Gerald's Game - Stephen King [12]
'Jesus, just what I need, Dear Abby from hell,' she said, and the thick, slurry quality of her voice frightened her more than the lack of feeling in her hands and lower arms.
She tried to yank herself back up to the mostly-sitting position she had managed just before Gerald's little diving exhibition (Had that horrible egg-cracking sound been part of her dream? She prayed that it had been), and thoughts of Ruth were swallowed by a sudden burst of panic when she did not move at all. Those tingling spirals of sensation spun through her muscles again, but nothing else happened. Her arms just went on hanging above and slightly behind her, as moveless and feelingless as stovelengths of rock maple. The muzzy feeling in her head disappeared — panic beat the hell out of smelling salts, she was discovering — and her heart kicked into a higher gear, but that was all. A vivid image culled from some long-ago history text flickered behind her eyes for a moment: a circle of laughing, pointing people standing around a young woman with her head and hands in stocks. The woman was bent over like a hag in a fairy-tale and her hair hung in her face like a penitent's shroud.
Her name is Goodwife Burlingame and she's being punished for hurting her husband, she thought. They're punishing the Goodwife because they can't get hold of the one who's really responsible for hurting him . . . the one who sounds like my old college roommate.
But was hurting the right word? Was it not likely that she was now sharing this bedroom with a dead man? Was it not also likely that, dog or no dog, the Notch Bay end of the lake was entirely deserted? That if she started to scream, she would be answered only by the loon? Only that and nothing more?
It was mostly that thought, with its strange echo of Poe's 'The Raven,' that brought her to a sudden realization of just what was going on here, what she had gotten herself into, and full-fledged, mindless terror suddenly fell on her. For twenty seconds or so (if asked how long that panic-attack lasted, she would have guessed at least three minutes and probably closer to five) she was totally in its grip. A thin rod of rational consciousness remained deep inside her, but it was helpless — only a dismayed spectator watching the woman writhe on the bed with her hair flying as she whipped her head from side to side in a gesture of negation, hearing her hoarse, frightened screams.
A deep, glassy pain at the base of her neck, just above the place where her left shoulder started, put a stop to it. It was a muscle-cramp, a bad one, what the jocks called a Charley horse. Moaning, Jessie let her head fall back against the separated mahogany slats which formed the head-board of the bed. The muscle she had strained was frozen in a strenuous flexed position, and it felt as hard as a rock. The fact that her exertion had forced pins and needles of feeling all the way down the forearms to the palms of her hands meant little next to that terrible pain, and she found that leaning back against the headboard was only putting more pressure on the over-strained muscle.
Moving instinctively, without any thought at all, Jessie planted her heels against the coverlet, raised her buttocks, and shoved with her feet. Her elbows bent and the pressure on her shoulders and upper arms eased. A moment later the Charley horse in her deltoid muscle began to let go. She let out her breath in a long, harsh sigh of relief.
The wind — it had progressed quite a bit beyond the breeze stage, she noticed — gusted outside, sighing through the pines on the slope between the house and the take. just off the kitchen (which was in another universe as far as Jessie was concerned), the door she and Gerald had neglected to pull shut banged against the swollen jamb; one time, two time, three time, four. These were the only sounds; only these and nothing more. The