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S t e p h e n

KING

GERALD'S GAME

Hodder & Stoughton

LONDON SYDNEY AUCKLAND

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to include the following copyrighted material.

Directions Publishing Corporation.

York, New York. Used by permission.

'Can I Get A Witness' by Eddie Holland, Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier. Published by Stone Agate Musk.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

King, Stephen

Gerald's game.

1. Title

813.54 [F]

ISBN 0-340-57493-3

First published in Great Britain 1992

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and

retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting

restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,

90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. The right of Stephen King to be identified as the author of

this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Hodder and Stoughton,

a division of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd,

Mill Road, Dunton Green, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 2YA.

Editorial Office: 47 Bedford Square, London WCIB 3DP.

Photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent

This book is dedicated, with love and admiration, to six good women:

Margaret Spruce Morehouse

Catherine S pruce Graves

Stephanie Spruce Leonard

Anne Spruce Labree

Tabitha Spruce Ki ng

Marcella Spruce

(Sadie) gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn

of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her

answer.

'You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you.

Pigs! Pigs!'

— W. Somerset Maugham,

'Rain'

C H A P T E R O N E

Jessie could hear the back door banging lightly, randomly, in the October breeze blowing around

the house. The jamb always swelled in the fall and you really had to give the door a yank to shut

it. This time they had forgotten. She thought of telling Gerald to go back and shut the door before

they got too involved or that banging would drive her nuts. Then she thought how ridiculous that

would be, given the current circumstances. It would ruin the whole mood.

What mood?

A good question, that. And as Gerald turned the hollow barrel of the key in the second lock, as

she heard the minute click from above her left ear, she realized that, for her at least, the mood

wasn't worth preserving. That was why she had noted the unlatched door in the first place, of

course. For her, the sexual turn-on of the bondage games hadn't lasted long.

The same could not be said of Gerald, however. He was wearing only a pair of Jockey shorts

now, and she didn't have to look as high as his face to see that his interest continued unabated.

This is stupid, she thought, but stupid wasn't the whole story, either. It was also a little scary.

She didn't like to admit it, but there it was.

'Gerald, why don't we just forget this?'

He hesitated for a moment, frowning a little, then went on across the room to the dresser

which stood to the left of the bathroom door. His face cleared as he went. She watched him from

where she lay on the bed, her arms raised and splayed out, making her look a little like Fay Wray

chained up and waiting for the great ape in King Kong. Her wrists had been secured to the

mahogany bed-posts with two sets of handcuffs. The chains gave each hand about six inches'

worth of movement. Not much.

He put the keys on top of the bureau — two minute clicks, her ears seemed in exceptionally

fine working order for a Wednesday afternoon — and then turned back to her. Over his head,

sunripples from the lake danced and wavered on the bedroom's high white ceiling.

'What do you say? This has lost a lot of its charm for me.' And it never had that much to begin

with, she did not add.

He grinned. He had a heavy, pink-skinned face below a narrow wi dow's peak of hair as black

as a crow's wing, and that grin of his had always done something to her that she didn't much care

for. She couldn't quite put her finger on what that something was, but —

Oh, sure you can. It makes him look stupid. You can practically see his IQ going down ten

points for every inch that grin spreads. At its maximum width, your killer corporate lawyer of a

husband looks like a janitor on work-release from the local mental institution.

That was cruel, but not entirely inaccurate. But how did you t ell your husband of almost

twenty years that every time he grinned he looked as if he were suffering from light mental retar-

dation? The answer was simple, of course: you didn't. His smile was a different matter entirely.

He had a lovely smile — she guessed it was that smile, so warm and good-humored, which had

persuaded her to go out with him in the first place. It had reminded her of her father's smile when

he told his family amusing things about his day as he sipped a before-dinner gin and tonic.

This wasn't the smile, though. This was the grin — a version of it he seemed to save just for

these sessions. She had an idea that to Gerald, who was on the inside of it, the grin felt wolfish.

Piratical, maybe. From her angle, however, lying here with her arms raised above her head and

nothing on but a pair of bikini panties, it only looked stupid. No . . . retarded. He was, after all,

no devil-may-care adventurer like the ones in the men's magazines over which he had spent the

furious ejaculations of his lonely, overweight puberty; he was an attorney with a pink, too-large

face spreading belo w a widow's peak which was narrowing relentlessl y t oward total baldness.

just an attorney with a hard-on poking the front of his undershorts out of shape. And only

moderately out of shape, at that.

