Gerald's Game - Stephen King [15]
'Gerald?' she whispered. 'Gerald, can you hear me? Please say you can.'
No answer. No movement. She could feel that deep homesick dismay again, welling and welling, like an unstanched wound.
'Gerald?' she whispered again.
Why are you whispering? He's dead. The man who once surprised you with a weekend trip to Aruba — Aruba, of all places — and once wore your alligator shoes on his ears at a New Year's Eve party that man is dead. So just why in the hell are you whispering?
'Gerald!' This time she screamed his name. 'Gerald, wake up!'
The sound of her own screaming voice almost sent her into another panicky, convulsive interlude, and the scariest part wasn't Gerald's continued failure to move or respond; it was the realization that the panic was still there, still right there, restlessly circling her conscious mind as patiently as a predator might circle the guttering campfire of a woman who has somehow wandered away from her friends and gotten lost in the deep, dark fastnesses of the woods.
You're not lost, Goodwife Burlingame said, but Jessie did not trust that voice. Its control sounded bogus, its rationality only paint-deep. You know just where you are.
Yes, she did. She was at the end of a twisting, rutted camp road which split off from Bay Lane two miles south of here. The camp road had been an aisle of fallen red and yellow leaves over which she and Gerald had driven, and those leaves were mute testimony to the fact that this spur, leading to the Notch Bay end of Kashwakamak, had been used little or not at all in the three weeks since the leaves had first begun to turn and then to fall. This end of the lake was almost exclusively the domain of summer people, and for all Jessie knew, the spur might not have been used since Labor Day. It was a total of five miles, first along the spur and then along Bay Lane, before one came out on Route 117, where there were a few year-round homes.
I'm out here alone, my husband is lying dead on the floor, and I'm handcuffed to the bed. I can scream until I turn blue and it won't do me any good; no one's going to hear. The guy with the chainsaw is probably the closest, and he's at least four miles away. He might even be on the other side of the lake. The dog would probably hear me, but the dog is almost certainly a stray. Gerald's dead, and that's a shame — I never meant to kill him, if that's what I did — but at least it was relatively quick for him. It won't he quick for me; if no one in Portland starts to worry about us, and there's no real reason why anyone should, at least for awhile . . .
She shouldn't be thinking this way; it brought the panic-thing closer. If she didn't get her mind out of this rut, she would soon see the panic-thing's stupid, terrified eyes. No, she absolutely shouldn't be thinking this way. The bitch of it was, once you got started, it was very hard to stop again.
But maybe it's what you deserve — the hectoring, feverish voice of Goody Burlingame suddenly spoke up. Maybe it is. Because you did kill him, Jessie. You can't kid yourself about that, because I won't let you. I'm sure he wasn't in very good shape, and I'm sure it would have happened sooner or later, anyway — a heart attack at the office, or maybe in the turnpike passing lane on his way home some night, him with a cigarette in his hand, trying to light it, and a big ten-wheeler behind him, honking for him to get the hell back over into the right-hand lane and make some room, But you couldn't wait for sooner or later, could you?" Oh no, not you, not Tom Mahout's good little girl Jessie. You couldn't just lie there and let him shoot his squirt, could you? Cosmo Girl Jessie Burlingame says 'No man chains me down.' You had to kick him in the guts and the nuts, didn't you? And you had to do it while his thermostat was already well over the red line. Let's cut to the chase, dear: you murdered him. So maybe you deserve to be right here, handcuffed to this bed. Maybe —
'Oh,