Gerald's Game by Stephen King.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Gerald's Game.
Author: Stephen King.
Genre: Fiction, horror, thriller.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1992.
Summary: On a warm weekday in October, in the lovely summer home of Gerald and Jessie Burlingame, a game is about to begin. It's a game to be played between husband and wife, ans a game that has Jessie being innocently handcuffed to the bedposts. Then, in one horrible, violent act, Gerald is dead and Jessie-well, she's alone and still chained to the bed. With no hope of rescue, and while trying desperately to get out of the handcuffs before dying and fighting the voices inside her head that begin to take over, Jessie is about to have company that goes beyond all of her worst nightmares.

My rating: 7.5/10
My review:


♥ This time he heard her all the way down. She could see it in the way the gleam in his eyes went out all at once, like candleflames in a strong gust of wind. She guessed that the two words which had finally gotten through to him were stupid and ridiculous. He had been a fat kid with thick glasses, a kid who hadn't had a date until he was eighteen-the year after he went on a strict diet and began to work out in an effort to strangle the engirdling flab before it could strangle him. By the time he was a sophomore in college, Gerald's life was what he described as "more or less under control" (as if life-his life, anyway-were a bucking bronco he had been ordered to tame), but she knew his high school years had been a horror show that had left him with a deep legacy of contempt for himself and suspicion of others.

His success as a corporate lawyer (and marriage to her; she believed that had also played a part, perhaps even the crucial one) had further restored his confidence and self-respect, but she supposed that some nightmares never completely ended. In a deep part of his mind, the bullies were still giving Gerald wedgies in study-hall, still laughing at Gerald's inability to do anything but girlie-pushups in phys ed, and there were words-stupid and ridiculous, for example-that could bring them instantly back to squirming, feverish life.

She waited to feel a pang of shame at hitting below the belt like this and was pleased-or maybe it was relief she felt-when no pang came. I guess maybe I'm just tired of pretending, she thought..

♥ When she was twelve or so, her brother Will had goosed her at a birthday party. All her friends had seen, and they had all laughed. Har-har, pretty funny, senhorra, I theenk. It hadn't been funny to her, though.

Will had been laughing hardest of all, so hard he was actually doubled over with one hand planted above each knee, his hair hanging in his face. This had been a year or so after the advent of the Beatles and the Stones and the Searchers and all the rest, and Will had had a lot of hair to hang. It had apparently blocked his view of Jessie, because he had no idea of how angry she was... and he was, under ordinary circumstances, very much aware of her turns of mood and temper. He'd gone on laughing until that froth of emotion so filled her that she understood she would have to do something with it or simply explode. So she had doubled up one small fist and had punched her well-loved brother in the mouth when he finally raised his head to look at her. The blow had knocked him over like a bowling pin and he had cried really hard.

Later she had tried to tell herself that he had cried more out of surprise than pain, but she had known, even at twelve, that that wasn't so. She had hurt him, hurt him plenty. His lower lip had split in one place, his upper lip in two, and she had hurt him plenty. And why? Because he had done something stupid? But he'd only been nine himself-nine that day-and at that age all kids were stupid. No; it hadn't been his stupidity. It had been her fear-fear that if she didn't do something with that ugly green froth of anger and embarrassment, it would

(put out the sun)

cause her to explode. The truth, first encountered on that day, was this: there was a well inside her, the water in that well was poisoned, and when he goosed her, William had sent a bucket down there, one which had come up filled with scum and squirming gluck. She had hated him for that, and she supposed it was really her hate which had caused her to strike out. That deep stuff had scared her. Now, all these years later, she was discovering it still did... but it still infuriated her, as well.

You won't put out the sun, she thought, without the slightest idea of what this meant. Be damned if you will.

♥ That's adrenaline, toots, or whatever glandular secretion your body dumps when you sprout claws and start climbing the walls. If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you've been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.

♥ She had read that there were even sexual free spirits who hanged themselves in their closets and then beat off as the blood-supply to their brains slowly decreased to nothing. Such news only served to increase her belief that men were not so much gifted with penises as cursed with them.

♥ New Age lit, Jessie remembered thinking at the time. The Victorians had Anthony Trollope; the Lost Generation had H.L. Mencken; we got stuck with dirty greeting cards and bumper-stickers witticisms like AS A MATTER OF FACT, I DO OWN THE ROAD.

♥ She could see the white crescents of his nails. Gerald had always been very vain about his hands and his nails. She had never realized just how vain until right now. It was funny how little you saw, sometimes. How little you saw even after you thought you'd seen it all.

♥ She raised her head a little, as if to look at the object in question, but her eyes remained closed. She didn't need her eyes to see it, anyway; she had been co-existing with that particular accessory for a long timer. What lay between her hips was a triangle of ginger-colored, crinkly hair surrounding an unassuming slit with all the aesthetic beauty of a badly healed scar. This thing-this organ that was really little more than a deep fold of flesh cradled by crisscrossing belts of muscle-seemed to her an unlikely wellspring for myth, but it certainly held mythic status in the collective male mind; it was the magic vale, wasn't it? The corral where even the wildest unicorns were eventually penned?

"Mother Macree, what bullshit," she said, smiling a little but not opening her eyes.