The size of his erection wasn't the important thing, though. The important thing was the grin.

It hadn't changed a bit, and that meant Gerald hadn't taken her seriously. She was supposed to

protest; after all, that was the game.

'Gerald? I mean it.'

The grin widened. A few more of his small, inoffensive attorney's teeth came into view; hi s IQ

tumbled another twenty or thirty points. And he still wasn't hearing her.

Are you sure of that?

She was. She couldn't read him like a book — she supposed it took a lot more than seventeen

years of marriage to get to that point — but she thought she usually had a pretty good idea of

what was going through his head. She thought something would be seriously out of whack if she

didn't.

If that's the truth, toots, how come he can't read you? How come he can't see this isn't just a

new scene in the same old sex-farce?

Now it was her turn to frown slightly. She had always heard voices inside her head — she

guessed everyone did, although people usually didn't talk about them, any more than they talked

about their bowel functions — and most of them were old friends, as comfortable as bedroom

slippers. This one, however, was new . . . and there was nothing comfortable about it. It was a

strong voice, one that sounded young and vigorous. It also sounded impatient. Now it spoke

again, answering its own question.

It isn't that he can't read you; it's just that sometimes, toots, he doesn't want to.

'Gerald, really — I don't feet like it. Bring the keys back and unlock me. We'll do something

else. I'll get on top, if you want. Or you can just lie there with your hands behind your head and

I'll do you, you know, the other way.'

Are you sure you want to do that? the new voice asked. Are you really sure you want to have

any sex with this man?

Jessie closed her eyes, as if she could make the voice shut up by doing that. When she opened

them again, Gerald was standing at the foot of the bed, the front of his shorts jutting like the

prow of a ship. Well . . . some kid's toy boat, maybe. His grin had widened further, exposing the

last few teeth — the ones with the gold fillings — on both sides. She didn't just dislike that dumb

grin, she realized; she despised it.

'I will let you up . . . if you're very, very good. Can you be very, very good, Jessie? '

Corny, the new no-bullshit voice commented. Très corny.

He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underpants like some absurd gunslinger. The

jockeys went down pretty fast once they got past his not-inconsiderable love handles. And there

it was, exposed. Not the formidable engine of love she had first encountered as a teenager in the

pages of Fanny Hill but something meek and pink and circumcised; five inches of completely

unremarkable erection. Two or three years ago, on one of her infrequent trips to Boston, she had

seen a movie cal led The Belly of an Architect. She thought, Right. And now I'm looking at The

Penis of an Attorney. She had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep from laughing. Laughing

at this point would be impolitic.

An idea came to her then, and it killed any urge she'd had to laugh. It was this: he didn't know

she was serious because for him, Jessie Mahout Burlingame, wife of Gerald, sister of Maddy and

Will, daughter of Tom and Sally, mother of no one, was really not here at all. She had ceased to

be here when the keys made their small, steely clicks in the locks of the handcuffs. The men's

adventure magazines of Gerald's teenage years had been replaced by a pile of skin magazines in

the bottom drawer of his desk, magazines in which women wearing pearls and nothing else knelt

on bearskin rugs while men with sex ual equipment that made Gerald's look strictly HO-scale by

comparison took them from behind. In the backs of these magazines, between the talk-dirty-to-

me phone ads with their 900 numbers, were ads for inflatable women which were supposed to be

anatomically correct — a biz arre concept if Jessie had ever encountered one. She thought of

those air-filled dollies now, their pink skins, lineless cartoon bodies, and featureless faces, with a

kind of revelatory amazement. It wasn't horror — not quite — but an intense light flashed on

inside her, and the landscape it disclosed was certainly more frightening than this stupid game, or

the fact that this time they were playing it in the summer house by the lake long after summer

had run away for another year.

But none of it had affected her hearing in the slightest. Now it was a chainsaw she heard,

snarling away in the woods at some considerab le distance — as much as five miles, maybe.

Closer by, out on the main body of Kashwakamak Lake, a loon tardy in starting its annual run

south lifted its crazed cry into the blue October air. Closer still, somewhere here on the north

shore, a dog barked. It was an ugly, ratcheting sound, but Jessie found it oddly comforting. It

meant that someone else was up here, midweek in October or no. Otherwise there was just the

sound of the door, loose as an old tooth in a rotted gum, slapping at the swollen jamb. She felt

that if she had to listen to that for long, it would drive her crazy.

