Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

If you’re going to live through this experience, Jess, I suggest you stop rehashing the past and start deciding what you’re going to do with the future… starting with the next ten minutes or so. I don’t think that dying of thirst on this bed would he very pleasant, do you?

No, not very pleasant… and she thought that thirst would be far from the worst of it. Crucifixion had been in the back of her mind almost since she’d awakened, floating up and down like some nasty drowned thing which is just a little too waterlogged to come all the way to the surface. She had read an article about this charming old method of torture and execution for a college history class, and had been surprised to learn that the old nails-through-the-hands-and-feet trick was only the beginning. Like magazine subscriptions and pocket calculators, crucifixion was the gift that kept on giving.

The real hardships began with cramps and muscle-spasms. Jessie reluctantly recognized that the pains she had suffered so far, even the paralyzing Charley horse which had put an end to her first panic-attack, were only tweaks compared to the ones which were waiting. They would rack her arms, diaphragm, and abdomen, growing steadily worse, more frequent, and more widespread as the day passed. Numbness would eventually begin to creep into her extremities no matter how hard she worked to keep the blood flowing, but numbness would bring no relief; by then she would almost certainly have begun suffering excruciating chest and stomach cramps. There were no nails in her hands and feet and she was lying down instead of hanging from a cross at the side of the road like one of the defeated gladiators in Spartacus, but those variations might only draw out her agony.

So what are you going to do right now, while you’re still pretty much free of pain and able to think?

“Whatever I can,” she croaked, “so why don’t you just shut up and let me think about it for a minute?”

Go ahead-be my guest.

She would start with the most obvious solution and work her way down from there… if she had to. And what was the most obvious solution? The keys, of course. They were still lying on top of the bureau, where he had left them. Two keys, but both exactly the same. Gerald, who could be almost endearingly corny, had often referred to them as the Primary and the Backup (Jessie had clearly heard those capital letters in her husband’s voice).

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, she could somehow slide the bed across the room to the bureau. Would she be able to actually get hold of one of those keys and put it to use? Jessie reluctantly realized that there were two questions there, not one. She supposed she might be able to pick up one of the keys in her teeth, but then what? She still wouldn’t be able to get it into the lock; her experience with the water-glass suggested there was going to be a gap no matter how much she stretched.

Okay; scratch the keys. Descend to the next rung on the ladder of probability. What might that be?

She thought about it for almost five minutes without success, turning it around and around in her mind like the sides of Rubik’s Cube, pumping her arms up and down as she did so. At some point during her ruminations, her eyes wandered to the phone sitting on the low table by the east window. She had dismissed it earlier as being in another universe, but perhaps she had been too hasty. The table, after all, was closer than the bureau, and the phone was a lot bigger than a handcuff key.

If she could move the bed over to the telephone table, might she not be able to lift the receiver off the cradle with her foot? And if she could do that, maybe she could use her big toe to push the Operator button at the bottom, between the keys marked * and #. It sounded like some crazy sort of vaudeville act, but-

Push the button, wait, then start screaming my head off.

Yes, and half an hour later either the big blue Medcu van from Norway or the big orange one marked Castle Country Rescue would turn up and trundle her off to safety. A crazy idea, all right, but so was turning a magazine subscription card into a straw. It could work, crazy or not-that was the point. It certainly had more potential than somehow pushing the bed all the way across the room and then trying to find a way to get one of the keys into one of the handcuff locks. There was one big problem with the idea, however: she would somehow have to find a way to move the bed to the right, and that was a heavy proposition. She guessed that, with its mahogany head- and footboards, it had to weigh at least three hundred pounds, and that estimate might be conservative.

But you can at least try it, babe, and you might get a big surprise the floor’s been waxed since Labor Day, remember. If a stray dog with its ribs sticking out can move your husband, maybe you can move this bed. You haven’t got anything to lose by trying, do you?

A good point.

Jessie worked her legs toward the left side of the bed, shifting her back and shoulders patiently to the right as she did so. When she got as far as she was going to using that method, she pivoted on her left hip. Her feet went over the side… and suddenly her legs and torso were not just moving to the left but sliding to the left, like an avalanche trying to happen. A horrible cramp jig-jagged up her left side as her body stretched in ways it hadn’t been meant to even under the best of conditions. It felt as if someone had given her a fast harsh scrape with a hot poker.

The short chain between the right-hand set of cuffs yanked taut, and for a moment the news from her left side was blotted out by fresh agony pulsing out of her right arm and shoulder. It felt as if someone were trying to twist that arm completely off. Now I know what a turkey drumstick feels like, she thought.

Her left heel thumped onto the floor; her right hung three inches above it. Her body was twisted unnaturally to the left with her right arm cast strenuously back behind her in a kind of frozen wave. The taut chain gleamed heartlessly above its rubber sleeve in the early-morning sun.

Jessie was suddenly sure she was going to die in this position, with her left side and right arm screaming. She would have to lie here, gradually growing numb as her flagging heart lost the battle to pump blood to all parts of her stretched and twisted body. Panic overtook her again and she howled for help, forgetting there was no one in the neighborhood but one raggedy-ass stray with a bellyful of lawyer. She flailed frantically for the bedpost with her right hand, but she had slid just a little too far; the dark-stained mahogany was half an inch beyond the tips of her straining fingers.

“Help! Please! Help! Help!”

No answer. The only sounds in this silent sunny bedroom were her sounds: hoarse, screaming voice, rasping breath, pounding heart. No one here but her, and unless she was able to get back onto the bed, she was going to die like a woman hung on a meat-hook. Nor was the situation done getting worse: her butt was still sliding toward the edge of the bed, pulling her right arm steadily backward at an angle which was becoming more and more extreme.

