Duma Key - Stephen King

I smiled and sat down beside him. "Sea voyages aren't in the plan, Jack."

"Good."

"Can you open that chicken for me, and tear me off a leg?"

He did as I asked, and they watched, fascinated, as I devoured first one leg, then the other. I asked if anyone wanted the breast, and when they both said no, I ate that, too. Halfway through it I thought of my daughter, lying pale and dead in Rhode Island. I kept on eating, doing it methodically, wiping my greasy hands on my jeans between bites. Ilse would have understood. Not Pam and probably not Lin, but Illy? Yes. I was frightened of what lay ahead, but I knew Perse was frightened, too. If she hadn't been, she would not have tried so hard to keep us out. On the contrary, she would have welcomed us in.

"Time's wasting, muchacho, " Wireman said. "Daylight fleets."

"I know," I said. "And my daughter's dead forever. I'm still starving, though. Is there anything sweet? Cake? Cookies? A motherfucking HoHo?"

There wasn't. I settled for another Pepsi and a few cucumber strips dipped in ranch dressing, which to me has always looked and tasted like slightly sweetened snot. At least my headache was fading. The images that had come to me in the dark - the ones that had been waiting all those years inside Noveen's rag-stuffed head - were also fading, but I had my own pictures to refresh them. I wiped my hands a final time and put the stack of torn and wrinkled sheets on my lap: the family album from hell.

"Keep an eye out for that heron," I told Wireman.

He looked around, glanced at the deserted ship ticking back and forth out there on the mild swell, then looked back at me. "Wouldn't the spear-pistol be better for Big Bird? With one of the silver harpoons attached?"

"No. The heron's something she just rides, the way a man rides a horse. She'd probably like it if we wasted one of the silvertips on it, but Perse is done getting what she likes." I smiled without humor. "That part of the lady's career is over."

iii

Wireman made Jack get up so he could strip the vines from the bench. Then we sat there, three unlikely warriors, two in their fifties and one barely out of his teens, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico on one side and a ruined mansion on the other. The red basket and mostly depleted food-bag were at our feet. I thought I had twenty minutes to tell them what I knew, even half an hour, and that would still leave enough time.

I hoped.

"Elizabeth's connection with Perse was closer than mine," I said. "Much more intense than mine. I don't know how she stood it. Once she had the china figure, she saw everything, whether she was there or not. And she drew everything. But the worst pictures she burned before she left this place."

"Like the picture of the hurricane?" Wireman asked.

"Yes. I think she was afraid of their power, and she was right to be afraid. But she saw it all. And the doll stored it all up. Like a psychic camera. In most cases, I just saw what Elizabeth saw and drew what Elizabeth drew. Do you understand that?"

They both nodded.

"Start with this path, which was once a road. It went from Shade Beach to the barn." I pointed to the long, vine-coated outbuilding where I hoped we would find a ladder. "I don't think the bootlegger who wore it into the coral was Dave Davis, but I'm confident he was one of Davis's business associates, and that a fair amount of hooch came onto the Florida Suncoast by way of Duma Key. From Shade Beach to John Eastlake's barn, then across to the mainland. Mostly top-shelf stuff headed for a couple of jazz clubs in Sarasota and Venice, stored as a favor to Davis."

Wireman glanced at the declining sun, then at his watch. "Does this have any bearing on our current situation, muchacho? I assume it does."

"You bet." I produced a drawing of a keg with a fat screw-lid bung on top. The word TABLE had been sketched in a semicircle on the side, with SCOTLAND below it, in another semicircle. It was ragged work; I drew far better than I printed. "Whiskey, gents."

Jack indicated a vague, humanoid scribble on the keg between TABLE and SCOTLAND. The figure had been executed in orange, and one foot was raised behind it. "Who's the chick in the dress?"

"That's not a dress, it's a kilt. It's supposed to be a highlander."

Wireman raised his shaggy brows. "Won't win any awards for that one, muchacho."

"Elizabeth put Perse in some sort of midget whiskey barrel," Jack mused. "Or maybe it was Elizabeth and Nan Melda-"

I shook my head. "Just Elizabeth."

"How big was this thing?"

I held my hands about two feet from each other, considered, then moved them a little farther apart.

Jack nodded, but he was frowning, too. "She put the china figure in and screwed the cap back on. Or put the plug in the jug. And drowned Perse to sleep. Which seems fucked up to me, boss. She was underwater when she started calling to Elizabeth, for God's sake. On the bottom of the Gulf!"

