Gerald’s Game

hours or so, the bedroom represented a kind of dour safety to her. The hallway, however… anything might be lurking out there. Anything, Then something which sounded like a thrown stone thudded against the west side of the house, just outside the window. Jessie uttered her own small howl of terror before realizing it was just the branch of the hoary old blue spruce out there by the deck.

Get hold of yourself, Punkin said sternly. Get hold of yourself andget out of here.

She tottered gamely onward, left arm still out, counting steps under her breath as she went. She passed the guest bedroom at twelve. At fifteen she reached Gerald’s study, and as she did, she began to hear a low, toneless hissing sound, like steam escaping a very old radiator. At first Jessie did not associate the sound with the study; she thought she was making it herself Then, as she was raising her right foot to make the sixteenth step, the sound intensified. This time it registered more clearly, and Jessie realized she couldn’t be the one making it, because she was holding her breath.

Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head toward the study, where her husband would never again work on legal briefs while he chainsmoked Marlboros and sang old Beach Boys hits under his breath. The house was groaning around her like an old ship plowing through a moderately heavy sea, creaking in its various joints as the wind shouldered against it with cold air. Now she could hear a clapping shutter as well as the banging door, but these sounds were somewhere else, in some other world where wives were not handcuffed and husbands did not refuse to listen and night-creatures did not stalk. She could hear the muscles and tendons in her neck creaking like old bedsprings as she turned her head. Her eyes throbbed in their sockets like chunks of hot charcoal.

I don’t want to look! her mind screamed. I don’t want to look, Idon’t want to see!

But she was helpless not to look. It was as if strong invisible hands were turning her head while the wind gusted and the back door banged and the shutter clapped and the dog once more sent its desolate, bone-chilling howl spiralling into the black October sky. Her head turned until she was looking into her dead husband’s study, and yes, sure enough, there it was, a tall figure standing beside Gerald’s Eames chair and in front of the sliding glass door. Its narrow white face hung in the darkness like a stretched skull. The dark, squarish shadow of its souvenir case squatted between its feet.

She drew in breath to scream with, but what came out was a sound like a teakettle with a broken whistle. “Huhhhhaaahhhhhhh.”

Only that and nothing more.

Somewhere, in that other world, hot urine was running down her legs; she had wet her pants for a second record-breaking day. The wind gusted in that other world, making the house shiver on its bones. The blue spruce knocked its branch against the west wall again. Gerald’s study was a lagoon of dancing shadows, and it was once more very difficult to tell what she was seeing… or if she was in fact seeing anything at all.

The dog raised its keen, horrified cry again and Jessie thought: Oh, you’re seeing it, all right. Maybe not as well as the dog out there issmelling it, but you are seeing it,

As if to remove any lingering doubts she might have had on this score, her visitor poked its head forward in a kind of parody of inquisitiveness, giving Jessie a clear but mercifully brief look at it. The face was that of an alien being that has tried to mimic human features without much success. It was too narrow, for one thing-narrower than any face Jessie had ever seen in her life. The nose seemed to have no more thickness than a butter-knife. The high forehead bulged like a grotesque garden bulb. The thing’s eyes were simple black circles below the thin upside-down V’s of its brows; its pudgy, liver-colored lips seemed to be simultaneously pouting and melting.

No, not melting, she thought with the bright narrow lucidity that sometimes lives, like the glowing filament in a lightbulb, within a sphere of complete terror. Not melting, smiling. It’s tryingto smile at me.

Then it bent over to grasp its case, and its narrow, incoherent face was mercifully lost from view again. Jessie staggered back a step, tried to scream again, and could only produce another loose, glassy whisper. The wind moaning around the eaves was louder.

Her visitor straightened up again, holding the case with one hand and unlatching it with the other. Jessie realized two things, not because she wanted to but because her mind’s ability to pick and choose what it would sense had been completely demolished. The first had to do with the smell she had noted earlier. It wasn’t garlic or onions or sweat or dirt. It was rotting flesh. The second had to do with the creature’s arms. Now that she was closer and could see better (she wished it weren’t so, but it was), they impressed her more forcibly-freakish, elongated things that seemed to waver in the wind-driven shadows like tentacles. They presented the case to her as if for her approval, and now Jessie saw it was not a travelling salesman’s case but a wicker box that looked like an oversized fisherman’s creel.

I’ve seen a box like that before, she thought. I don’t know if it wason some old TV show or in real life, but I have. When I was just a littlegirl. It came out of a long black car with a door in the back.

A soft and sinister UFO voice suddenly spoke up inside her. Once upon a time, Jessie, when President Kennedy was still alive and alllittle girls were Punkins and the plastic body-bag had yet to be invented-back in the Time of the Eclipse, let us say-boxes like this werecommon, They came in all sizes, from Men’s Extra Large to Six-Month Miscarriage. Your friend keeps his souvenirs in an old-fashioned mortician’s body-box, Jessie.

As she realized this, she realized something else, as well. It was perfectly obvious, once you thought about it. The reason her visitor smelled so bad was because it was dead. The thing in Gerald’s study wasn’t her father, but it was a walking corpse, just the same.

No… no, that can’t he-

But it was. She had smelled exactly the same thing on Gerald, not three hours ago. Had smelled it in Gerald, simmering in his flesh like some exotic disease which can only be caught by the dead.

