Gerald's Game - Stephen King [61]
Coming up from her troubled sleep was like that.
First there was a black, roaring confusion that was like being inside a thundercloud. She bumped and yawed her way through it, not having the slightest idea of who she was or when she was, let alone where she was. Then a warmer, calmer layer: she had been caught in the most awful nightmare in all of recorded history (at least in her recorded history), but a nightmare was all it had been, and now it was over. As the surface neared, however, she encountered another chilly layer: an idea that the reality waiting ahead was almost as bad as the nightmare. Maybe worse.
What is it? she asked herself. What could possibly be worse than what I've just been through?
She refused to think about that. The answer was within reach, but if it occurred to her, she might decide to flip over and start finning her way back down into the depths again. To do that would be to drown, and while drowning might not be the worst way to step out — not as bad as running your Harley into a rock wall or parachuting into a cat's cradle of high-voltage wires, for instance — the idea of opening her body to that flat mineral smell, which reminded her simultaneously of copper and oysters, was insupportable. Jessie kept stroking grimly upward, telling herself that she would worry about reality when and if she actually broke the surface.
The last layer she passed through was as warm and fearful as freshly spilled blood: her arms were probably going to be deader than stumps. She just hoped she would be able to command enough movement in them to get the blood flowing again.
Jessie gasped, jerked, and opened her eyes. She hadn't the slightest idea of how long she had been asleep, and the clock-radio on the bureau, stuck in its own hell of obsessive repetition (twelve-twelve-twelve, it flashed into the darkness, as if time had stopped forever at midnight), was no help. All she knew for sure was that it was full dark and the moon was now shining through the skylight instead of the east window.
Her arms were jumping with a nervous jitter-jive of pins and needles. She usually disliked that feeling intensely, but not now; it was a thousand times better than the muscle cramps she had expected as the price of waking her dead extremities back up. A moment or two later she noticed a spreading dampness beneath her legs and bottom and realized that her previous need to urinate was gone. Her body had taken care of the problem while she slept.
She doubled her fists and cautiously pulled herself up a little, wincing at the pain in her wrists and the deep, Sobbing ache the movement caused in the backs of her hands. Most of that pain's a result of trying to slip out of the cuffs, she thought. You got nobody to blame but yourself, sweetheart.
The dog had begun to bark again. Each shrill cry was like a .Splinter pounded into her eardrum, and she realized that sound was what had pulled her up and out of her sleep just as she had been about to dive below the nightmare. The location of the sounds — told her the dog was back outside. She was glad it had left the house, but a little puzzled, as well. Maybe it just hadn't been comfortable under a roof after spending such a long time outside. That idea made a certain amount of sense . . . as much as anything else in this situation, anyway.
'Get it together, Jess,' she advised herself in a solemn, sleep-foggy voice, and maybe — just maybe — she was doing that. The panic and the unreasoning shame she'd felt in the dream were departing. The dream itself seemed to be drying out, taking on the curiously