Gerald's Game(96)

She hit the Mercedes's horn-ring with the heel of her left hand. It uttered a single brief sound, more burp than beep, but it was enough to get the dog started. It turned and vanished into the woods without so much as a single look back.

Follow its example, Jess. Get out of here while you still can.

Good idea. In fact, it was the only idea. She reached across her body again with her left hand, this time to pull the transmission lever down into Drive. It caught with its usual reassuring little hitch and the car began rolling slowly up the paved driveway. The wind-driven trees shimmied like shadow-dancers on either side of it, sending the fall's first tornado-funnels of leaves whirling up into the night sky. I'm doing it, Jessie thought with wonder. I'm actually doing it, actually getting the puck out of here.

She was rolling up the driveway, rolling toward the unnamed wheel-track which would take her to Bay Lane, which would in its turn take her to Route 117 and civilization. As she watched the house (it looked more than ever like a huge white skull in the windy October moonlight) shrink in the rearview mirror, she thought: Why is it letting me go? And is it? Is it really?

Part of her-the fear-maddened part which would never entirely escape the handcuffs and the master bedroom of the house on the upper bay of Kashwakamak Lake-assured her that it wasn't; the creature with the wicker case was only playing with her, as a cat plays with a wounded mouse. Before she got much farther, certainly before she got to the top of the driveway, it would come racing after her, using its long cartoon legs to close the distance between them, stretching out its long cartoon arms to seize the rear bumper and bring the car to a halt. German efficiency was fine, but when you were dealing with something which had come back from the dead... well...

But the house continued to dwindle in the rearview mirror, and nothing came out of the back door. Jessie reached the top of the driveway, turned right, and began to follow her high beams down the narrow wheelruts toward Bay Lane, guiding the car with her left hand. Every second or third August a volunteer crew of summer residents, fueled mostly by beer and gossip, cut back the underbrush and trimmed the overhanging branches along the way out to Bay Lane, but this had been an off-year and the lane was much narrower than Jessie liked. Each time a wind-driven branch tapped at the car's roof or body, she cringed a little.

Yet she was escaping. One by one the landmarks she had learned over the years made their appearance in the headlights and then dwindled behind her: the huge roc with the split top, the overgrown gate with the faded sign reading RIDEOUT's HIDEOUT nailed to it, the uprooted spruce leaning amid a stand of smaller spruces like a large drunk being carried home by his smaller, livelier friends. The drunk spruce was only three-tenths of a mile from Bay Lane, and it was only two miles to the highway from there.

"I can handle it if I take it easy," she said, and pushed the radio ON button with her right thumb, doing it very carefully. Bach mellow, stately, and above all, rational-flooded the car from four directions. Better and better. "Take it easy," she repeated, speaking a little louder. "Go greasy." Even the last shock-the stray dog's glaring orange eyes-was fading a little now, although she could feel herself beginning to shake. "No problems whatsoever, if I just take it easy."

She was doing that, all right-maybe a little too easy, in fact. The speedometer needle was barely touching the 10 MPH mark. Being safely locked in the familiar surroundings of one's own car was a wonderful restorative-already she had begun to wonder if she hadn't been jumping at shadows all along-but this would be a very bad time to begin taking things for granted. If there had been someone in the house, he (it, some deeper voice-the UFO of all UFOs-insisted) might have used one of the other doors to leave the house. He might be following her right now. It was even possible that, were she to continue puddling along at a mere ten miles an hour, a really determined follower might catch up.

Jessie flicked her eyes up to the rearview mirror, wanting to reassure herself that this idea was only paranoia induced by shock and exhaustion, and felt her heart fall dead in her chest. Her left hand dropped from the wheel and thumped into her lap on top of the right. That should have hurt like hell, but there was no pain-absolutely none at all.

The stranger was sitting in the back seat with its eerily long hands pressed against the side of its head, like the monkey that hears no evil. Its black eyes stared at her with sublimely empty interest.

You see...me see...WE see.nothing but shadows! Punkin cried, but this cry was more than distant; it seemed to have originated at the other end of the universe.

And it wasn't true. It was more than shadows she saw in the mirror. The thing sitting back there was tangled in shadows, yes, but not made of them. She saw its face: bulging brow, round black eyes, blade-thin nose, plump, misshapen lips.

"Jessie!" the space cowboy whispered ecstatically. "Nora! Ruth! My-oh-my! Punkin Pie!"

Her eyes, frozen on the mirror, saw her passenger lean slowly forward, saw its swollen forehead nodding toward her right ear as if the creature intended to tell her a secret. She saw its pudgy lips slide away from its jutting, discolored teeth in a grimacing, vapid smile. It was at this point that the final breakup of Jessie Burlingame's mind began.

No! her own voice cried in a voice as thin as the voice of a vocalist on a scratchy old 78-rpm record. No, please no! It's not fair!

"Jessie!" Its stinking breath as sharp as a rasp and as cold as air inside a meat-locker. "Nora! Jessie! Ruth! Jessie! Punkin! Goodwife! Jessie! Mommy!"