Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

Jessie bent her head and spoke to them .

“You have to stop doing that. Later on you can shake like mad, if you want, but right now you have to help me. You have to.” Yes. Because the thought of dropping the keys or knocking them off the bureau after getting this far… that was unthinkable. She stared sternly at her fingers. They didn’t stop trembling, not entirely, but as she watched, their jitters quieted to a barely visible thrumming.

“Okay,” she said softly. “I don’t know if that’s good enough or not, but we’re going to find out.”

At least the keys were the same, which gave her two chances. She found nothing at all strange in the fact that Gerald had brought them both; he was nothing if not methodical. Planning for contingencies, he often said, was the difference between being good and being great. The only contingencies he hadn’t planned on this time were the heart attack and the kick which had provoked it. The result, of course, was that he was neither good nor great, only dead.

“The doggy’s dinner,” Jessie muttered, once again having no idea at all she was speaking aloud. “Gerald used to be a winner, but now he’s just the doggy’s dinner. Right, Ruth? Right, Punkin?

She tweezed one of the small steel keys between the thumb and forefinger of her sizzling right hand (as she touched the metal, that pervasive feeling that all this was a dream occurred), picked it up, looked at it, then looked at the cuff which enclosed her left wrist. The lock was a small circle pressed into its side; to Jessie it looked like the sort of doorbell a rich person might have at the tradesman’s entrance of the manor house. To open the lock, you simply stuck the hollow barrel of the key into the circle until you heard it click into place, then turned it.

She lowered the key toward the lock, but before she could slip the barrel in, another wave of that peculiar darkheadedness rolled through her mind. She swayed on her feet and found herself once again thinking of Karl Wallenda. Her hand began to shake again.

“Stop that!” she cried fiercely, and jammed the key desperately at the lock. “Stop th-”

The key missed the circle, struck the hard steel beside it instead, and turned in her blood-slicked fingers. She held onto it a second longer, and then it squirted out of her grasp-went greasy, one might have said-and fell to the floor. Now there was only the one key left,. and if she lost that-

You won’t, Punkin said. I swear you won’t. Just go for it before you lose your courage.

She flexed her right arm once, then raised the fingers toward her face. She looked at them, closely. The shakes were abating again, not enough to suit her, but she couldn’t wait. She was afraid she would black out if she did.

She reached out with her faintly trembling hand, and came very close to pushing the remaining key over the edge of the bureau in her first effort to grip it. It was the numbness-the goddam numbness that simply wouldn’t leave her fingers. She took a deep breath, held it, made a fist in spite of the pain and the fresh flow of blood it provoked, then let the air out of her lungs in a long, whistling sigh. She felt a little better. This time she pressed her first finger to the small head of the key and dragged it toward the edge of the bureau instead of trying to pick it up immediately. She didn’t stop until it was sticking out over the edge.

If you drop it, Jessie! the Goodwife moaned. Oh, if you drop this one, too!

“Shut up, Goody,” Jessie said, and pushed her thumb up against the bottom of the key, creating a pincers. Then, trying not to think at all about what was going to happen to her if this went wrong, she lifted the key and brought it to the cuff. There was a bad run of seconds when she was unable to align the shaking barrel of the key with the lock, and a worse one when the lock itself momentarily doubled… then quadrupled. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, took another deep breath, then popped them open. Now she saw only one lock again, and she jabbed the key into it before her eyes could do any more tricks.

“Okay,” she breathed. “Let’s see.”

She applied clockwise pressure. Nothing happened. Panic tried to jump up into her throat, and then she suddenly remembered the rusty old pickup truck Bill Dunn drove on his caretaking rounds, and the joke sticker on the back bumper: LEFTY LOOSEY, RIGHTY TIGHTY, it said. Above the words was a drawing of a large screw.

“Lefty loosey,” Jessie muttered, and tried turning the key counter-clockwise. For one moment she did not understand that the cuff had popped open; she thought the loud click she heard was the sound of the key breaking off in the lock, and she shrieked, sending a spray of blood from her cut mouth to the top of the dresser. Some of it spattered Gerald’s tie, red on red. Then she saw the notched latch-lock was standing open, and realized she had done it-she had actually done it.

Jessie Burlingame pulled her left hand, a little puffy around the wrist but otherwise unharmed, free of the open cuff, which fell back against the headboard as its mate had done. Then, with an expression of deep, wondering awe, she raised both hands slowly up to her face. She looked from the left to the right and back to the left again. She was unmindful of the fact that the right was covered with blood; it was not blood she was interested in, at least not yet. For the moment she only wanted to make absolutely sure she was really free.

She looked back and forth between her hands for almost thirty seconds, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a Ping-Pong match. Then she drew in a deep breath, cocked her head back, and uttered another high-pitched, drilling shriek. She felt a fresh wave of darkness, big and smooth and vicious, thunder through her, but she ignored it and went on shrieking. It seemed to her that she had no choice; it was either shriek or die. The brittle broken-glass edge of madness in that shriek was unmistakable, but it was still a scream of utter triumph and victory. Two hundred yards away, in the woods at the head of the driveway, the former Prince lifted its head from its muzzle and looked uneasily toward the house.

She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off her hands, couldn’t seem to stop shrieking. She had never felt anything remotely like what she was feeling now, and some distant part of her thought: If sex was even half this good, people would be doing it on every streetcorner they just wouldn’t be able to help themselves.

Then she ran out of breath and swayed backward. She grabbed for the headboard, but a moment too late-she lost her balance and spilled onto the bedroom floor. As she went down, Jessie realized that part of her had been expecting the handcuff chains to snub her before she fell. Pretty funny, when you thought about it.

She struck the open wound on the inside of her wrist as she landed. Pain. lit up her right arm like the lights on a Christmas tree and this time when she screamed it was all pain. She bit it off quickly when she felt herself drifting away from consciousness again. She opened her eyes and stared into her husband’s torn face. Gerald looked back at her with an expression of endless, glazed surprise- This wasn’t supposed to happen to me, I’m a lawyer with my name on the door. Then the fly which had been washing its front legs on his upper lip disappeared up one of his nostrils and Jessie turned her head so quickly she thumped it on the floorboards and saw stars. When she opened her eyes this time, she was looking up at the headboard, with its gaudy drips and tunnels of blood. Had she been standing way up there only a few seconds ago? She was pretty sure she had been, but it was hard to believe-from here, the fucking bed looked approximately as tall as the Chrysler Building.