Except it wasn't bullshit, not entirely. That slit was the object of every man's lust-the heterosexual ones, at least-but it was also frequently an object of their inexplicable scorn, distrust, and hate. You didn't hear that dark anger in all their jokes, but it was present in enough of them, and in some it was right out front, raw as a sore: What's a woman? As life-support system for a cunt.

♥ Back in 1979, a year which once had the ring of science fiction and now seemed impossibly antique.

♥ "Go away!" Jessie tried to shout, but her voice came out sounding weak and trembly. She wasn't going to make the dog go away by shouting at it; the bastard somehow knew she couldn't get up off the bed and hurt it.

This can't be happening, she thought. How could it be, when just three hours ago I was in the passenger seat of the Mercedes with my seatbelt around me, listening to the Rainmakers on the tape player and reminding myself to see what was playing at the Mountain Valley Cinemas, just in case we decide to spend the night? How can my husband be dead when were singing along with Bob Walkenhorst? "One more summer," we sang, "one more chance, one more stab at romance." We both know all the words to that one, because it's a great one, and that being the case, how can Gerald possibly be dead? How can things have possibly gotten from there to here? Sorry, folks, but this just has to be a dream. It's much too absurd for reality.

The stray began to advance slowly into the room, legs stiff with caution, tail drooping, eyes wide and black, lips peeled back to reveal a full complement of teeth. About such concepts as absurdity it knew from nothing.

♥ "Stop... oh please, can't you stop?"

The dog paid no attention. Once it had sat up and begged for table scraps, its eyes appearing to laugh, its mouth appearing to grin, but those days, like its former name, were long gone and hard to find. This was now, and things were what they were. Survival was not a matter for politeness and apology. It hadn't eaten for two days, there was food here, and although there was also a master here who didn't want it to take the food (the days when there had been masters who laughed and patted its head and called it GOOD DOG and gave it scraps for doing its small repertoire of tricks were all gone), this master's feet were small and soft instead of hard and hurtful, and its voice said it was powerless.

♥ She felt a swollen green sac of poison pulsing somewhere inside her-bitter stuff, hateful as hemlock. She was afraid that if that sac burst, she would choke on her own frustrated rage.

♥ Jessie moaned. It was a sound that went beyond desperation and into despair. It sounded like giving up.

♥ I want to go to sleep, she thought. It was the child's voice again. Now it sounded shocked and frightened. It had no interest in logic, no patience for cans and can'ts.

♥ Golden light-it was almost sunset light now-dazzled her, and she shut her eyes again, watching the ebb and flow of red and black as her heart pushed membranes of blood through her closed lids. After a few moments of this, she noticed that the same darting patterns repeated themselves over and over again. It was almost like looking at protozoa under a microscope, protozoa on a slide which had been tinted with a red stain. She found this repeating pattern both interesting and soothing. She supposed you didn't have to be a genius to understand the appeal such simple repeating shapes held, given the circumstances. When all the normal patterns and routines of a person's life fell apart-and with such shocking suddenness-you had to find something you could hold onto, something that was both sane and predictable. If she organized swirl of blood in the thin sheaths of skin between your eyeballs and the last sunlight of an October day was all you could find, then you took it and said thank you very much. Because if you couldn't find something to hold onto, something that made at least some sort of sense, the alien elements of the new world order were apt to drive you quite mad.

♥ Sole was good because Gerald, who would live on a diet of nothing but roast beef and fried chicken it left to his own devices (with the occasional order of deep-fried mushrooms thrown in for nutritional purposes), actually claimed to like sole. She had bought it without the slightest premonition that he would be eaten before he could eat.

♥ ..it had seemed harmless enough, just another act in the amazing tie-dyed carnival that was college back then. For Jessie, those first two years of college-particularly with someone like Ruth Neary to tour her through the games, rides, and exhibits-had been for the most part quite wonderful, a time when fearlessness seemed usual and achievement inevitable. Those were the days when no dorm room was complete without a Peter Max poster and if you were tired of the Beatles-not that anybody was-you could slap on a little Hot Tuna or MC5. It had all been a little too bright to be real, like things seen through a fever which is not quite high enough to be life-threatening. In fact, those first two years had been a blast.

The blast had ended with that first meeting of the women's consciousness group. In there, Jessie had discovered a ghastly gray world which seemed simultaneously to preview the adult future that lay ahead for her in the eighties and to whisper of gloomy childhood secrets that had been buried alive in the sixties... but did not lie quiet there.

..That was when the carnival ended for Jessie Mahout. Ended? No, that wasn't right? It was as if she had been afforded a momentary glimpse behind the carnival; had been allowed to see the gray and empty fields of autumn that were the real truth: nothing but empty cigarette wrappers and used condoms and a few cheap broken prizes caught in the tall grass, waiting to either blow away or be covered by the winter snows. She saw that silent stupid sterile world waiting beyond the thin layer of patched canvas which was all that separated it from the razzle-dazzle brightness of the midway, the patter of the hucksters, and the glimmer-glamour of the rides, and it terrified her. To think that only this lay ahead for her, only this and nothing more, was awful; to think that it lay behind her as well, imperfectly hidden by the patched and tawdry canvas of her own doctored memories, was insupportable.

♥ Of course it wasn't surprising; who but someone with an eidetic memory could reel off a complete inventory of the items on a bedroom shelf? Who would have ever thought such things could matter?

Well, they matter now. I'm living in a world where all the perspectives have changed.

