Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

( you will not die it’s not poison)

is how the big people goose each other.

She whirls, expecting to see her father. He did something like this to her during the eclipse, a thing she supposes the whining Cult-of-Selfers, the Live-in-the-Pasters like Ruth and Nora, would call child abuse. Whatever it was, it will be him-she’s sure of that much-and she is afraid she will exact a terrible punishment for the thing he did, no matter how serious or trivial that thing was: she will raise the croquet mallet and drive it into his face, smashing his nose and knocking out his teeth, and when he falls down on the grass the dogs will come and eat him up.

Except it isn’t Tom Mahout standing there; it’s Gerald. He’s naked. The Penis of an Attorney pokes out at her from below the soft pink bowl of his belly. He has a set of Kreig police handcuffs in each hand. He holds them out to her in the weird afternoon darkness. Unnatural starlight gleams on the cocked jaws which are stamped M-I7 because his source could not provide him with any F-23s.

Come on, Jess, he says, grinning. It isn’t as though you don’t know the score. Besides, you liked it. That first time you came so hard you almost blew up. I don’t mind telling you that was the best piece of ass I ever had in my life, so good I sometimes dream about it. And do you know why it was so good? Because you didn’t have to take any of the responsibility. Almost all women like it better when the man takes over completely-it’s a proven fact of female psychology. Did you come when your father molested you, Jessie? I bet you did. I bet you came so bard Yom almost bleu, up. The Cult-of-Selfers may want to argue about these things, but we know the truth, don’t we? Some women can say they want it, but some need a man to tell them they want it. You’re one of the latter. But that’s okay, Jessie; that’s what the cuffs are for. Only they were never really handcuffs at all. They’re bracelets of love. So put them on, sweetheart. Put them on.

She backs up, shaking her head, not knowing if she wants to laugh or cry. The subject itself is new, but the rhetoric is all too familiar. The lawyer’s tricks don’t work on me, Gerald-I’ve been married to one too long, What we both know is that the business with the handcuffs was never about me at all. It was about you… about waking up your old booze-stunned John Thomas a little, to be blunt. So you can just save your fucked-up version of female psychology, okay?

Gerald is smiling in a knowing, disconcerting way. Good try, babe. It doesn’t wash, but it was still a damned good shot. The best defense is a good offense, right? I think I taught you that. Never mind, though. Right now you’ve got a choice to make. Either put the bracelets on or swing that mallet and kill me again.

She looks around and realizes with dawning panic and dismay that everyone at Will’s party is watching her confrontation with this naked (except for his glasses, that is), overweight, sexually aroused man… and it’s not just her family and her childhood friends, either. Mrs Henderson, who will be her Freshman Advisor at college, is standing by the punch-bowl; Bobby Hagen, who will take her to the Senior Prom-and fuck her afterward in the back seat of his father’s Oldsmobile 88-is standing on the patio next to the blonde girl from the Neuworth Parsonage, the one whose parents loved her but idolized her brother.

Barry , Jessie thinks. She’s Olivia and her brother’s Barry.

The blonde girl is listening to Bobby Hagen but looking at Jessie, her face calm but somehow haggard. She is wearing a sweatshirt which shows R. Crumb’s Mr Natural hurrying down a city street. The words in the balloon coming out of Mr Natural’s mouth say, “Vice is nice, but incest is best.” Behind Olivia, Kendall Wilson, who will hire Jessie for her first teaching job, is cutting a piece of chocolate birthday cake for Mrs Paige, her childhood piano teacher. Mrs Paige is looking remarkably lively for a woman who died of a stroke two years ago while picking apples at Corrit’s Orchards in Alfred.

Jessie thinks, This isn’t like dreaming; it’s like drowning. Everyone I’ve ever known seems to be standing here under this weird starlit afternoon sky, watching my naked husband try to put me in handcuffs while Marvin Gaye sings “Can I Get a Witness.” If there’s any comfort to be had, it’s this: things can’t possibly get any worse.

Then they do. Mrs Wertz, her first-grade teacher, starts to laugh. Old Mr Cobb, their gardener until he retired in ii964, laughs with her. Maddy joins in, and Ruth, and Olivia of the scarred breats. Kendall Wilson and Bobby Hagen are bent almost double and they are clapping each other on the back like men who have heard the granddaddy of all dirty jokes in the local barber-shop. Perhaps the one whose punchline is A life-support system for a cunt.

Jessie looks down at herself and sees that now she is naked, too. Written across her breasts in a shade of lipstick known as Peppermint Yum-Yum are three damning words: DADDY’s LITTLE GIRL.

I have to wake up, she thinks. I’ll die of shame if I don’t.

But she doesn’t, at least not right away. She looks up and sees that Gerald’s knowing, disconcerting smile has turned into a gaping wound. Suddenly the stray dog’s blood-soaked snout pokes out between his teeth. The dog is also grinning, and the head that comes shoving out between its fangs like the onset of some obscene birth belongs to her father. His eyes, always a bright blue, are now gray and haggard above his grin. They are Olivia’s eyes, she realizes, and then she realizes something else, as well: the flat mineral smell of lakewater, so bland and yet so horrible, is everywhere.

“ I love too hard, my friends sometimes say,” her father sings from inside the mouth of the dog which is inside the mouth of the husband, “ But I believe, I believe, that a woman should be loved that way…

She casts the mallet aside and runs, screaming. As she passes the horrible creature with its bizarre chain of nested heads, Gerald snaps one of the handcuffs around her wrist.

Got you! he yells triumphantly. Got you, me proud beauty!

At first she thinks the eclipse must not have been total yet after all, because the day has begun to grow still darker. Then it occurs to her that she is probably fainting. This thought is accompanied by feelings of deep relief and gratitude.

Don’t be silly, Jess-you can’t faint in a dream.

But she thinks she may be doing just that, and in the end it doesn’t matter much whether it is a faint or only a deeper cave of sleep toward which she is fleeing like the survivor of some cataclysm. What matters is that she is finally escaping the-dream which had assaulted her in a much more fundamental way than her father’s act on the deck that day, she is finally escaping, and gratitude seems like a beautifully normal response to these circumstances.

She has almost made it into that comforting cave of darkness when a sound intrudes: a splintery, ugly sound like a loud spasm of coughing. She tries to flee the sound and finds she cannot. It has her like a hook, and like a hook it begins to pull her up toward the vast but fragile silver sky that separates sleep from consciousness.

The former Prince, who had once been the pride and joy of young Catherine Sutlin, sat in the kitchen entryway for about ten minutes after its latest foray into the bedroom. It sat with its head up, its eyes wide and unblinking. It had been existing on very short commons over the last two months, it had fed well this evening-gorged, in fact-and it should have been feeling logy and sleepy. It had been both for awhile, but now all sleepiness had departed. What replaced it was a feeling of nervousness which grew steadily worse. Something had snapped several of the hair-thin tripwires posted in that mystical zone where the dog’s senses and its intuition overlapped. The bitchmaster continued to moan in the other room, and to make occasional talking noises, but her sounds were not the source of the stray’s jitters; they were not what had caused it to sit up when it had been on the verge of drifting placidly off to sleep, and not the reason why its good ear was now cocked alertly forward and its muzzle had wrinkled back far enough to show the tips of its teeth.