Gerald's Game - Stephen King [102]
Someone had been in the bedroom with her last night after all, it seemed.
As this thought settled inexorably into Jessie's overstrained mind, she began to scream. Outside, on the back stoop, the stray lifted its scuffed, scratched muzzle from its paws for a moment. It cocked its good ear. Then it lost interest and lowered its head again. It wasn't as if the noise were being made by anything dangerous, after all; it was only the bitchmaster. Besides, the smell of the dark thing which had come in the night was on her now. It was one the stray was very familiar with. It was the smell of death.
The former Prince closed its eyes and went back to sleep.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - F I V E
At last she began to get herself under some kind of control again. She did this, absurdly enough, by reciting Nora Callighan's little mantra.
'One is for feet,' she said, her dry voice cracking and wavering in the empty bedroom, 'ten little toes, cute little piggies, all in a row . Two is for legs, lovely and long, three is my sex, where everything's wrong.'
She pushed steadily on, reciting the couplets she could remember, skipping the ones she couldn't, keeping her eyes closed. She went through the whole thing half a dozen times. She was aware that her heartbeat was slowing down and the worst of her terror was once more draining away, but she had no conscious awareness of the radical change she had made in at least one of Nora's jangly little couplets.
After the sixth repetition she opened her eyes and looked about the room like a woman who has just awakened from a short, restful nap. She avoided the corner by the bureau, however. She didn't want to look at the earring again, and she most certainly didn't want to look at the footprint.
Jessie? The voice was very soft, very tentative. Jessie thought it was the voice of the Goodwife, now drained of both its shrill ardor and its feverish denial. Jessie, can I say something?
'No,' she responded immediately in her harsh dust-in-the-cracks voice. 'Take a hike. I want to be done with all you bitches.'
Please, Jessie. Please listen to me.
She closed her eyes and found she could actually see that part of her personality she had come to call Goody Burlingame. Goody was still in the stocks, but now she raised her head — an act that couldn't have been easy with the cruel wooden restraint pressing into the back of her neck. Her hair fell away from her face momentarily, and Jessie was surprised to see not the Goodwife but a young girl.
Yeah, but she's still me, Jessie thought, and almost laughed. If this wasn't a case of comic-book psychology, she didn't know what was. She had just been thinking about Nora, and one of Nora's favorite hobbyhorses was about how people had to care for 'the child inside.' Nora claimed that the most common reason for unhappiness was failure to feed and nurture that interior child.
Jessie had nodded solemnly at all this, keeping her belief that the idea was mostly sentimental Aquarian/New Age slop to herself. She had liked Nora, after all, and although she thought Nora had held onto a few too many sets of mental love-beads from the late sixties and early seventies, she was clearly seeing Nora's 'child inside' now, and that seemed perfectly all right. Jessie supposed that the concept might even have some symbolic validity, and under the circumstances, the stocks made a hell of an apt image, didn't they? The person in them was the Goodwife-in-waiting, the Ruth-in-waiting, the Jessie-in-waiting. She was the little girl her father had called Punkin.
'So talk,' Jessie said. Her eyes were still closed, and a combination of stress, hunger, and thirst had combined to make the vision of the girl in the stocks almost exquisitely real. Now she could see the words FOR SEXUAL EXTICEMENT written on a sheet of vellum nailed above the girl's head. The words were written in candy-pink Peppermint Yum-Yum lipstick, of course.
Nor was her