Gerald's Game - Stephen King [163]
And do you know what haunts me most of all? I thought it was my father, that was my Daddy, come back from the dead to do what he'd wanted to do before. 'Go ahead,' I told him. 'Go ahead, but promise you'll unlock me and let me out afterward. Just promise me that.'
I think I would have said the same it I'd known who he really was, Ruth. Think? I know I would have said the same. Do you understand? I would have let him put his cock — the cock he stuck down the rotting throats of dead men — into me, if only he would have promised me I didn't have to die the dog's death of muscle-cramps and convulsions that was waiting for me. If only he would have promised to SET ME FREE.
Jessie stopped for a moment, breathing so hard and fast she was almost panting. She looked at the words on the screen — the unbelievable, unspeakable admission on the screen — and felt a sudden strong urge to delete them. Not because she was ashamed for Ruth to read them; she was, but that wasn't it. What she didn't want to do was deal with them, and she supposed that if she didn't delete them, she would have to do just that. Words had a way of creating their own imperatives.
Not until they're out of your hands, they don't, Jessie thought, and reached out with the black-clad index finger of her right hand. She touched the DELETE button — stroked it, actually — and then drew back. It was the truth, wasn't it?
'Yes,' she said in the same muttery voice she'd used so often during her hours of captivity — only at least now it wasn't Goody or the mind-Ruth she was talking to; she had gotten back to herself without having to go all the way around Robin Hood's barn to do it. That was maybe progress of a sort. 'Yes, it's the truth, all right.'
And nothing but, so help her God. She wouldn't use the DELETE button on the truth, no matter how nasty some people including herself, as a matter of fact — might find that truth to be. She would let it stand. She might decide not to send the letter after all (didn't know if it was even fair to send it, to burden a woman she hadn't seen in years with this ration of pain and madness), but she would not delete it. Which meant it would be best to finish now, in a rush, before the last of her courage deserted her and the last of her strength ran out.
Jessie leaned forward and began typing again.
Brandon said, 'There's one thing you're going to have to remember and accept, Jessie — there's no empirical proof. Yes, I know your rings are gone, but about them you could have been right the first time — some light-fingered cop could have taken them.'
'What about Exhibit 217?' I asked. 'The wicker box?'
He shrugged, and I had one of those sudden bursts of understanding the poets call epiphanies. He was holding onto the possibility that the wicker box had just been a coincidence. That wasn't easy, but it was easier than having to accept all the rest — most of all the fact that a monster like Joubert could actually touch the life of someone he knew and liked. What I saw in Brandon Milheron's face that day was perfectly simple: he was going to ignore a whole stack of circumstantial evidence and concentrate on the lack of empirical evidence. He was going to hold onto the idea that the whole thing was simply my imagination, seizing on the Joubert case to explain a particularly vivid hallucination I'd had while I was handcuffed to the bed.
And that insight was followed by a second one, an even clearer one; that I could do it, too. I could come to believe I had been wrong . . . but if I succeeded in doing that, my life would be ruined. The voices would start to come back not just yours or Punkin's or Nora Callighan's but my mother's and my sister's and my brother's and