Gerald, now naked save for his spectacles, knelt on the bed and began crawling up toward her.

His eyes were still gleaming.

She had an idea it was that gleam which had kept her playing the game long after her initial

curiosity had been satisfied. It had been years since she'd seen that much heat in Gerald's gaze

when he looked at her. She wasn't bad-looking — she'd managed to keep the weight off, and still

had most of her figure — but Gerald's interest in her had waned just the same. She had an idea

that the booze was partly to blame for that — he drank a hell of a lot more now than when they'd

first been married — but she knew the booze wasn't all of it. What was the old saw about

familiarity breeding contempt? That wasn't supposed to hold true for men and women in love, at

least according to the Romantic poets she'd read in English Lit 101, but in the years since college

she had discovered there were certain facts of life about which John Keats and Percy Shelley had

never written. But of course, they had both died a lot younger than she and Gerald were now.

And all of that didn't matter much right here and right now. What mayb e did was that she had

gone on with the game longer than she had really wanted to because she had liked that hot little

gleam in Gerald's eyes. It made her feel young and pretty and desirable. But . . .

. . . but if you really thought it was you he was seeing when he got that look in his eye, you

were misled, toots. Or maybe you misled yourself. And maybe now you have to decide — really,

really decide — if you intend to continue putting up with this humiliation. Because isn't that

pretty much how you feel? Humiliated?

She sighed. Yes. It pretty much was.

'Gerald, I do mean it.' She spoke louder now, and for the first time the gleam in his eyes

flickered a little. Good. He could hear her after all, it seemed. So maybe things were still okay.

Not great, it had been a long time since things had been what you could call great, but okay.

Then the gleam reappeared, and a moment later the idiot grin followed.

'I'll teach you, me proud beauty,' he said. He actually said that, pronouncing beauty the way

the landlord in a bad Victorian melodrama might say it.

Let him do it, then. Just let him do it and it will be done.

This was a voice she was much more familiar with, and she intended to follow its advice. She

didn't know if Gloria Steinem would approve and didn't care; the advice had the attractiveness of

the completely practical. Let him do it and it would be done. QED.

Then his hand — his soft, short-fingered hand, its flesh as pink as that which capped his penis

— reached out and grasped her breast, and something inside her suddenly popped like an over-

strained tendon. She bucked her hips and back sharply upward, flinging his hand off.

'Quit it, Gerald. Unlock these stupid handcuffs and let me up. This stopped being fun around

last March, while there was still snow on the ground. I don't feet sexy; I feel ridiculous.'

This time he heard her all the way down. She could see it in the way the gleam in his eyes

went out all at once, like candle flames in a strong gust of wind. She guessed that the two words

which had finally gotten through to him were stupid and ridiculous. He had been a fat kid with

thick glasses, a kid who hadn't had a date until he was eighteen — the year after he went on a

strict diet and began to work out in an effort to strangle the engirdling flab before it could

strangle him. By the time he was a sophomore in college, Gerald's life was what he described as

'more or less under control' (as if life — his life, anyway — were a bucking bronco he had been

ordered to tame), but she knew his high school years had been a horror show that had left him

with a deep legacy of contempt for himself and suspicion of others.

His success as a corporate lawyer (and marriage to her; she beli eved that had also played a

part, perhaps even the crucial one) had further restored hi s confidence and self-respect, but she

supposed that some nightmares never completely ended. In a deep part of his mind, the bullies

were still giving Gerald wedgies in study-hall, still laughing at Gerald's inability to do anything

but girlie-pushups in phys ed, and there were words — stupid and ridiculous, for instance — that

brought all that back as if high school had been yesterday . . . or so she suspected. Psychologists

could be incredibly stupid about many things, almost wilfully stupid, it often seemed to her, but

about the horrible persistence of some memories she thought they were bang-on. Some memories

battened onto a person's mind like evil leeches, and certain words stupid and ridiculous, for

example — could bring them instantly back to squirming, feverish life.

