Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

Jesus, tootsie! Ruth cried. She sounded alarmed. You don’t have any choice! I thought that at long last we all agreed on at least one thing, that you need help, and you need it f-

Jessie suddenly slammed the door on Ruth’s voice, and slammed it hard. Instead of moving the chair, she bent over it, picked up the culotte skirt, and carefully pulled it up her legs. Drops of blood from the soaked bandage on her wrist splattered across the front of it at once, but she hardly saw them. She was busy ignoring the jangle of angry, perplexed voices, and wondering just who had let all these weird people into her head in the first place. It was like waking up one morning and discovering your home had become a boarding hotel overnight. All the voices were expressing horrified disbelief at what she was planning to do, but Jessie suddenly discovered she didn’t give much of a shit. This was her life. Hers.

She picked up the blouse and slipped her head into it. To her confused, shocked mind, the fact that yesterday had been warm enough for this casual sleeveless top seemed to conclusively prove the existence of God. She didn’t think she would have been able to bear sliding her stripped right hand down a long sleeve.

Never mind that, she thought, this is nuts, and I don’t need any make-believe voices to tell me so, I’m thinking about driving out of here - about trying, anyway-when the only thing I have to do is move that chair and plug the phone back in. It must be the blood-loss-it’s driven me temporarily insane. This is a nutty idea. Christ, that chair can’t weigh fifty pounds… I’m almost home and dry!

Yes, except it wasn’t the chair, and it wasn’t the idea of the Rescue Services guys finding her in the same room as the naked, chewed corpse of her husband. Jessie had a pretty good idea she would be preparing to leave in the Mercedes even if the phone were in perfect working order and she had already summoned the police, the ambulance, and the Deering High School Marching Band. Because the phone wasn’t the important thing-not at all. The important thing was… well…

The important thing is that I have to get the fuck out of here right away, she thought, and suddenly she shuddered. Her bare arms broke out in gooseflesh. Because that thing is going to come back.

Bullseye. The problem wasn’t Gerald, or the chair, or what the Rescue Services guys might think when they got down here and saw the situation. It wasn’t even the question of the telephone. The problem was the space cowboy; her old friend Dr Doom. That was why she was putting on her clothes and splashing a little more of her blood around instead of making an effort to re-establish communications with the outside world. The stranger was someplace close by; of that she felt certain. It was only waiting for dark, and dark was close now. If she passed out while she was trying to push the chair away from the wall, or while she was crawling gaily around in the dust and the cobwebs behind it, she might still be here, all alone, when the thing with the suitcase of bones arrived. Worse, she might still be alive.

Besides, her visitor had cut the line. She had no way of knowing this… but her heart knew it just the same. If she went through all the rigamarole of moving the chair and plugging the t-connector back in, the phone would still be dead, just like the one in the kitchen and the one in the front hall.

And what’s the big deal, anyway? she told her voices. I’m planning to drive out to the main road, that’s all. Compared to performing impromptu surgery with a water-glass and pushing a double bed across the room while losing a pint of blood, it’ll be a breeze. The Mercedes is a good car, and it’s a straight shot up the driveway. I’ll putter out to Route 117 at ten miles an hour, and if I feel too weak to drive all the way to Dakin’s Store once I make the highway, I’ll just pull across the road, put on the four-way flashers, and lay on the horn when I see someone coming. No reason why that shouldn’t work, with the roadflat and open for a mile and a half in either direction. The big thing about the car is the locks. Once I’m in it, there’ll be doors I can lock. It won’t be able to get in.

It , Ruth tried to sneer, but Jessie thought she sounded scared-yes, even her.

That’s right, she returned. You were the one who always used to tell me I ought to put my head on hold more often and follow my heart, weren’t you? You bet you were, And do you know what my heart says now, Ruth? It says that the Mercedes is the only chance I have. And if you want to laugh at that, go right ahead… but my mind is made up.

Ruth apparently did not want to laugh. Ruth had fallen silent.

Gerald handed me the car-keys just before he got out of the car, so he could reach into the back seat and get his briefcase. He did do that, didn’t he? Please God, let my memory of that he right.

Jessie slipped her hand into the left pocket of her skirt and found only a couple of Kleenex. She reached down with her right hand, pressed it gingerly against the outside of that pocket, and let out a sigh of relief as she felt the familiar bulge of the car-key and the big round joke fob Gerald had given her for her last birthday. The words on the fob read YOU SEXY THING. Jessie decided she had never felt less sexy and more like a thing in her entire life, but that was okay; she could live with it. The key was in her pocket, that was the important thing. The key was her ticket out of this awful place.

Her tennies stood side by side underneath the telephone table, but Jessie decided she was as dressed as she intended to get. She started slowly toward the hall door, moving in tiny little invalid steps. As she went, she reminded herself to try the phone in the hall before going outside-it couldn’t hurt.

She had barely rounded the head of the bed when the light began to slink out of the day again. It was as if the fat bright sunbeams slanting through the west window were connected to a dimmer-circuit, and someone was turning down the rheostat. As they dimmed, the diamond-dust revolving within them disappeared.

Oh no, not now, she pleaded. Please, you’ve got to he kidding. But the light continued to fade, and Jessie suddenly realized she was swaying again, her upper body describing ever-widening circles in the air. She groped for the bedpost and instead found herself clutching the bloody handcuff from which she had so recently escaped.

July 20 th, 1963, she thought incoherently. 5:42 P.M. Total eclipse. Can I get a witness?

The mixed smell of sweat, semen, and her father’s cologne filled her nose. She wanted to gag on it, but she was suddenly too weak. She managed two more tottery steps, then fell forward onto the bloodstained mattress. Her eyes were open and they blinked occasionally, but otherwise she lay as limp and moveless as a woman who has been cast up, drowned, on some deserted beach.

Her first returning thought was that the darkness meant she was dead.

Her second was that if she was dead, her right hand wouldn’t feel as if it had first been napalmed and then flayed with razorblades. Her third was the dismayed realization that if it was dark and her eyes were open-as they seemed to be-then the sun had gone down. That jolted her up from the in-between place where she had been lying, not quite unconscious but deep in a post-shock lassitude, in a hurry. At first she couldn’t remember why the idea of sundown should be so frightening, and then