Gerald's Game Read online

  Barry, Jessie thinks. She's Olivia and her brother's Barry.

  The blonde girl is listening to Bobby Hagen but looking at Jessie, her face calm but somehow haggard. She is wearing a sweatshirt which shows R. Crumb's Mr. Natural hurrying down a city street. The words in the balloon coming out of Mr. Natural's mouth say, "Vice is nice, but incest is best." Behind Olivia, Kendall Wilson, who will hire Jessie for her first teaching job, is cutting a piece of chocolate birthday cake for Mrs. Paige, her childhood piano teacher. Mrs. Paige is looking remarkably lively for a woman who died of a stroke two years ago while picking apples at Corrit's Orchards in Alfred.

  Jessie thinks, This isn't like dreaming; it's like drowning. Everyone I've ever known seems to be standing here under this weird starlit afternoon sky, watching my naked husband try to put me in handcuffs while Marvin Gaye sings "Can I Get a Witness. " If there's any comfort to be had, it's this: things can't possibly get any worse.

  Then they do. Mrs. Wertz, her first-grade teacher, starts to laugh. Old Mr. Cobb, their gardener until he retired in 1964, laughs with her. Maddy joins in, and Ruth, and Olivia of the scarred breasts. Kendall Wilson and Bobby Hagen are bent almost double, and they are clapping each other on the back like men who have heard the granddaddy of all dirty jokes in the local barber-shop. Perhaps the one whose punchline is A life-support system for a cunt.

  Jessie looks down at herself and sees that now she is naked, too. Written across her breasts in a shade of lipstick known as Peppermint Yum-Yum are three damning words: DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL.

  I have to wake up, she thinks. I'll die of shame if I don't.

  But she doesn't, at least not right away. She looks up and sees that Gerald's knowing, disconcerting smile has turned into a gaping wound. Suddenly the stray dog's blood-soaked snout pokes out between his teeth. The dog is also grinning, and the head that comes shoving out between its fangs like the onset of some obscene birth belongs to her father. His eyes, always a bright blue, are now gray and haggard above his grin. They are Olivia's eyes, she realizes, and then she realizes something else, as well: the flat mineral smell of lake-water, so bland and yet so horrible, is everywhere.

  "I love too hard, my friends sometimes say," her father sings from inside the mouth of the dog which is inside the mouth of the husband, "But I believe, I believe, that a woman should be loved that way ..."

  She casts the mallet aside and runs, screaming, As she passes the horrible creature with its bizarre chain of nested heads, Gerald snaps one of the handcuffs around her wrist.

  Got you! he yells triumphantly. Got you, me proud beauty!

  At first she thinks the eclipse must not have been total yet after all, because the day has begun to grow still darker. Then it occurs to her that she is probably fainting. This thought is accompanied by feelings of deep relief and gratitude.

  Don't be silly, Jess--you can't faint in a dream.

  But she thinks she may be doing just that, and in the end it doesn't matter much whether it is a faint or only a deeper cave of sleep toward which she is fleeing like the survivor of some cataclysm. What matters is that she is finally escaping the dream which has assaulted her in a much more fundamental way than her father's act on the deck that day, she is finally escaping, and gratitude seems like a beautifully normal response to these circumstances.

  She has almost made it into that comforting cave of darkness when a sound intrudes: a splintery, ugly sound like a loud spasm of coughing. She tries to flee the sound and finds she cannot. It has her like a hook, and like a hook it begins to pull her up toward the vast but fragile silver sky that separates sleep from consciousness.

