The cramp in her side gave a final deep pinch and then began to loosen. Jessie noted its departure no more than she had noted the loss of her primitive glass scalpel. She could feel the force of her concentration--her mind seemed to burn with it, like a torch coated with pine resin--and all of it was fixed on her right hand. She held it up, examining it, in the golden sunlight of late afternoon. The fingers were thickly streaked with gore. Her forearm appeared to have been daubed with slobbers of bright red latex paint. The handcuff was little more than a curved shape rising out of the general flood, and Jessie knew it was as good as it was going to be. She cocked her arm and then pulled downward, as she had twice before. The handcuff slid ... slid some more ... and then bound up again. It had been stopped once more by the obdurate outcrop of bone below the thumb.
"No!" she shrieked, and yanked harder. "I refuse to die this way! Do you hear me? I REFUSE TO DIE THIS WAY!"
The handcuff bit in deep, and for a moment Jessie was sickeningly sure that it would not move so much as another millimeter, that the next time it moved would be when some cigar-chomping cop unlocked it and took it off her dead body. She could not move it, no power on earth could move it, and neither the princes of heaven nor the potentates of hell would move it.
Then there was a sensation in the back of her wrist that felt like heat-lightning, and the handcuff jerked upward a little. It stopped, then began to move again. That hot, electrical tingle began to spread as it did, quickly becoming a dark burning which first spread all the way around her hand like a bracelet and then bit in like a battalion of hungry red ants.
The cuff was moving because the skin it rested on was moving, sliding the way a heavy object on a rug will slide if someone pulls the rug. The ragged, circular cut she had inscribed about her wrist widened, pulling wet strands of tendon across the gap and creating a red bracelet. The skin on the back of her hand began to wrinkle and bunch ahead of the cuff, and now what she thought of was how the coverlet had looked when she had pushed it down to the bottom of the bed with her pedaling feet.
I'm peeling my hand, she thought. Oh dear Jesus, I'm peeling it like an orange.
"Let go!" she screamed at the handcuff, suddenly infuriated beyond all reason. In that moment it became a live thing to her, some hateful clinging creature with many teeth, like a lamprey eel or a rabid weasel. "Oh, won't you ever let me go?"
The cuff had slid much further than it had on her previous attempts to slip out of it, but still it clung, stubbornly refusing to give her that last quarter (or perhaps it was now only an eighth) of an inch. The bleary, blood-greased circle of steel now lay across a hand partially stripped of skin, baring a shiny meshwork of tendons the color of fresh plums. The back of her hand looked like a turkey drumstick from which the crispy outer skin has been removed. The steady downward pressure she was exerting had yanked the wound across her inner wrist even wider, creating a blood-caked chasm. Jessie wondered if she might not yank her hand right off in this final effort to free herself. And now the handcuff, which had still been moving a tittle--at least she thought it had been--stopped again. And this time it stopped cold.
Of course it has, Jessie! Punkin screamed. Look at it! It's all crooked! If you could straighten it out again--
Jessie pistoned her arm forward, snapping the handcuff chain back onto her wrist. Then, before her arm could even think of cramping, she pulled downward again, using every bit of strength she had left. A red mist of pain engulfed her hand as the cuff tore across the raw meat between her wrist and the middle of her hand. All the skin which had been pulled away was puddled loosely here, on a diagonal running from the base of her pinky to the base of her thumb. For a moment this loose mass of skin held the cuff back, and then it rolled under the steel with a tiny squelch. That left only that last outcrop of bone, but that was enough to stop her progress. Jessie pulled harder. Nothing happened.
That's it, she thought. Everybody out of the pool.
Then, just as she was about to relax her aching arm, the cuff slid over the small protrusion which had held it for so long, flew off the ends of her fingers, and clacked against the bedpost. It all happened so fast that Jessie was at first unable to grasp that it had happened. Her hand no longer looked like the sort of equipment normally issued to human beings, but it was her hand, and it was free.
Free.
Jessie looked from the empty blood-smeared cuff to her mangled hand, her face slowly filling with comprehension. Looks like a bird that flew into a factory machine and then got spit out the other end, she thought, but that cuffs not on it anymore. It's really not.
"Can't believe it," she croaked. "Can't. Fucking. Believe it."
Never mind, Jessie. You have to hurry.
She started like someone being shaken awake from a doze. Hurry? Yes indeed. She didn't know how much blood she had lost--a pint seemed a reasonable enough guess, judging from the sodden mattress and the streamlets running and dripping down the crossboards--but she knew that if she lost much more she was going to pass out, and the trip from unconsciousness to death would be a short one--just a quick ferry-ride across a narrow river.
Not going to happen, she thought. It was the tough-as-nails voice again, but this time it belonged to no one but her, and that made Jessie happy. I didn't go through all this nasty shit just to die passed out on the floor. I haven't seen the paperwork, but I'm pretty sure that isn't in my contract.
