by Stephen King
Jessie drove her head back against the headboard hard enough to send a school of big white fish exploding across her field of vision. It hurt--it hurt a lot--but the mind-voice cut out like a radio in a power-failure, and that made it worth it.
"There," she said. "And if you start up again, I'll do that again. I'm not kidding, either. I'm tired of listening to--"
Now it was her own voice, speaking unselfconsciously aloud in the empty room, that cut out like a radio in a power-failure. As the spots before her eyes began to fade, she saw the morning sunlight glinting off something which lay about eighteen inches beyond Gerald's outstretched hand. It was a small white object with a narrow thread of gold twisting up through the center, making it look like the yin-yang symbol. At first Jessie thought it was a finger-ring, but it was really too small for that. Not a finger-ring but a pearl earring. It had dropped to the floor while her visitor had been stirring the contents of its case around, showing them off to her.
"No," she whispered. "No, not possible."
But it was there, glinting in the morning sunshine and every bit as real as the dead man who seemed almost to be pointing at it: a pearl earring spliced with a delicate glint of gold.
It's one of mine! It spilled out of my jewelry box, it's been there since the summer, and I'm just noticing it now!
Except that she only owned one set of pearl earrings, they had no gold highlights, and they were back in Portland, anyway.
Except that the men from Skip's had been in to wax the floors the week after Labor Day, and if there had been an earring left on the floor, one of them would have picked it up and put it either on the dresser or in his own pocket.
Except there was something else, too.
No there's not. There's not, and don't you dare say there is.
It was just beyond the orphan earring.
Even if there was, I wouldn't look at it.
Except she couldn't not look at it. Her eyes moved past the earring of their own accord and fixed on the floor just inside the door to the front hall. There was a little spot of dried blood there, but it wasn't the blood which had caught her attention. The blood belonged to Gerald. The blood was all right. It was the footprint beside it that worried her.
If there was a track there, it was there before!
Much as Jessie wished she could believe that, the track had not been there before. Yesterday there hadn't been a single scuff on this floor, let alone a foot-track. Nor had she or Gerald left the one she was looking at. That was a shoe-shaped ring of dried mud, probably from the overgrown path that meandered along the shore of the lake for a mile or so before cutting back into the woods and heading south, toward Motton.
Someone had been in the bedroom with her last night after all, it seemed.
As this thought settled inexorably into Jessie's overstrained mind, she began to scream. Outside, on the back stoop, the stray lifted its scuffed, scratched muzzle from its paws for a moment. It cocked its good ear. Then it lost interest and lowered its head again. It wasn't as if the noise were being made by anything dangerous, after all; it was only the bitchmaster. Besides, the smell of the dark thing which had come in the night was on her now. It was one the stray was very familiar with. It was the smell of death.
The former Prince closed its eyes and went back to sleep.
25
At last she began to get herself under some kind of control again. She did this, absurdly enough, by reciting Nora Callighan's little mantra.
"One is for feet," she said, her dry voice cracking and wavering in the empty bedroom, "ten little toes, cute little piggies, all in a row. Two is for legs, lovely and long, three is my sex, where everything's wrong."
She pushed steadily on, reciting the couplets she could remember, skipping the ones she couldn't, keeping her eyes closed. She went through the whole thing half a dozen times. She was aware that her heartbeat was slowing down and the worst of her terror was once more draining away, but she had no conscious awareness of the radical change she had made in at least one of Nora's jangly little couplets.
After the sixth repetition she opened her eyes and looked about the room like a woman who has just awakened from a short, restful nap. She avoided the corner by the bureau, however. She didn't want to look at the earring again, and she most certainly didn't want to look at the footprint.
Jessie? The voice was very soft, very tentative. Jessie thought it was the voice of the Goodwife, now drained of both its shrill ardor and its feverish denial. Jessie, can I say something?
"No," she responded immediately in her harsh dust-in-the-cracks voice. "Take a hike. I want to be done with all you bitches."
Please, Jessie. Please listen to me.
She closed her eyes and found she could actually see that part of her personality she had come to call Goody Burlingame. Goody was still in the stocks, but now she raised her head--an act that couldn't have been easy with the cruel wooden restraint pressing into the back of her neck. Her hair fell away from her face momentarily, and Jessie was surprised to see not the Goodwife but a young girl.
Yeah, but she's still me, Jessie thought, and almost laughed. If this wasn't a case of comic-book psychology, she didn't know what was. She had just been thinking about Nora, and one of Nora's favorite hobbyhorses was about how people had to care for "the child inside." Nora claimed that the most common reason for unhappiness was failure to feed and nurture that interior child.
Jessie had nodded solemnly at all this, keeping her belief that the idea was mostly sentimental Aquarian/ New Age slop to herself. She had liked Nora, after all, and although she thought Nora had held onto a few too many sets of mental love-beads from the late sixties and early seventies, she was clearly seeing Nora's "child inside" now, and that seemed perfectly all right. Jessie supposed that the concept might even have some symbolic validity, and under the circumstances, the stocks made a hell of an apt image, didn't they? The person in them was the Goodwife-in-waiting, the Ruth-in-waiting, the Jessie-in-waiting. She was the little girl her father had called Punkin.