  12

  The former Prince, who had once been the pride and joy of young Catherine Sutlin, sat in the kitchen entryway for about ten minutes after its latest foray into the bedroom. It sat with its head up, its eyes wide and unblinking. It had been existing on very short commons over the last two months, it had fed well this evening --gorged, in fact--and it should have been feeling logy and sleepy. It had been both for awhile, but now all sleepiness had departed. What replaced it was a feeling of nervousness which grew steadily worse. Something had snapped several of the hair-thin tripwires posted in that mystical zone where the dog's senses and its intuition overlapped. The bitchmaster continued to moan in the other room, and to make occasional talking noises, but her sounds were not the source of the stray's jitters; they were not what had caused it to sit up when it had been on the verge of drifting placidly off to sleep, and not the reason why its good ear was now cocked alertly forward and its muzzle had wrinkled back far enough to show the tips of its teeth.

  It was something else ... something not right ... something which was possibly dangerous.

  As Jessie's dream peaked and then began to spiral down into darkness, the dog suddenly scrambled to its feet, unable to bear the steady sizzle in its nerves any longer. It turned, pushed open the loose back door with its snout, and jumped out into the windy dark. As it did, some strange and unidentifiable scent came to it. There was danger in that scent ... almost certainly danger.

  The dog raced for the woods as fast as its swollen, overloaded belly would allow. When it had gained the safety of the undergrowth, it turned and squirmed a little way back toward the house. It had retreated, true enough, but a great many more alarm-bells would have to go off inside before it would consider completely abandoning the wonderful supply of food it had found.

  Safely hidden, its thin, weary, intelligent face crisscrossed with overlapping ideograms of moonshadow, the stray began to bark, and it was this sound which eventually drew Jessie back to consciousness.

  13

  During their summers on the lake in the early sixties, before William was able to do much more than paddle in the shallows with a pair of bright orange water-wings attached to his back, Maddy and Jessie, always good friends despite the difference in their ages, often went down to swim at the Neidermeyers'. The Neidermeyers had a float equipped with a diving platform, and it was there that Jessie began to develop the form which won her a place first on her high school swim-team and then on the All-State team in 1971. What she remembered second-best about diving from the board on the Neidermeyers' float (first--for then and for always--was the swoop through the hot summer air toward the blue glitter of the waiting water) was how it felt to come up from the depths, through conflicting layers of warm and cold.

  Coming up from her troubled sleep was like that.

  First there was a black, roaring confusion that was like being inside a thundercloud. She bumped and yawed her way through it, not having the slightest idea of who she was or when she was, let alone where she was. Then a warmer, calmer layer: she had been caught in the most awful nightmare in all of recorded history (at least in her recorded history), but a nightmare was all it had been, and now it was over. As the surface neared, however, she encountered another chilly layer: an idea that the reality waiting ahead was almost as bad as the nightmare. Maybe worse.

  What is it? she asked herself. What could possibly be worse than what I've just been through?

  She refused to think about that. The answer was within reach, but if it occurred to her, she might decide to flip over and start finning her way back down into the depths again. To do that would be to drown, and while drowning might not be the worst way to step out--not as bad as running your Harley into a rock wall or parachuting into a cat's cradle of high-voltage wires, for instance--the idea of opening her body to that flat mineral smell, which reminded her simultaneously of copper and oysters, was insupportable. Jessie kept stroking grimly upward, telling herself that she would worry about reality when and if she actually broke the surface.

  The last layer she passed through was as warm and fearful as freshly spilled blood: her arms were probably going to be deader than stumps. She just hoped she would be able to command enough movement in them to get the blood flowing again.

  Jessie gasped, jerked, and opened her eyes. She hadn't the slightest idea of how long she
had been asleep, and the clock-radio on the dresser, stuck in its own hell of obsessive repetition (twelve-twelve-twelve, it flashed into the darkness, as if time had stopped forever at midnight), was no help. All she knew for sure was that it was full dark and the moon was now shining through the skylight instead of the east window.

  Her arms were jumping with a nervous jitter-jive of pins and needles. She usually disliked that feeling intensely, but not now; it was a thousand times better than the muscle cramps she had expected as the price of waking her dead extremities back up. A moment or two later she noticed a spreading dampness beneath her legs and bottom and realized that her previous need to urinate was gone. Her body had taken care of the problem while she slept.