All right, but your legs--
It was a reminder she didn't really need. She hadn't been on her pins in over twenty-four hours, and despite her efforts to keep them waked up, it could be a bad mistake to depend on them too much, at least to begin with. They might cramp up; they might try to buckle under her; they might do both. But forewarned was forearmed ... or so they said. Of course she had gotten a lot of advice like that in the course of her lifetime (advice most often ascribed to that mysterious, ubiquitous group known as "they"), and nothing she had ever seen on Firing Line or read in the Reader's Digest had prepared her for what she had just done. Still, she would be as careful as she could. Jessie had an idea she might not have a lot of leeway in that regard, however.
She rolled left, her right arm trailing after her like the tail of a kite or the rusty exhaust-pipe of an old car. The only part of it that felt completely alive was the back of her hand, where the exposed packets of tendon burned and raved. The pain was bad, and that sense that her right arm wanted a divorce from the rest of her body was worse, but these things were all but lost in an uprush of mingled hope and triumph. She felt an almost divine joy in her ability to roll across the bed without being stopped by the cuff around her wrist. Another cramp struck her, slamming into her lower belly like the business end of a Louisville Slugger, but she ignored it. Had she called that feeling joy? Oh, that was much too mild a word. It was ecstasy. Full, flat-out ecsta--
Jessie! The edge of the bed! Jesus, stop!
It didn't look like the edge of the bed; it looked like the edge of the world on one of those old-fashioned maps from before the time of Columbus. Beyond here there be monsters and sarpents, she thought. Not to mention a fractured left wrist. Stop, Jess!
But her body ignored the command; it kept on rolling, cramps and all, and Jessie had just enough time to rotate her left hand inside the left cuff before she thumped onto her belly at the edge of the bed, then went off it entirely. Her toes hit the floor with a jarring smash, but her scream was not entirely one of pain. Her feet were, after all, on the floor again. They were actually on the floor.
She finished her clumsy escape from the bed with her left arm stuck stiffly off in the direction of the post to which it was still tethered and her right arm temporarily trapped between her chest and the side of the bed. She could feel warm blood pumping onto her skin and running down her breasts.
Jessie got her face over to one side, then had to wait in this new, agonizing position as a cramp of paralyzing, glassy intensity gripped her back from the nape of her neck to the cleft of her buttocks. The
sheet against which her breasts and lacerated hand were pressed was growing soggy with blood.
I have to get up, she thought. I have to get up right away, or I'll bleed to death right here.
The cramp in her back passed and at last she found herself able to plant her feet solidly beneath her. Her legs felt nowhere near as weak and swoony as she had been afraid they might be; in fact, they felt absolutely eager to be about their appointed business. Jessie pushed upward. The shackle clipped around the left-hand bedpost slid up as far as it could before encountering the next-highest crossboard, and Jessie suddenly found herself in a position she had strongly come to suspect she would never attain again: standing on her own two feet, beside the bed which had been her prison... almost her coffin.
A feeling of enormous gratitude tried to wash over her, and she pushed against it as firmly as she had pushed against the panic. There might be time for gratitude later, but the things to remember right now were that she still wasn't free of the goddamned bed, and her time to get free was severely limited. It was true that she hadn't felt the slightest sensation of faintness or lightheadedness yet, but she had an idea that meant nothing. When the collapse came, it would probably come all at once; shoot out the lights.
Still, had standing up--onty that, and nothing more--ever been so great? So inexpressibly wonderful?
"Nope," Jessie croaked. "Don't think so."
Holding her right arm across her chest and keeping the wound in her inner wrist pressed tightly against the upper slope of her left breast, Jessie made a half-turn, placing her bottom against the wall. She was now standing next to the left side of the bed, in a position that looked almost like a soldier's parade rest. She took a long, deep breath, then asked her right arm and poor stripped right hand to go back to work.
The arm rose creakily, like the arm of an old and badly cared-for mechanical toy, and her hand settled on the bed-shelf. Her third and fourth fingers still refused to move at her command, but she was able to grip the shelf between her thumb and first two fingers well enough to tip it off its brackets. It landed on the mattress where she had lain for so many hours, the mattress where her outline still lay, a sunken, sweaty shape pressed into the pink quilting, its upper half partially traced in blood. Looking at that shape made Jessie feel sick and angry and afraid. Looking at it made her feel crazy.
She shifted her eyes from the mattress with the shelf now lying on it to her trembling right hand. She raised it to her mouth and used her teeth to grip the sliver of glass poking out from beneath the thumbnail. The glass slipped, then slid between an upper canine and incisor, slicing deeply into the tender pink meat of her gum. There was a quick, penetrating sting and Jessie felt blood spew into her mouth, its taste sweet-salty, its texture as thick as the cherry cough-syrup she'd had to swallow when she had the flu as a child. She paid no attention to this new cut--she'd made her peace with much worse in the last few minutes--but only reset her grip and drew the sliver smoothly free of her thumb. When it was out, she spat it onto the bed along with a mouthful of warm blood.
