Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

“There are three things,” I said. “First, I need to know he’s real. Second, I need to know the things he did are real. Third, I need to know I’ll never wake up again with him standing in my bedroom.”

That brought it all back, Ruth, and I began to cry. There was nothing tricky or calculating about those tears; they just came. Nothing I could have done would have stopped them.

“Please help me, Brandon,” I said, “Every time I turn off the light, he’s standing across the room from me in the dark, and I’m afraid that unless I can turn a spotlight on him, that’s going to go on forever. There isn’t anybody else I can ask, and I have to know. Please help me.”

He let go of my hand, produced a handkerchief from somewhere inside that day’s screamingly neat lawyer’s suit, and wiped my face with it. He did it as gently as my Mom used to when I came into the kitchen bawling my head off because I’d skinned my knee-that was back in the early years, before I turned into the family’s squeaky wheel, you understand.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll find out everything I can, and I’ll pass it all on to you… unless and until you tell me to stop, that is. But I have a feeling you better fasten your seatbelt.”

He found out quite a lot, and now I’m going to pass it on to you, Ruth, but fair warning: he was right about the seatbelt. If you decide to skip some of the next few pages, I’ll understand. I wish I could skip writing them, but I have an idea that’s also part of the therapy. The final part, I hope.

This section of the story-what I suppose I could call Brandon’s Tale-starts back in 1984 or 1985. That was when cases of graveyard vandalism started popping up in the Lakes District of western Maine. There were similar cases reported in half a dozen small towns across the state line and into New Hampshire. Stuff like tombstone-tipping, spray-paint graffiti, and stealing commemorative flags is pretty common stuff out in the willywags, and of course there’s always a bunch of smashed pumpkins to swamp out of the local boneyard on November lst, but these crimes went a lot further than pranks or petty theft. Desecration was the word Brandon used when he brought me his first report late last week, and that word had started showing up on most of the police crime-report forms by 1988.

The crimes themselves seemed abnormal to the people who discovered them, and to those who investigated them, but the modus operandi was sane enough; carefully organized and focused. Someone-possibly two or three someones, but more likely a single person-was breaking into the crypts and mausoleums of small-town cemeteries with the efficiency of a good burglar breaking into a house or store. He was apparently arriving at these jobs equipped with drills, a bolt-cutter, heavy-duty hacksaws, and probably a winch-Brandon says a lot of four-wheel-drive vehicles come equipped with them these days.

The breaks were always aimed at the crypts and mausoleums, never at individual graves, and almost all of them came in winter, when the ground is too hard to dig in and the bodies have to be stored until the deep frosts let go. Once the perpetrator gained entry, he used the bolt-cutter and power drill to open the coffins. He systematically stripped the corpses of any jewelry they might have been wearing when they were interred; he used pliers to pull gold teeth and teeth with gold fillings.

Those acts are despicable, but at least they’re understandable. Robbery was only where this guy got started, though. He gouged out eyes, tore off ears, cut dead throats. In February of 1989, two corpses in the Chilton Remembrance Cemetery were found without noses-he apparently knocked them off with a hammer and a chisel. The officer who caught that one told Brandon, “it would have been easy-it was like a deep-freeze in there, and they probably broke off like Popsicles. The real question is what does a guy do with two frozen noses once he has them? Does he put “em on his keychain? Maybe sprinkle “em with nacho cheese and then zap “em in the microwave? What?”

Almost all the desecrated corpses were found minus feet and hands, sometimes also arms and legs, and in several cases the man doing this also took heads and sex-organs. Forensic evidence suggests he used an axe and a butcher-knife for the gross work and a variety of scalpels for the finer stuff. He wasn’t bad, either. “A talented amateur,” one of the Chamberlain County deputies told Brandon. “I wouldn’t want him working on my gall-bladder, but I guess I’d trust him to take a mole off my arm… it he was full of Halcion or Prozac, that is.”

In a few cases he opened up the bodies and/or skull cases and filled them with animal excrement. What the police saw more frequently were cases of sexual desecration. He was an equal-opportunity kind of guy when it came to stealing gold teeth, jewelry, and limbs, but when it came to taking sexual equipment-and having sex with the dead-he stuck strictly to the gentlemen.

This may have been extremely lucky for me.

I learned a lot about the way rural police departments work during the month or so following my escape from our house by the lake, but that’s nothing compared with what I’ve learned in the last week or so. One of the most surprising things is how discreet and tactful small-town cops can be. I guess when you know everybody in the area you patrol by their first names, and are related to a good many of them, discretion becomes almost as natural as breathing.

The way they handled my case is one example of this strange, sophisticated discretion; the way they handled Joubert’s is another. The investigation went on for seven years, remember, and a lot of people were in on it before it ended two State Police departments, four country sheriffs, thirty-one deputies, and God knows how many local cops and constables. It was right there at the front of their open files, and by 1989 they even had a name for him-Rudolph, as in Valentino. They talked about Rudolph when they were in District Court, waiting to testify on their other cases, they compared notes on Rudolph at law-enforcement seminars in Augusta and Derry and Waterville, they discussed him on their coffee-breaks. “And we took him home,” one of the cops told Brandon-the same guy who told him about the noses, as a matter of fact. “You bet we did. Guys like us always take guys like Rudolph home. You catch up on the latest details at backyard barbecues, maybe kick it around with a buddy from another department while you’re watching your kids play Little League ball. Because you never know when you’re going to put something together in a new way and hit the jackpot.”

But here’s the really amazing part (and you’re probably way ahead of me… if you’re not in the bathroom tossing your cookies, that is): for all those years all those cops knew they had a real live monster-a ghoul, in fact-running around the western part of the state, and the story never surfaced in the press until Joubert was caught! In a way I find that weird and a little spooky, but in a much larger way I find it wonderful. I guess the law-enforcement battle isn’t going so well in a lot of the big cities, but out here in East Overshoe, whatever they’re doing still seems to work just fine.

Of course you could argue that there’s plenty of room for improvement when it takes seven years to catch a nut like Joubert, but Brandon clarified that for m e in a hurry. He explained that the perp (they really do use that word) was operating exclusively in one-horse towns where budget shortfalls have forced the cops to deal only with the most serious and immediate problems… which means crimes against the living rather than against the dead. The cops say there are at least two hot-car rings and four chop-shops operating in the western half of the state, and those are only the ones they know about. Then there are the murderers, the wife-beaters, the robbers, the speeders, and the drunks. Above all, there’s the old dope-ola. It gets bought, it gets sold, it gets grown, and people keep hurting or killing each other over it. According to Brandon the Police Chief over in Norway won’t even use the word cocaine anymore-he calls it Powdered Shithead, and in his written reports he calls it Powdered S******d. I got the point he was trying to make. When you’re a small-town cop trying to ride herd on the whole freakshow in a four-year-old Plymouth cruiser that feels like it’s going to fall apart every time you push it over seventy, your job gets prioritized in a hurry, and a guy who likes to play with dead people is a long way from the top of the list.