Gerald's Game - Stephen King [65]
Stop it! Goody shouted angrily. Stop this foolishness right this minute and get a grip on yourself!
But she discovered she couldn't stop it, because this was no dream and also because she had become increasingly sure that the figure standing in the corner, as silent as Frankenstein's monster before the lightning-bolts, was real. But even if it was, it hadn't spent the afternoon turning people into pork-chops with a chainsaw. Of course not — that was nothing but a movie-inspired variation of the simple, gruesome summer-camp tales that seemed so funny when you were gathered around the fire, — roasting marshmallows with the rest of the girls, and so awful later on, when you lay shivering in your sleeping-bag, believing that each snapping twig signalled the approach of the Lakeview Man, that legendary brain-blasted survivor of the Korean War.
The thing standing in the corner wasn't the Lakeview Man, and it wasn't a chainsaw murderer, either. There was something on the floor (at least she was pretty sure there was), and Jessie supposed it could be a chainsaw, but it could also be a suitcase . . . a backpack . . . a salesman's sample case . . .
Or my imagination.
Yes. Even though she was looking right at it, whatever it was, she knew she couldn't rule out the possibility of imagination. Yet in some perverse way this only reinforced the idea that the creature itself was real, and it was becoming harder and harder to dismiss the feeling of malevolence which came crawling out of the tangle of black shadows and powdery moonlight like a constant low snarl.
It hates me, she thought. Whatever it is, it hates me. It must. Why else would it just stand there and not help me?
She looked back up at that half-seen face, at the eyes which seemed to glitter with such feverish avidity in their round black sockets, and she began to weep.
'Please, is someone there?' Her voice was humble, choked with tears. 'If there is, won't you please help me? Do you see these handcuffs? The keys are right there beside you, on top of the bureau . . . '
Nothing. No movement. No response. It only stood there — if it was there at all, that was — looking out at her from behind its feral mask of shadows.
'If you didn't want me to tell anyone I saw you, I wouldn't,' she tried again. Her voice wavered, blurred, swooped and slid. 'I sure wouldn't! And I'd be so . . . so grateful . . . '
It watched her.
Only that and nothing more.
Jessie felt the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. 'You're scaring me, you know,' she said. 'Won't you say something? Can't you talk? If you're really there, can't you please talk to me?'
A thin, terrible hysteria seized her then and flew away with some valuable, irreplaceable part of her caught firmly in its scrawny talons. She wept and pleaded with the fearful figure standing motionless in the corner of the bedroom; she remained conscious throughout but sometimes wavered into that curious blank place reserved for those whose terror has become so great it approaches rapture. She would hear herself asking the figure in a hoarse, weepy voice to please let her out of the handcuffs, to please oh please oh please let her out of the handcuffs, and then she would drop back into that weird blank spot. She knew her mouth was still moving because she could feel it. She could also hear the sounds that were coming out of it, but while she was in the blank place, these sounds were not words but only loose blabbering torrents of sound. She could also hear the wind blowing and the dog barking, aware but not knowing, hearing but not understanding, losing everything in her horror of the half-seen shape, the awful visitor, the uninvited guest. She could not cease her contemplation of its narrow, misshapen head, its white cheeks, its slumped shoulders . . . but more and more it was the creature's hands to which her eyes were drawn: those dangling, long-fingered hands that ended much farther down on the legs than normal hands had any right to do. Some unknown length of time