"Okay," she murmured, and began to wriggle her body in between the wall and the headboard, panting harshly as she did so.
The bed moved out from the wall more easily than she could have hoped for, but one thing she'd never questioned was that it would move, if she ever managed to get sufficient leverage. Now she had it, and began to herd the hateful bed across the waxed floor. Its foot slid off to the right as she went because she was only able to push on the left side, but Jessie had taken this into account and was comfortable with it. Had, in fact, made it a part of her rudimentary plan. When your luck changes, she thought, it changes all the way. You may have cut your upper gum all to shit, Jess, but you haven't stepped on a single piece of broken glass. So just keep moving this bed, sweetheart, and keep counting your bl--
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). Gerald refused to move. It was as if the chemical changes which were part of his decay had bonded him to the floor. The flies rose in a buzzing, disturbed cloud just above his distended midsection. That was all.
"Fuck it, then," Jessie said. She began to push the bed again. She managed to step over Gerald with her right foot, but her left came down squarely on his belly. The pressure created a ghastly buzzing sound in his throat and forced a brief but filthy breath of gas from his gaping mouth. "Excuse yourself, Gerald," she muttered, and then left him behind without another look. It was the bureau she was looking at now, the bureau with the keys resting on top of it.
As soon as she had left Gerald behind, the blanket of disturbed flies resettled and resumed their day's work. There was, after all, so much to do and so little time in which to do it.
32
Her biggest fear had been that the foot of the bed would try to hang up either in the bathroom door or the far corner of the room, making it necessary for her to back and fill like a woman trying to shoehorn a big car into a small parking space. As it turned out, the rightward-tending arc the bed described as she moved it slowly across the room was almost perfect. She only had to make a single mid-course correction, pulling her end of the bed a little farther to the left so she could be sure the other end would clear the bureau. It was while she was doing this--pulling with her head down and her butt out and both arms wrapped tightly around the bedpost--that she suffered her first bout of lightheadedness ... only as she lay with her weight against the post, looking like a woman who is so drunk and tired that she can only stand up by pretending to dance cheek-to-cheek with her boyfriend, she thought that darkheadedness would probably be a better way to describe it. The dominant feeling was one of loss--not just of thought and will but of sensory input as well. For one confused moment she was convinced that time had whiplashed, flinging her to a place that was neither Dark Score nor Kashwakamak but some other place entirely, a place that was on the ocean rather than any inland lake. The smell was no longer oysters and pennies but sea-salt. It was the day of the eclipse again, that was the only thing that was the same. She had run into the blackberry tangles to get away from some other man, some other Daddy who wanted to do a lot more than shoot his squirt on the back of her panties. And now he was at the bottom of the well.
Deja vu poured over her like strange water.
Oh Jesus, what is this? she thought, but there was no answer, only that puzzling image again, one she hadn't thought of since she had returned to the sheet-divided bedroom to change her clothes on the day of the eclipse: a skinny woman in a housedress, her dark hair put up in a bun, a puddle of white fabric beside her.
Whoa, Jessie thought, clutching at the bedpost with her tattered right hand and trying desperately to keep her knees from buckling. Hold on, Jessie--just hold on. Never mind the woman, never mind the smells, never mind the darkness. Hold on and the darkness will pass.
She did, and it did. The image of the skinny woman kneeling beside her slip and looking at the splintered hole in the old boards went first, and then the darkness began to fade. The bedroom brightened again, gradually taking on its former five o'clock autumn hue. She saw motes of dust dancing in the light slanting in through the lakeside windows, saw her own shadow-legs stretching acro
ss the floor. They broke at the knees so that the rest of her shadow could climb the wall. The darkness pulled back, but it left a high sweet buzzing in her ears. When she looked down at her feet she saw they too were coated with blood. She was walking in it, leaving tracks in it.
You're running out of time, Jessie.
She knew.
Jessie lowered her chest to the headboard again. Getting the bed started was harder this time, but she finally managed it. Two minutes later she was standing next to the bureau she had stared at so long and hopelessly from the other side of the room. A tiny dry smile quivered the corners of her lips. I'm like a woman who's spent her whole life dreaming of the black sands of Kona and can't believe it when she's finally standing on them, she thought. It seems like just another dream, only maybe a little more real than most, because in this one your nose itches.
Her nose didn't itch, but she was looking down at the crumpled snake of Gerald's tie and the knot was still in it. That last was the sort of detail even the most realistic dreams rarely supplied. Beside the red tie were two small, round-barrelled keys, clearly identical. The handcuff keys.