Yes indeed. In this world a stray dog could be scarier than Freddy Krueger, the phone was in the Twilight Zone, the sought-for desert oasis, goal of a thousand grizzled Foreign Legionnaires in a hundred desert romances, was a glass of water with a few last slivers of ice floating on top. In this new world order, the bedroom shelf had become a shipping lane as vital as the Panama Canal and an old paperback western or mystery in the wrong place could become a lethal roadblock.

♥ She thought, Everything is perspective... and the voices that describe the world to you, I suppose. They matter. The voices inside your head.

♥ Jesus, sometimes I can't believe how dumb people can be. They ought to make it a law that you have to get a license, or at least a learner's permit, before you're allowed to talk. Until you pass your Talker's Test, you should have to be a mute. It would solve a lot of problems. But that's not the way things are, and as soon as Hart Hall's answer to Florence Nightingale came in, you closed up like a clam. There was nothing I could do to make you open up again, although God knows I tried.

You should have just left me alone! Jessie returned. The glass of water was starting to shake in her hand, and the makeshift purple straw was trembling between her lips. You should have stopped meddling! It didn't concern you!

Sometimes friends can't help their concern, Jessie, the voice inside said, and it was so full of kindness that Jessie was silenced.

♥ Sometimes, she was discovering, it was impossible to take the mind's advice, no matter how good it was. Sometimes the body simply rose up and slapped all that good advice aside. She was discovering something else, as well-giving in to those simply physical needs could be an inexpressible relief.

♥ The dog padded softly to the heap of meat in the middle of the floor. Although its hunger was not less, the meat actually smelled better. This was because its first meal had gone a long way toward breaking down the ancient, inbred taboo against this sort of meat, although the dog did not know this and wouldn't have cared if it did.

..The old taboo had faded, but it hadn't disappeared. Besides, its hunger was sated; what it was doing now wasn't eating but snacking. It turned and trotted out of the room again. Most of Gerald's left cheek dangled from its mouth like the scalp of an infant.

♥ She wants to change the past, but the past is heavy-trying to do that, she discovers, is like trying to pick up the house by one corner so you can look under it for things that have been lost, or forgotten, or hidden.

♥ She is helpless to change what is going to happen, and she understands that this is the very essence of both nightmare and tragedy.

♥ The time of the eclipse has come.

No! she screams again. That was two years ago!

You're wrong on that one, toots, Ruth Neary says. For you it never ended. For you the sun never came back out.

♥ She wants to tell Ruth, as she told Nora on the day she walked out of Nora's office for good, that there is a big difference between living with something and being kept imprisoned by it. Don't you two goofs understand that the Cult of Self is just another cult?..

♥ But that's okay, Jessie; that's what the cuffs are for. Only they were never really handcuffs at all. They're bracelets of love. So put them on, sweetheart. Put them on.

♥ Don't be silly, Jess-you can't faint in a dream.

But she thinks she may be doing just that, and in the end it doesn't matter much whether it is a faint or only a deeper cave of sleep toward which she is fleeing like the survivor of some cataclysm. What matters is that she ins finally escaping the dream which has assaulted her in a much more fundamental way than her father's act on the deck that day, she is finally escaping, and gratitude seems like a beautifully normal response to these circumstances.

She has almost made it into that comforting cave of darkness when a sound intrudes: a splintery, ugly sound like a loud spasm of coughing. She tries to flee the sound and finds she cannot. It has her like a hook, and like a hook it begins to pull her up toward she vast but fragile silver sky that separates sleep from consciousness.

♥ But another part of her-a part which was perhaps the home of those few voices inside which were the real UFOs, not just the wiretaps her subconscious had patched into her conscious mind at some point-insisted that there was a darker truth here, something that trailed from the heels of logic like an irrational (and perhaps supernatural shadow). This voice insisted that things changed in the dark. Things especially changed in the dark, it said, when a person was alone. When that happened, the locks fell off the cage which held the imagination, and anything-any things-might be set free.

It can be your Daddy, this essentially alien part of her whispered, and with a chill of fear Jessie recognized it as the voice of madness and reason mingled together. It can be, never doubt it. People are almost always safe from ghosts and ghouls and the living dead in daylight, and they're usually safe from them at night if they're with others, but when a person is alone in the dark, all bets are off. Men and women alone in the dark are like open doors, Jessie, and if they call out or scream for help, who knows what dread things may answer? Who knows what some men and women have seen in the hour of their solitary deaths? Is it so hard to believe that some of them may have died of fear, no matter what the words on the death certificate say?

"I don't believe that," she said in a blurry, wavering voice. She spoke louder, striving for a firmness she didn't feel. "You're not my father! I don't think you're anyone! I think you're only made of moonlight!"

♥ Jessie saw the evening star glowing mildly in the darkening sky and suddenly realized she had been out on the deck, listening to them circle the subject of the eclipse-and the subject of her-for almost three-quarters of an hour. She discovered a minor but interesting fact of life that night: time speeds by fastest when you are eavesdropping on conversations about yourself.

♥ He was breathing fast, and Jessie suddenly felt sorry for him. The eclipse had probably given him the creeps, too, but of course he was an adult and wasn't supposed to let on. In a lot of ways adults were sad creatures.

♥ Do you love me? he asked again, and although she was gripped by a terrible premonition that the right answer to this question had become the wrong one, she was ten years old and it was still the only answer she had to give.

