Gerald Game - 1992
Gerald Game - 1992, e-book, Stephen King, Stephen King (ENG)
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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.
Kenneth Patchen.'But Eve n So'. Copyright 1968
by Kenneth Patchen. Reprinted bypermission of
New Directions Publishing Corporation.
'Space Cowboy'. Lyrics and Music by Steven Miller and Ben Sidran. Copyright 1969
Sailor Music.
Used by permission
All rights reserved.
'The Talkin' Blues'. Words and Music by Woodie Guthrie. TRO. Copyright 1988
Ludlow Music Inc.,
New York, New York. Used by permission.
'Can I Get A Witness' by Eddie Holland, Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier. Published by
Stone Agate
Musk. Copyright 1
963.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
King, Stephen
Gerald's game.
1. Title
813.54 [F]
ISBN 0-340-57493-3
Copyright 1992 by Stephen King
First published in Great Britain 1992
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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 Spruce Graves
Stephanie Spruce Leonard
Anne Spruce Labree
Tabitha Spruce King
Marcella Spruce
(Sadie) gathered herself together. No one could describe
the scorn of her expression or the
contemptuous hatred sheput 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 forme.'
Andit never had that much to begin with,
she did not add.
He grinned. He had a heavy, pink-skinned face below a narrow widow'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 seehis IQ going down ten points
for every inch that grin spreads. At itsmaximum width, your killer corporate lawyer of a husband
looks like ajanitor on work-release from the local mental institution.
That was cruel, but not entirely inaccurate. But how did you tell 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 per-suaded 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 below a widow's
peak which was narrowing relentlessly toward 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; his 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 hecan'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'twant 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 youreally sure you want to have any
sex with this man?
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