Gerald's Game(76)

The stray decided the bitchmaster was probably still harmless in spite of the sharp edges which now glinted in her voice, but it still kept a wary eye on her as it trotted over to its supply of meat. It was better to be safe. It had suffered greatly in the course of learning that simple lesson, and it wasn't one it would forget easily, or soon-it was always better to be safe.

It gave her one final look with its bright and desperate eyes before dipping its head, seizing one of Gerald's love-handles, and tearing a large portion of it away. Seeing this was bad, but for Jessie it was not the worst. The worst was the cloud of flies which rose from their feeding- and nesting-ground when the stray locked its teeth and yanked. Their somnolent buzz finished the "ob of demolishing some vital, survival-oriented part of her, some part that had to do with both hope and heart.

The dog stepped back as delicately as a dancer in a movie musical, its good ear cocked, the meat dangling from its jaws. Then it turned and trotted quickly from the room. The flies were beginning resettlement operations even before it was out of sight. Jessie leaned her head back against the mahogany crossboards and closed her eyes. She began praying again, but this time it was not escape she prayed for. This time she prayed that God would take her quickly and mercifully, before the sun went down and the white-faced stranger came back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The next four hours were the worst of Jessie Burlingame's life. The cramps in her muscles grew steadily more frequent and more intense, but it wasn't intramuscular pain that made the hours between eleven and three so terrible; it was her mind's stubborn, gruesome refusal to relinquish its hold on lucidity and go into the dark. She had read Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" in junior high school, but not until now had she grasped the real horror of its opening lines: Nervous! True, very nervous I am and have been, but why will you say I am mad?

Madness would be a relief, but madness would not come. Neither would sleep. Death might beat them both, and dark certainly would. She could only lie on the bed, existing in a dull olive-drab reality shot through with occasional gaudy blasts of pain as her muscles cramped up. The cramps mattered, and so did her horrible, tiresome sanity, but little else seemed to certainly the world outside this room had ceased to hold any real meaning for her. In fact, she came strongly to believe that there was no world outside this room, that all the people who had once filled it had gone back to some existential Central Casting office, and all the scenery had been packed away like stage-flats after one of Ruth's beloved college drama society productions.

Time was a cold sea through which her consciousness forged like a waddling, graceless icebreaker. Voices came and went like phantoms. Most spoke inside her head, but for awhile Nora Callighan talked to her from the bathroom, and at another point Jessie had a conversation with her mother, who seemed to be lurking in the hall. Her mother had come to tell her that Jessie never would have gotten into a mess like this if she had been better about picking up her clothes. "If I had a nickel for every slip I ever fished out of the corner and turned rightside-out," her mother said, "I could buy the Cleveland Gas Works." This had been a favorite saying of her mother's, and Jessie realized now that none of them had ever asked her why she would want the Cleveland Gas Works.

She continued to exercise weakly, pedaling with her feet and pumping her arms up and down as far as the handcuffs-and her own flagging strength-would allow. She no longer did this to keep her body ready for escape when the right option finally occurred to her, because she had finally come to understand, in her heart and in her head, that there were no options left. The jar of face cream had been the last. She was exercising now only because the movement seemed to alleviate the cramps a little.

In spite of the exercise, she could feel coldness creeping into her feet and hands, settling onto her skin like a skim of ice and then working its way in. This was nothing like the gone-to-sleep feeling with which she had awakened this morning; it was more like the frostbite she had suffered during a long afternoon of cross-country skiing as a teenager-sinister gray spots on the back of one hand and on the flesh of her calf where her legging hadn't quite covered, dead spots that seemed impervious to even the baking heat of the fireplace. She supposed this numbness would finally overwhelm the cramps and that, in the end, her death might turn out to be quite merciful after all-like going to sleep in a snowbank-but it was moving much too slowly.

Time passed but it wasn't time; it was just a relentless, unchanging flow of information passing from her sleepless senses to her eerily lucid mind. There was only the bedroom, the scenery outside (the last few stage-flats, yet to be packed away by the propmaster in charge of this shitty little production), the buzz of flies turning Gerald into a late-season incubator, and the slow movement of the shadows along the floor as the sun made its way across a painted autumn sky. Every now and then a cramp would stab into one of her armpits like an icepick or pound a thick steel nail into her right side. As the afternoon wore endlessly along, the first cramps began to strike into her belly, where all hunger pangs had now ceased, and into the overstressed tendons of her diaphragm. These latter were the worst, freezing the sheath of muscles in her chest and locking down her lungs. She stared up at the reflected water-ripples on the ceiling with agonized, bulging eyes as each one struck, arms and legs trembling with effort as she tried to continue breathing until the cramp eased. It was like being buried up to the neck in cold wet cement.

Hunger passed but thirst did not, and as that endless day turned about her, she came to realize that simple thirst (only that and nothing more) might accomplish what the increasing levels of pain and even the fact of her own oncoming death hadn't been able to: it might drive her mad. It wasn't just her throat and mouth now; every part of her body cried out for water. Even her eyeballs were thirsty, and the sight of the ripples dancing on the ceiling to the left of the skylight made her groan softly.