Without thinking about it or planning it (unless the body, goaded by pain, sometimes thinks for itself), Jessie braced her bare left heel on the floor and shoved backward with all her might. It was the only brace-point remaining to her painfully slued body, and the maneuver worked. Her lower body arched, the chain between the cuffs binding her right hand grew slack, and she seized the bedpost with the panicky zeal of a drowning woman seizing a life-ring. She used it to yank herself backward, ignoring the scream of her back and biceps. When her feet were up again, she paddled frantically back from the edge, as if she had dipped into a swimming pool filled with baby sharks and had noticed Just in time to save her toes.

At last she regained her former slumped sitting position against the crossboards, arms outstretched, the small of her back resting on the sweat-soaked pillow in its badly wrinkled cotton case. She let her head loll back against the mahogany slats, breathing rapidly, her bare breasts oiled with sweat she couldn’t afford to lose. She closed her eyes and laughed weakly.

Say, that was pretty exciting, wasn’t it, Jessie? I think it’s the fastest and hardest your heart has heat since 1985, when you came within a Christmas party kiss or so of going to bed with Tommy Delguidace. Nothing to lose by trying, isn’t that what you thought? Well, now you know better.

Yes. And she knew something else, as well.

Oh? And what’s that, toots?

“I know that fucking phone is out of reach,” she said.

Yes indeed. When she had pushed off with her left heel just now, she had shoved with all the enthusiasm of total, ass-freezing panic. The bed hadn’t moved an iota, and now that she had a chance to think about it, she was glad it hadn’t. If it had jigged to the right, she would still be hanging off it. And even if she had been able to push it all the way across to the telephone table that way, why…

“I’d’ve been hanging over the wrong fucking side,” she said, half-laughing and half-sobbing. “Jesus, somebody shoot me.”

Doesn’t look good, one of the UFO voices-one she definitely could have done without-told her. In fact, it sort of looks like the Jessie Burlingame Show just got its cancellation notice.

“Pick another choice,” she said huskily. “I don’t like that one.”

There aren’t any others. There weren’t that many to begin with, and you’ve researched them all.

She closed her eyes again and for the second time since this nightmare began, she saw the playground behind the old Falmouth Grammar School on Central Avenue. Only this time it wasn’t the image of two little girls balancing on a seesaw that filled her mind; instead she saw one little boy-her brother Will-skinning the cat on the monkey-bars.

She opened her eyes, slumped down, and bent her head to look more closely at the headboard. Skinning the cat meant hanging from a bar, then curling your legs up and over your own shoulders. You finished with a quick little pivot which enabled you to land on your feet again. Will had been so adept at this neat and economical movement that it had looked to Jessie as if he were turning somersaults inside his own hands.

Suppose I could do that? Just skin the cat right over the top of this goddam headboard. Swing over the top and…

“And land on my feet,” she whispered.

For several moments this seemed dangerous but feasible. She would have to move the bed out from the wall, of course-you couldn’t skin the cat if you didn’t have a place to land-but she had an idea she could manage that. Once the bed-shelf was removed (and it would be easy to knock it off its support brackets, unanchored as it was), she would do a backover roll and plant her bare feet against the wall above the top of the headboard. She hadn’t been able to move the bed sideways, but with the wall to push against-

“Same weight, ten times the leverage,” she muttered. “Modern physics at its finest.”

She was reaching for the shelf with her left hand, meaning to tip it up and off the L-brackets when she took another good look at Gerald’s goddam police handcuffs with their suicidally short chains. If he had clipped them onto the bedposts a little higher between the first and second crossboards, say-she might have chanced it; the maneuver would probably have resulted in a pair of broken wrists, but she had reached a point where a pair of broken wrists seemed an entirely acceptable price to pay for escape… after all, they would heal, wouldn’t they? Instead of between the first and second crossboards, however, the cuffs were attached between the second and third, and that was just a little too far down. Any attempt to skin the cat over the headboard would do more than break her wrists; it would result in a pair of shoulders not lust dislocated but actually ripped out of their sockets by her descending weight.

And try moving this goddam bed anywhere with a pair of broken wrists and two dislocated shoulders. Sound like fun?

“No,” she said huskily. “Not too much.”

Let’s cut through it, Jess-you’re stuck here. You can call me the voice Of despair if it makes you feel better, or if it helps you to hold onto your sanity for a little while longer-God knows I’m all for sanity-but what I really am is the voice of truth, and the truth of this situation is that you’re stuck here.

Jessie turned her head sharply to one side, not wanting to hear this self-styled voice of truth, and found she was no more able to shut it out than she had been able to shut out the other ones.

Those are real handcuffs you’re wearing, not the cute little bondage numbers with the padding inside the wristlets and a hidden escape-lever you can push if someone gets carried away and starts going a little too far. You’re for-real locked up, and you don’t happen to be either a fakir from the Mysterious East, capable of twisting your body up like a pretzel, or an escape artist like Harry Houdini or David Copperfield. I’m just telling it the way I see it, okay? And the way I see it, you’re toast.

She suddenly remembered what had happened after her father had left her bedroom on the day of the eclipse-how she had thrown herself on her bed and cried until it had seemed her heart would either break or melt or maybe just seize up for good. And now, as her mouth began to tremble, she looked remarkably as she had then: tired, confused, frightened, and lost. That last most of all.

Jessie began to cry, but after the first few tears, her eyes would produce no more; stricter rationing measures had apparently gone into effect. She cried anyway, fearlessly, her sobs as dry as sandpaper in her throat.