The dog stepped back as delicately as a dancer in a movie musical, its good ear cocked, the meat dangling from its jaws. Then it turned and trotted quickly from the room. The flies were beginning resettlement operations even before it was out of sight. Jessie leaned her head back against the mahogany crossboards and closed her eyes. She began praying again, but this time it was not escape she prayed for. This time she prayed that God would take her quickly and mercifully, before the sun went down and the white-faced stranger came back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The next four hours were the worst of Jessie Burlingame’s life. The cramps in her muscles grew steadily more frequent and more intense, but it wasn’t intramuscular pain that made the hours between eleven and three so terrible; it was her mind’s stubborn, gruesome refusal to relinquish its hold on lucidity and go into the dark. She had read Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in junior high school, but not until now had she grasped the real horror of its opening lines: Nervous! True, very nervous I am and have been, but why will you say I am mad?
Madness would be a relief, but madness would not come. Neither would sleep. Death might beat them both, and dark certainly would. She could only lie on the bed, existing in a dull olive-drab reality shot through with occasional gaudy blasts of pain as her muscles cramped up. The cramps mattered, and so did her horrible, tiresome sanity, but little else seemed to certainly the world outside this room had ceased to hold any real meaning for her. In fact, she came strongly to believe that there was no world outside this room, that all the people who had once filled it had gone back to some existential Central Casting office, and all the scenery had been packed away like stage-flats after one of Ruth’s beloved college drama society productions.
Time was a cold sea through which her consciousness forged like a waddling, graceless icebreaker. Voices came and went like phantoms. Most spoke inside her head, but for awhile Nora Callighan talked to her from the bathroom, and at another point Jessie had a conversation with her mother, who seemed to be lurking in the hall. Her mother had come to tell her that Jessie never would have gotten into a mess like this if she had been better about picking up her clothes. “If I had a nickel for every slip I ever fished out of the corner and turned rightside-out,” her mother said, “I could buy the Cleveland Gas Works.” This had been a favorite saying of her mother’s, and Jessie realized now that none of them had ever asked her why she would want the Cleveland Gas Works.
She continued to exercise weakly, pedaling with her feet and pumping her arms up and down as far as the handcuffs-and her own flagging strength-would allow. She no longer did this to keep her body ready for escape when the right option finally occurred to her, because she had finally come to understand, in her heart and in her head, that there were no options left. The jar of face cream had been the last. She was exercising now only because the movement seemed to alleviate the cramps a little.
In spite of the exercise, she could feel coldness creeping into her feet and hands, settling onto her skin like a skim of ice and then working its way in. This was nothing like the gone-to-sleep feeling with which she had awakened this morning; it was more like the frostbite she had suffered during a long afternoon of cross-country skiing as a teenager-sinister gray spots on the back of one hand and on the flesh of her calf where her legging hadn’t quite covered, dead spots that seemed impervious to even the baking heat of the fireplace. She supposed this numbness would finally overwhelm the cramps and that, in the end, her death might turn out to be quite merciful after all-like going to sleep in a snowbank-but it was moving much too slowly.
Time passed but it wasn’t time; it was just a relentless, unchanging flow of information passing from her sleepless senses to her eerily lucid mind. There was only the bedroom, the scenery outside (the last few stage-flats, yet to be packed away by the propmaster in charge of this shitty little production), the buzz of flies turning Gerald into a late-season incubator, and the slow movement of the shadows along the floor as the sun made its way across a painted autumn sky. Every now and then a cramp would stab into one of her armpits like an icepick or pound a thick steel nail into her right side. As the afternoon wore endlessly along, the first cramps began to strike into her belly, where all hunger pangs had now ceased, and into the overstressed tendons of her diaphragm. These latter were the worst, freezing the sheath of muscles in her chest and locking down her lungs. She stared up at the reflected water-ripples on the ceiling with agonized, bulging eyes as each one struck, arms and legs trembling with effort as she tried to continue breathing until the cramp eased. It was like being buried up to the neck in cold wet cement.
Hunger passed but thirst did not, and as that endless day turned about her, she came to realize that simple thirst (only that and nothing more) might accomplish what the increasing levels of pain and even the fact of her own oncoming death hadn’t been able to: it might drive her mad. It wasn’t just her throat and mouth now; every part of her body cried out for water. Even her eyeballs were thirsty, and the sight of the ripples dancing on the ceiling to the left of the skylight made her groan softly.
With these very real perils closing in on her, the terror she had felt of the space cowboy should have waned or disappeared entirely, but as the afternoon drew on, she found the white-faced stranger weighing more heavily on her mind rather than less. She saw its shape constantly, standing just beyond the small circle of light which enclosed her reduced consciousness, and although she could make out little more than its general shape (thin to the point of emaciation), she found she could see the sunken sickly grin that curved its mouth with greater and greater clarity as the sun dragged its harrow of hours into the west. In her ear she heard the dusty murmur of the bones and jewels as its hand stirred them in its old-fashioned case.
It would come for her. When it was dark it would come. The dead cowboy, the outsider, the specter of love.
You did see it, Jessie. It was Death, and you did see it, as people who die in the lonely places often do, Of course they do; it’s stamped on their twisted faces, and you can read it in their bulging eyes. It was Old Cowboy Death, and tonight when the sun goes down, he’ll be back for you.
Shortly after three, the wind, which had been calm all day, began to pick up. The back door began to bang restlessly against the jamb again. Not long after, the chainsaw quit and she could hear the faint sound of wind-driven wavelets slapping against the rocks along the shore. The loon did not raise its voice; perhaps it had decided the time had come to fly south, or at least relocate to a part of the lake where the screaming lady could not be heard.
It’s just me now. Until the other one gets here, at least.
She no longer made any effort to believe her dark visitor was only imagination; things had gone much too far for that.
A fresh cramp sank long, bitter teeth into her left armpit, and she pulled her cracked lips back in a grimace. It was like having your heart poked with the tines of a barbecue fork. Then the muscles just below her breasts tightened and the bundle of nerves in her solar plexus seemed to ignite like a pile of dry sticks. This pain was new, and it was enormous-far beyond anything she had experienced thus far. It bent her backward like a greenwood stick, torso twisting from side to side, knees snapping open and shut. Her hair flew in clots and clumps. She tried to scream and couldn’t. For a moment she was sure this was it, the end of the line. One final convulsion, as powerful as six sticks of dynamite planted in a granite ledge, and out you go, Jessie; cashier’s on your right.