Gerald's Game - Stephen King [68]
The feeling was reality. There was no getting around it. The feeling was reality.
The thing standing in the corner held the open case out for her inspection, one hand supporting the bottom. It plunged its other hand into the tangle of bones and jewelry and stirred it, producing a tenebrous click and rustle that sounded like dirt-clogged castanets. It stared at her as it did this, and somehow unformed features of its strange face wrinkled upward in amusement, its mouth gawping in that silent grin, its slumped shoulders rising and falling in strangled chums of laughter.
No! Jessie screamed, but no sound came out.
Suddenly she felt someone — most likely the Goodwife, and boy, had she ever underestimated the intestinal fortitude of that lady — running for the switches which governed the circuitbreakers in her head. Goody had seen tendrils of smoke starting to seep out through the cracks in the closed doors of those panels, had understood what they meant, and was making a final, desperate effort to shut down the machinery before the motors overheated and the bearings froze.
The grinning figure across the room reached deeper into the case and held out a handful of bones and gold to Jessie in the moonlight.
There was an intolerably bright flash inside her head and then the lights went out. She did not faint prettily, like the heroine in a florid stage play, but was snapped brutally backward like a condemned murderer who has been strapped into the hotseat and has just gotten his first jolt of the juice. All the same it was an end to the horror, and for the time being that was enough. Jessie Burlingame went into the darkness without a murmur of protest.
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
She struggled briefly back to consciousness some time later, aware of only two things: the moon had made it around to the west windows, and she was terribly afraid ... of what she at first didn't know. Then it came to her: Daddy had been here, was perhaps here still. The creature hadn't looked like him, that was true, but that was only because Daddy had been wearing his eclipse face.
Jessie struggled up, pushing with her feet so hard she shoved the coverlet down beneath her. She wasn't able to do much with her arms, however. The Littering pins and needles had stolen away while she'd been unconscious, and they had no more feeling than a couple of chair-legs. She stared into the corner by the bureau with wide, moon-silvered eyes. The wind had died and the shadows were, at least for the time being, still. There was nothing in the corner. Her dark visitor had gone.
Maybe not, Jess — maybe he's just changed location. Maybe he's hiding ander the bed, how's that for a thought? If he is, he, could reach up at any second and put one of his handf on your hip,
The wind stirred — only a puff, not a gust — and the back door banged weakly. Those were the only sounds. The dog had fallen silent, and it was this more than anything else which convinced her that the stranger was gone. She had the house to herself.
Jessie's gaze dropped to the large dark blob on the floor.
Correction, she thought. There's Gerald. Can't forget about him.
She put her head back and closed her eyes, aware of a steady low pulse in her throat, not wanting to wake up enough for that pulse to transform itself into what it really was: thirst. She didn't know if she could go from black unconsciousness to ordinary sleep or not, but she knew that was what she wanted; more than anything else — except perhaps for someone to drive down here and rescue her — she wanted to sleep.
There was no one here, Jessie — you know that, don't you? It was, absurdity of absurdities, Ruth's voice. Tough-talking Ruth, whose stated motto, cribbed from a Nancy Sinatra song, was 'One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.' Ruth, who had been reduced