Gerald's Game(43)

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 intruder'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 acombination 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'tyou? It's nothing but wind, shadows, a soupcon of moonlight anda 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 thefirst place? I don't think it would have done that without a very goodreason, do you?

Yet she understood that Goody was deeply frightened 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 evenif 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 winddriven 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!

You wouldn't want to, a whispery, ominous UFO voice advised her.

But I have to talk to it-have to establish contact, Jessie thought, and immediately responded to herself in a nervous, scolding voice that felt like Ruth and Goody mixed together: Don't think of it asan it, Jessie-think of it as a he. Think of it as a man, someone who'smaybe been lost in the woods, someone who's as scared as you are.