Gerald's Game(85)

She shifted her eyes from the mattress with the shelf now lying on it to her trembling right hand. She raised it to her mouth and used her teeth to grip the sliver of glass poking out from beneath the thumbnail. The glass slipped, then slid between an upper canine and incisor, slicing deeply into the tender pink meat of her gum. There was a quick, penetrating sting and Jessie felt blood spew into her mouth, its taste sweet-salty, its texture as thick as the cherry cough-syrup she'd had to swallow when she had the flu as a child. She paid no attention to this new cut-she'd made her peace with much worse in the last few minutes-but only reset her grip and drew the sliver smoothly free of her thumb. When it was out, she spat it onto the bed along with a mouthful of warm blood.

"Okay," she murmured, and began to wriggle her body in between the wall and the headboard, panting harshly as she did so.

The bed moved out from the wall more easily than she could have hoped for, but one thing she'd never questioned was that it would move, if she ever managed to get sufficient leverage. Now she had it, and began to herd the hateful bed across the waxed floor. Its foot slid off to the right as she went because she was only able to push on the left side, but Jessie had taken this into account and was comfortable with it. Had, in fact, made it a part of her rudimentary plan. When your luck changes, she thought, it changes all the way. You may have cut your upper gum all to shit, Jess,but you haven't stepped on a single Piece of broken glass. So just keepmoving this bed, sweetheart, and keep counting your bl-

Her foot thumped against something. She looked down and saw she had kicked Gerald's plump right shoulder. Blood pattered down on his chest and face. A drop fell in one staring blue eye. She felt no pity for him; she felt no hate for him; she felt no love for him. She felt a kind of horror and disgust for herself, that all the feelings with which she had occupied herself over the years-those so-called civilized feelings that were the meat of every soap-opera, talk-show, and radio phone-in program-should prove so shallow compared with the survival instinct, which had turned out (in her case, at least), to be as overbearing and brutally insistent as a bulldozer blade. But that was the case, and she had an idea that if Arsenio or Oprah ever found themselves in this situation, they would do most of the things she had done.

"Out of my way, Gerald," she said, and kicked him (denying the enormous satisfaction it gave her even as it welled up inside). Gerald refused to move. It was as if the chemical changes which were part of his decay had bonded him to the floor. The flies rose in a buzzing, disturbed cloud just above his distended midsection.

That was all.

"Fuck it, then," Jessie said. She began to push the bed again. She managed to step over Gerald with her right foot, but her left came down squarely on his belly. The pressure created a ghastly buzzing sound in his throat and forced a brief but filthy breath of gas from his gaping mouth. "Excuse yourself, Gerald," she muttered, and then left him behind without another look. It was the bureau she was looking at now, the bureau with the keys resting on top of it.

As soon as she had left Gerald behind, the blanket of disturbed flies resettled and resumed their day's work. There was, after all, so much to do and so little time in which to do it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Her biggest fear had been that the foot of the bed would try to hang up either in the bathroom door or the far corner of the room, making it necessary for her to back and fill like a woman trying to shoehorn a big car into a small parking space. As it turned out, the rightward-tending arc the bed described as she moved it slowly across the room was almost perfect. She only had to make a single mid-course correction, pulling her end of the bed a little farther to the left so she could be sure the other end would clear the bureau. It was while she was doing this-pulling with her head down and her butt out and both arms wrapped tightly around the bedpost-that she suffered her first bout of lightheartedness... only as she lay with her weight against the post, looking like a woman who is so drunk and tired that she can only stand up by pretending to dance cheek-to-cheek with her boyfriend, she thought that darkheadedness would probably be a better way to describe it. The dominant feeling was one of loss-not just of thought and will but of sensory input as well. For one confused moment she was convinced that time had whiplashed, flinging her to a place that was neither Dark Score nor Kashwakamak but some other place entirely, a place that was on the ocean rather than any inland lake. The smell was no longer oysters and pennies but sea-salt. It was the day of the eclipse again, that was the only thing that was the same. She had run into the blackberry tangles to get away from some other man, some other Daddy who wanted to do a lot more than shoot his squirt on the back of her panties. And now he was at the bottom of the well.

Deja vu poured over her like strange water.

Oh Jesus, what is this? she thought, but there was no answer, only that puzzling image again, one she hadn't thought of since she had returned to the sheet-divided bedroom to change her clothes on the day of the eclipse: a skinny woman in a housedress, her dark hair put up in a bun, a puddle of white fabric beside her.

Whoa, Jessie thought, clutching at the bedpost with her tattered right hand and trying desperately to keep her knees from buckling. Hold on, Jessie-just hold on. Never mind the woman, nevermind the smell, never mind the darkness. Hold on and the darkness willpass.

She did, and it did. The image of the skinny woman kneeling beside her slip and looking at the splintered hole in the old boards went first, and then the darkness began to fade. The bedroom brightened again, gradually taking on its former five o'clock autumn hue. She saw motes of dust dancing in the light slanting in through the lakeside windows, saw her own shadow-legs stretching across the floor. They broke at the knees so that the rest of her shadow could climb the wall. The darkness pulled back, but it left a high sweet buzzing in her ears. When she looked down at her feet she saw they too were coated with blood. She was walking in it, leaving tracks in it.