  She doubled her fists and cautiously pulled herself up a little, wincing at the pain in her wrists and the deep, sobbing ache the movement caused in the backs of her hands. Most of that pain's a result of trying to slip out of the cuffs, she thought. You got nobody to blame but yourself, sweetheart.

  The dog had begun to bark again. Each shrill cry was like a splinter pounded into her eardrum, and she realized that sound was what had pulled her up and out of her sleep just as she had been about to dive below the nightmare. The location of the sounds told her the dog was back outside. She was glad it had left the house, but a little puzzled, as well. Maybe it just hadn't been comfortable under a roof after spending such a long time outside. That idea made a certain amount of sense ... as much as anything else in this situation, anyway.

  "Get it together, Jess," she advised herself in a solemn, sleep-foggy voice, and maybe--just maybe--she was doing that. The panic and the unreasoning shame she'd felt in the dream were departing. The dream itself seemed to be drying out, taking on the curiously desiccated quality of an overexposed photograph. Soon, she realized, it would be gone entirely. Dreams on waking were like the empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems. There had been times when this amnesia--if that was what it was--had struck her as sad. Not now. She had never in her life equated forgetting with mercy so quickly and completely.

  And it doesn't matter, she thought. It was just a dream after all. I mean, all those heads sticking out of heads? Dreams are supposed to be symbolic, of course--yes, I know--and I suppose there might have been some symbolism in this one ... maybe even some truth. If nothing else, I think that now I understand why I hit Will when he goosed me that day. Nora Callighan would undoubtedly be thrilled--she'd call it a breakthrough. Probably it is. It doesn't do a thing about getting me out of this fucking jailhouse jewelry, though, and that's still my top priority. Does anyone disagree with that?

  Neither Ruth nor Goody replied; the UFO voices were likewise silent. The only response, in fact, came from her stomach, which was sorry as hell all this had happened but still felt compelled to protest the cancellation of supper with a long, low rumble. Funny, in a way

  ... but apt to be less so come tomorrow. By then her thirst would have come raging back, too, and she was under no illusions about how long those last two sips of water would stave it off.

  I've got to center my concentration--I've just got to. The problem isn't food, and it isn't water, either. Right now those things matter as little as why I punched Will in the mouth at his ninth-birthday party. The problem is how I'm--

  Her thoughts broke off with the clean snap of a knot exploding in a hot fire. Her eyes, which had been wandering aimlessly across the darkened room, locked on the far corner, where the wind-driven shadows of the pines danced wildly in the nacreous light falling through the skylight.

  There was a man standing there.

  Terror greater than any she had ever known crept over her. Her bladder, which had in fact relieved only the worst of its discomfort, now voided itself in a painless gush of heat. Jessie hadn't the slightest idea of that or anything else. Her terror had blown her mind temporarily clean from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. No sound escaped her, not even the smallest squeak; she was as incapable of sound as she was of thought. The muscles of her neck, shoulders, and arms turned to something that felt like warm water and she slid down the headboard until she hung from the handcuffs in a kind of slack swoon. She didn't black out--didn't even come close to it--but that mental emptiness and the total physical incapacity which accompanied it were worse than a blackout. When thought did attempt to return, it was at first blocked by a dark, featureless wall of fear.

  A man. A man in the corner.

  She could see his dark eyes gazing at her with fixed, idiotic attention. She could see the waxy whiteness of his narrow cheeks and high forehead, although the in- . truder's actual features were blurred by the diorama of shadows which went flying across them. She could see slumped shoulders and dangling apelike arms which ended in long hands; she sensed feet somewhere in the black triangle of shadow thrown by the bureau, but that was all.

