulge of the car-key and the big round joke fob Gerald had given her for her last birthday. The words on the fob read YOU SEXY THING. Jessie decided she had never felt less sexy and more like a thing in her entire life, but that was okay; she could live with it. The key was in her pocket, that was the important thing. The key was her ticket out of this awful place.

Her tennies stood side by side underneath the telephone table, but Jessie decided she was as dressed as she intended to get. She started slowly toward the hall door, moving in tiny little invalid steps. As she went, she reminded herself to try the phone in the hall before going outside-it couldn’t hurt.

She had barely rounded the head of the bed when the light began to slink out of the day again. It was as if the fat bright sunbeams slanting through the west window were connected to a dimmer-circuit, and someone was turning down the rheostat. As they dimmed, the diamond-dust revolving within them disappeared.

Oh no, not now, she pleaded. Please, you’ve got to he kidding. But the light continued to fade, and Jessie suddenly realized she was swaying again, her upper body describing ever-widening circles in the air. She groped for the bedpost and instead found herself clutching the bloody handcuff from which she had so recently escaped.

July 20^th, 1963, she thought incoherently. 5:42 P.M. Totaleclipse. Can I get a witness?

The mixed smell of sweat, semen, and her father’s cologne filled her nose. She wanted to gag on it, but she was suddenly too weak. She managed two more tottery steps, then fell forward onto the bloodstained mattress. Her eyes were open and they blinked occasionally, but otherwise she lay as limp and moveless as a woman who has been cast up, drowned, on some deserted beach.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Her first returning thought was that the darkness meant she was dead.

Her second was that if she was dead, her right hand wouldn’t feel as if it had first been napalmed and then flayed with razorblades. Her third was the dismayed realization that if it was dark and her eyes were open-as they seemed to be-then the sun had gone down. That jolted her up from the in-between place where she had been lying, not quite unconscious but deep in a post-shock lassitude, in a hurry. At first she couldn’t remember why the idea of sundown should be so frightening, and then

(space cowboy-monster of love)

it all came back to her in a rush so strong it was like an electrical shock. The narrow, corpse-white checks; the high forehead; the rapt eyes.

The wind had come up strongly once more while she had been lying semi-conscious on the bed, and the back door was banging again. For a moment the door and the wind were the only sounds, and then a long, wavering howl rose in the air. Jessie believed it was the most awful sound she had ever heard; the sound she imagined a victim of premature burial might make after being disinterred and dragged, alive but insane, from her coffin.

The sound faded into the uneasy night (and it was night, no doubt about that), but a moment later it came again: an inhuman falsetto, full of idiot terror. It rushed over her like a living thing, making her shudder helplessly on the bed and grope for her ears. She covered them, but could not shut out that terrible cry when it came a third time.

“Oh, don’t,” she moaned. She had never felt so cold, so cold, so cold. “Oh, don’t… don’t.”

The howl funneled away into the gusty night and was not immediately renewed. Jessie had a moment to catch her breath and realize it was only a dog, after all- probably the dog, in fact, the one who had turned her husband into its own personal McDonald’s Drive-Thru. Then the cry was renewed, and it was impossible to believe any creature from the natural world could make such a sound; surely it was a banshee, or a vampire writhing with a stake in its heart. As the howl rose toward its crystalline peak, Jessie suddenly understood why the animal was making that sound.

It had come back, just as she had feared it would. The dog knew it, sensed it, somehow.

She was shivering all over. Her eyes feverishly scanned the corner where she had seen her visitor standing last night-the corner where it had left the pearl earring and the single footprint. It was far too dark to see either of these artifacts (always assuming they were there at all), but for a moment Jessie thought she saw the creature itself, and she felt a scream rise in her throat. She closed her eyes tight, opened them again, and saw nothing but the wind-driven shadows of the trees outside the west window. Farther on in that direction, beyond the writhing shapes of the pines, she could see a fading band of gold on the line of the horizon.