♥ Her father shifted, pressing the hard thing more firmly against her bottom. Jessie suddenly realized what it was-not the handle of a screwdriver or the tack-hammer from the toolbox in the pantry, that was for sure-and the alarm she felt was matched by a momentary spiteful pleasure which had more to do with her mother than her father.

This is what you get for not sticking up for me, she thought, looking at the dark circle in the sky through the layers of smoked glass, and then: I guess this is what we both get.

♥ Then the more assertive voice spoke up. On the afternoon of the eclipse it sounded a bit like her mother's voice (it called her tootsie, for one thing, as Sally sometimes did when she was irritated with Jessie for shirking some chore or forgetting some responsibility), but Jessie had an idea it was really the voice of her own adult self. If its combative bray was a little distressing, that was only because it was too early for that voice, strictly speaking. It was here just the same, though. It was here, and it was doing the best it could to put her back together again. She found its brassy loudness oddly comforting.

♥ People died in accidents, of course-she supposed she had seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of "death-clips" on the TV news during her lifetime. Body-bags carried away from wrecked cars or winched out of the jungle in Medi-Vac slings, feet sticking out from beneath hastily spread blankets while buildings burned in the background, white-faced, stumble-voiced witnesses pointing to pools of sticky dark stuff in alleys or on barroom floors. She had seen the white-shrouded shape that had been John Belushi toted out of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles; she had seen aerialist Karl Wallenda lose his balance, fall heavily to the cable he had been trying to cross (it had been strung between two resort hotels, she seemed to remember), clutch it briefly, and then plunge to his death below. The news programs had played that one over and over as if obsessed with it. So she knew people died in accidents, of course she knew it, but until now she had somehow never realized there were people inside those people, people just like her, people who hadn't had the slightest idea they would never eat another cheeseburger, watch another round of Final Jeopardy (and please make sure your answer is in the form of a question), or call their best friends to say that penny poker on Thursday night or shopping on Saturday afternoon seemed like a great idea. No more beer, no more kisses, and your fantasy of making love in a hammock during a thunderstorm was never going to be fulfilled, because you were going to be too busy being dead. Any morning you rolled out of bed might be your last.

♥ If her interior clock was right, Today would be coming on just about now. Men and women all over America-unhandcuffed, for the most part-were sitting at kitchen tables, drinking juice and coffee, eating bagels and scrambled eggs (or maybe one of those cereals that are supposed to simultaneously soothe your heart and excite your bowels). They were watching Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric yuck it up with Joe Garagiola. A little later they would watch Willard Scott wish a couple of centenarians a happy day. There would be guests-one who would talk about something called the prime rate and something else called the Fed, one who would show viewers how they could keep their pet Chows from chewing up their slippers, and one who would plug his latest movie-and none of them would realize that over in western Maine there was an accident in progress; that one of their more-or-less-loyal viewers was unable to tune in this morning because she was handcuffed to a bed less than twenty feet from her naked, dogchewed, flyblown husband.

♥ Sometimes when she got her mother's notes and postcards-All well here, sweetheart, heard from Maddy, she writes so faithfully, my appetite's a little better since it cooled off-Jessie felt an urge to snatch up the telephone and call her mother and scream: Did you forget everything Mom? Did you forget the day you threw the shoes at me and broke my favorite vase and I cried because I thought you must know, that he must have finally broken down and told you, even though it had been three years since the day of the eclipse by then? Did you forget how often you scared us with your screams and your tears?

That's unfair, Jessie. Unfair and disloyal.

Unfair it might be, but that did not make it untrue.

If she had known what happened that day-

The image of the woman in stocks recurred to Jessie again, there and gone almost too fast to be recognized, like subliminal advertising: the pinned hands, the hair covering the face like a penitent's shroud, the little knot of pointing, contemptuous people. Mostly women.

Her mother might not have come right out and said so, but yes-she would have believed it was Jessie's fault, and she really might have thought it was a conscious seduction. It wasn't that much of a stretch from squeaky wheel to Lolita, was it? And the knowledge that something sexual had happened between her husband and her daughter very likely would have caused her to stop thinking about leaving and actually do it.

Believed it? You bet she would have believed it.

♥ "And here's something I need to say once more. I need to say I'm sorry, Jess. I did a shabby, shameful thing."

He had looked away when he said that, she remembered. All the time he had been deliberately driving her into hysterics of guilt and fear and impending doom, all the time he had been making sure she would never say anything by threatening to tell everything, he had looked right at her. When he offered that last apology, however, his gaze had shifted to the crayon designs on the sheets which divided the room. This memory filled her with something that felt simultaneously like grief and rage. He had been able to face her with his lies; it was the truth which had finally caused him to look away.

♥ "I couldn't be pregnant, then?" she blurted.

He winced, and then his face had tensed as he worked to suppress some strong emotion. Horror or grief, she'd thought then; it was only all these years later that it occurred to her that what he might actually have been trying to control was a burst of wild, relieved laughter. At last he had gotten himself under control and kissed the tip of her nose.

"No, honey, of course not. The thing that make women pregnant didn't happen. Nothing like that happened."