  She had no idea how long she lay in that horrible semi-swoon, paralyzed but aware, like a beetle stung by a trapdoor spider. It seemed like a very long time. The seconds dripped by, and she found herself unable to even close her eyes, let alone avert them from her strange guest. Her first terror of him began to abate a little, but what replaced it was somehow worse: horror and an unreasoning, atavistic revulsion. Jessie later thought that the wellspring of these feelings--the most powerful negative emotions she had ever experienced in her life, including those which had swept her only a short time before, as she had watched the stray dog preparing to dine on Gerald--was the creature's utter stillness. It had crept in here while she slept and now merely stood in the corner, camouflaged by the ceaseless ebb and flow of shadows over its face and body, staring at her with its strangely avid black eyes, eyes so large and rapt they reminded her of the sockets in a skull.

  Her visitor only stood there in the corner; merely that and nothing more.

  She lay in the handcuffs with her arms stretched above her, feeling like a woman at the bottom of a deep well. Time passed, marked only by the idiot blink of the clock proclaiming it was twelve, twelve, twelve, and at last a coherent thought stole back into her brain, one which seemed both dangerous and vastly comforting.

  There's no one here but you, Jessie. The man you see in the corner is a combination of shadows and imagination--no more than that.

  She fought her way back to a sitting position, pulling with her arms, grimacing at the pain in her overtaxed shoulders, pushing with her feet, trying to dig her bare heels into the coverlet, breathing in harsh little blurts of effort ... and while doing these things, her eyes never left the hideously elongated shape in the corner.

  It's too tall and too thin to be a real man, Jess--you see that, don't you? It's nothing but wind, shadows, a soupcon of moonlight... and a few leftovers from your nightmare, I imagine. Okay?

  It almost was. She started to relax. Then, from outside, the dog voiced another hysterical volley of barks. And didn't the figure in the corner--the figure that was nothing but wind, shadows, and a soupcon of moonlight--didn' t that nonexistent figure turn its head slightly in that direction?

  No, surely not. Surely that was just another trick of the wind and the dark and the shadows.

  That might well be; in fact she was almost sure that part--the head-turning part--had been an illusion. But the rest of it? The figure itself? She could not quite convince herself that it was all imagination. Surely no figure which looked that much like a man could be just an illusion ... could it?

  Goodwife Burlingame spoke up suddenly, and although her voice was fearful, there was no hysteria in it, at least not yet; oddly, it was the Ruth part of her which had suffered the most extreme horror at the idea she might not be alone in the room, and it was the Ruth part that was still close to gibbering.

  If that thing's not real, Goody said, why did the dog leave in the first place? I don't think it would have done that without a very good reason, do you?

  Yet she understood that Goody was deeply fri
ghtened just the same, and yearning for some explanation of the dog's departure that didn't include the shape Jessie either saw or thought she saw standing in the corner. Goody was begging her to say that her original idea, that the dog had left simply because it no longer felt comfortable in the house, was much more likely. Or maybe, she thought, it had left for the oldest reason of all: it had smelled another stray, this one. a bitch in heat. She supposed it was even possible that the dog had been spooked by some noise--a branch knocking against an upstairs window, say. She liked that one the best, because it suggested a kind of rough justice: that the dog had also been spooked by some imaginary intruder, and its barks were intended to frighten this nonexistent newcomer away from its pariah's supper.

  Yes, say any of those things, Goody suddenly begged her, and even if you can't believe any of them yourself, make me believe them.

  But she didn't think she could do that, and the reason was standing in the corner beside the bureau. There was someone there. It wasn't a hallucination, it wasn't a combination of wind-driven shadows and her own imagination, it wasn't a holdover from her dream, a momentary phantom glimpsed in the perceptual no-man's -land between sleeping and waking. It was a

  (monster it's a monster a boogeymonster come to eat me up)

  man, not a monster but a man, standing there motionlessly and watching her while the wind gusted, making the house creak and the shadows dance across its strange, half-glimpsed face.

  This time the thought-Monster! Boogeymonster!--rose from the lower levels of her mind to the more brightly lit stage of her consciousness. She denied it again, but she could feel her terror returning, just the same. The creature on the far side of the room might be a man, but even if it was, she was becoming more and more sure that there was something very wrong with its face. If only she could see it better!