Gerald's Game Read online

  Can I look through the smoked glass yet, Dad?

  Not yet. His hand, heavy and warm on her leg. She puts her own hand over it, then turns to him and grins.

  It's exciting, isn't it?

  Yes.. Yes it is, Punkin. Quite a bit more than I thought it would be, actually.

  She wriggles again, wanting to find a way to coexist with the hard part of him against which her bottom is now resting. He draws in a quick hissing mouthful of air over his bottom lip.

  Daddy? Am I too heavy? Did I hurt you?

  No. You're fine.

  Can I look at it through the glass yet?

  Not yet, Punkin. But very soon.

  The world no longer has the look it gets when the sun dives into a cloud; now it seems as if twilight has come in the middle of the afternoon. She hears the old hooty-owl in the woods, and the sound makes her shiver. On WNCH Debbie Reynolds is fading out, and the deejay who comes in on top of them will soon be replaced by Marvin Gaye.

  Look out on the lake! Daddy tells her, and when she does, she sees a weird twilight creeping over a lackluster world from which every strong color has been subtracted, leaving nothing but subdued pastels. She shivers and tells him it's creepy; he tells her to try not to be too scared to enjoy it, a statement she will examine carefully--too carefully, perhaps--for double meanings years later. And now ...

  Dad? Daddy? It's gone. Can I--

  Yes: Now it's okay. But when I say you have to stop, you have to stop. No arguments, understand?

  He gives her three panes of smoked glass in a stack, but first he gives her a potholder. He gives it to her because he made the viewers from panes of glass cut from an old shed window, and he is less than confident of his abilities with the glass-cutter. And as she looks down at the potholder in this experience which is both dream and memory, her mind suddenly leaps even further back, as nimbly as an acrobat turning a flip, and she hears him say The last thing I need ...

  29

  ". . . is for your mother to come home and find a note saying . . . "

  Jessie's eyes flashed open as she spoke these words to the empty room, and the first thing they saw was the empty glass: Gerald's water-glass, still standing on the shelf. Standing there near the cuff binding her wrist to the bedpost. Not the left wrist but the right.

  . . . a note saying I've taken you to the Emergency Room so they can try to sew a couple of your fingers back on.

  Now Jessie understood the purpose of that old, hurtful memory; understood what Punkin had been trying to tell her all along. The answer had nothing to do with the old Adam, or with the faint mineral smell of the wet spot on her old cotton underpants. It had everything to do with half a dozen panes of glass carefully cut from the crumbling putty of an old shed window. She had lost the jar of Nivea cream, but there was still at least one other source of lubrication left to her, wasn't there? One other way to ooze on over to the Promised Land. There was blood. Until it clotted, blood was almost as slippery as oil.

  It's going to hurt like hell, Jessie.

  Yes, of course it would hurt like hell. But she thought she had heard or read somewhere that there were fewer nerves in the wrists than at many of the body's vital checkpoints; that was why slitting one's wrists, especially in a tubful of hot water, had been a preferred method of suicide ever since the original toga-parties in Imperial Rome. Besides, she was half-numb already.

  "I was half-numb to let him lock me up in these things in the first place," she croaked.

  If you cut too deep, you'll bleed to death just like those old Romans.

  Yes, of course she would. But if she didn't cut at all, she'd lie here until she died of seizures or dehydration ... or until her friend with the bag of bones showed up tonight.

  "Okay," she said. Her heart was pumping very hard, and she was fully awake for the first time in hours. Time restarted with a ram and a jerk, like a freight-train pulling out of a siding and back onto the main line. "Okay, that's the convincer."

  Listen, a voice said urgently, and Jessie realized with amazement that it was the voice of Ruth and the Goodwife. They had merged, at least for the time being. Listen carefully, Jess.

  "I'm listening," she told the empty room. She was also looking. It was the glass she was looking at. One of a set of twelve she'd gotten on sale at Sears three or four years ago. Six or eight of them broken by now. Soon there would be another She swallowed and grimaced. It was like trying to swallow around a flannel-covered stone lodged in her throat. "I'm listening very carefully, believe me."

