Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

sexual hanky-panky-but remembering what happened in i963 can’t do a thing for me now except add to my general misery, So let’s just drop that whole subject, okay? Let’s forget Dark Score Lake .

“What do you say, Ruth?” she asked in a low voice, and her gaze shifted to the batik butterfly across the room. For just a moment there was another image-a little girl, somebody’s sweet little Punkin, smelling the sweet aroma of aftershave and looking up into the sky through a piece of smoked glass-and then it was mercifully gone.

She looked at the butterfly for a few moments longer, wanting to make sure those old memories were going to stay gone, and then she looked back at Gerald’s glass of water. Incredibly, there were still a few slivers of ice floating on top, although the darkening room continued to hold the heat of the afternoon sun and would for awhile longer.

Jessie let her gaze drift down the glass, let it embrace those chilly bubbles of condensation standing on it. She couldn’t actually see the coaster on which the glass stood-the shelf cut it off-but she didn’t have to see it to visualize the dark, spreading ring of moisture forming on it as those cool beads of condensation continued to trickle down the sides of the glass and pool around it at the bottom.

Jessie’s tongue slipped out and swiped across her upper lip, not imparting much moisture.

I want to drink! the scared, demanding voice of the child-of somebody’s sweet little Punkin-yelled. I want it and I want it right… NOW!

But she couldn’t reach the glass. It was a clear-cut case of so near and yet so far.

Ruth: Don’t give up so easy-if you could hit the goddam dog with an ashtray, tootsie, maybe you can get the glass. Maybe you can.

Jessie raised her right hand again, straining as hard as her throbbing shoulder would allow, and still came up at least two and a half inches short. She swallowed, grimacing at the sandpapery jerk and clench of her throat.

“See?” she asked. “Are you happy now?”

Ruth didn’t reply, but Goody did, She spoke up softly, almost apologetically, inside jessie’s head. She said get it, not reach it . They… they might not be the same thing, Goody laughed in an embarrassed who-am-I-to-stick-my-oar-in way, and Jessie had a moment to think again how surpassingly odd it was to feel a part of yourself laughing like that, as if it really were an entirely separate entity. If I had a few more voices, Jessie thought, we could have a goddam bridge tournament in here.

She looked at the glass a moment longer, then let herself flop back down on the pillows so she could study the underside of the shelf. It wasn’t attached to the wall, she saw; it lay on four steel brackets that looked like upside-down capital L’s. And the shelf wasn’t attached to them , either - she was sure of it. She remembered once when Gerald had been talking on the phone, and had absentmindedly attempted to lean on the shelf. Her end had started to come up, levitating like the end of a seesaw, and if Gerald hadn’t snatched his hand away immediately, he would have flipped the shelf like a tiddlywink.

The thought of the telephone distracted her for a moment, but only a moment. It sat on the low table in front of the east window, the one with its scenic view of the driveway and the Mercedes, and it might as well have been on another planet, for all the good it could do in her current situation. Her eyes returned to the underside of the shelf, first studying the plank itself and then scanning the L-shaped brackets again.

When Gerald leaned on his end, her end had tilted. If she exerted enough pressure on her end to tilt his, the glass of water…

“It might slide down,” she said in a hoarse, musing voice. “It might slide down to my end.” Of course it might also go sliding gaily right past her to shatter on the floor, and it might bang into some unseen obstacle up there and overturn before it ever got to her, but it was worth trying, wasn’t it?

Sure, I guess so, she thought. I mean, I was planning to fly to New York in my Learjet-eat at Four Seasons, dance the night away at Birdland-but with Gerald dead I guess that would be a little tacky. And with all the good hooks currently out of reach-all the had ones, too, as far as that goes-I guess I might as well try for the consolation prize.

All right; how was she supposed to go about it?

“Very carefully,” she said. “ That’s how.”

She used the handcuffs to pull herself up again and studied the glass some more. Not being able to actually see the surface of the shelf now struck her as a drawback. She had a pretty good idea of what was on her end, but was less sure about Gerald’s and the no-man’s-land in the middle. Of course it wasn’t surprising; who but someone with an eidetic memory could reel off a complete inventory of the items on a bedroom shelf? Who would have ever thought such things could matter?

Well, they matter now, I’m living in a world where all the perspectives have changed.

Yes indeed. In this world a stray dog could be scarier than Freddy Krueger, the phone was in the Twilight Zone, the sought-for desert oasis, goal of a thousand grizzled Foreign Legionnaires in a hundred desert romances, was a glass of water with a few last slivers of ice floating on top. In this new world order, the bedroom shelf had become a shipping lane as vital as the Panama Canal and an old paperback western or mystery in the wrong place could become a lethal roadblock.

Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little? she asked herself uneasily, but in truth she did not. This would be a long-odds operation under the best of circumstances, but if there was junk on the runway, forget it. A single skinny Hercule Poirot-or one of the Star Trek novels Gerald read and then dropped like used napkins-wouldn’t show above the angle of the shelf, but it would be more than enough to stop or overturn the water-glass. No, she wasn’t exaggerating. The perspectives of this world really bad changed, and enough to make her think of that science fiction movie where the hero started to shrink and went on getting smaller until he was living in his daughter’s dolihouse and going in fear of the family cat. She was going to learn the new rules in a hurry… learn them and live by them.

Don’t lose your courage, Jessie, Ruth’s voice whispered.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m going to try-I really am. But sometimes it’s good to know what you’re up against. I think sometimes that makes a difference.”

She rotated her right wrist outward from her body as far as it would go, then raised her arm. In this position she looked like a woman-shape in a line of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She began to patter her fingers on the shelf again, feeling for obstructions along the stretch where she hoped the glass would finish up.

She touched a piece of fairly heavy-gauge paper and thumbed it for a moment, trying to think what it might be. Her first guess was a sheet from the note-pad that usually hid in the clutter on the telephone table, but it wasn’t thin enough for that. Her eye happened on a magazine-either Time or Newsweek , Gerald had brought both along-lying face-down beside the phone. She remembered him thumbing rapidly through one of the magazines while he took off his socks and unbuttoned his shirt. The piece of paper on the shelf was probably one of those annoying blow-in subscription cards with which the newsstand copies of magazines are always loaded. Gerald often laid such cards aside for later use as bookmarks. It might be something else, but Jessie decided it didn’t matter to her plans in any case. It wasn’t solid enough to stop the glass or overturn it. There was nothing else up there, at least within reach of her stretching, wriggling fingers.