Yes, and half an hour later either the big blue Medcu van from Norway or the big orange one marked Castle County 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 meathook. 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 tkink it's the fastest and hardest your heart has beat 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 just 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, tearlessly, her sobs as dry as sandpaper in her throat.
24
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, and 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 face 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!
It leaped forward, dropping the case (bones and pendants and rings and necklaces spilled out toward where Gerald lay sprawled with his mutilated arm pointing toward the hallway door) and shooting out its hands. She saw its fingers ended in dark filthy nails so long they were really claws, and then she shook herself awake with a gasp and a jerk, the handcuff chains swinging and jingling as she made warding-off gestures with her hands. She was whispering the word "No" over and over again in a-slurry monotone.
It was a dream! Stop it, Jessie, it was just a dream!
She slowly lowered her hands, letting them dangle limply inside the cuffs once more. Of course it had been--just a variation of the bad dream she'd had last night. It had been realistic, though--Jesus, yes. Far worse, when you got right down to it, than the one of the croquet party, or even the one in which she had recalled the furtive and unhappy interlude with her father during the eclipse. It was passing strange that she had spent so much time this morning thinking about those dreams and so little thinking about the far scarier one. In fact, she really hadn't thought of the creature with the weirdly long arms and the gruesome souvenir case at all until she'd dozed off and dreamed of him just now.
A snatch of song occurred to her, something from the Latter Psychedelic Age: "Some people call me the space cowboy . . . yeah . . . some call me the gangster of love ..."
Jessie shuddered. The space cowboy. That was somehow just right. An outsider, someone who had nothing to do with anything, a wildcard, a--
"A stranger," Jessie whispered, and suddenly remembered the way its cheeks had wrinkled when it began to grin. And once that detail had fallen into place, others began falling into place around it. The gold teeth twinkling far back in the grinning mouth. The pouty, poochy lips. The livid brow and the blade of nose. And there was the case, of course, like something you might expect to see banging against a travelling salesman's leg as he ran to catch his train--
Stop it, Jessie--stop giving yourself the horrors. Don't you have enough problems without worrying about the boogeyman?
She most certainly did, but she found that, now that she had begun thinking about the dream, she couldn't seem to stop. Worse than that was the fact that the more she thought about it, the less dreamlike it became.
What if I was awake? she thought suddenly, and once the idea was articulated, she was horrified to discover some part of her had believed just that all along. It had only been waiting for the rest of her to catch up.
No, oh no, it was just a dream, that's all--
But what if it wasn't? What if it wasn't?
Death, the white-faced stranger agreed. It was Death you saw. I'll be back tonight, Jessie. And tomorrow night I'll have your rings in my case with the rest of my pretty things . . . my souvenirs.
Jessie realized she was shivering violently, as if she had caught a chill. Her wide eyes looked helplessly into the empty corner where the
(space cowboy gangster of love)
had stood, the corner which was now bright with morning sunshine but would be dark with tangles of shadow tonight. Knots of gooseflesh had begun to pop up on her skin. The inescapable truth came again: she was probably going to die here.
Eventually someone will find you, Jessie, but it might take a long time. The first assumption will be that the two of you are off on some wild romantic fling, Why not? Didn't you and Gerald give every outward appearance of second-decade wedded bliss? It was only the two of you who knew that, at the end, Gerald could get it up with any reliability only if you were handcuffed to the bed. Sort of makes you wonder if someone played a few little games with him on the day of the eclipse, doesn't it?
"Stop talking," she muttered. "All of you, stop talking."
But sooner or later people will get nervous and start hunting for you. It'll probably be Gerald's colleagues who actually get the wheels turning, don't you think? I mean, there are a couple of women in Portland you call friends, but you've never really let them inside your life, have you? Acquaintances is really all they are, ladies to have tea with and swap catalogues with. None of them are going to worry much if you drop out of sight for a week or ten days. But Gerald will have appointments, and when he doesn't show up by Friday noon, I think some of his bullpen buddies will start making phone calls and asking questions. Yes, that's the way it will probably start, but I think it'll probably be the caretaker who actually discovers the bodies, don't you? I bet he'll turn his face away while he's throwing the spare blanket from the closet shelf over you, Jessie. He won't want to see the way your fingers stick out of the handcuffs, as stiff as pencils and as white as candles. He won't want to look at your frozen mouth, or the foam long since dried to scales on your lips. Most o
f all he won't want to look at the expression of horror in your eyes, so he'll shift his own eyes to the side while he covers you up.
Jessie moved her head from side to side in a slow, hopeless gesture of negation.
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 staring 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.
"Oh please, can't you quit?" Jessie moaned. "No more voices, please, no more voices."
But this voice wouldn't stop; wouldn't even acknowledge her. It just went on and on, whispering directly into her mind from someplace far down on her brain-stem. Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.
They'll take 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 ofyour last meal--the salami-and-cheese sub from Ama-to'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--