  Good. Because once you start this, you won't be able to stop again. Everything's got to happen fast, because your system is already dehydrated. But remember this: even if things go all wrong--

  "--they'll work out just fine," she finished. And it was true, wasn't it? The situation had taken on a simplicity that was, in its own ghastly way, sort of elegant. She didn't want to bleed to death, of course--who would?--but it would be better than the intensifying cramps and the thirst. Better than him. It. The hallucination. Whatever it was.

  She licked her dry lips with her dry tongue and caught at her flying, confused thoughts. Tried to put them in order as she had done before going after the sample jar of face cream which was now lying uselessly on the floor beside the bed. It was getting harder to think, she discovered. She kept hearing snatches of

  (go greasy)

  that talking blues, kept smelling her father's cologne, kept feeling that hard thing against her bottom. And then there was Gerald. Gerald seemed to be talking to her from his place on the floor. It's going to be back, Jessie. Nothing you can do will stop it. It will teach you a lesson, me proud beauty.

  She flicked her eyes toward him, then looked hastily back at the water-glass. Gerald appeared to be grinning ferociously at her with the part of his face which the dog had left intact. She made another effort to set her wits to work, and after some effort, the thoughts began to roll.

  She took ten minutes, going over the steps again and again. There wasn't much, in truth, to go over--her agenda was suicidally risky but not complicated. She mentally rehearsed each move several times just the same, looking for the minor mistake which might cost her her last chance at life. She couldn't find it. In the end there was only one major drawback--it would have to be done very fast, before the blood could start to coagulate--and there were only two possible outcomes: a quick escape, or unconsciousness and death.

  She reviewed the whole thing one more time--not putting off the necessary nasty business but examining it the way she would have examined a scarf she had knitted for runs and dropped stitches--while the sun continued its steady westward run. On the back stoop the dog got up, leaving the glistening knot of gristle upon which it had been gnawing. It ambled toward the woods. It had caught a whiff of that black scent again, and with its belly full, even a whiff was too much.

  30

  Twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock flashed, and whatever time it really was, it was time.

  One more thing before you start. You've got yourself nerved up to the sticking point, and that's good, but keep your focus. If you start off by dropping the damn glass on the floor, you really will be fucked.

  "Stay out, dog!" she called shrilly, with no idea that the dog had retreated to the stand of woods beyond the head of the driveway some minutes before. She hesitated a moment longer, considering another prayer, and then decided she had done all the praying she intended to do. Now she would depend on her voices ... and on herself.

  She reached for the glass with her right hand, moving without her former tentative care. Part of her--probably the part which had so liked and admired Ruth Neary--understood that this final job was not about care and caution but about bringing down the hammer and bringing it down hard.

  Now I must be Samurai Lady, she thought, and smiled.

  She closed her fingers upon the glass she had worked so hard to get in the first place, looked at it curiously for a moment--looked at it as a gardener might look at some unexpected specimen
she has found growing in among her beans or peas--then gripped it. She slitted her eyes almost completely shut to protect them from flying splinters, then brought the glass down hard on the shelf, in the manner of one who cracks the shell of a hardboiled egg. The sound the glass made was absurdly familiar, absurdly normal, a sound no different from that made by the hundreds of glasses which had either slipped through her fingers during the washing-up or been knocked onto the floor by her elbow or straying hand in all the years since she had graduated from her plastic Dandy Duck cup at the age of five. Same old kersmash; there was no special resonance to indicate the fact that she had just begun the unique job of risking her life in order to save it.

  She did feel a single random chunk of glass strike low on her forehead, just above the eyebrow, but that was the only one to hit her face. Another piece--a big one, by the sound--spun off the shelf and shattered on the floor. Jessie's lips were pressed together in a tight white line, anticipating what would surely be the major source of pain, at least to begin with: her fingers. They had been gripping the glass tightly when it shattered. But there was no pain, only a sense of faint pressure and even fainter heat. Compared with the cramps which had been ripping at her for the last couple of hours, it was nothing.

  The glass must have broken lucky, and why not? Isn't it time I had a little luck?

