Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

Okay; scratch the keys. Descend to the next rung on the ladder of probability. What might that be?

She thought about it for almost five minutes without success, turning it around and around in her mind like the sides of Rubik’s Cube, pumping her arms up and down as she did so. At some point during her ruminations, her eyes wandered to the phone sitting on the low table by the east window. She had dismissed it earlier as being in another universe, but perhaps she had been too hasty. The table, after all, was closer than the bureau, and the phone was a lot bigger than a handcuff key.

If she could move the bed over to the telephone table, might she not be able to lift the receiver off the cradle with her foot? And if she could do that, maybe she could use her big toe to push the Operator button at the bottom, between the keys marked * and #. It sounded like some crazy sort of vaudeville act, but-

Push the button, wait, then start screaming my head off .

Yes, and half an hour later either the big blue Medcu van from Norway or the big orange one marked Castle Country Rescue would turn up and trundle her off to safety. A crazy idea, all right, but so was turning a magazine subscription card into a straw. It could work, crazy or not-that was the point. It certainly had more potential than somehow pushing the bed all the way across the room and then trying to find a way to get one of the keys into one of the handcuff locks. There was one big problem with the idea, however: she would somehow have to find a way to move the bed to the right, and that was a heavy proposition. She guessed that, with its mahogany head- and footboards, it had to weigh at least three hundred pounds, and that estimate might be conservative.

But you can at least try it, babe, and you might get a big surprise the floor’s been waxed since Labor Day, remember. If a stray dog with its ribs sticking out can move your husband, maybe you can move this bed. You haven’t got anything to lose by trying, do you?

A good point.

Jessie worked her legs toward the left side of the bed, shifting her back and shoulders patiently to the right as she did so. When she got as far as she was going to using that method, she pivoted on her left hip. Her feet went over the side… and suddenly her legs and torso were not just moving to the left but sliding to the left, like an avalanche trying to happen. A horrible cramp jig-jagged up her left side as her body stretched in ways it hadn’t been meant to even under the best of conditions. It felt as if someone had given her a fast harsh scrape with a hot poker.

The short chain between the right-hand set of cuffs yanked taut, and for a moment the news from her left side was blotted out by fresh agony pulsing out of her right arm and shoulder. It felt as if someone were trying to twist that arm completely off. Now I know what a turkey drumstick feels like , she thought.

Her left heel thumped onto the floor; her right hung three inches above it. Her body was twisted unnaturally to the left with her right arm cast strenuously back behind her in a kind of frozen wave. The taut chain gleamed heartlessly above its rubber sleeve in the early-morning sun.

Jessie was suddenly sure she was going to die in this position, with her left side and right arm screaming. She would have to lie here, gradually growing numb as her flagging heart lost the battle to pump blood to all parts of her stretched and twisted body. Panic overtook her again and she howled for help, forgetting there was no one in the neighborhood but one raggedy-ass stray with a bellyful of lawyer. She flailed frantically for the bedpost with her right hand, but she had slid just a little too far; the dark-stained mahogany was half an inch beyond the tips of her straining fingers.

“ Help! Please! Help! Help!”

No answer. The only sounds in this silent sunny bedroom were her sounds: hoarse, screaming voice, rasping breath, pounding heart. No one here but her, and unless she was able to get back onto the bed, she was going to die like a woman hung on a meat-hook. Nor was the situation done getting worse: her butt was still sliding toward the edge of the bed, pulling her right arm steadily backward at an angle which was becoming more and more extreme.

Without thinking about it or planning it (unless the body, goaded by pain, sometimes thinks for itself), Jessie braced her bare left heel on the floor and shoved backward with all her might. It was the only brace-point remaining to her painfully slued body, and the maneuver worked. Her lower body arched, the chain between the cuffs binding her right hand grew slack, and she seized the bedpost with the panicky zeal of a drowning woman seizing a life-ring. She used it to yank herself backward, ignoring the scream of her back and biceps. When her feet were up again, she paddled frantically back from the edge, as if she had dipped into a swimming pool filled with baby sharks and had noticed Just in time to save her toes.

At last she regained her former slumped sitting position against the crossboards, arms outstretched, the small of her back resting on the sweat-soaked pillow in its badly wrinkled cotton case. She let her head loll back against the mahogany slats, breathing rapidly, her bare breasts oiled with sweat she couldn’t afford to lose. She closed her eyes and laughed weakly.

Say, that was pretty exciting, wasn’t it, Jessie? I think it’s the fastest and hardest your heart has heat since 1985, when you came within a Christmas party kiss or so of going to bed with Tommy Delguidace. Nothing to lose by trying, isn’t that what you thought? Well, now you know better.

Yes. And she knew something else, as well.

Oh? And what’s that, toots?

“ I know that fucking phone is out of reach,” she said.

Yes indeed. When she had pushed off with her left heel just now, she had shoved with all the enthusiasm of total, ass-freezing panic. The bed hadn’t moved an iota, and now that she had a chance to think about it, she was glad it hadn’t. If it had jigged to the right, she would still be hanging off it. And even if she had been able to push it all the way across to the telephone table that way, why…

“I’d’ve been hanging over the wrong fucking side,” she said, half-laughing and half-sobbing. “Jesus, somebody shoot me.”

Doesn’t look good , one of the UFO voices-one she definitely could have done without-told her. In fact, it sort of looks like the Jessie Burlingame Show just got its cancellation notice.

“Pick another choice,” she said huskily. “I don’t like that one.”

There aren’t any others. There weren’t that many to begin with, and you’ve researched them all.

She closed her eyes again and for the second time since this nightmare began, she saw the playground behind the old Falmouth Grammar School on Central Avenue. Only this time it wasn’t the image of two little girls balancing on a seesaw that filled her mind; instead she saw one little boy-her brother Will-skinning the cat on the monkey-bars.

She opened her eyes, slumped down, and bent her head to look more closely at the headboard. Skinning the cat meant hanging from a bar, then curling your legs up and over your own shoulders. You finished with a quick little pivot which enabled you to land on your feet again. Will had been so adept at this neat and economical movement that it had looked to Jessie as if he were turning somersaults inside his own hands.

Suppose I could do that? Just skin the cat right over the top of this goddam headboard. Swing over the top and…