When she had pushed off with her left heel just now, she had shoved with all the enthusiasm of total, ass-freezing panic. The bed hadn't moved an iota, and now that she had a chance to think about it, she was glad it hadn't. If it had jigged to the right, she would still be hanging off it. And even if she had been able to push it all the way across to the telephone table that way, why...
"I'd've been hanging over the wrong fucking side," she said, half-laughing and half-sobbing. "Jesus, somebody shoot me."
Doesn't look good, one of the UFO voices-one she definitely could have done without-told her. In fact, it sort of looks like the Jessie Burlingame Show just got its cancellation notice.
"Pick another choice," she said huskily. "I don't like that one."
There aren't any others. There weren't that many to begin with, and you've researched them all.
She closed her eyes again and for the second time since this nightmare began, she saw the playground behind the old Falmouth Grammar School on Central Avenue. Only this time it wasn't the image of two little girls balancing on a seesaw that filled her mind; instead she saw one little boy-her brother Will-skinning the cat on the monkey-bars.
She opened her eyes, slumped down, and bent her head to look more closely at the headboard. Skinning the cat meant hanging from a bar, then curling your legs up and over your own shoulders. You finished with a quick little pivot which enabled you to land on your feet again. Will had been so adept at this neat and economical movement that it had looked to Jessie as if he were turning somersaults inside his own hands.
Suppose I could do that? Just skin the cat right over the top of this goddam headboard. Swing over the top and...
"And land on my feet," she whispered.
For several moments this seemed dangerous but feasible. She would have to move the bed out from the wall, of course-you couldn't skin the cat if you didn't have a place to land-but she had an idea she could manage that. Once the bed-shelf was removed (and it would be easy to knock it off its support brackets, unanchored as it was), she would do a backover roll and plant her bare feet against the wall above the top of the headboard. She hadn't been able to move the bed sideways, but with the wall to push against-
"Same weight, ten times the leverage," she muttered. "Modern physics at its finest."
She was reaching for the shelf with her left hand, meaning to tip it up and off the L-brackets when she took another good look at Gerald's goddam police handcuffs with their suicidally short chains. If he had clipped them onto the bedposts a little higher between the first and second crossboards, say-she might have chanced it; the maneuver would probably have resulted in a pair of broken wrists, but she had reached a point where a pair of broken wrists seemed an entirely acceptable price to pay for escape... after all, they would heal, wouldn't they? Instead of between the first and second crossboards, however, the cuffs were attached between the second and third, and that was just a little too far down. Any attempt to skin the cat over the headboard would do more than break her wrists; it would result in a pair of shoulders not lust dislocated but actually ripped out of their sockets by her descending weight.
And try moving this goddam bed anywhere with a pair of broken wrists and two dislocated shoulders. Sound like fun?
"No," she said huskily. "Not too much."
Let's cut through it, Jess-you're stuck here. You can call me the voice Of despair if it makes you feel better, or if it helps you to hold onto your sanity for a little while longer-God knows I'm all for sanity-but what I really am is the voice of truth, and the truth of this situation is that you're stuck here.
Jessie turned her head sharply to one side, not wanting to hear this self-styled voice of truth, and found she was no more able to shut it out than she had been able to shut out the other ones.
Those are real handcuffs you're wearing, not the cute little bondage numbers with the padding inside the wristlets and a hidden escape-lever you can push if someone gets carried away and starts going a little too far. You're for-real locked up, and you don't happen to