  Then she raised her hand and saw the glass hadn't broken lucky after all. Dark red blisters of blood were welling up at the tips of her thumb and three of her four fingers; only her pinky had escaped being cut. Shards of glass stuck out of her thumb, second, and third fingers like weird quills. The creeping numbness in her extremities--and perhaps the keen edges on the pieces of glass which had cut her--had kept her from feeling the lacerations much, but they were there. As she watched, fat drops of blood began to patter down on the pink quilted surface of the mattress, staining it a far darker color.

  Those narrow darts of glass, sticking out of her middle two fingers like pins from a pincushion, made her feel like throwing up even though there was nothing at all in her stomach.

  Some Samurai Lady you turned out to be, one of the UFO voices sneered.

  But they're my fingers! she cried at it. Don't you see? They're my fingers!

  She felt panic flutter, forced it back, and returned her attention to the chunk of water-glass she was still holding. It was a curved upper section, probably a quarter of the whole, and on one side it had broken in two smooth arcs. They came to an almost perfect point which glittered cruelly in the afternoon sun. A lucky break, that ... maybe. If she could keep her courage up. To her this curving prong of glass looked like a fantastic fairy-tale weapon--a tiny scimitar, something to be carried by a warlike pixie on its way to do battle beneath a toadstool.

  Your mind is wandering, dear, Punkin said. Can you afford that?

  The answer, of course, was no.

  Jessie laid the quarter-section of drinking glass back down on the shelf, placing it carefully so she would be able to reach it without serious contortions. It lay on its smooth curved belly, the scimitar-shaped prong jutting out. A tiny spark of reflected sun glittered hotly at the tip. She thought it might do very well for the next job, if she was careful not to bear down too hard. If she did that, she would probably push the glass off the shelf or snap off the accidental blade-shape.

  "Just be careful," she said. "You won't need to bear down if you're careful, Jessie. Just pretend--"

  But the rest of that thought

  (you're carving roast beef)

  didn't seem very productive, so she blocked it before more than its leading edge could get through. She lifted her right arm, extending it until the handcuff chain was almost taut and her wrist hovered above the gleaming hook of glass. She wanted very much to sweep away the rest of the glass littering the shelf--she sensed it waiting for her up there like a minefield--but she didn't dare. Not after her experience with the jar of Nivea cream. If she accidentally knocked the blade-shaped piece of glass off the shelf, or broke it, she would need to sift through the leftovers for an acceptable substitute. Such precautions seemed almost surreal to her, but she did not for a single moment try to tell herself they were unnecessary. If she was going to get out of this, she was going to have to bleed a lot more than she was bleeding now.

  Do it just the way you saw it, Jessie, that's all . . . and don't chicken out.

  "No chickening out," Jessie agreed in her harsh dust-in-the-cracks voice. She spread her hand and then shook her wrist, hoping to get rid of the glass poking out of her fingers. She mostly succeeded; only the sliver in her thumb, buried deeply in the tender flesh beneath the nail, refused to go. She decided to leave it and get on with the rest of her business.

  What you're planning to do is absolutely crazy, a nervous voice told her. No UFO here; this was a voice Jessie knew well. It was the voice of her mother. Not that I'm surprised, you understand; it's a typical Jessie Mahout overreaction, and if I've seen it once, I've seen it a thousand times. Think about it, Jessie--why cut yourself up and maybe bleed to death? Someone will come and rescue you; anything else is simply unthinkable. Dying in one's summer house? Dying in handcuffs? Utterly ridiculous, take my word for it. So rise above your usual whiny nature, Jessie --just this one time. Don't cut yourself on that glass. Don't you do it!

  That was her mother, all right; the mimicry was so good it was eerie. She wanted you to believe you were hearing love and common sense masquerading as anger, and while the woman had not been entirely incapable of love, Jessie thought the real Sally Mahout was the woman who had one day marched into Jessie's room and thrown a pair of high heels at her without a single word of explanation, either then or later.

  Besides, everything that voice had said was a lie. A scared lie.

  "No," she said, "I won't take your word for it. No one's coming... except maybe the guy from last night. No chickening out."

  With that, Jessie lowered her right wrist toward the gleaming blade of glass.

