Gerald's Game - Stephen King [125]
She lowered the key toward the lock, but before she could slip the barrel in, another wave of that peculiar darkheadedness rolled through her mind. She swayed on her feet and found herself once again thinking of Karl Wallenda. Her hand began to shake again.
'Stop that!' she cried fiercely, and jammed the key desperately at the lock. 'Stop th — '
The key missed the circle, struck the hard steel beside it instead, and turned in her blood-slicked fingers. She held onto it a second longer, and then it squirted out of her grasp — went greasy, one might have said — and fell to the floor. Now there was only the one key left,. and if she lost that —
You won't, Punkin said. I swear you won't. Just go for it before you lose your courage.
She flexed her right arm once, then raised the fingers toward her face. She looked at them, closely. The shakes were abating again, not enough to suit her, but she couldn't wait. She was afraid she would black out if she did.
She reached out with her faintly trembling hand, and came very close to pushing the remaining key over the edge of the bureau in her first effort to grip it. It was the numbness — the goddam numbness that simply wouldn't leave her fingers. She took a deep breath, held it, made a fist in spite of the pain and the fresh flow of blood it provoked, then let the air out of her lungs in a long, whistling sigh. She felt a little better. This time she pressed her first finger to the small head of the key and dragged it toward the edge of the bureau instead of trying to pick it up immediately. She didn't stop until it was sticking out over the edge.
If you drop it, Jessie! the Goodwife moaned. Oh, if you drop this one, too!
'Shut up, Goody,' Jessie said, and pushed her thumb up against the bottom of the key, creating a pincers. Then, trying not to think at all about what was going to happen to her if this went wrong, she lifted the key and brought it to the cuff. There was a bad run of seconds when she was unable to align the shaking barrel of the key with the lock, and a worse one when the lock itself momentarily doubled . . . then quadrupled. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, took another deep breath, then popped them open. Now she saw only one lock again, and she jabbed the key into it before her eyes could do any more tricks.
'Okay,' she breathed. 'Let's see.'
She applied clockwise pressure. Nothing happened. Panic tried to jump up into her throat, and then she suddenly remembered the rusty old pickup truck Bill Dunn drove on his caretaking rounds, and the joke sticker on the back bumper: LEFTY LOOSEY, RIGHTY TIGHTY, it said. Above the words was a drawing of a large screw.
'Lefty loosey,' Jessie muttered, and tried turning the key counter-clockwise. For one moment she did not understand that the cuff had popped open; she thought the loud click she heard was the sound of the key breaking off in the lock, and she shrieked, sending a spray of blood from her cut mouth to the top of the dresser. Some of it spattered Gerald's tie, red on red. Then she saw the notched latch-lock was standing open, and realized she had done it — she had actually done it.
Jessie Burlingame pulled her left hand, a little puffy around the wrist but otherwise unharmed, free of the open cuff, which fell back against the headboard as its mate had done. Then, with an expression of deep, wondering awe, she raised both hands slowly up to her face. She looked from the left to the right and back to the left again. She was unmindful of the fact that the right was covered with blood; it was not blood she was interested in, at least not yet. For the moment she only wanted to make absolutely sure she was really free.
She looked back and forth between her hands for almost thirty seconds, her eyes moving