Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

Sunset Trails is the family camp (although after three generations of haphazard family expansion, it is really big enough to be called a compound) on the north end of Dark Score Lake. This year they have broken their customary nine weeks of seclusion there because Will wants-just once, he has told his mother and father, speaking in the tones of a nobly suffering old grandee who knows he cannot cheat the reaper much longer-to have a birthday party with his rest-of-the-year friends as well as his family.

Tom Mahout vetoes the idea at first. He is a stock broker who divides his time between Portland and Boston, and for years he has told his family not to believe all that propaganda about how guys who go to work wearing ties and shirts with white collars spend their days goofing off-either hanging around the watercooler or dictating lunch invitations to pretty blondes from the steno pool. “No hardscrabble spud-farmer in Aroostook County works any harder than I do,” he frequently tells them. “Keeping up with the market isn’t easy, and it isn’t particularly glamorous, either, no matter what you may have heard to the contrary.” The truth is none of them have heard anything to the contrary, all of them (his wife included, most likely, although Sally would never say so) think his job sounds duller than donkeyshit, and only Maddy has the vaguest idea of what it is he does.

Tom insists that he needs that time on the lake to recover from the stresses of his job, and that his son will have plenty of birthdays with his friends later on. Will is turning nine, after all, not ninety. “Plus,” Tom adds, “birthday parties with your pals really aren’t much fun until you’re old enough to have a keg or two.”

So Will’s request to have his birthday at the family’s year-round home on the coast would probably have been denied if not for Jessie’s sudden, surprising support of the plan (and to Will it’s plenty surprising; Jessie is three years older and lots of times he’s not sure she remembers she even has a brother). Following her initial soft-Voiced suggestion that maybe it would be fun to come home-just for two or three days, of course-and have a lawnparty, with croquet and badminton and a barbecue and Japanese lanterns that would come on at dusk, Tom begins to warm to the idea. He is the sort of man who thinks of himself as a “strongwilled son of a bitch” and is often thought of as a “stubborn old goat” by others; whichever way you saw it, he has always been a tough man to move once he has set his feet… and his jaw.

When it comes to moving him-to changing his mind-his younger daughter has more luck than the rest of them put together” Jessie often finds a way into her father’s mind by way of some loop hole or secret passage denied to the rest of the family. Sally believes-with some justification-that their middle child has always been Tom’s favorite and Tom has fooled himself into believing none of the others know. Maddy and Will see it in simpler terms. they believe that Jessie sucks up to their father and that he in turn spoils her rotten. “If Daddy caught Jessie smoking,” Will told his older sister the year before, after Maddy had been grounded for that very offense, “he’d probably buy her a lighter.” Maddy laughed, agreed, and hugged her brother. Neither they nor their mother has the slightest idea of the secret which lies between Tom Mahout and his younger daughter like a heap of rotting meat.

Jessie herself believes she is just going along with her baby brother’s request-that she’s sticking up for him. She has no idea, not on the surface of her mind, anyway, how much she has come to hate Sunset Trails and how eager she is to get away. She has also come to hate the lake she once passionately loved-especially its faint, flat mineral smell. By 1965 she can hardly bear to go swimming there, even on the hottest of days. She knows her mother thinks it’s her shape-Jessie began to bud early, as Sally did herself, and at the age of twelve she has most of her woman’s figure-but it’s not her shape. She’s gotten used to that, and knows that she’s a long way from being a Playboy pin-up in either of her old, faded jantzen tank suits. No, it’s not her breasts, not her hips, not her can. It’s that smell.

Whatever reasons and motives may be swirling around beneath, Will Mahout’s request is finally approved by the Mahout family’s head honcho. They made the trip back to the coast yesterday, leaving early enough for Sally (eagerly assisted by both daughters) to prepare for the party. And now it’s August 14th, and August 14th is surely the apotheosis of summer in Maine, a day of fadedblue-denim skies and fat white clouds, all of it freshened by a salt-tangy breeze.

Inland-and that includes the Lakes District, where Sunset Trails has stood on the shore of Dark Score Lake since Tom Mahout’s grandfather built the original cabin in 1923-the woods and lakes and ponds and bogs lie sweltering under temperatures in the mid-nineties and humidity just below the saturation point, but here on the seacoast it’s only eighty. The seabreeze is an extra bonus, rendering the humidity negligible and sweeping away the mosquitoes and sandflies. The lawn is filled with children, mostly Will’s friends but girls who chum with Maddy and Jessie as well, and for once, mirabile dictu, they all seem to be getting along. There hasn’t been a single argument, and around five o'clock, as Tom raises the first martini of the day to his lips, he glances at Jessie, who is standing nearby with their croquet mallet propped on her shoulder like a sentry’s rifle (and who is clearly within earshot of what sounds like a casual husband-and-wife conversation but which may actually be a shrewd bank-shot compliment aimed at his daughter), then back at his wife. “I guess it was actually a pretty good idea, after all,” he says.

Better than good, Jessie thinks. Absolutely great and totally monster, if you want to know the truth. Even that isn’t what she really means, really thinks, but it would be dangerous to say the rest out loud; it would tempt the gods. What she really thinks is that the day is flawless-a sweet and perfect peach of a day. Even the song blasting out of Maddy’s portable record player (which jessie’s big sister has cheerfully carted out to the patio for this occasion, although it is ordinarily the Great Untouchable Icon) is okay. Jessie is never really going to like Marvin Gaye-no more than she is ever going to like that faint mineral smell which rises from the take on hot summer afternoons-but this song is okay. I’ll be doggone if you ain’t a pretty thing… bay-bee: silly, but not dangerous.

It is August 14th, 1965, a day that was, a day that still is in the mind of a dreaming woman handcuffed to a bed in a house on the shore of a lake forty miles south of Dark Score (but with the same mineral smell, that nasty, evocative smell, on hot, still summer days), and although the twelve-year-old girl she was doesn’t see Will creeping up behind her as she bends over to address her croquet ball, turning her bottom into a target simply too tempting for a boy who has only lived one year for each inning in a baseball game to ignore, part of her mind knows he is there, and that this is the seam where the dream has been basted to the nightmare.

She lines up her shot, concentrating on the wicket six feet away. A hard shot but not an impossible one, and if she drives the ball through, she may well catch Caroline after all. That would be nice, because Caroline almost always wins at croquet. Then, just as she draws her mallet back, the music coming from-the record-player changes.

“ Oww, listen everybody,” Marvin Gaye sings, sounding a lot more than just mock-threatening to Jessie this time, “ especially you girls…”