Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

It was something else… something not right… something which was possibly dangerous.

As Jessie’s dream peaked and then began to spiral down into darkness, the dog suddenly scrambled to its feet, unable to bear the steady sizzle in its nerves any longer. It turned, pushed open the loose back door with its snout, and jumped out into the windy dark. As it did, some strange and unidentifiable scent came to it. There was danger in that scent… almost certainly-danger.

The dog raced for the woods as fast as its swollen, overloaded belly would allow. When it had gained the safety of the undergrowth, it turned and squirmed a little way back toward the house. It had retreated, true enough, but a great many more alarm-bells would have to go off inside before it would consider completely abandoning the wonderful supply of food it had found.

Safely hidden, its thin, weary, intelligent face crisscrossed with overlapping ideograms of moonshadow, the stray began to bark, and it was this sound which eventually drew Jessie back to consciousness.

During their summers on the lake in the early sixties, before William was able to do much more than paddle in the shallows with a pair of bright orange water-wings attached to his back, Maddy and Jessie, always good friends despite the difference in their ages, often went down to swim at the Neidermeyers'. The Neidermeyers had a float equipped with a diving platform, and it was there that Jessie began to develop the form which won her a place first on her high school swim-team and then on the All-State team in 1971-What she remembered second-best about diving from the board on the Neidermeyers” float (first-for then and for always-was the swoop through the hot summer air toward the blue glitter of the waiting water) was how it felt to come up from the depths, through conflicting layers of warm and cold.

Coming up from her troubled sleep was like that.

First there was a black, roaring confusion that was like being inside a thundercloud. She bumped and yawed her way through it, not having the slightest idea of who she was or when she was, let alone where she was. Then a warmer, calmer layer: she had been caught in the most awful nightmare in all of recorded history (at least in h er recorded history), but a nightmare was all it had been, and now it was over. As the surface neared, however, she encountered another chilly layer: an idea that the reality waiting ahead was almost as bad as the nightmare. Maybe worse.

What is it? she asked herself. What could possibly be worse than what I’ve just been through?

She refused to think about that. The answer was within reach, but if it occurred to her, she might decide to flip over and start finning her way back down into the depths again. To do that would be to drown, and while drowning might not be the worst way to step out-not as bad as running your Harley into a rock wall or parachuting into a cat’s cradle of high-voltage wires, for instance-the idea of opening her body to that flat mineral smell, which reminded her simultaneously of copper and oysters, was insupportable. Jessie kept stroking grimly upward, telling herself that she would worry about reality when and if she actually broke the surface.

The last layer she passed through was as warm and fearful as freshly spilled blood: her arms were probably going to be deader than stumps. She just hoped she would be able to command enough movement in them to get the blood flowing again.

Jessie gasped, jerked, and opened her eyes. She hadn’t the slightest idea of how long she had been asleep, and the clock-radio on the bureau, stuck in its own hell of obsessive repetition (twelve-twelve-twelve, it flashed into the darkness, as if time had stopped forever at midnight), was no help. All she knew for sure was that it was full dark and the moon was now shining through the skylight instead of the east window.

Her arms were jumping with a nervous jitter-jive of pins and needles. She usually disliked that feeling intensely, but not now; it was a thousand times better than the muscle cramps she had expected as the price of waking her dead extremities back up. A moment or two later she noticed a spreading dampness beneath her legs and bottom and realized that her previous need to urinate was gone. Her body had taken care of the problem while she slept.

She doubled her fists and cautiously pulled herself up a little, wincing at the pain in her wrists and the deep, Sobbing ache the movement caused in the backs of her hands. Most of that pain’s a result of trying to slip out of the cuffs, she thought. You got nobody to blame but yourself, sweetheart.

The dog had begun to bark again. Each shrill cry was like a.Splinter pounded into her eardrum, and she realized that sound was what had pulled her up and out of her sleep just as she had been about to dive below the nightmare. The location of the sounds-told her the dog was back outside. She was glad it had left the house, but a little puzzled, as well. Maybe it just hadn’t been comfortable under a roof after spending such a long time outside. That idea made a certain amount of sense… as much as anything else in this situation, anyway.

“Get it together, Jess,” she advised herself in a solemn, sleep-foggy voice, and maybe-just maybe-she was doing that. The panic and the unreasoning shame she’d felt in the dream were departing. The dream itself seemed to be drying out, taking on the curiously desiccated quality of an overexposed photograph. Soon, she realized, it would be gone entirely. Dreams on waking were like the empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems. There had been times when this amnesia-if that was what it was-had struck her as sad. Not now. She had never in her life equated forgetting with mercy so quickly and completely.

And it doesn’t matter, she thought. It was just a dream after all. I mean, all those heads sticking out of heads? Dreams are supposed to he symbolic, of course-yes, I know-and I suppose there might have been some symbolism in this one… maybe even some truth. If nothing else, I think that now I understand why I hit Will when he goosed me that day. Nora Callighan would undoubtedly he thrilled-she’d call it a breakthrough. Probably it is. It doesn’t do a thing about getting me out of this fucking jailhouse jewelry, though, and that’s still my top priority. Does anyone disagree with that?

Neither Ruth nor Goody replied; the UFO voices were likewise silent. The only response, in fact, came from her stomach, which was sorry as hell all this had happened but still felt compelled to protest the cancellation of supper with a long, low rumble. Funny, in a way… but apt to be less so come tomorrow. By then her thirst would have come raging back, too, and she was under no illusions about how long those last two sips of water would stave it off.

I’ve got to center my concentration-I’ve just got to. The problem isn’t food, and it isn’t water, either, Right now those things matter as little as why I punched Will in the mouth at his ninth-birthday party. The problem is how I’m-

Her thoughts broke off with the clean snap of a knot exploding in a hot fire. Her eyes, which had been wandering aimlessly across the darkened room, locked on the far corner, where the wind-driven shadows of the pines danced wildly in the nacreous light falling through the skylight.

There was a man standing there.

Terror greater than any she had ever known crept over her. Her bladder, which had in fact relieved only the worst of its discomfort, now voided itself in a painless gush of heat. Jessie hadn’t the slightest idea of that or anything else. Her terror had blown her mind temporarily clean from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. No sound escaped her, not even the smallest squeak; she was as incapable of sound as she was of thought. The muscles of her neck, shoulders, and arms turned to something that felt like warm water and she slid down the headboard until she hung from the handcuffs in a kind of slack swoon. She didn’t black out-didn’t even come close to it-but that mental emptiness and the total physical incapacity which accompanied it were worse than a blackout. When thought did attempt to return, it was at first blocked by a dark, featureless wall of fear.