♥ In New York City, the regulars of the Today program had signed off for another day. On the NBC affiliate which served southern and western Maine, they were replaced first by a local chat-show (a large, motherly woman in a gingham apron showed how easy it was to slow-cook beans in your Crock-pot), then by a game-show where celebrities cracked jokes and contestants uttered loud, orgasmic screams when they won cars and boats and bright red Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners. In the Burlingame home on scenic Kashwakamak Lake, the new widow dozed uneasily in her restraints, and then began to dream once more. It was a nightmare, one made more vivid and somehow more persuasive by the very shallowness of the dreamer's sleep.

In it Jessie was lying in the dark again, a man-or a manlike thing-was once more standing across from her in the corner of the room. The man wasn't her father; the man wasn't her husband; the man was a stranger, the stranger, the one who haunts all our sickest, most paranoid imaginings and deepest fears. It was the fact of a creature Nora Callighan, with her good advice and sweet, practical nature, had never taken into account. This black being could not be conjured away by anything with an ology suffix. It was a cosmic wildcard.

But you do know me, the stranger with the long white face said. It bent down and grasped the handle of its bag. Jessie noted, with no surprise at all, that the handle was a jawbone and the bag itself was made of human skin. The stranger picked it up, flicked the clasps, and opened the lid. Again she saw the bones and the jewels; again it reached its hand into the tangle and began to move it in slow circles, producing those ghastly clickings and clackings and rappings and tappings.

No I don't, she said. I don't know who you are, I don't, I don't, I don't!

I'm Death, of course, and I'll be back tonight. Only tonight I think I'll do a little more than just stand in the corner, tonight I think I'll jump out at you... just... like... this!

♥ Bill will call the police and they'll show up with the forensics unit and the County Coroner. They'll all stand around the bed smoking cigars (Doug Rowe, undoubtedly wearing his awful white trenchcoat, will be standing outside with his film-crew, of course), and when the coroner pulls off the blanket, they'll wince. Yes-I think even the most hardened of them are going to wince a little, and some of them may actually leave the room. Their buddies will razz them about it later. And the ones who stay will nod and tell each other that the person on the bed died hard. "You only have to look at her to see that," they'll say. But they won't know the half of it. They won't know that the real reason your eyes are starting and your mouth is frozen in a scream is because of what you saw at the end. What you saw coming out of the dark. Your father may have been your first lover, Jessie, but your last is going to be the stranger with the long white face and the travelling bag made out of human skin.

..They'll tale you to Augusta and the State Medical Examiner will cut you open so he can inventory your guts. That's the rule in cases of unattended or questionable death, and yours is going to be both. He'll have a peek at what's left of your last meal-the salami-and-cheese sub from Amato's in Gorham-and take a little section of brain to look at under his microscope, and in the end he'll call it death by misadventure. "The lady and gentleman were playing an ordinarily harmless game," he'll say, "only the gentleman had the bad taste to have a heart attack at a critical moment and the woman was left to... well, it's best not to go into it. Best not to even think about it any more than is strictly necessary. Suffice it to say that the lady died hard-you only have to look at her to see that." That's how it's going to shake out, Jess. Maybe someone will notice your wedding ring is gone, but they won't hunt for it long, if at all. Nor will the ME notice that one of your bones-an unimportant one, the third phalange in your right foot, let's say-is gone. But we'll know, won't we, Jessie? In fact, we know already. We'll know that it took them. The cosmic stranger; the space cowboy. We'll know-

♥ This was the very sound which she had believed, less than three minutes ago, would drive her mad. It did not, and now she discovered a newer, deeper terror: in spite of everything which had happened to her, she was still a very long way from insanity. It seemed to her that, no matter what horrors might lie ahead for her now that this last door to escape had been barred, she must face them sane.

♥ Madness would be a relief, but madness would not come. Neither would sleep. Death might beat them both, and dark certainly would. She could only lie on the bed, existing in a dull olive-drab reality shot through with occasional gaudy blasts of pain as her muscles crammed up. The cramps mattered, and so did her horrible, tiresome sanity, but little else seemed to-certainly the world outside this room had ceased to hold any real meaning for her.

♥ Time was a cold sea through which her consciousness forged like a waddling, graceless icebreaker. Voices came and went like phantoms. Most spoke inside her head, but for a while Nora Callighan talked to her from the bathroom, and at another point Jessie had a conversation with her mother, who seemed to be lurking in the hall.

♥ Jessie closed her eyes, praying for sleep. Even a short release from the long and tiresome job of dying would be welcome at this point.

♥ The girl looked lovely and deeply happy, which didn't surprise Jessie at all. The girl had, after all, escaped her bonds; she was free. Jessie felt no jealousy of her on this account, but she did have a strong desire-almost a need-to tell her that she must do more than simply enjoy her freedom; she must treasure it and guard it and use it.

♥ Twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock flashed, and whatever time it really was, it was time.

♥ Her foot thumped against something. She looked down and saw she had kicked Gerald's plump right shoulder. Blood pattered down on his chest and face. A drop fell in one staring blue eye. She felt no pity for him; she felt no hate for him; she felt no love for him. She felt a kind of horror and disgust for herself, that all the feelings with which she had occupied herself over the years-those so-called civilized feelings that were the meat of every soap-opera, talk-show, and radio phone-in program-should prove so shallow compared with the survival instinct, which had turned out (in her case, at least), to be as overbearing and brutally insistent as a bulldozer blade. But that was the case, and she had an idea that if Arsenio or Oprah ever found themselves in this situation, they would do most of the things she had done.

