Gerald's Game - Stephen King [118]
'Just be careful,' she said. 'You won't need to bear down if you're careful, Jessie. just pretend
But the rest of that thought
(you're carving roast beef)
didn't seem very productive, so she blocked it before more than its leading edge could get through. She lifted her right arm, extending it until the handcuff chain was almost taut and her wrist hovered above the gleaming hook of glass. She wanted very much to sweep away the rest of the glass littering the shelf — she sensed it waiting for her up there like a minefield — but she didn't dare. Not after her experience with the jar of Nivea cream. If she accidentally knocked the blade-shaped piece of glass off the shelf, or broke it, she would need to sift through the leftovers for an acceptable substitute. Such precautions seemed almost surreal to her, but she did not for a single moment try to tell herself they were unnecessary. If she was going to get out of this, she was going to have to bleed a lot more than she was bleeding now.
Do it just the way you saw it, Jessie, that's all . . . and don't chicken out.
'No chickening out,' Jessie agreed in her harsh dust-in-the-cracks voice. She spread her hand and then shook her wrist, hoping to get rid of the glass poking out of her fingers. She mostly succeeded; only the sliver in her thumb, buried deeply in the tender flesh beneath the nail, refused to go. She decided to leave it and get on with the rest of her business.
What you're planning to do is absolutely crazy, a nervous voice told her. No UFO here; this was a voice Jessie knew well. It was the voice of her mother. Not that I'm surprised, you understand; it's a typical Jessie Mahout overreaction, and if I've seen it once, I've seen it a thousand times . Think about it, Jessie — why cut yourself up and maybe bleed to death? Someone will come and rescue you; anything else is simply unthinkable, Dying in one's summer house? Dying in handcuffs? Utterly ridiculous, take my word for it. So rise above your usual whiny nature, Jessie — just this one time. Don't cut yourself on that glass. Don't you do it!
That was her mother, all right; the mimicry was so good it was eerie. She wanted you to believe you were hearing love and common sense masquerading as anger, and while the woman had not been entirely incapable of love, Jessie thought the real Sally Mahout was the woman who had one day marched into Jessie's room and thrown a pair of high heels at her without a single word of explanation, either then or later.
Besides, everything that voice had said was a lie. A scared lie.
'No,' she said, 'I won't take your word for it. No one's coming . . . except maybe the guy from last night. No chickening out.' With that, Jessie lowered her right wrist toward the gleaming blade of glass.
C H A P T E R T H I R T Y - O N E
It was important that she see what she was doing, because she felt almost nothing at first; she could have cut her wrist to bleeding ribbons and felt little save those distant sensations of pressure and warmth. She was greatly relieved to find that seeing wasn't going to be a problem; she had smashed the glass at a good place on the shelf (A break at last! part of her mind rejoiced sarcastically), and her view was almost completely unobstructed.
Hand tilted back, Jessie sank her inner wrist — that part which bears the lines palm-readers call the Bracelets of Fortune — onto the broken curve of glass. She watched, fascinated, as the jutting point first dimpled her skin, then popped it. She kept pressing and her wrist kept eating the glass. The dimple filled up with blood and disappeared.
Jessie's first reaction was disappointment. The glass hook hadn't created the gusher she had hoped for (and half feared). Then the sharp edge severed the blue bundles of vein lying closest to the surface of her skin, and the blood began flowing out faster. It did not come in the pulsing jets she had expected but in a fast, steady flow, like water from a tap which has