You won’t, Punkin said. I swear you won’t. Just go for it before youlose your courage.

She flexed her right arm once, then raised the fingers toward her face. She looked at them, closely. The shakes were abating again, not enough to suit her, but she couldn’t wait. She was afraid she would black out if she did.

She reached out with her faintly trembling hand, and came very close to pushing the remaining key over the edge of the bureau in her first effort to grip it. It was the numbness-the goddam numbness that simply wouldn’t leave her fingers. She took a deep breath, held it, made a fist in spite of the pain and the fresh flow of blood it provoked, then let the air out of her lungs in a long, whistling sigh. She felt a little better. This time she pressed her first finger to the small head of the key and dragged it toward the edge of the bureau instead of trying to pick it up immediately. She didn’t stop until it was sticking out over the edge.

If you drop it, Jessie! the Goodwife moaned. Oh, if you drop thisone, too!

“Shut up, Goody,” Jessie said, and pushed her thumb up against the bottom of the key, creating a pincers. Then, trying not to think at all about what was going to happen to her if this went wrong, she lifted the key and brought it to the cuff. There was a bad run of seconds when she was unable to align the shaking barrel of the key with the lock, and a worse one when the lock itself momentarily doubled… then quadrupled. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, took another deep breath, then popped them open. Now she saw only one lock again, and she jabbed the key into it before her eyes could do any more tricks.

“Okay,” she breathed. “Let’s see.”

She applied clockwise pressure. Nothing happened. Panic tried to jump up into her throat, and then she suddenly remembered the rusty old pickup truck Bill Dunn drove on his caretaking rounds, and the joke sticker on the back bumper: LEFTY LOOSEY, RIGHTY TIGHTY, it said. Above the words was a drawing of a large screw.

“Lefty loosey,” Jessie muttered, and tried turning the key counter-clockwise. For one moment she did not understand that the cuff had popped open; she thought the loud click she heard was the sound of the key breaking off in the lock, and she shrieked, sending a spray of blood from her cut mouth to the top of the dresser. Some of it spattered Gerald’s tie, red on red. Then she saw the notched latch-lock was standing open, and realized she had done it-she had actually done it.

Jessie Burlingame pulled her left hand, a little puffy around the wrist but otherwise unharmed, free of the open cuff, which fell back against the headboard as its mate had done. Then, with an expression of deep, wondering awe, she raised both hands slowly up to her face. She looked from the left to the right and back to the left again. She was unmindful of the fact that the right was covered with blood; it was not blood she was interested in, at least not yet. For the moment she only wanted to make absolutely sure she was really free.

She looked back and forth between her hands for almost thirty seconds, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a Ping-Pong match. Then she drew in a deep breath, cocked her head back, and uttered another high-pitched, drilling shriek. She felt a fresh wave of darkness, big and smooth and vicious, thunder through her, but she ignored it and went on shrieking. It seemed to her that she had no choice; it was either shriek or die. The brittle broken-glass edge of madness in that shriek was unmistakable, but it was still a scream of utter triumph and victory. Two hundred yards away, in the woods at the head of the driveway, the former Prince lifted its head from its muzzle and looked uneasily toward the house.

She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off her hands, couldn’t seem to stop shrieking. She had never felt anything remotely like what she was feeling now, and some distant part of her thought: If sexwas even half this good, people would be doing it on every streetcorner they just wouldn’t be able to help themselves.

Then she ran out of breath and swayed backward. She grabbed for the headboard, but a moment too late-she lost her balance and spilled onto the bedroom floor. As she went down, Jessie realized that part of her had been expecting the handcuff chains to snub her before she fell. Pretty funny, when you thought about it.

She struck the open wound on the inside of her wrist as she landed. Pain. lit up her right arm like the lights on a Christmas tree and this time when she screamed it was all pain. She bit it off quickly when she felt herself drifting away from consciousness again. She opened her eyes and stared into her husband’s torn face. Gerald looked back at her with an expression of endless, glazed surprise-This wasn’t supposed to happen to me, I’m a lawyer with myname on the door. Then the fly which had been washing its front legs on his upper lip disappeared up one of his nostrils and Jessie turned her head so quickly she thumped it on the floorboards and saw stars. When she opened her eyes this time, she was looking up at the headboard, with its gaudy drips and tunnels of blood. Had she been standing way up there only a few seconds ago? She was pretty sure she had been, but it was hard to believe-from here, the fucking bed looked approximately as tall as the Chrysler Building.

Get moving, Jess! It was Punkin, once more yelling in that urgent, annoying voice of hers. For someone with such a sweet little face, Punkin could certainly be a bitch when she set her mind to it.

“Not a bitch,” she said, letting her eyes slip closed. A small, dreamy smile touched the corners of her mouth. “A squeaky wheel.”

Get moving, damn it!

Can’t. Need a little rest first.

If you don’t get moving right away, you can rest forever! Now shag Your fat ass!

That got to her. “Nothing fat about it, Miss Smartmouth,” she muttered pettishly, and tried to struggle to her feet. It took only two efforts (the second thwarted by another of those paralyzing cramps across her diaphragm) to convince her that getting up was, at least for the time being, a bad idea. And doing so would actually create more problems than it would solve, because she needed to get into the bathroom, and the foot of the bed now lay across the doorway like a roadblock.

Jessie went under the bed, moving with a gliding, swimming motion that was almost graceful, blowing a few errant dust bunnies out of her way as she went. They drifted off like small gray tumbleweeds. For some reason the dust bunnies made her think of the woman in her vision again-the woman kneeling in the blackberry tangles with her slip in a white pile beside her. She slid into the gloom of the bathroom and a new smell smote her nostrils: the dark, mossy smell of water. Water dripping from the tub faucets; water dripping from the shower head; water dripping from the washbasin taps. She could even smell the peculiar waiting-to-be mildew odor of a damp towel in the basket behind the door. Water, water, everywhere, and every drop to drink. Her throat shrank dryly inside her neck, seeming to cry out, and she became aware that she was actually touching water-a small puddle from the leaky pipe under the sink, the one the plumber never seemed to get to no matter how many times he was asked. Gasping, Jessie pulled herself over to the puddle, dropped her head, and began to lick the linoleum. The taste of the water was indescribable, the silky feel of it on her lips and tongue beyond all dreams of sweet sensuousness.

The only problem was that there wasn’t enough. That enchantingly dank, enchantingly green smell was all around her, but the puddle below the sink was gone and her thirst wasn’t slaked but only awake. That smell, the smell of shady springs and old hidden wellheads, did what even Punkin’s voice hadn’t been able to it got Jessie on her feet again.