  31

  It was important that she see what she was doing, because she felt almost nothing at first; she could have cut her wrist to bleeding ribbons and felt little save those distant sensations of pressure and warmth. She was greatly relieved to find that seeing wasn't going to be a problem; she had smashed the glass at a good place on the shelf (A break at last! part of her mind rejoiced sarcastically), and her view was almost completely unobstructed.

  Hand tilted back, Jessie sank her inner wrist--that part which bears the lines palm-readers call the Bracelets of Fortune--onto the broken curve of glass. She watched, fascinated, as the jutting point first dimpled her skin, then popped it. She kept pressing and her wrist kept eating the glass. The dimple filled up with blood and disappeared.

  Jessie's first reaction was disappointment. The glass hook hadn't created the gusher she had hoped for (and half feared). Then the sharp edge severed the blue bundles of vein lying closest to the surface of her skin, and the blood began flowing out faster. It did not come in the pulsing jets she had expected but in a fast, steady flow, like water from a tap which has been spun almost all the way open. Then something bigger parted and the stream became a freshet. It coursed across the shelf and spilled down her forearm. Too late to back out now; she was for it. One way or the other, she was for it.

  Pull back, at least! the mother-voice screamed. Don't make it any worse--you've done enough! Try it now!

  A tempting idea, but Jessie thought that what she had done so far was a long way from being enough. She didn't know the word "degloving," a technical term used most commonly by doctors in connection with burn-victims, but now that she had begun this grisly operation, she understood she could not depend on blood alone to slide her free. Blood might not be enough.

  She slowly and carefully twisted her wrist, splitting the tight skin of her lower hand. Now she felt a weird tingling across her palm, as if she had cut into some small but vital sheath of nerves which had been half-dead to begin with. The third and fourth fingers of her right ha
nd swooned forward as if they had been killed. The first two, along with the thumb, began to jitter wildly back and forth. As mercifully numb as her flesh was, Jessie still found something inexpressibly horrible in these signs of the damage she was doing herself. Those two crumpled fingers, so like little corpses, were somehow worse than all the blood she had spilled thus far.

  Then both this horror and the growing feeling of heat and pressure in her wounded hand were overwhelmed as a fresh cramp moved into her side like a storm-front. It dug at her mercilessly, trying to tear her out of her twisted position, and Jessie fought back with terrified fury. She couldn't move now. She would almost certainly knock her improvised cutting tool to the floor if she did.

  "No you don't," she muttered through her clenched teeth. "No, you bastard--get out of Dodge."

  She held herself rigidly in position, trying to keep from bearing down on the fragile glass blade any harder than she already was, not wanting to snap it off and have to try finishing with some less apt tool. But if the cramp spread from her side to her right arm, as it was apparently trying to--

  "No," she moaned. "Go away, do you hear? Just go the fuck away!"

  She waited, knowing she could not afford to wait, also knowing she could do nothing else; she waited and listened to the sound of her life's blood pattering to the floor from the bottom of the headboard. She watched more blood run off the shelf in little streamlets. Tiny sparkles of glass gleamed in some of these. She had begun to feel like a victim in a slasher movie.

  You can't wait any longer, Jessie! Ruth rapped at her. You're all out of time!

  What I'm really out of is luck, and I never had that goddam much to start with, she told Ruth.

  At that moment she either felt the cramp loosen a little or was able to kid herself that she did. Jessie revolved her hand inside the cuff, screaming with pain as the cramp pounced once more, sinking its hot claws into her midsection, trying to set it on fire again. She kept moving just the same, however, and now it was the back of her wrist that she impaled. The soft inner part was turned up and Jessie watched, fascinated, as the deep gash across her Bracelets of Fortune opened its black-red mouth wide and appeared to laugh at her. She drove the glass as deeply into the back of her hand as she dared, still fighting the cramp in her midriff and lower chest, then yanked her hand back toward her, spraying a fine mist of backspatter across her forehead, her cheeks, and the bridge of her nose. The broken chunk of glass with which she had performed this rudimentary surgery went spinning to the floor, and there the pixie-blade shattered. Jessie spared it not a single thought; its job was done. Meantime, there was one more step to be taken, one more thing to see: whether the cuff would maintain its jealous hold on her, or if flesh and blood might not at last conspire to make it let go.