"Out of my way, Gerald," she said, and kicked him (denying the enormous satisfaction it gave her even as it welled up inside).

♥ For a moment the door and the wind were the only sounds, and then a long, wavering howl rose in the air. Jessie believed it was the most awful sound she had ever heard; the sound she imagined a victim of premature burial might make after being disinterred and dragged, alive but insane, from her coffin.

♥ Now she could a clapping shutter as well as the banging door, but these sounds were somewhere else, in some other world where wives were not handcuffed and husbands did not refuse to listen and night-creatures did not stalk.

♥ ..its pudgy, liver-colored lips seemed to be simultaneously pouting and melting.

No, not melting, she thought with the bright narrow lucidity that sometimes lives, like the glowing filament in a lightbulb, within a sphere of complete terror. Not melting, smiling. It's trying to smile at me.

♥ I've seen a box like that before, she thought. I don't know if it was on some old TV show or in real life, but I have. When I was just a little girl. It came out of a long black car with a door in the back.

A soft and sinister UFO voice suddenly spoke up inside her. Once upon a time, Jessie, when President Kennedy was still alive and all little girls were Punkins and the plastic body-bag had yet to be invented-back in the Time of the Eclipse, let us say-boxes like this were common. They all came in all sizes, from Men's Extra Large to Six-Month Miscarriage. Your friend keeps his souvenirs in an old-fashioned mortician's body-box, Jessie.

As she realized this, she realized something else, as well. It was perfectly obvious, once you thought about it. The reason her visitor smelled so bad was because it was dead. The thing in Gerald's study wasn't her father, but it was a walking corpse, just the same.

No... no, that's can't be-

But it was.

♥ It was Punkin, and she was shrieking... but she was also a long way off, lost in some deep stone gorge in Jessie's head. There were lots of gorges in there, she was discovering, and lots of dark, twisty canyons and caves that had never seen the light of the sun-places where the eclipse never ended, you might say. It was interesting. Interesting to find that a person's mind was really nothing but a graveyard built over a black hollow place with freakish reptiles like this crawling around the bottom. Interesting.

♥ Why is it letting me go? And is it? Is it really?

Part of her-the fear-maddened part which would never entirely escape the handcuffs and the master bedroom of the house on the upper bay of Kashwakamak Lake-assured her that it wasn't; the creature with the wicker case was only playing with her, as a cat plays with a wounded mouse. Before she got much farther, certainly before she got to the top of the driveway. It would come racing after her, using its long cartoon legs to close the distance between them, stretching out its long cartoon arms to seize the rear number and bring the car to a halt. German efficiency was fine, but when you were dealing with something which had come back from the dead... well...

♥ He hadn't wasted her time with pity, and what a relief that had been. Jessie had also discovered that pity came cheap in the aftermath of tragedy, and that all the pity in the world wasn't worth a pisshole in the snow.

♥ Anyway, most of the case histories suggested that the human mind often reacted to extreme trauma the way a squid reacts to danger-by covering the entire landscape with a billow of obscuring ink. You knew something had happened, and that it had been no day in the park, but that was all. Everything else was gone, hidden by that ink. A lot of the case-history people said that-people who had been reaped, people who had been in car crashes, people who had been caught in fires and had crawled into closets to die, even one skydiving lady whose parachute hadn't opened and who had been recovered, badly hurt but miraculously alive, from the large soft bog in which she had landed.

What was it like, coming down? they had asked the skydiving lady. What did you think about when you realized your chute hadn't opened, wasn't going to open? And the skydiving lady had replied, I can't remember. I remember the starter patting me on the back, and I think I remember the pop-out, but the next thing I remember is being on a stretcher and asking one of the men putting me into the back of the ambulance how badly I was hurt. Everything in the middle is just a haze. I suppose I prayed, but I can't even remember that for sure.

Or maybe you really remembered everything, my skydiving friend, Jessie thought, and lied about it, just like I did. Maybe even for the same reasons. For all I know, every damned one of the case-registry people in every damned one of the books I read was lying.

Maybe so. Whether they were or not, the fact remained that she did remember her hours handcuffed to the bed-from the click of the key in the second lock right up to that final freezing moment when she had looked into the rearview mirror and seen that thing in the house had become the thing in the back seat, she remembered it all. She remembered those moments by day and relived them by night in horrible dreams where the water-glass slid past her along the inclined plane of the shelf and shattered on the floor, where the stray dog bypassed the cold buffet on the floor in favor of the hot meal on the bed, where the hideous night-visitor in the corner asked Do you love me, Punkin? in her father's voice and maggots squirmed like semen from the tip of its erect penis.

But remembering a thing and reliving a thing did not confer an obligation to tell a thing, even when the memories made you sweat and the nightmares made you scream.

