Gerald's Game - Stephen King [85]
Jessie actually glanced over her shoulder to see if perhaps that spooky skinny woman had gotten behind her. But the upstairs hallway was deserted; she was alone.
She looked down at her arms and saw they were rippled with gooseflesh.
You're losing your mind, the voice that would one day be Goodwife Burlingame mourned. Oh Jessie, you've been bad, you've been very bad, and now you're going to have to pay by losing your mind.
'I'm not,' she said. She looked at her pale, strained face in the bathroom mirror. 'I'm not!'
She waited for a moment in a kind of horrified suspension to see if any of the voices — or the image of the woman kneeling by the splintered boards with her slip puddled on the ground beside her — would come back, but she neither heard nor saw anything. That creepy other who had told Jessie some she had pushed some he down some well was apparently gone.
Strain, toots, the voice that would one day be Ruth advised, and Jessie had a clear idea that while the voice didn't exactly believe that, it had decided Jessie had better get moving again, and right away. You thought about a woman with a slip beside her because you've got underwear on the brain this afternoon, that's all. I'd forget the whole thing, if I were you.
That was great advice. Jessie quickly dampened her shorts and shirt under the tap, wrung them out, and then stepped into the shower. She soaped, rinsed, dried, hurried back to the bedroom. She ordinarily wouldn't have bothered with the robe again for the quick dash across the hall, but this time she did, only holding it shut instead of taking time to belt it closed.
She paused in the bedroom again, biting her lip, praying that the weird other voice wouldn't come back, praying that she wouldn't have another of those crazy hallucinations or illusions or whatever they were. Nothing came. She dropped the robe on her bed, hurried across to her bureau, pulled on fresh underwear and shorts.
She smells that same smell, she thought. Whoever that woman is, she smells the same smell coming out of the well she made the man fall into, and it's happening now, during the eclipse. I'm sure —
She turned, a fresh blouse in one hand, and then froze. Her father was standing in the doorway, watching her.
C H A P T E R N I N E T E E N
Jessie awoke in the mild, milky light of dawn with the perplexing and ominous memory of the woman still filling her mind — the woman with her dark hair pulled back in that tight countrywoman's bun, the woman who had been kneeling in the blackberry tangles with her slip puddled beside her, the woman who had been looking down through broken boards and smelling that awful bland smell. Jessie hadn't thought of that woman in years, and now, fresh from her dream of 1963 that hadn't been a dream but a recollection, it seemed to her that she had been granted some sort of supernatural vision on that day, a vision that had perhaps been caused by stress and then lost again for the same reason.
But it didn't matter — not that, not what had happened with her father out on the deck, not what had happened later, when she had turned around to see him standing in the bedroom door. All that had happened a long time ago, and as for what was happening right now —
I'm in trouble. I think I'm in very serious trouble.
She lay back against the pillows and looked up at her suspended arms. She felt as dazed and helpless as a poisoned insect in a spider's web, wanting no more than to be asleep again — dreamlessly this time, if possible — with her dead arms and dry throat in another universe.
No such luck.
There was a slow, somnolent buzzing sound somewhere close by. Her first thought