Gerald's Game - Stephen King [66]
'What are you?' she sobbed. 'A man? A devil? What in God's name are you?'
The wind gusted.
The door banged.
Before her, the figure's face seemed to change . . . seemed to wrinkle upward in a grin. There was something horribly familiar about that grin, and Jessie felt the core of her sanity, which had borne this assault with remarkable strength until now, at last begin to waver.
'Daddy?' she whispered. 'Daddy, is that you?'
Don't be silly! the Goodwife cried, but Jessie could now feel even that sustaining voice wavering toward hysteria. Don't be a goose, Jessie! Your father has been dead since 1980!'
Instead of helping, it made things worse. Much worse. Tom Mahout had been interred in the family crypt in Falmouth, and that was less than a hundred miles from here. jessie's burning, terrified mind insisted upon showing her a hunched figure, its clothes and rotted shoes caked with blue-green mold, slinking across moon-drenched fields and hurrying through tracts of scruffy woods between suburban housing developments; she saw gravity working on the decayed muscles of its arms as it came, gradually stretching them until the hands were swinging beside the knees. It was her father. It was the man who had delighted her with rides on his shoulders at three, who had comforted her at the age of six when a capering circus clown frightened her into tears, who had told her bedtime stories until she was eight — old enough, he said, to read them on her own. Her father, who had cobbled together homemade filters on the afternoon of the eclipse and held her on his lap as the moment of totality approached, her father who had said, Don't worry about anything . . . don't worry, and don't look around. But she had thought maybe he was worried, because his voice had been all thick and shaky, hardly like his usual voice at all.
In the corner, the thing's grin seemed to widen and suddenly the room was filled with that smell, that flat smell that was half-metallic and half-organic; a smell that reminded her of oysters in cream, and how your hand smelled after you'd been clutching a fistful of pennies, and the way the air smelled just before a thunderstorm.
'Daddy, is it you?' she asked the shadowy thing in the corner, and from somewhere came the distant cry of the loon. Jessie could feel the tears trickling slowly down her cheeks. And now something exceedingly odd was happening, something she never would have expected in a thousand years. As she became increasingly sure that it was her father, that it was Tom Mahout standing in the corner, twelve years gone in death or not, her terror began to leave her. She had drawn her legs up, but now she let them slip back down and fall open. As she did, a fragment of her dream recurred — DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL printed across her breasts in Peppermint Yum-Yum lipstick.
'All right, go ahead,' she told the shape. Her voice was a little hoarse but otherwise steady. 'It's why you came back, isn't it? So go ahead. How could I stop you, anyway? Just promise you'll unlock me afterward. That you'll unlock me and let me go.'.
The figure made no response of any kind. It only stood within its surreal jackstraws of moonlight and shadow, grinning at her. And as the seconds passed (twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock on the bureau said, seeming to suggest that the whole idea of time passing was an illusion, that time had in fact frozen solid), Jessie thought that perhaps she had been right in the first place, that there was really no one in here with her at all. She