♥ But I couldn't quite believe it, Ruth-not even with the sun coming up and me out of the handcuffs, out of the house, and locked inside my own car. I got the idea that if he wasn't in the back seat he was in the trunk, and if he wasn't in the trunk, he was crouched down by the back bumper. I got the idea that he was still with me, in other words, and he's been with me ever since. That's what I need to make you-you or somebody-understand; that's what I really need to say. He has been with me ever since. Even when my rational mind decided that he'd probably been shadows and moonlight every time I saw him, he was with me. Or maybe I should say it was with me. My visitor is "the man with the white face" when the sun is up, you see, he's "the thing with the white face" when it's down. Either way, him or it, my rational mind was eventually able to give him up, but I have found that is nowhere near enough. Because every time a board creaks in the house at night I know that it's come back, every time a funny shadow dances on the wall I know it's come back, every time I hear an unfamiliar step coming up the walk I know it's come back-come back to finish the job. It was there in the Mercedes that morning when I woke up, and it's been here in my house on Eastern Prom almost every night, maybe hiding behind the drapes or standing in the closet with its wicker case between its feet. There is no magic stake to drive through the hearts of the real monsters, and oh Ruth, it makes me so tired.

♥ Funny what you remember when you think you're getting ready to die, isn't it?

♥ He does have a kind of sweetness about him-yes, he does-and he was honest with me from the jump, but of course he still had his own agenda from the beginning. Believe me when I say my eyes are wide open on that score, my dear; I was, after all, married to a lawyer for almost two decades, and I know how fiercely they compartmentalize the various aspects of their lives and personalities. It's what allows them to survive without having too many breakdowns, I suppose, but it's also what makes so many of them utterly loathsome.

♥ He was smiling, but it was a less winning smile that time, I'm afraid. It was the kind of smile men always seem to get on their faces when they're thinking about how silly women are, and how it should really be against the law to let them out without keepers.

♥ The light dawned, then, Ruth. I suddenly understood that all of them-all the men investigating what had happened out at the lake-had made certain assumptions about how I'd handled the situation and why I'd done the things I'd done. Most of them worked in my favor, and that certainly simplified things, but there was still something both infuriating and a little spooky in the realization that they drew mot of their conclusions not from what I'd said or from any evidence they'd found in the house, but only from the fact that I'm a woman, and women can be expected to behave in certain predictable ways.

When you look at it that way, there's no difference at all between Brandon Milheron in his natty three-piece suits and old Constable Teagarden in his satchel-seat bluejeans and red firehouse suspenders. Men still think the same things about us they have always thought, Ruth-I'm sure of it. A lot of them have learned to say the right things at the right times, but as my mother used to say, "Even a cannibal can learn to recite the Apostles' Creed."

And do you know what? Brandon Milheron admires me, and he admires the way I handled myself after Gerald dropped dead. Yes he does. I have seen it on his face time after time, and if he drops by this evening, as he usually does, I am confident I will see it there again. Brandon thinks I did a damned good job, a damned brave job... for a woman. In fact, I think that by the time we had our first conversation about my hypothetical visitor, he had sort of decided I'd behaved the way he would have in a similar situation... if, that is, he'd had to deal with a high fever at the same time he was trying to deal with everything else. I have an idea that's how most men believe most women think: like lawyers with malaria. It would certainly explain a lot of their behavior, wouldn't it?

I'm talking about condescension-a man-versus-woman thing-but I'm also talking about something a hell of a lot bigger and a hell of a lot more frightening, as well. He didn't understand, you see, and that has nothing to do with any differences between the sexes: that's the curse of being human, and the surest proof that all of us are really alone. Terrible things happened in that house, Ruth, I didn't know just how terrible until later, and he didn't understand that. I told him the things I did in order to keep that terror from eating me alive, and he nodded and he smiled and he sympathized, and I think it ended up doing me some good, but he was the best of them, and he never got within shouting distance of the truth... of how the terror just seemed to keep on growing until it became this big black haunted house inside my head. It's still there, too, standing with its door open, inviting me to come back inside any time I want, and I never do want to go back, but sometimes I find myself going back, anyway, and the minute I step inside, the door slams shut behind me and locks itself.

♥ As for the rings themselves, I didn't care what had happened to them then and I don't know. I've come more and more to believe in these last few months that the only reason a man sticks a ring on your finger is because the law no longer allows him to put one through your nose.

♥ If you decide to stop now, Jessie, don't bother to file the document. Just delete it. We both know you'll never have the guts to face Joubert again-not the way a person has to face a thing she's writing about. Sometimes it takes heart to write about a thing, doesn't it? To let that thing out of the room way in the back of your mind and put it up there on the screen.and the story never surfaced in the press until Joubert was caught! In a way I find that weird and a little spooky, but in a much larger way I find it wonderful. I guess the law-enforcement battle isn't going so well in a lot of the big cities, but out here in East Overshoe, whatever they're doing still seemed to work just fine.

Of course you could argue that there's plenty of room for improvement when it takes seven years to catch a nut like Joubert, but Brandon clarified that for me in a hurry. He explained that the perp (they really do use that word) was operating exclusively in one-horse towns where budget shortfalls have forced the cops to deal only with the most serious and immediate problems... which means crimes against the living rather than against the dead. The cops say there are at least two hot-car rings and four chop-shops operating in the western half of the state, and those are only the ones they know about. Then, there are the murderers, the wife-beaters, the robbers, the speeders, and the drunks. Above all, there's the old dope-ola. It gets bought, it gets sold, it gets grown, and people keep hurting or killing each other over it. According to Brandon, the Police Chief over in Norway won't even use the word cocaine anymore-he calls it Powdered Shithead, and in his written reports he calls it Powdered S******d. I got the point he was trying to make. When you're a small-town cop trying to ride herd on the whole freakshow in a four-year-old Plymouth cruiser that feels like it's going to fall apart every time you push it over seventy, your job gets prioritized in a hurry, and a guy who likes to play with the dead people is a long way from the top of the list.

