Gerald's Game(86)

You're running out of time, Jessie.

She knew.

Jessie lowered her chest to the headboard again. Getting the bed started was harder this time, but she finally managed it. Two minutes later she was standing next to the bureau she had stared at so long and hopelessly from the other side of the room. A tiny dry smile quivered the corners of her lips. I'm like a woman who'sspent her whole life dreaming of the black sands of Kona and can't believeit when she's finally standing on them, she thought. It seems like justanother dream, only maybe a little more real than most, because in thisone your nose itches.

Her nose didn't itch, but she was looking down at the crumpled snake of Gerald's tie and the knot was still in it. That last was the sort of detail even the most realistic dreams rarely supplied. Beside the red tie were two small, round-barrelled keys, clearly identical. The handcuff keys.

Jessie raised her right hand and looked at it critically. The third and fourth fingers still hung limply. She wondered briefly just how much nerve-damage she had done to her hand, then dismissed the thought. It might matter later on-as some of the other things she had dismissed for the duration of this gruelling fourthquarter drive downfield might matter later on-but for the time being, nerve-damage to her right hand was no more important to her than the price of hogbelly futures in Omaha. The important thing was that the thumb and first two fingers on that hand were still taking messages. They shook a little, as if expressing shock at the sudden loss of their lifelong neighbors, but they still responded.

Jessie bent her head and spoke to them.

"You have to stop doing that. Later on you can shake like mad, if you want, but right now you have to help me. You have to." Yes. Because the thought of dropping the keys or knocking them off the bureau after getting this far... that was unthinkable. She stared sternly at her fingers. They didn't stop trembling, not entirely, but as she watched, their jitters quieted to a barely visible thrumming.

"Okay," she said softly. "I don't know if that's good enough or not, but we're going to find out."

At least the keys were the same, which gave her two chances. She found nothing at all strange in the fact that Gerald had brought them both; he was nothing if not methodical. Planning for contingencies, he often said, was the difference between being good and being great. The only contingencies he hadn't planned on this time were the heart attack and the kick which had provoked it. The result, of course, was that he was neither good nor great, only dead.

"The doggy's dinner," Jessie muttered, once again having no idea at all she was speaking aloud. "Gerald used to be a winner, but now he's just the doggy's dinner. Right, Ruth? Right, Punkin?

She tweezed one of the small steel keys between the thumb and forefinger of her sizzling right hand (as she touched the metal, that pervasive feeling that all this was a dream occurred), picked it up, looked at it, then looked at the cuff which enclosed her left wrist. The lock was a small circle pressed into its side; to Jessie it looked like the sort of doorbell a rich person might have at the tradesman's entrance of the manor house. To open the lock, you simply stuck the hollow barrel of the key into the circle until you heard it click into place, then turned it.

She lowered the key toward the lock, but before she could slip the barrel in, another wave of that peculiar darkheadedness rolled through her mind. She swayed on her feet and found herself once again thinking of Karl Wallenda. Her hand began to shake again.

"Stop that!" she cried fiercely, and jammed the key desperately at the lock. "Stop th-"

The key missed the circle, struck the hard steel beside it instead, and turned in her blood-slicked fingers. She held onto it a second longer, and then it squirted out of her grasp-went greasy, one might have said-and fell to the floor. Now there was only the one key left,. and if she lost that-

You won't, Punkin said. I swear you won't. Just go for it before youlose your courage.

She flexed her right arm once, then raised the fingers toward her face. She looked at them, closely. The shakes were abating again, not enough to suit her, but she couldn't wait. She was afraid she would black out if she did.

She reached out with her faintly trembling hand, and came very close to pushing the remaining key over the edge of the bureau in her first effort to grip it. It was the numbness-the goddam numbness that simply wouldn't leave her fingers. She took a deep breath, held it, made a fist in spite of the pain and the fresh flow of blood it provoked, then let the air out of her lungs in a long, whistling sigh. She felt a little better. This time she pressed her first finger to the small head of the key and dragged it toward the edge of the bureau instead of trying to pick it up immediately. She didn't stop until it was sticking out over the edge.

If you drop it, Jessie! the Goodwife moaned. Oh, if you drop thisone, too!

"Shut up, Goody," Jessie said, and pushed her thumb up against the bottom of the key, creating a pincers. Then, trying not to think at all about what was going to happen to her if this went wrong, she lifted the key and brought it to the cuff. There was a bad run of seconds when she was unable to align the shaking barrel of the key with the lock, and a worse one when the lock itself momentarily doubled... then quadrupled. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, took another deep breath, then popped them open. Now she saw only one lock again, and she jabbed the key into it before her eyes could do any more tricks.

"Okay," she breathed. "Let's see."