Gerald's Game - Stephen King [124]
Whoa, Jessie thought, clutching at the bedpost with her tattered right hand and trying desperately to keep her knees from buckling. Hold on, Jessie — just hold on. Never mind the woman, never mind the smell, never mind the darkness. Hold on and the darkness will pass.
She did, and it did. The image of the skinny woman kneeling beside her slip and looking at the splintered hole in the old boards went first, and then the darkness began to fade. The bedroom brightened again, gradually taking on its former five o'clock autumn hue. She saw motes of dust dancing in the light slanting in through the lakeside windows, saw her own shadow-legs stretching across the floor. They broke at the knees so that the rest of her shadow could climb the wall. The darkness pulled back, but it left a high sweet buzzing in her ears. When she looked down at her feet she saw they too were coated with blood. She was walking in it, leaving tracks in it.
You're running out of time, Jessie.
She knew.
Jessie lowered her chest to the headboard again. Getting the bed started was harder this time, but she finally managed it. Two minutes later she was standing next to the bureau she had stared at so long and hopelessly from the other side of the room. A tiny dry smile quivered the corners of her lips. I'm like a woman who's spent her whole life dreaming of the black sands of Kona and can't believe it when she's finally standing on them, she thought. It seems like just another dream, only maybe a little more real than most, because in this one your nose itches.
Her nose didn't itch, but she was looking down at the crumpled snake of Gerald's tie and the knot was still in it. That last was the sort of detail even the most realistic dreams rarely supplied. Beside the red tie were two small, round-barrelled keys, clearly identical. The handcuff keys.
Jessie raised her right hand and looked at it critically. The third and fourth fingers still hung limply. She wondered briefly just how much nerve-damage she had done to her hand, then dismissed the thought. It might matter later on — as some of the other things she had dismissed for the duration of this gruelling fourthquarter drive downfield might matter later on — but for the time being, nerve-damage to her right hand was no more important to her than the price of hogbelly futures in Omaha. The important thing was that the thumb and first two fingers on that hand were still taking messages. They shook a little, as if expressing shock at the sudden loss of their lifelong neighbors, but they still responded.
Jessie bent her head and spoke to them.
'You have to stop doing that. Later on you can shake like mad, if you want, but right now you have to help me. You have to.' Yes. Because the thought of dropping the keys or knocking them off the bureau after getting this far . . . that was unthinkable. She stared sternly at her fingers. They didn't stop trembling, not entirely, but as she watched, their jitters quieted to a barely visible thrumming.
'Okay,' she said softly. 'I don't know if that's good enough or not, but we're going to find out.'
At least the keys were the same, which gave her two chances. She found nothing at all strange in the fact that Gerald had brought them both; he was nothing if not methodical. Planning for contingencies, he often said, was the difference between being good and being great. The only contingencies he hadn't planned on this time were the heart attack and the kick which had provoked it. The result, of course, was that he was neither good nor great, only dead.
'The doggy's dinner,' Jessie muttered, once again having no idea at all she was speaking aloud. 'Gerald used to be a winner, but now he's just the doggy's dinner. Right, Ruth? Right, Punkin?
She tweezed one of the small steel keys between the thumb and forefinger of her sizzling right hand (as she touched the metal, that pervasive feeling that all this was a dream occurred), picked it up, looked at it, then looked at the cuff which enclosed her left