CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

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 exticement 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.

I can’t! she cried. I’ve tried everything! I can’t get out on my own!

You forget 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 gabardine slacks 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.