Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

Little by little she had been able to persuade herself, at least in her waking hours, that this was the truth of it. Her space cowboy had been a kind of Rorschach pattern, one made not of ink and paper but of wind-driven shadows and imagination. She didn’t blame herself for any of this, however; quite the opposite. If not for her imagination, she never would have seen how she might be able to get the water-glass… and even if she had gotten it, she never would have thought of using a magazine blow-in card as a straw. No, she thought her imagination had more than earned its right to a few hallucinatory megrims, but it remained important for her to remember she’d been alone that night. If recovery began anywhere, she had believed, it began with the ability to separate reality from fantasy. She told Brandon some of this. He had smiled, hugged her, kissed her temple, and told her she was getting better in all sorts of ways.

Then, last Friday, her eye had happened on the lead story of the Press-Herald’s County News section. All her assumptions began to change then, and they had gone right on changing as the story of Raymond Andrew Joubert began its steady march from filler between the Community Calendar and the County Police Beat to banner headlines on the front page. Then, yesterday… seven days after Joubert’s name had first appeared on the County page…

There was a tap at the door, and Jessie’s first feeling, as always, was an instinctive cringe of fear. It was there and gone almost before she realized it. Almost… but not quite.

“Meggie? That you?”

“None other, ma'am.”

“Come on in.”

Megan Landis, the housekeeper Jessie had hired in December (that was when her first fat insurance check had arrived via registered mail), came in with a glass of milk on a tray. A small pill, gray and pink, sat beside the glass. At the sight of the glass, Jessie’s right wrist began to itch madly. This didn’t always happen, but it wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar reaction, either. At least the twitches and that weird my-skin-is-crawling-right-off-the-bones sensation had pretty much stopped. There had been awhile there, before Christmas, when Jessie had really believed she was going to spend the rest of her life drinking out of a plastic cup.

“How’s yet paw today?” Meggie asked, as if she had picked up Jessie’s itch by some kind of sensory telepathy. Nor did Jessie think this a ridiculous idea. She sometimes found Meggie’s questions-and the intuitions which prompted them-a little creepy, but never ridiculous.

The hand in question, now lying in the sunbeam which had startled her away from what she had been writing on the Mac, was dressed in a black glove lined with some frictionless space-age polymer. Jessie supposed the burn-glove-for that was what it was-had been perfected in one dirty little war or another. Not that she would ever have refused to wear it on that account, and not that she wasn’t grateful. She was very grateful indeed. After the third skin-graft, you learned that an attitude of gratitude was one of life’s few reliable hedges against insanity.

“Not too bad, Meggie.”

Meggie’s left eyebrow lifted, stopping just short of I-don’t-believe-you height. “No? If you’ve been running that keyboard for the whole three hours you’ve been in here, I bet it’s singing “Ave Maria."”

“Have I really been here for-?” She glanced at her watch and saw that she had been. She glanced at the copy-minder on top of the VDT screen and saw she was on the fifth page of the document she had opened just after breakfast. Now it was almost lunch, and the most surprising thing was she hadn’t strayed as far from the truth as Meggie’s lifted brow suggested: her hand really wasn’t that bad. She could have waited another hour for the pill if she’d had to.

She took it nevertheless, washing it down with the milk. As she was drinking the last of it, her eyes wandered back to the VDT and read the words on the current screen:

No one found me that night; I woke up on my own just after dawn the next day. The engine had finally stalled, but the car was still warm. I could hear birds singing in the woods, and through the trees I could see the lake, flat as a mirror, with little ribbons of steam rising off it. It looked very beautiful, and at the same time I hated the sight of it, as I have hated the very thought of it ever since. Can you understand that, Ruth? I’ll be damned if I can.

My hand was hurting like hell-whatever help I’d gotten from the aspirin was long gone-but what I felt in spite of the pain was the most incredible sense of peace and well-being. Something was gnawing at it, though. Something I’d forgotten. At first I couldn’t remember what it was. I don’t think my brain wanted me to remember what it was. Then, all at once, it came to me. He’d been in the back seat, and he’d leaned forward to whisper the names of all my voices in my ear.

I looked into the mirror and saw the back seat was empty. That eased my mind a little bit but then I

The words stopped at that point, with the little cursor flashing expectantly just beyond the end of the last unfinished sentence. It seemed to beckon to her, urge her forward, and suddenly Jessie recalled a poem from a marvellous little book by Kenneth Patchen. The book was called But Even So, and the poem had gone like this: “Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we’d be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?”

Good question, Jessie thought, and let her eyes wander from the VDT screen to Meggie Landis’s face. Jessie liked the energetic Irishwoman, liked her a lot- hell, owed her a lot-but if she had caught the little housekeeper looking at the words on the Mac’s screen, Meggie would have been headed down Forest Avenue with her severance pay in her pocket before you could say Dear Ruth, I suppose you’re surprised to hear from me after all these years.

But Megan wasn’t looking at the pc’s screen; she was looking at the sweeping view of Eastern Prom and Casco Bay beyond it. The sun was still shining and the snow was still falling, although now it was clearly winding down.

“Devil’s beating his wife,” Meggie remarked.

“I beg your pardon?” Jessie asked, smiling.

“That’s what my mother used to say when the sun came out before the snow stopped.” Meggie looked a little embarrassed as she held her hand out for the empty glass. “What it means I’m not sure I could say.”

Jessie nodded. The embarrassment on Meggie Landis’s face had lensed into something else-something that looked to Jessie like unease. For a moment she hadn’t any idea what could have made Meggie look that way, and then it came to her-a thing so obvious it was easy to overlook. It was the smile. Meggie wasn’t used to seeing Jessie smile. Jessie wanted to assure her that it was all right, that the smile didn’t mean she was going to leap from her chair and attempt to tear Meggie’s throat out.

Instead, she told her, “My own mother used to say, “The sun doesn’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day.” I never knew what that one meant either.”

The housekeeper did look in the Mac’s direction now, but it was the merest flick of dismissal: Time to put your toys away, Missus, her glance said. “That pill’s going to make you sleepy if you don’t dump a little food atop it. I’ve got a sandwich waiting for you, and soup heating on the stove.”

Soup and sandwich-kid food, the lunch you had after sledding all morning on the day when school was cancelled because of a nor'easter; food you ate with the cold still blazing redly in your cheeks like bonfires. It sounded absolutely great, but…

“I’m going to pass, Meg.”