It might be seven o'clock, but if I can still see the last of the sunset,it’s probably not even that late. Which means I was only out for an hour,an hour and a half, tops. Maybe it’s not too late to get out of here.Maybe-

This time the dog seemed actually to scream. The sound made Jessie feel like screaming back. She grasped one of the footposts because she had started to sway on her feet again, and suddenly realized she couldn’t remember getting off the bed in the first place. That was how much the dog had freaked her out.

Get control of yourself, girl. Take a deep breath and get control ofyourself.

She did take a deep breath, and the smell she drew in with the air was one she knew. It was like that flat mineral smell which had haunted her all these years-the smell that meant sex, water, and father to her-but not exactly like that. Some other odor or odors seemed mixed into this version of it-old garlic… ancient onions… dirt… unwashed feet, maybe. The smell tumbled Jessie back down a well of years and filled her with the helpless, inarticulate terror children feel when they sense some faceless, nameless creature-some It-waiting patiently beneath the bed for them to stick out a foot… or perhaps dangle a hand…

The wind gusted. The door banged. And somewhere closer by, a board creaked stealthily the way boards do when someone who is trying to be quiet treads lightly upon them.

It’s come back, her mind whispered. It was all the voices now; they had entwined in a braid. That’s what the dog smells, that’s what you smell, and Jessie, that’s what made the board creak. The thing thatwas here last night has come back for you,

“Oh God, please, no,” she moaned. “Oh God no. Oh God no. Oh dear God don’t let that be true.”

She tried to move, but her feet were frozen to the floor and her left hand was nailed to the bedpost. Her fear had immobilized her as surely as oncoming headlights immobilize a deer or rabbit caught in the middle of the road. She would stand here, moaning under her breath and trying to pray, until it came to her, came for her-the space cowboy, the reaper of love, just some door-to-door salesman of the dead, his sample case filled with bones and finger-rings instead of Amway or Fuller brushes.

The dog’s ululating cry rose in the air, rose in her head, until she thought it must surely drive her mad.

I’m dreaming, she thought. That’s why I couldn’t remember standingup; dreams are the mind’s version of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books,and you can never remember unimportant stuff like that when you’rehaving one. I passed out, yes- that really happened, only instead ofgoing down into a coma, I came up into natural sleep. I guess that meansthe bleeding must have stopped, because I don’t think people who arebleeding to death have nightmares when they’re going down for the count.I’m sleeping, that’s all, Sleeping and having the granddaddy of all haddreams.

A fabulously comforting idea, and only one thing wrong with it: it wasn’t true. The dancing tree-shadows on the wall by the bureau were real. So was that weird smell drifting through the house. She was awake, and she had to get out of here.

I can’t move! she wailed.

Yes you can, Ruth told her grimly. You didn’t get out of thosefucking handcuffs just to die off right, tootsie. Get moving, now-I don’tneed to tell you how to do it, do I?

“No,” Jessie whispered, and slapped lightly at the bedpost with the back of her right hand. The result was an immediate and enormous blast of pain. The vise of panic which had been holding her shattered like glass, and when the dog voiced another of those freezing howls, Jessie barely heard it-her hand was a lot closer, and it was howling a lot louder.

And you know what to do next, toots-don’t you?

Yes-the time had come to make like a hockey player and get the puck out of here, to make like a library and book. The thought of Gerald’s rifle surfaced for a second, and then she dismissed it. She didn’t have the slightest idea where the gun was, or even if it was here at all.

Jessie walked slowly and carefully across the room on her trembling legs, once again holding out her left hand to steady her balance. The hallway beyond the bedroom door was a carousel of moving shadows with the door to the guest bedroom standing open on the right and the small spare room Gerald used as a study standing open on the left. Farther down on the left was the archway which gave on the kitchen and living room. On the right was the unlatched back door the Mercedes and maybe freedom.

Fifty steps, she thought. Can’t be any more than that, and it’sprobably less. So get going, okay?

But at first she just couldn’t. Bizarre as it would undoubtedly seem to someone who hadn’t been through what she had been through during the last twenty-eight