Stephen King - Duma Key

“Never mind,” Jack said, still grinning. Then he grew serious again. “But there are no such things as vampires, Edgar. There could be ghosts, I’ll give you that much — I think almost everyone believes there could be ghosts — but there’s no such thing as vampires.” He brightened as an idea struck him. “Besides, it takes a vampire to make a vampire. The Eastlake twins drowned .”

I picked up the short harpoon again, turning it from side to side, making the reflection from the tarnished tip tumble along the wall. “Still, this is suggestive.”

“Really,” Jack agreed.

“So’s the unlocked door you found when you brought the picnic basket,” I said. “The tracks. The canvas that was lifted out of the rack and put onto the easel.”

“You saying it was the crazy librarian after all, amigo ?”

“No. Just that…” My voice cracked, broke. I had to take another sip of water before I could say what needed saying. “Just that maybe vampires aren’t the only things that come back from the dead.”

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked. “Zombies?”

I thought of the Perse with her rotting sails. “Let’s say deserters.”

“Are you sure you want to be here alone tonight, Edgar?” Wireman asked. “Because I’m not sure it’s such a great idea. Especially with that stack of old pictures for company.” He sighed. “You have succeeded in giving Wireman a first-class case of the willies.”

We were sitting out in the Florida room, watching the sun start its long, slow decline toward the horizon. I had produced cheese and crackers.

“I’m not sure this will work otherwise,” I said. “Think of me as a gunslinger of the art world. I paint alone, podner.”

Jack looked at me over a fresh glass of iced tea. “You’re planning to paint ?”

“Well — sketch. It’s what I know how to do.” And when I thought back to a certain pair of gardening gloves — HANDS printed on the back of one, OFF on the back of the other — I thought sketching would be enough, especially if I did it with little Elizabeth Eastlake’s colored pencils.

I swung around to Wireman. “You have the funeral parlor tonight, correct?”

Wireman glanced at his watch and heaved a sigh. “Correct. From six until eight. There’s another visitation tomorrow from noon until two. Relatives from afar will come to bare their teeth at the usurping interloper. That would be me. Then the final act, day after tomorrow. Funeral at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Osprey. That’s at ten. Followed by cremation at Abbot-Wexler. Burny-burny, hot-hot-hot.”

Jack grimaced. “Gross me out .”

Wireman nodded. “ Death is gross, son. Remember what we sang as children? ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, and the pus runs out like shaving cream.’”

“Classy,” I said.

“Yep,” Wireman agreed. He selected another cracker, looked at it, then threw it violently back onto the tray. It bounced onto the floor. “This is nuts. The whole thing.”

Jack picked up the cracker, seemed to consider eating it, then put it aside. Perhaps he had decided eating crackers off a Florida room floor violated another man-law. Probably it did. There are so many.

I said to Wireman, “When you come back from the funeral parlor tonight, you check in on me, okay?”

“Yes.”

“If I tell you I’m fine, to just go on home, you do it.”

“Don’t interrupt you if you’re communing with your muse. Or the spirits.”

I nodded, because he wasn’t that far off. Then I turned to Jack. “And you’re staying at El Palacio while Wireman’s at the funeral parlor, right?”

“Sure, if that’s what you guys want.” He looked a little uneasy about it, and I didn’t blame him. It was a big house, Elizabeth had lived in it a long time, and it was where her memory was freshest. I would have been uneasy, too, if I hadn’t been sure the spooks on Duma Key were elsewhere.

“If I call you, come on the run.”

“I will. Call me on the house phone or my cell phone.”

“You sure your cell phone’s working?”

He looked slightly shamefaced. “Battery was a little flat, is all. I got it charged in my car.”

Wireman said, “I wish I understood better why you feel like you have to keep fooling with this, Edgar.”

“Because it’s not over. For years it was. For years Elizabeth lived here very quietly, first with her father and then on her own. She had her charities, she had her friends, she played tennis, she played bridge — so Mary Ire told me — and most of all, she had the Suncoast art scene. It was the quiet, rewarding life of an elderly woman with lots of money and few bad habits other than her cigarettes. Then things started to change. La lotería . You said it yourself, Wireman.”

“You really think something’s been making all this happen,” he said. Not with disbelief; with awe.

“It’s what you believe,” I said.

“Sometimes I do. It isn’t what I want to believe. That there’s something with a reach so long… with eyesight keen enough to see you… me… God knows who or what else…”

“I don’t like it either,” I said, but that was far from the truth. The truth was I hated it. “I don’t like the idea that something may have actually reached out and killed Elizabeth — maybe scared her to death — just to shut her up.”

“And you think you can find out what’s going on from those pictures.”

“Some, yes. How much I won’t know until I try.”

“And then?”

“It depends. Almost certainly a trip to the south end of the Key. There’s unfinished business there.”

Jack put down his tea-glass. “What unfinished business?”

I shook my head. “Don’t know. Her pictures may tell me.”

“Just as long as you don’t get in over your head and discover you can’t get back to shore,” Wireman said. “That’s what happened to those two little girls.”

“I know it,” I said.

Jack pointed his finger at me. “Take care of yourself. Man-law.”

I nodded and pointed back. “Man-law.”

Twenty minutes later I sat in Little Pink with my sketch-pad on my lap and the red picnic basket beside me. Directly ahead, filling the western-facing window with light, was the Gulf. Far below me was the murmur of the shells. I had set my easel aside and covered my paint-splattered work-table with a piece of toweling. I laid the remains of her freshly sharpened colored pencils on top of it. There wasn’t much left of those pencils, which were fat and somehow antique, but I thought there’d be enough. I was ready.

“Bullshit I am,” I said. I was never going to be ready for this, and part of me was hoping nothing would happen. I thought something would, though. I thought that was why Elizabeth had wanted me to find her drawings. But how much of what was inside the red basket did she actually remember? My guess was that Elizabeth had forgotten most of what had happened to her when she was a child even before the Alzheimer’s came along to complicate things. Because forgetting isn’t always involuntary. Sometimes it’s willed .

Who would want to remember something so awful that it had made your father scream until he bled? Better to stop drawing completely. To just go cold turkey. Better to tell people you can hardly even draw stick figures, that when it comes to art you’re like wealthy alums who support their college sports teams: if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter. Better to put it out of your mind completely, and in your old age, creeping senility will take care of the rest.