"So talk," Jessie said. Her eyes were still closed, and a combination of stress, hunger, and thirst had combined to make the vision of the girl in the stocks almost exquisitely real. Now she could see the words FOR SEXUAL ENTICEMENT written on a sheet of vellum nailed above the girl's head. The words were written in candy-pink Peppermint Yum-Yum lipstick, of course.
Nor was her imagination done yet. Next to Punkin was another set of stocks, with another girl in them. This one was perhaps seventeen, and fat. Her complexion was blotched with pimples. Behind the prisoners, a town common appeared, and after a moment Jessie could see a few cows grazing on it. Someone was ringing a bell--over the next hill, it sounded like--with monotonous regularity, as if the ringer intended to keep it up all day . . . or at least until the cows came home.
You're losing your mind, Jess, she thought faintly, and she supposed this was true but unimportant. She might even count it among her blessings before much longer. She pushed the thought away and turned her attention back to the girl in the stocks. As she did, she found her exasperation had been replaced by tenderness and anger. This version of Jessie Mahout was older than the one who had been molested during the eclipse, but not much older--twelve, perhaps, fourteen at the outside. At her age she had no business being in stocks on the town common for any crime, but sexual enticement? Sexual enticement, for heaven's sake? What kind of bad joke was that? How could people be so cruel? So willfully blind?
What do you want to tell me, Punkin?
Only that it's real, the girl in the stocks said. Her face was pale with pain, but her eyes were grave and concerned and lucid. It's real, you know it is, and it will be back tonight. I think that this time it will do more than just look. You have to get out of the handcuffs before the sun goes down, Jessie. You have to be out of this house before it comes back.
Once again she wanted to cry, but there were no tears; there was nothing but that dry, sandpapery sting.
&
nbsp; I can't! she cried. I've tried everything! I can't get out on my own!
You forgot one thing, the girl in the stocks told her. I don't know if it's important or not, but it might be.
What?
The girl turned her hands over inside the holes which held them, exposing her clean pink palms. He said there were two kinds, remember? M-17 and F-23. You almost remembered yesterday, I think. He wanted F-23s, but they don't make many and they're hard to get, so he had to settle for two pairs of M-17s. You do remember, don't you? He told you all about it on the day he brought the handcuffs home.
She opened her eyes and looked at the cuff which enclosed her right wrist. Yes, he certainly had told her all about it; had, in fact, babbled like a coke addict on a two-pipe high, beginning with a late-morning call from the office. He'd wanted to know if the house was empty--he could never remember which days the housekeeper had off--and when she assured him it was, he had asked her to slip into something comfortable. "Something that's almost there" was the way he'd put it. She remembered being intrigued. Even over the phone, Gerald had sounded ready to blow a fuse, and she had suspected he was thinking kinky. That was all right with her; they were closing in on their forties, and if Gerald wanted to experiment a little, she was willing enough to accommodate him.
He had arrived in record time (he must have left all three miles of the 295 city bypass smoking behind him, she thought), and what Jessie remembered best about that day was how he had gone bustling about the bedroom, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling. Sex wasn't the first thing that came to her mind when she thought of Gerald (in a word-association test, security would probably have popped out first), but that day the two things had been all but interchangeable. Certainly sex had been the only thing on his mind; Jessie believed his usually polite attorney's pecker would have ripped the fly out of his natty pinstripe trousers if he'd been any slower getting them off.
Once they and the shorts beneath had been discarded, he had slowed down a little, ceremoniously opening the Adidas sneaker box he'd brought upstairs with him. He brought out the two sets of handcuffs which had been inside and held them up for her inspection. A pulse had been fluttering in his throat, a flickery little movement almost as fast as a hummingbird's wing. She remembered that, too. Even then his heart must have been under a strain.
You would have done me a big favor, Gerald, if you'd popped your cork right then and there.
She wanted to be horrified at this unkind thought about the man with whom she had shared so much of her life, and found the most she could manage was an almost clinical self-disgust. And when her thoughts returned to how he'd looked that day--those flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes--her hands curled quietly into hard little fists.
"Why couldn't you leave me alone?" she asked him now. "Why did you have to be such a prick about it? Such a bully?"
Never mind. Don't think about Gerald; think about the cuffs. Two sets of Kreig Security Hand Restraints, size M-17. The M designation for Male; the 17 for the number of notches on the latch-locks.
A sensation of bright heat bloomed in her stomach and chest. Don't feel that, she told herself, and if you absolutely have to feel it, pretend it's indigestion.
That was impossible, however. It was hope she felt, and it wouldn't be denied. The best she could do was balance it with reality, keep reminding herself of her first failed attempt to squeeze out of the cuffs. Yet in spite of her efforts to remember the pain and the failure, what she found herself thinking about was how close --how fucking close--she had come to escape. Another quarter of an inch might have been enough to turn the trick, she had thought then, and a half would have done it for sure. The bony outcrops below her thumbs were a problem, yes, but was she actually going to die on this bed because she was unable to bridge a gap not much wider than her upper lip? Surely not.
