Gerald's Game(58)

Her revulsion turned to guilty horror, and Jessie quickly fished the underpants back out. All at once the flat odor seemed to fill her nose, thick and bland and sickening. Oysters and copper, she thought, and that was all it took. She fell on her knees in front of the toilet, the underpants wadded up in one clenched hand, and vomited. She flushed quickly, before the smell of partly digested hamburger could get into the air, then turned on the cold sink-tap and rinsed her mouth out. Her fear that she was going to spend the next hour or so in here, kneeling in front of the toilet and puking, began to subside. Her stomach seemed to be settling. If she could just keep from getting another whiff of that bland copper-creamy smell...

Holding her breath, she thrust the panties under the cold tap, rinsed them, wrung them out, and flung them back in the hamper. Then she took a deep breath, pushing her hair away from her temples with the backs of her damp hands at the same time. If her mother asked her what a damp pair of panties was doing in the dirty clothes-

Already you're thinking like a criminal, the voice that would one day belong to the Goodwife mourned. Do you see what being a bad girl gets you, Jessie? Do you? I certainly hope you d-

Be quiet, you little creep, the other voice snarled back. You can nag all you want later on, but right now we're trying to take care of a little business here, if you don't mind. Okay?

No answer. That was good. Jessie brushed nervously at her hair again, although very little of it had fallen back down against her temples. If her mother asked what the damp panties were doing in the dirty-clothes hamper, Jessie would simply say it was so hot she went for a dip without changing out of her shorts. All three of them had done that on several occasions this summer.

Then you better remember to run your shorts and shirt under the tap, too. Right, toots?

Right, she agreed. Good point.

She slipped into the robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door and returned to the bedroom to get the shorts and the teeshirt she'd been wearing when her mother, brother, and older sister left that morning... a thousand years ago, it now seemed. She didn't see them at first, and got down on her knees to look under the bed.

The other woman is on her knees, too, a voice remarked, and she smells that same smell. That smell that's like copper and cream.

Jessie heard but didn't hear. Her mind was on her shorts and tee-shirt-on her cover story. As she had suspected, they were under the bed. She reached for them.

It's coming out of the well, the voice remarked further. The smell from the well.

Yes, yes, Jessie thought, grabbing the clothes and starting back to the bathroom. The smell from the well, very good, you're a poet and you don't know it.

She made him fall down the well, the voice said, and that finally got through. Jessie came to a dead stop in the bathroom doorway, her eyes widening. She was suddenly afraid in some new and deadly way. Now that she was actually listening to it, she realized that this voice was not like any of the others; this one was like a voice you might pick up on the radio late at night, when conditions were exactly right-a voice that might come from far, far away.

Not that far, Jessie; she is in the path of the eclipse, too.

For one moment, the upper hallway of the house of Dark Score Lake seemed to be gone. What replaced it was a tangle of blackberry bushes, shadowless under the eclipse-darkened sky, and a clear smell of sea-salt. Jessie saw a skinny woman in a housedress with her dark hair put up in a bun. She was kneeling by a splintered square of boards. There was a puddle of white fabric beside her. Jessie was quite sure it was the skinny woman's slip. Who are you? Jessie asked the woman, but she was already gone "if she had ever been there in the first place, that was.

Jessie actually glanced over her shoulder to see if perhaps that spooky skinny woman had gotten behind her. But the upstairs hallway was deserted; she was alone.

She looked down at her arms and saw they were rippled with gooseflesh.

You're losing your mind, the voice that would one day be Goodwife Burlingame mourned. Oh Jessie, you've been bad, you've been very bad, and now you're going to have to pay by losing your mind.

"I'm not," she said. She looked at her pale, strained face in the bathroom mirror. "I'm not!"

She waited for a moment in a kind of horrified suspension to see if any of the voices-or the image of the woman kneeling by the splintered boards with her slip puddled on the ground beside her-would come back, but she neither heard nor saw anything. That creepy other who had told Jessie some she had pushed some he down some well was apparently gone.

Strain, toots, the voice that would one day be Ruth advised, and Jessie had a clear idea that while the voice didn't exactly believe that, it had decided Jessie had better get moving again, and right away. You thought about a woman with a slip beside her because you've got underwear on the brain this afternoon, that's all. I'd forget the whole thing, if I were you.

That was great advice. Jessie quickly dampened her shorts and shirt under the tap, wrung them out, and then stepped into the shower. She soaped, rinsed, dried, hurried back to the bedroom. She ordinarily wouldn't have bothered with the robe again for the quick dash across the hall, but this time she did, only holding it shut instead of taking time to belt it closed.

She paused in the bedroom again, biting her lip, praying that the weird other voice wouldn't come back, praying that she wouldn't have another of those crazy hallucinations or illusions or whatever they were. Nothing came. She dropped the robe on her bed, hurried across to her bureau, pulled on fresh underwear and shorts.