She waited to feel a pang of shame at hitting below the belt like this and was pleased — or

maybe it was relief she felt — when no pang came. I guess maybe I'm just tired of pretending,

she thought, and this idea led to another: she might have her own sexual agenda, and if she did,

this business with the handcuffs was definitely not on it. They made her feel demeaned. The

whole idea made her feel dem eaned. Oh, a certain uneasy excitem ent had accompanied the first

few ex periments — the ones with the scarves — and on a couple of occasions she'd had multiple

orgasms, and that was a rarity for her. All the same, there had been side-effects she didn't care

for, and that feeling of being somehow demeaned was only one of them. She'd had her own

nightmares following each of those early versions of Gerald's game. She awoke from them

sweaty and gasping, her hands thrust deeply into the fork of her crotch and rolled into tight little

balls. She only remembered one of these dreams, and that memory was distant, blurred: she had

been playing croquet without any clothes on, and all at once the sun had gone out.

Never mind all that, Jessie; those are things you can consider another day. Right now the only

important thing is getting him to let you loose.

Yes. Because this wasn't their game; this game was all his. She had gone on playing it simply

because Gerald wanted her to. And that was no longer good enough.

The loon voiced its lonely cry out on the lake again. Gerald's dopey grin of anticipation had

been replaced by a look of sulky displeasure. You broke my toy, you bitch, that look said.

Jessie found herself remembering the last time she'd gotten a good look at that expression. In

August Gerald had come to her with a glossy brochure, had pointed out what he wanted, and she

had said yes, of course he could buy a Porsche if he wanted a Porsche, they could certainly

afford a Porsche, but she thought he might do better to buy a membership in the Forest Avenue

Health Club, as he had been threatening to do for the past two years. 'You don't have a Porsche

body just now,' she had said, knowing she wasn't being very diplomatic but feeling that this

really wasn't the time for diplomacy. Also, he had exasperated her to the point where she hadn't

cared a whole hell of a lot for his feelings. This had been happening more and more frequently to

her lately, and it dismayed her, but she didn't know what to do about it.

'Just what is that supposed to mean?' he had asked stiffly. She didn't bother to answer; she had

learned that when Gerald asked such quest ions, they were almost always rhetorical. The

important message lay in the simple subtext: You're upsetting me, Jessie. You're not playing the

game.

But on that occasion — perhaps in an unknowing tune-up for this one — she had elected to

ignore the subtext and answer the question.

'It means that you're still going to be forty-six this winter whether you own a Porsche or not,

Gerald . . . and you're still going to be thirty pounds overweight.' Cruel, yes, but she could have

been downright gratuitous; could have passed on the image which had flashed before her eyes

when she had looked at the photograph of the sports car on the front of the glossy brochure

Gerald had handed her. In that blink of an instant she had seen a chubby little kid with a pink

face and a widow's peak stuck in the innertube he'd brought to the old swimming hole.

Gerald had snatched the brochure out of her hand and had stalked away without another word.

The subject of the Porsche had not been raised since . . . but she had often seen it in his resentful

We Are Not Amused stare.

She was seeing an even hotter version of that stare right now.

'You said it sounded like fun. Those were your ex act words: "It sounds like fun."'

Had she said that? She supposed she had. But it had been a mistake. A little goof, that was all,

a little slip on the old banana peel. Sure. But how did you tell your husband that when he had his

lower lip pooched out like Baby Huey getting ready to do a tantrum?

She didn't know, so she dropped her gaze . . . and saw something she didn't like at all. Gerald's

version of Mr Happy hadn't wilted a bit. Apparently Mr Happy hadn't heard about the change of

plans.

'Gerald, I just don't — '

' . . . feel like it? Well, that's a hell of a note, isn't it? I took the whole day off work. And if we

spend the night, that means tomorrow morning off, as well.' He brooded over this for a moment,

and then repeated: 'You said it sounded like fun.'

She began to fan out her excuses like a tired old poker-hand (Yes, but now I have a headache;

Yes, but I'm having these really shitty pre-menstrual cramps; Yes, but I'm a woman and therefore

entitled to change my mind; Yes, but now that we're actually out here in the Big Lonely you

frighten me, you had beautiful brute of a man, you), the lies that fed either his misconceptions or

his ego (the two were frequently interchangeable), but before she could pick a card, any card, the

new voice spoke up. It was the first time it had spoken out loud, and Jessie was fascinated to find

that it sounded the same in the air as it did inside her head: strong, dry, decisive, in control.

It also sounded curiously familiar.

'You're right — I guess I did say that, but what really sounded like fun was breaking away

Geralds_Game

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