Jessie made a strong effort to set these thoughts aside and return her mind to the day Gerald had brought the cuffs home. To how he had held them up with the wordless awe of a jeweler displaying the finest diamond necklace to ever pass through his hands. She had been fairly impressed with them herself, come to that. She remembered how shiny they had been, and how the light from the window had pricked gleams of light off the blued steel of the cuffs and the notched curves of the latch-locks which allowed one to adjust the handcuffs to wrists of various sizes.
She'd wanted to know where he had gotten them-- it was a matter of simple curiosity, not accusation--but all he would tell her was that one of the courthouse sharpies had helped him out. He dropped her a hazy little half-wink when he said it, as if there were dozens of these shifty fellows drifting through the various halls and antechambers of the Cumberland County Courthouse, and he knew them all. In fact, he'd behaved that afternoon as if it had been a couple of Scud missiles he'd scored instead of two pairs of handcuffs.
She had been lying on the bed, dressed in a white lace teddy and matching silk hose, an ensemble which was most definitely almost there, watching him with a mixture of amusement, curiosity, and excitement . . . but amusement had held the pole position that day, hadn't it? Yes. Seeing Gerald, who always tried so hard to be Mr. Cool, go striding around the room like a horse in heat had struck her as very amusing indeed. His hair had been frizzed up in the wild corkscrews Jessie's kid brother used to call "chickens," and he'd still been wearing his black nylon dress-for-success socks. She remembered biting the insides of her cheeks--and quite hard, too--to keep her smile from showing.
Mr. Cool had been talking .faster than an auctioneer at a bankruptcy sale that afternoon. Then, all at once, he had stopped in mid-spiel. An expression of comic surprise had overspread his face.
"Gerald, what's wrong?" she had asked.
"I just realized that I don't know if you even want to consider this," he had replied. "I've been prattling on and on, I'm just about frothing at the you-know-what, as you can plainly see, and I never once asked you if--"
She had smiled then, partially because she'd gotten very bored with the scarves and hadn't known how to tell him, but mostly just because it was good to see him excited about sex again. All right, it was maybe a little weird to get turned on by the idea of locking your wife up in handcuffs before going deep-sea diving with the long white pole. So what? It was just between the two of them, wasn't it, and it was all in fun--really no more than an X-rated comic opera. Gilbert and Sullivan Do Bondage, I'm just a handcuffed lay-dee in the King's Nay-vee. Besides, there were weirder kinks; Frieda Soames from across the street had once confessed to Jessie (after two drinks before lunch and half a bottle of wine during) that her ex-husband had enjoyed being powdered and diapered.
Biting the insides of her cheeks hadn't worked the second time, and she had burst out laughing. Gerald had looked at her with his head cocked slightly to the right and a little smile tilting up the left corner of his mouth. It was an expression she had come to know well over the last seventeen years--it meant he was either preparing to be angry or to laugh along with her. It was usually impossible to tell which way he would tip.
"Want to share?" he'd asked.
She hadn't replied immediately. She stopped laughing instead and fixed him with what she hoped was an expression worthy of the meanest Nazi bitch-goddess ever to grace the cover of a Man's Adventure magazine. When she felt she had achieved the right degree of icy hauteur, she raised her arms and said five uncalculated words which had brought him leaping across to the bed, obviously dizzy with excitement:
"Get over here, you bastard."
In no time at all he had been fumbling the cuffs onto her wrists and then attaching them to the bedposts. There were no slats on the headboard in the master bedroom of the Portland house; if he had suffered his heart attack there, she could have slipped the cuffs right off the tops of the posts. As he panted and fussed over the cuffs, one knee rubbing delightfully against her down below while he did it, he talked. And one of the things he had told her was about M and F, and how the latch-locks worked. He had wanted Fs, he told her, be
cause the female cuffs had latch-locks with twenty-three notches instead of seventeen, the number most male cuffs had. More notches meant the female cuffs would close smaller. They were hard to come by, though, and when his courthouse friend had told Gerald he could get him two sets of men's hand restraints at a very reasonable price, Gerald had jumped at the chance.
"Some women can pull right out of men's cuffs," he'd told her, "but you're fairly big-boned. Besides, I didn't want to wait. Now ... let's just see . . ."
He had snapped the cuff on her right wrist, pushing the latch-lock in fast at first but slowing down as he approached the end, asking her if he was hurting her as each notch clicked past. It was fine all the way to the last notch, but when he had asked her to try and get out, she hadn't been able to do so. Her wrist had slipped most of the way through the cuff, all right, and Gerald had told her later that not even that was supposed to happen, but when it bound up along the back of her hand and at the base of her thumb, his comical expression of anxiety had faded.
"I think they're going to do just fine," he had said. She remembered that very well, and she remembered what he'd said next even more clearly: "We're going to have a lot of fun with these."
With the memory of that day still vivid in the front of her mind, Jessie once again began to apply downward pressure, trying to somehow shrink her hands enough so she could yank them through the cuffs. The pain struck sooner this time, starting not in her hands but in the overtaxed muscles of her shoulders and arms. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, bore down harder, and tried to shut out the hurt.
