Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

All right-let’s talk about Nora instead, Ruth said. Nora, your therapist? Nora, your counsellor? The one you started to go see around the time you stopped painting because some of the paintings were scaring you? Which was also the time, coincidentally or not, when Gerald’s sexual interest in you seemed to evaporate and you started sniffing the collars of his shirts for perfume? You remember Nora, don’t you?

Nora Callighan was a prying bitch! the Goodwife snarled.

“No,” Jessie muttered. “She was well-intentioned, I don’t doubt that a bit, she just always wanted to go one step too far. Ask one question too many.”

You said you liked her a lot. Didn’t I hear you say that?

“I want to stop thinking,” Jessie said. Her voice was wavery and uncertain. “I especially want to stop hearing voices, and talking back to them, too. It’s nuts.”

Well, you better listen just the same, Ruth said grimly, because you can’t run away from this the way you ran away from Nora the way you ran away from me, for that matter.

I never ran away from you, Ruth! Shocked denial, and not very convincing. She had done just that, of course. Had simply packed her bags and moved out of the cheesy but cheerful dorm suite she and Ruth shared. She hadn’t done it because Ruth had started asking her too many of the wrong questions-questions about Jessie’s childhood, questions about Dark Score Lake, questions about what might have happened there during the summer just after Jessie started to menstruate. No, only a bad friend would have moved out for such reasons. Jessie hadn’t moved out because Ruth started asking questions; she moved out because Ruth wouldn’t stop asking them when Jessie asked her to do so. That, in Jessie s opinion, made Ruth a bad friend. Ruth had seen the lines Jessie had drawn in the dust… and had then deliberately stepped over them anyway. As Nora Callighan had done, years later.

Besides, the idea of running away under these conditions was pretty ludicrous, wasn’t it? She was, after all, handcuffed to the bed.

Don’t insult my intelligence, cutie-Pie, Ruth said. Your mind isn’t handcuffed to the bed, and we both know it. You can still ran if you want to, but my advice-my strong advice-is don’t you do it, because I’m the only chance you’ve got. If you just lie there pretending this is a bad dream you got from sleeping on your left side, you’re going to die in handcuffs. Is that what you want? Is that your prize for living your whole life in handcuffs, ever since-

“ I will not think about that!” Jessie screamed at the empty room.

For a moment Ruth was silent, but before Jessie could do more than begin to hope that she’d gone away, Ruth was back… and back at her, worrying her like a terrier worrying a rag.

Come on, Jess-you’d probably like to believe you’re crazy rather than dig around in that old grave, but you’re really not, you know. I’m you, the Goodwife’s you… we’re all you, as a matter of fact. I have a pretty good idea of what happened that day at Dark Score when the rest of the family was gone, and the thing I’m really curious about doesn’t have a lot to do with the events per se. What I’m really curious about is this: is there apart of you-one I don’t know about-that wants to he sharing space with Gerald in that dog’s guts come this time tomorrow? I only ask because that doesn’t sound like loyalty to me; it sounds like lunacy.

Tears were trickling down her cheeks again, but she didn’t know if she was crying because of the possibility-finally articulated-that she actually could die here or because for the first time in at least four years she had come close to thinking about that other summer place, the one on Dark Score Lake, and about what happened there on the day when the sun went out.

Once upon a time she had almost spilled that secret at a women’s consciousness group… back in the early seventies that had been, and of course attending that meeting had been her roomie’s idea, but Jessie had gone along willingly, at least to begin with; it had seemed harmless enough, just another act in the amazing tie-dyed carnival that was college back then. For Jessie, those first two years of college-particularly with someone like Ruth Neary to tour her through the games, rides, and exhibits-had been for the most part quite wonderful, a time when fearlessness seemed usual and achievement inevitable. Those were the days when no dorm room was complete without a Peter Max poster and if you were tired of the Beatles-not that anybody was-you could slap on a little Hot Tuna or MC5. It had all been a little too bright to be real, like things seen through a fever which is not quite high enough to be life-threatening. In fact, those first two years had been a blast.

The blast had ended with that first meeting of a women’s consciousness group. In there, Jessie had discovered a ghastly gray world which seemed simultaneously to preview the adult future that lay ahead for her in the eighties and to whisper of gloomy childhood secrets that had been buried alive in the sixties… but did not lie quiet there. There had been twenty women in the living room of the cottage attached to the Neuworth Interdenominational Chapel, some perched on the old sofa, others peering out of the shadows thrown by the wings of the vast and lumpy parsonage chairs, most sitting cross-legged on the floor in a rough circle-twenty women between the ages of eighteen and fortysomething. They had joined hands and shared a moment of silence at the beginning of the session. When that was over, Jessie had been assaulted by ghastly stories of rape, of incest, of physical torture. If she lived to be a hundred she would never forget the calm, pretty blonde girl who had pulled up her sweater to show the old scars of cigarette burns on the underside of her breasts.

That was when the carnival ended for Jessie Mahout. Ended? No, that wasn’t right. It was as if she had been afforded a momentary glimpse behind the carnival; had been allowed to see the gray and empty fields of autumn that were the real truth: nothing but empty cigarette wrappers and used condoms and a few cheap broken prizes caught in the tall grass, waiting to either blow away or be covered by the winter snows. She saw that silent stupid sterile world waiting beyond the thin layer of patched canvas which was all that separated it from the razzle-dazzle brightness of the midway, the patter of the hucksters, and the glimmer-glamour of the rides, and it terrified her. To think that only this lay ahead for her, only this and nothing more, was awful; to think that it lay behind her as well, imperfectly hidden by the patched and tawdry canvas of her own doctored memories, was insupportable.

After showing them the bottoms of her breasts, the pretty blonde girl had pulled her sweater back down and explained that she could say nothing to her parents about what her brother’s friends had done to her on the weekend her parents had gone to Montreal because it might mean that what her brother had been doing to her off and on all during the last year would come out, and her parents would never have believed that.

The blonde girl’s voice was as calm as her face, her tone perfectly rational. When she finished there was a thunderstruck pause-a moment during which Jessie had felt something tearing loose inside her and had heard a hundred ghostly interior voices screaming in mingled hope and terror-and then Ruth had spoken.