Continuing

Good Morning.

It's positively beautiful out. The sky's a perfect, uniform blue, with the occasional bright, white, cotton-ball cumulus clouds drifting lazily across. The sun is shining on everything, making colors seem to pop out from everywhere (and the recent spring buds on the trees are adding to that effect). Even in shadow, under the overhang where I'm sitting (the sunlight directly hitting my laptop makes the brightness have to go way up and therefore kills my battery), colors seem brighter. A slight breeze is playfully blowing about, cool enough to even the heat from the sun, but not enough to cause goosebumps. It's a very pleasant 51 degrees.

Perfect weather for writing (or talking, rather, which is what I think of this more as).

I'm sitting outside of that local Starbucks, an iced green tea lemonade on one side of my laptop, Gerald's Game on the other. I've got an open bag of sunflower seeds in the chair beside me, and have a couple of hours before I have to work. I'm pretty much in heaven.

So I believe that I got through chapter 12 last time, and am now due to start 13.

Jessie wakes up. After having such a dream, she is rather disconcerted. It takes her a good while to finally get herself out of the sleep, and she's rather uneasy. She glances around the room, not really looking for anything, simply assessing the situation. It's about the same that it has been, except for one minor development.

She's not alone.

In the corner of the room, she thinks she sees a man standing there. Just past the line where the light from the window stops, in that bit of shadow that seems to lurk perpetually in the corners of houses. She freaks out, and spends the majority of the chapter arguing with herself about whether or not someone is there. She notices that he seems to have something at his feet, and it looks almost like a chainsaw to her. She had heard someone previously out in the woods who had been using a chainsaw. Then, however, she only thought of him as a means of escape. In this case, however, she invasions the man having been out there chopping up bodies with the chainsaw, and feels that he has come to dispose of her similarly.

It's interesting; throughout all the pages since she noticed the man, I didn't once think of him as a means of escape until page 128, when she asks him to unlock her. I mean, he is another person, one who is not chained down, and is standing right next to the bureau that has the keys. Under ordinary circumstances, another person being in the room would be a cause of relief, of joy. He'd be able to let her out. Not once, however, even before Jessie starts freaking out about him, does the reader see him in this light. No part of his appearance is positive. Is it because we're in the middle of the woods and he's come random person? Is it because he hasn't let her out yet; has only been standing in the corner, watching the naked Jessie Burlingame sleep? Is it because we remember Prince being scared of something? Whatever it is, from the very get-go, we know that this guy, if he is really there, means trouble.

She eventually loses control, at the same time as certain that someone is there as she is that she's only believing it out of sheer hope, and loses control, just begging and sobbing and whining to the apparition that may/may not be real.

Part of the voice of dissent says that he can't be real, he's much too oddly shaped. His head is very narrow, his nose only seeming to be the length of a pencil. His arms seem to hang down to his knees, and his fingers are much too long. At one point, in her panic, she thinks that this is her father, come back after all these years to do what she can only imagine he wanted to do during the eclipse. One of her voices points out that her father's been dead for years, and this does not help at all. It only causes her to fleetingly think that this is her fathers reanimated corpse.

The figure then, seeming more real by the second, picks up the item by its feet, and she see's that it's a box. It opens the box, holding it out to her, almost as if he's showing it off the way a child would show off a drawing to its parents. Inside the box is a nightmarish party mix: jewelry mixed with human bones. The description King gives here is perfect, we can see the finger bones rattling off of earrings, we can hear the sound of them clacking together. Read pg. 133, you'll see what I mean.

This is finally too much for her, and she faints again. This time, however, it's not the drifting off type; she is violently snapped back by one of her voices and is completely out in a fraction of a second.

The next chapter, 14, is very short, barely more than a page. She regains consciousness, and it's even later in the evening. She looks around, panicky, and sees that she has the room alone (save for her deceased husband).

Her Ruth voice maintains that no one was ever there, that he was just a figmentation of her imagination. Jessie and Goody, however, maintain that someone was indeed there, and still fear that it was Daddy, only camouflaged. He was wearing his "eclipse face".

And that is that for now. It's only 11:30, I've still not got work for a good while, but I'm going to walk across the street to get a sub, and then try to relocate to be a little bit warmer (in the shade, without the sunlight to contradict the breeze, it's a bit chilly). I'll be back in a little while.

'Til next time (be it only 30 minutes or so).