Gerald's Game - Stephen King [144]
'How's yet paw today?' Meggie asked, as if she had picked up Jessie's itch by some kind of sensory telepathy. Nor did Jessie think this a ridiculous idea. She sometimes found Meggie's questions — and the intuitions which prompted them — a little creepy, but never ridiculous.
The hand in question, now lying in the sunbeam which had startled her away from what she had been writing on the Mac, was dressed in a black glove lined with some frictionless space-age polymer. Jessie supposed the burn-glove — for that was what it was — had been perfected in one dirty little war or another. Not that she would ever have refused to wear it on that account, and not that she wasn't grateful. She was very grateful indeed. After the third skin-graft, you learned that an attitude of gratitude was one of life's few reliable hedges against insanity.
'Not too bad, Meggie.'
Meggie's left eyebrow lifted, stopping just short of I-don't-believe-you height. 'No? If you've been running that keyboard for the whole three hours you've been in here, I bet it's singing "Ave Maria."'
'Have I really been here for — ?' She glanced at her watch and saw that she had been. She glanced at the copy-minder on top of the VDT screen and saw she was on the fifth page of the document she had opened just after breakfast. Now it was almost lunch, and the most surprising thing was she hadn't strayed as far from the truth as Meggie's lifted brow suggested: her hand really wasn't that bad. She could have waited another hour for the pill if she'd had to.
She took it nevertheless, washing it down with the milk. As she was drinking the last of it, her eyes wandered back to the VDT and read the words on the current screen:
No one found me that night; I woke up on my own just after dawn the next day. The engine had finally stalled, but the car was still warm. I could hear birds singing in the woods, and through the trees I could see the lake, flat as a mirror, with little ribbons of steam rising off it. It looked very beautiful, and at the same time I hated the sight of it, as I have hated the very thought of it ever since. Can you understand that, Ruth? I'll be damned if I can.
My hand was hurting like hell — whatever help I'd gotten from the aspirin was long gone — but what I felt in spite of the pain was the most incredible sense of peace and well-being. Something was gnawing at it, though. Something I'd forgotten. At first I couldn't remember what it was. I don't think my brain wanted me to remember what it was. Then, all at once, it came to me. He'd been in the back seat, and he'd leaned forward to whisper the names of all my voices in my ear.
I looked into the mirror and saw the back seat was empty. That eased my mind a little bit but then I
The words stopped at that point, with the little cursor flashing expectantly just beyond the end of the last unfinished sentence. It seemed to beckon to her, urge her forward, and suddenly Jessie recalled a poem from a marvellous little book by Kenneth Patchen. The book was called But Even So, and the poem had gone like this: 'Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?'
Good question, Jessie thought, and let her eyes wander from the VDT screen to Meggie Landis's face. Jessie liked the energetic Irishwoman, liked her a lot — hell, owed her a lot — but if she had caught the little housekeeper looking at the words on the Mac's screen, Meggie would have been headed down Forest Avenue with her severance pay in her pocket before you could say Dear Ruth, I suppose you're surprised to hear from me after all these years.
But Megan wasn't looking