I listened to all this carefully, and I agreed, but not all the way. "Some of it feels true, but some of it feels a little self-serving," I said. "I mean, the stuff Joubert was doing... well, it went a little further than just 'playing with dead people,' didn't it? Or am I wrong?"

"You're not wrong at all," he said.

What neither of us wanted to come right out and say was that for seven years this aberrant soul had gone flitting from town to town getting blowjobs from the dead, and to me putting a stop to that seemed quite a bit more important than nabbing teenage girls who've been shoplifting cosmetics at the local drugstore or finding out who's been growing goofy-weed in the woodlot behind the Baptist church.

♥ She looked at the words on the screen-the unbelievable, unspeakable admission on the screen-and felt a sudden strong urge to delete them. Not because she was ashamed for Ruth to read them; she was, but that wasn't it. What she didn't want to do was deal with them, and she supposed that if she didn't delete them, she would have to do just that. Words had a way of creating their own imperatives.

Not until they're out of your hands, they don't, Jessie thought, and reached out with the black-clad index finger of her right hand. She touched the DELETE button-stroked it, actually-and then drew back. It was the truth, wasn't it?

.."Yes, it's the truth, all right."

And nothing but, so help her God. She wouldn't use the DELETE button on the truth, no matter how nasty some people-including herself, as a matter of fact-might find that truth to be. She would let it stand. She might decide not to send the letter after all (didn't know if it was even fair to send it, to burden a woman she hadn't seen in years with this ration of pain and madness), but she would not delete it. Which meant it would be best to finish now, in a rush, before the last of her courage deserted her and the last of her strength ran out.

Jessie leaned forward and began typing again.

♥ The memory was this: in the two years or so between the day of the eclipse and the day of my brother Will's birthday party-the one where he goosed me during the croquet game-I heard all those voices almost constantly. Maybe Will's goosing me acted as some kind of rough, accidental therapy. I suppose it's possible; don't they say that our ancestors invented cooking after eating what forest fires left behind? Although if some serendipitous therapy took place that day, I have an idea that it didn't come with the goose but when I hauled off and pounded Will one in the mouth for doing it... and at this point none of that matters. What matters is that, following that day on the deck, I spent two years sharing space in my head with a kind of whispering choir, dozens of voices that passed judgment on my every word and action. Some were kind and supportive, but most were the voices of people who were afraid, people who were wounded, people who thought Jessie was a worthless little baggage who deserved every bad thing that happened to her and who would have to pay double for every good thing. For two years I heard those voices, Ruth, and when they stopped, I forgot them. Not a little at a time, but all at once.

Howe could a thing like that happen? I don't know, and in a very real sense, I don't care. I might if the change had made things worse, I suppose, but it didn't-it made them immeasurably better. I spent the two years between the eclipse and the birthday party in a kind of fugue state, with my conscious mind shattered into a lot big squabbling fragments, and the real epiphany was this: if I let nice, kind Brandon Milheron have his way, I'd end up right back where I started-headed down Nuthouse Lane by way of Schizophrenia Boulevard. And this time there's no little brother around to administer crude shock therapy; this time I have to do it myself, just as I had to get out of Gerald's goddam handcuffs myself.

♥ I thought of waving the cudgel of the press in front of him-it was the one thing I was almost sure would make him cave in-but in the end, I didn't have to. All I had to do was cry. In a way it makes me feel unbelievably sleazy to write that, but in another way it does not; in another way I recognize it as just another symptom if what's wrong between the fellers and the girls in this particular square-dance. He didn't entirely believe I was serious until I started to cry, you see.

♥ The man in the orange jumpsuit is hunched over a yellow legal pad, apparently writing something.

From a million miles away, Jessie feels Brandon Milheron's hand press more insistently against her waist. "This is close enough," he murmurs.

She moves away from him. He's wrong; it's not close enough. Brandon doesn't have the slightest idea of what she's thinking or feeling, but that's okay; she knows. For the time being, all her voices have become one voice; she is basking in unexpected unanimity, and what she knows is this: if she doesn't get closer to him now, if she doesn't get just as close as she can, he will never be far enough away. He will always be in the closet, or just outside the window, or hiding under the bed at midnight, grinning his pallid, wrinkled grin-the one that shows the glimmers of gold far back in his mouth.

♥ She likes Brandon, she honestly does, but her days of doing things simply because it's a man doing the telling are over.

♥ I treated you shabbily all those years ago, and while it wasn't strictly my fault-I've only come to realize lately how often and how much we are moved by others, even when we are priding ourselves on our control and self-reliance-I still want to say I'm sorry. And I want to tell you something else, something I'm really starting to believe: I'm going to be okay. Not today, not tomorrow, and not next week, but eventually. As okay as we mortals are privileged to get, anyway. It's good to know that-good to know that survival is still an option, and that sometimes it even feels good. That sometimes it actually feels like victory.

♥ She went to the window in the parlor and stood there for awhile before going upstairs, looking out over the Bay. It was starting to get dark. For the first time in a long time, this simple realization didn't fill her with terror.

"Oh, what the fuck," she told the empty house. "Bring on the night."