Now her visitor was opening the box again and holding it out to her, and once again she saw the golden glitters and diamond flashes amid the heaps of bones. Once again she watched as the narrow dead man’s hand reached in and began to stir the contents of the wicker body-box-a box which had perhaps once held the corpses of infants or very small children. Once again she heard the tenebrous click and whisk of bones, a sound like dirt-clogged castanets.

Jessie stared, hypnotized and almost ecstatic with terror. Her sanity was giving way; she could feel it going, almost hear it, and there wasn’t a thing on God’s green earth she could do about it.

Yes there is! You can run! You have to run, and you have to do itnow!

It was Punkin, and she was shrieking… but she was also a long way off, lost in some deep stone gorge in Jessie’s head. There were lots of gorges in there, she was discovering, and lots of dark, twisty canyons and caves that had never seen the light of the sun-places where the eclipse never ended, you might say. It was interesting. Interesting to find that a person’s mind was really nothing but a graveyard built over a black hollow place with freakish reptiles like this crawling around the bottom. Interesting.

Outside, the dog howled again, and Jessie finally found her voice. She howled with it, a doglike sound from which most of her sanity had been subtracted. She could imagine herself making sounds like that in some madhouse. Making them for the rest of her life. She found she could imagine that very easily.

Jessie, no! Hold on! Hold onto your mind and run! Run away!

Her visitor was grinning at her, its lips wrinkling away from its gums, once again revealing those glimmers of gold at the back of its mouth, glimmers that reminded her of Gerald. Gold teeth.

It had gold teeth, and that meant it was-

It means it’s real, yes, but we’ve already established that, haven’t we? The only question left is what you’re going to do now. Got any ideas,Jessie? If you do, you better trot them out, because time has gotten awfullyshort.

The apparition stepped forward, still holding its case open, as if it expected her to admire the contents. It was wearing a necklace, she saw-some weird sort of necklace. The thick, unpleasant smell was growing stronger. So was that unmistakable feeling of malevolence. Jessie tried to take a compensatory step back for the one the visitor had taken toward her, and found that she couldn’t move her feet. It was as if they had been glued to the floor.

It means to kill you, toots, Ruth said, and Jessie understood this was true. Are you going to let it? There was no anger or sarcasm in Ruth’s voice now, only curiosity. After all that’s happened to you,are you really going to let it?

The dog howled. The hand stirred. The bones whispered. The diamonds and rubies flashed their dim nightfire.

Hardly aware of what she was doing, let alone why she was doing it, Jessie grasped her own rings, the ones on the third finger of her left hand, with the wildly trembling thumb and forefinger of her right. The pain across the back of that hand as she squeezed was dim and distant. She had worn the rings almost constantly across all the days and years of her marriage and the last time she’d taken them off, she’d had to soap her finger. Not this time. This time they slid off easily.

She held her bloody right hand out to the creature, who had now come all the way to the bookcase just inside the entrance to the study. The rings lay on her palm in a mystic figure eight below the makeshift sanitary napkin bandage. The creature stopped. The smile on its pudgy, misshapen mouth faltered into some new expression which might have been anger or only confusion.

“Here,” Jessie said in a harsh, choked growl. “Here, take them. Take them and leave me alone.”

Before the creature could move, she threw the rings at the open case as she had once thrown coins at the EXACT CHANGE baskets on the New Hampshire Turnpike. There was less than five feet between them now, the mouth of the case was large, and both rings went in. She distinctly heard the double click as her wedding and engagement bands fell against the bones of strangers.

The thing’s lips wrinkled back from its teeth again, and it once more began to utter that sibilant, creamy hiss. It took another step forward, and something-something which had been lying stunned and unbelieving on the floor of her mind-awoke.

“No!” she screamed. She turned and went lurching up the hallway while the wind gusted and the door banged and the shutter clapped and the dog howled and it was right behind her, it was, she could hear that hissing sound, and at any moment it would reach out for her, a narrow white hand floating at the end of a fantastic arm as long as a tentacle, she would feel those rotting white fingers close on her throat-

Then she was at the back door, she was opening it, she was spilling out onto the stoop and tripping over her own right foot; she was falling and somehow reminding herself even as she went down to turn her body so she would land on her left side. She did, but still hit hard enough to see stars. She rolled over onto her back, lifted her head, and stared at the door, expecting to see the narrow white face of the space cowboy loom behind the screen. It didn’t, and she could no longer hear the hissing sound, either. Not that those things meant much; it could hurtle into view at any second, seize her, and tear her throat out.

Jessie struggled to her feet, managed one step, and then her legs, trembling with a combination of shock and blood-loss, betrayed her and spilled her back to the planks next to the wirecovered compartment which held the garbage. She moaned and looked up at the sky, where clouds filigreed by a moon three-quarters full were racing from west to east at lunatic speed. Shadows rolled across her face like fabulous tattoos. Then the dog howled again, sounding much closer now that she was outside, and that provided the tiny bit of extra incentive she needed. She reached up to the garbage compartment’s low sloped top with her left hand, felt around for the handle, and used it to haul herself to her feet. Once she was up, she held the handle tightly until the world stopped swaying. Then she let go and walked slowly toward the Mercedes, now holding out both arms for balance.