"Leave that for now." I put the sketch of the whiskey barrel on the bottom of the stack and showed them the next one. It was Nan Melda, using the telephone in the parlor. There was something furtive about the tilt of her head and the hunch of her shoulders, only a quick stroke or two, but it said all that needed to be said about how southern folk felt back in 1927 about black housekeepers using the parlor phone, even in an emergency.

"We thought Adie and Emery read about it in the paper and came back, but the Atlanta papers probably didn't even cover the drowning of two little girls in Florida. When Nan Melda was sure the twins were missing, she called Eastlake - the Mister - on the mainland to give him the bad news. Then she called where Adie was staying with her new husband."

Wireman pounded his fist on his leg. "Adie told her Nanny where she was staying! Of course she did!"

I nodded. "The newlyweds had to've caught a train that very night, because they were home before dark the next day."

"By then the two middle daughters must have been home, too," Jack said.

"Yep, the whole family," I said. "And the water out there..." I gestured toward where the slim white ship rode at anchor, waiting for dark. "It was covered with small boats. The hunt for the bodies went on for at least three days, although they all knew those girls had to be dead. I imagine the last thing on John Eastlake's mind was trying to figure out how his eldest daughter and her husband got the news. All he could think during those days was his lost twins."

"THEY ARE GONE," Wireman murmured. "Pobre hombre."

I held up the next picture. Here were three people standing on the veranda of Heron's Roost, waving, as a big old touring car motored down the crushed shell driveway toward the stone posts and the sane world beyond. I had sketched in a scattering of palms and some banana trees, but no hedge; the hedge did not exist in 1927.

In the rear window of the touring car, two small white ovals were looking back. I touched each in turn. "Maria and Hannah," I said. "Going back to the Braden School."

Jack said, "That's a little cold, don't you think?"

I shook my head. "I don't, actually. Children don't mourn like adults."

Jack nodded. "Yeah. I guess. But I'm surprised..." He fell silent.

"What?" I asked. "What surprises you?"

"That Perse let them go," Jack said.

"She didn't, not really. They were only going to Bradenton."

Wireman tapped the sketch. "Where's Elizabeth in this?"

"Everywhere," I said. "We're looking through her eyes."

iv

"There's not much more, but the rest is pretty bad."

I showed them the next sketch. It was as hurried as the other ones, and the male figure in it was depicted back-to, but I had no doubt it was the living version of the thing that had clamped a manacle on my wrist in the kitchen of Big Pink. We were looking down on him. Jack looked from the picture to Shade Beach, now eroded to a mere strip, then back to the picture. Finally he looked at me.

"Here?" he asked in a low voice. "The point of view in this one is from right here?"

"Yes."

"That's Emery," Wireman said, touching the figure. His voice was even lower than Jack's. Sweat had sprung up on his brow.

"Yes."

"The thing that was in your house."

"Yes."

He moved his finger. "And those are Tessie and Laura?"

"Tessie and Lo-Lo. Yes."

"They... what? Lured him in? Like sirens in one of those old Greek fairy tales?"

"Yes."

"This really happened," Jack said. As if to get the sense of it.

"It really did," I agreed. "Never doubt her strength."

Wireman looked toward the sun, which was nearer the horizon than ever. Its track had begun to tarnish at last. "Then finish up, muchacho, quick as you can. So we can do our business and get the hell out of here."

"I don't have much more to tell you, anyway," I said. I shuffled through a number of sketches that were little more than vague scribbles. "The real heroine was Nan Melda, and we don't even know her last name."

I showed them one of the half-finished sketches: Nan Melda, recognizable by the kerchief around her head and a perfunctory dash of color across the brow and one cheek, talking to a young woman in the front hallway. Noveen was propped nearby, on a table that was nothing but six or eight lines with a quick oval shape to bind them together.

"Here she is, telling Adriana some tall tale about Emery, after he disappeared. That he was called suddenly back to Atlanta? That he went to Tampa to get a surprise wedding present? I don't know. Anything to keep Adie in the house, or at least close by."

"Nan Melda was playing for time," Jack said.

"It was all she could do." I pointed toward the crowding jungle overgrowth between us and the north end of the Key, growth that had no business being there - not, at least, without a team of horticulturalists working overtime to provide its upkeep. "All that wasn't there in 1927, but Elizabeth was here, and she was at the peak of her talents. I don't think anyone trying to use the road that went off-island would have stood a chance. God knows what Perse had made Elizabeth draw into existence between here and the drawbridge."

"Adriana was supposed to be next?" Wireman asked.

"Then John. Maria and Hannah after them. Because Perse meant to have all of them except - maybe - Elizabeth herself. Nan Melda must have known she could only hold Adie a single day. But a day was all she needed."

