Gerald's Game(93)

I don't want to look! her mind screamed. I don't want to look, Idon't want to see!

But she was helpless not to look. It was as if strong invisible hands were turning her head while the wind gusted and the back door banged and the shutter clapped and the dog once more sent its desolate, bone-chilling howl spiralling into the black October sky. Her head turned until she was looking into her dead husband's study, and yes, sure enough, there it was, a tall figure standing beside Gerald's Eames chair and in front of the sliding glass door. Its narrow white face hung in the darkness like a stretched skull. The dark, squarish shadow of its souvenir case squatted between its feet.

She drew in breath to scream with, but what came out was a sound like a teakettle with a broken whistle. "Huhhhhaaahhhhhhh."

Only that and nothing more.

Somewhere, in that other world, hot urine was running down her legs; she had wet her pants for a second record-breaking day. The wind gusted in that other world, making the house shiver on its bones. The blue spruce knocked its branch against the west wall again. Gerald's study was a lagoon of dancing shadows, and it was once more very difficult to tell what she was seeing... or if she was in fact seeing anything at all.

The dog raised its keen, horrified cry again and Jessie thought: Oh, you're seeing it, all right. Maybe not as well as the dog out there issmelling it, but you are seeing it,

As if to remove any lingering doubts she might have had on this score, her visitor poked its head forward in a kind of parody of inquisitiveness, giving Jessie a clear but mercifully brief look at it. The face was that of an alien being that has tried to mimic human features without much success. It was too narrow, for one thing-narrower than any face Jessie had ever seen in her life. The nose seemed to have no more thickness than a butter-knife. The high forehead bulged like a grotesque garden bulb. The thing's eyes were simple black circles below the thin upside-down V's of its brows; its pudgy, liver-colored lips seemed to be simultaneously pouting and melting.

No, not melting, she thought with the bright narrow lucidity that sometimes lives, like the glowing filament in a lightbulb, within a sphere of complete terror. Not melting, smiling. It's tryingto smile at me.

Then it bent over to grasp its case, and its narrow, incoherent face was mercifully lost from view again. Jessie staggered back a step, tried to scream again, and could only produce another loose, glassy whisper. The wind moaning around the eaves was louder.

Her visitor straightened up again, holding the case with one hand and unlatching it with the other. Jessie realized two things, not because she wanted to but because her mind's ability to pick and choose what it would sense had been completely demolished. The first had to do with the smell she had noted earlier. It wasn't garlic or onions or sweat or dirt. It was rotting flesh. The second had to do with the creature's arms. Now that she was closer and could see better (she wished it weren't so, but it was), they impressed her more forcibly-freakish, elongated things that seemed to waver in the wind-driven shadows like tentacles. They presented the case to her as if for her approval, and now Jessie saw it was not a travelling salesman's case but a wicker box that looked like an oversized fisherman's creel.

I've seen a box like that before, she thought. I don't know if it wason some old TV show or in real life, but I have. When I was just a littlegirl. It came out of a long black car with a door in the back.

A soft and sinister UFO voice suddenly spoke up inside her. Once upon a time, Jessie, when President Kennedy was still alive and alllittle girls were Punkins and the plastic body-bag had yet to be invented-back in the Time of the Eclipse, let us say-boxes like this werecommon, They came in all sizes, from Men's Extra Large to Six-Month Miscarriage. Your friend keeps his souvenirs in an old-fashioned mortician's body-box, Jessie.

As she realized this, she realized something else, as well. It was perfectly obvious, once you thought about it. The reason her visitor smelled so bad was because it was dead. The thing in Gerald's study wasn't her father, but it was a walking corpse, just the same.

No... no, that can't he-

But it was. She had smelled exactly the same thing on Gerald, not three hours ago. Had smelled it in Gerald, simmering in his flesh like some exotic disease which can only be caught by the dead.

Now her visitor was opening the box again and holding it out to her, and once again she saw the golden glitters and diamond flashes amid the heaps of bones. Once again she watched as the narrow dead man's hand reached in and began to stir the contents of the wicker body-box-a box which had perhaps once held the corpses of infants or very small children. Once again she heard the tenebrous click and whisk of bones, a sound like dirt-clogged castanets.

Jessie stared, hypnotized and almost ecstatic with terror. Her sanity was giving way; she could feel it going, almost hear it, and there wasn't a thing on God's green earth she could do about it.

Yes there is! You can run! You have to run, and you have to do itnow!

It was Punkin, and she was shrieking... but she was also a long way off, lost in some deep stone gorge in Jessie's head. There were lots of gorges in there, she was discovering, and lots of dark, twisty canyons and caves that had never seen the light of the sun-places where the eclipse never ended, you might say. It was interesting. Interesting to find that a person's mind was really nothing but a graveyard built over a black hollow place with freakish reptiles like this crawling around the bottom. Interesting.