Gerald's Game - Stephen King [110]
Madness would be a relief, but madness would not come. Neither would sleep. Death might beat them both, and dark certainly would. She could only lie on the bed, existing in a dull olive-drab reality shot through with occasional gaudy blasts of pain as her muscles cramped up. The cramps mattered, and so did her horrible, tiresome sanity, but little else seemed to certainly the world outside this room had ceased to hold any real meaning for her. In fact, she came strongly to believe that there was no world outside this room, that all the people who had once filled it had gone back to some existential Central Casting office, and all the scenery had been packed away like stage-flats after one of Ruth's beloved college drama society productions.
Time was a cold sea through which her consciousness forged like a waddling, graceless icebreaker. Voices came and went like phantoms. Most spoke inside her head, but for awhile Nora Callighan talked to her from the bathroom, and at another point Jessie had a conversation with her mother, who seemed to be lurking in the hall. Her mother had come to tell her that Jessie never would have gotten into a mess like this if she had been better about picking up her clothes. 'If I had a nickel for every slip I ever fished out of the corner and turned rightside-out,' her mother said, 'I could buy the Cleveland Gas Works.' This had been a favorite saying of her mother's, and Jessie realized now that none of them had ever asked her why she would want the Cleveland Gas Works.
She continued to exercise weakly, pedaling with her feet and pumping her arms up and down as far as the handcuffs — and her own flagging strength — would allow. She no longer did this to keep her body ready for escape when the right option finally occurred to her, because she had finally come to understand, in her heart and in her head, that there were no options left. The jar of face cream had been the last. She was exercising now only because the movement seemed to alleviate the cramps a little.
In spite of the exercise, she could feel coldness creeping into her feet and hands, settling onto her skin like a skim of ice and then working its way in. This was nothing like the gone-to-sleep feeling with which she had awakened this morning; it was more like the frostbite she had suffered during a long afternoon of cross-country skiing as a teenager — sinister gray spots on the back of one hand and on the flesh of her calf where her legging hadn't quite covered, dead spots that seemed impervious to even the baking heat of the fireplace. She supposed this numbness would finally overwhelm the cramps and that, in the end, her death might turn out to be quite merciful after all — like going to sleep in a snowbank — but it was moving much too slowly.
Time passed but it wasn't time; it was just a relentless, unchanging flow of information passing from her sleepless senses to her eerily lucid mind. There was only the bedroom, the scenery outside (the last few stage-flats, yet to be packed away by the propmaster in charge of this shitty little production), the buzz of flies turning Gerald into a late-season incubator, and the slow movement of the shadows along the floor as the sun made its way across a painted autumn sky. Every now and then a cramp would stab into one of her armpits like an icepick or pound a thick steel nail into her right side. As the afternoon wore endlessly along, the first cramps began to strike into her belly, where all hunger pangs had now ceased, and into the overstressed tendons of her diaphragm. These latter were the worst, freezing the sheath of muscles in her chest and locking down her lungs. She stared up at the reflected water-ripples on the ceiling with agonized, bulging eyes as each one struck, arms and legs trembling with effort as she tried to continue breathing until the cramp eased. It was like being buried up to the neck in cold wet cement.