I showed them another picture. Although much more hurried, it was once again Nan Melda and Libbit standing in the shallow end of the pool. Noveen lay on the edge with one rag arm trailing in the water. And beside Noveen, sitting on its fat belly, was a wide-mouth ceramic keg with TABLE printed on the side in a semicircle.

"Nan Melda told Libbit what she had to do. And she told Libbit she had to do it no matter what she saw in her head or how loud Perse screamed for her to stop... because she would scream, Nan Melda said, if she found out. She said they'd just have to hope Perse found out too late to make any difference. And then Melda said..." I stopped. The track of the lowering sun was growing brighter and brighter. I had to go on, but it was hard now. It was very, very hard.

"What, muchacho?" Wireman said gently. "What did she say?"

"She said that she might scream, too. And Adie. And her Daddy. But she couldn't stop. 'Dassn't stop, child,' she said. 'Dassn't stop or it's all for nothing.'" As if of its own accord, my hand plucked the Venus Black from my pocket and scrawled two words beneath the primitive drawing of the girl and the woman in the swimming pool:

dassn't stop

My eyes blurred with tears. I dropped the pencil into the sea oats and wiped the tears away. So far as I know, that pencil is still where I dropped it.

"Edgar, what about the silver-tipped harpoons?" Jack asked. "You never said anything about them."

"There weren't any magic goddam harpoons," I said tiredly. "They must have come years later, when Eastlake and Elizabeth returned to Duma Key. God knows which of them got the idea, and whichever one it was may not have even been completely sure why it seemed important."

"But..." Jack was frowning again. "If they didn't have the silver harpoons in 1927... then how..."

"No silver harpoons, Jack, but plenty of water."

"I still don't follow that. Perse came from the water. She's of water." He looked at the ship, as if to make sure it was still there. It was.

"Right. But at the pool, her hold slipped. Elizabeth knew it, but didn't understand the implications. Why would she? She was just a child."

"Oh, fuck," Wireman said. He slapped his forehead. "The swimming pool. Fresh water. It was a freshwater pool. Fresh as opposed to salt."

I pointed a finger at him.

Wireman touched the picture I'd drawn of the ceramic keg sitting beside the doll. "This keg was an empty? Which they filled from the pool?"

"I have no doubt." I shuffled the swimming-pool sketch aside and showed them the next one. The perspective was again from almost exactly where we were sitting. Above the horizon, a just-risen sickle moon shone between the masts of a rotting ship I hoped I would never have to draw again. And on the beach, at the edge of the water -

"Christ, that's awful," Wireman said. "I can't even see it clearly and it's still awful."

My right arm was itching, throbbing. Burning. I reached down and touched the picture with the hand I hoped I would never have to see again... although I was afraid I might.

"I can see it for all of us," I said.

How to Draw a Picture (XI)

Don't quit until the picture's complete. I can't tell you if that's the cardinal rule of art or not, I'm no teacher, but I believe those six words sum up all I've been trying to tell you. Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter. And there always comes a time - if the work is sincere, if it comes from that magic place where thought, memory, and emotion all merge - when you will want to quit, when you will think that if you put your pencil down your eye will dull, your memory will lapse, and the pain will end. I know all this from the last picture I drew that day - the one of the gathering on the beach. It was only a sketch, but I think that when you're mapping hell, a sketch is all you need.

I started with Adriana.

All day long she has been frantic about Em, her emotions ranging from wild anger at him to fear for him. It has even crossed her mind that Daddy has Done Something Rash, although that seems unlikely; his grief has made him torpid and unresponsive ever since the search ended.

When sunset comes and there's still no sign of Em, you'd think she'd become more nervous than ever, but instead she grows calm, almost cheerful. She tells Nan Melda that Em will be back directly, she's sure of it. She feels it in her bones and hears it in her head, where it sounds like a small, chiming bell. She supposes that bell is what they mean by "woman's intuition," and you don't become fully aware of it until you're married. She tells Nanny this, too.

Nan Melda nods and smiles, but she watches Adie narrowly. She's been watching her all day. The girl's man is gone for good, Libbit has told her this and Melda believes her, but Melda also believes that the rest of the family may be saved... that she herself may be saved.

Much, however, depends on Libbit herself.

Nan Melda goes up to check on her remaining babby-un, touching the bracelets on her left arm as she climbs the stairs. The silver bracelets are from her Mama, and Melda wears them to church every Sunday. Perhaps that's why she took them from her special-things box today, slipping them on and pushing them up until they stuck on the swell of her forearm instead of letting them dangle loose above her wrist. Perhaps she wanted to feel a little closer to her Mama, to borrow a little of Mama's quiet strength, or perhaps she just wanted the association of something holy.