Gerald's Game - Stephen King [140]
You see . . . me see . . . WE see . nothing but shadows! Punkin cried, but this cry was more than distant; it seemed to have originated at the other end of the universe.
And it wasn't true. It was more than shadows she saw in the mirror. The thing sitting back there was tangled in shadows, yes, but not made of them. She saw its face: bulging brow, round black eyes, blade-thin nose, plump, misshapen lips.
'Jessie!' the space cowboy whispered ecstatically. 'Nora! Ruth! My-oh-my! Punkin Pie!'
Her eyes, frozen on the mirror, saw her passenger lean slowly forward, saw its swollen forehead nodding toward her right ear as if the creature intended to tell her a secret. She saw its pudgy lips slide away from its jutting, discolored teeth in a grimacing, vapid smile. It was at this point that the final breakup of Jessie Burlingame's mind began.
No! her own voice cried in a voice as thin as the voice of a vocalist on a scratchy old 78-rpm record. No, please no! It's not fair!
'Jessie!' Its stinking breath as sharp as a rasp and as cold as air inside a meat-locker. 'Nora! Jessie! Ruth! Jessie! Punkin! Goodwife! Jessie! Mommy!'
Her bulging eyes noted that the long white face was now half-hidden in her hair and its grinning mouth was almost kissing her ear as it whispered its delicious secret over and over and over: Jessie! Nora! Goody! Punkin! Jessie! Jessie! Jessie!'
There was a white airburst inside her eyes, and what it left behind was a big dark hole. As Jessie dove into it, she had one final coherent thought: I shouldn't have looked — it burned my eyes after all.
Then she fell forward toward the wheel in a faint. As the Mercedes struck one of the large pines which bordered this section of the road, the seatbelt locked and jerked her backward again. The crash would probably have triggered the airbag, if the Mercedes had been a model recent enough to have come equipped with the system. It was not hard enough to damage the engine or even cause it to stall; good old German efficiency had triumphed again. The bumper and grille were dented and the hood ornament was knocked askew, but the engine idled contentedly away to itself.
After about five minutes, a microchip buried in the dashboard sensed that the motor was now warm enough to turn on the heater. Blowers under the dash began to whoosh softly. Jessie had slumped sideways against the driver's door, where she lay with her cheek pressed to the window, looking like a tired child who has finally given up and gone to sleep with grandma's house just over the next hill. Above her, the rearview mirror reflected the empty back seat and the empty moonlit lane behind it.
C H A P T E R T H I R T Y - F I V E
It had been snowing all morning — gloomy, but good letter-writing weather — and when a bar of sun fell across the keyboard of the Mac, Jessie glanced up in surprise, startled out of her thoughts. What she saw out the window did more than charm her; it filled her with an emotion she had not experienced for a long time and hadn't expected to experience again for a long time to come, if ever. It was joy, a deep, complex joy she could never have explained.
The snow hadn't stopped — not entirely, anyway — but a bright February sun had broken through the clouds overhead, turning both the fresh six inches on the ground and the snow still floating down through the air to a brilliant diamantine white. The window offered a sweeping view of Portland's Eastern Promenade, and it was a view which had soothed and fascinated Jessie in all weathers and seasons, but she had never seen anything quite like this; the combination of snow and sun had turned the gray air over Casco Bay into a fabulous jewel-box of interlocking rainbows.
If there were real people living in those snow-globes where you can shake up a blizzard any time you want to, they'd see this weather all the time, she thought, and laughed. This sound was as fabulously strange to her ears as that feeling of joy was to her heart, and it only took a moment's thought to realize why: she hadn't laughed at all since the previous