Stephen King - Duma Key

Then more crying. It was cut off by a click. Next came the hum of an open line.

I reached out and pushed the OFF button, silencing it.

I walked into the Florida room and looked at the tennis balls, still bobbing in on the waves. I felt doubled, like a man watching a man.

The dead twins had left a message in my studio — Where our sister? Had Illy been the sister they meant?

I could almost hear the hag laughing and see her nodding.

“Are you here, Perse?” I asked.

The wind rushed in through the screens. The waves crashed on the shore with metronome-like regularity. Birds flew over the water, crying. On the beach I could see another burst-open tennis ball crate, already half-buried in the sand. Treasure from the sea; fair salvage from the caldo . She was watching, all right. Waiting for me to break down. I was quite sure of it. Her — what? her guardians? — might sleep in the daytime, but not her.

“I win, you win,” I said. “But you think you got your lasties, don’t you? Clever Perse.”

Of course she was clever. She’d been playing the game for a long time. I had an idea she’d been old when the Children of Israel were still grubbing in the gardens of Egypt. Sometimes she slept, but now she was awake.

And her reach was long.

My phone began to ring. I went back in, still feeling like two Edgars, one earthbound, the other floating above the earthbound Edgar’s head, and picked it up. It was Dario. He sounded upset.

“Edgar? What’s this shit about not releasing the paintings to—”

“Not now, Dario,” I said. “Hush.” I broke the connection and called Pam. Now that I wasn’t thinking about it, the numbers came with no problem whatsoever; that marvelous muscle memory thing took over completely. It occurred to me that human beings might be better off if that was the only kind of memory they had.

Pam was calmer. I don’t know what she’d taken, but it was already working. We talked for twenty minutes. She wept through most of the conversation, and was intermittently accusatory, but when I made no effort to defend myself, her anger collapsed into grief and bewilderment. I got the salient points, or so I thought then. There was one very salient point that we both were missing, but as a wise man once said, “You can’t hit em if you can’t see em,” and the police representative who called Pam didn’t think to tell her what Mary Ire had brought to our daughter’s Providence apartment.

Besides the gun, that was. The Beretta.

“The police say she must have driven, and almost nonstop,” Pam said dully. “She never could have gotten a gun like that on an airplane. Why did she do it? Was it another fucking painting ?”

“Of course it was,” I said. “She bought one. I never thought of that. I never thought of her . Not once. It was Illy’s fucking boyfriend I was worried about.”

Speaking very calmly, my ex-wife — that’s what she surely was now — said: “ You did this.”

Yes. I had. I should have realized Mary Ire would buy at least one painting, and that she’d probably want a canvas from the Girl and Ship series — the most toxic of all. Nor would she have wanted the Scoto to store it, not when she lived right up the road in Tampa. For all I knew, she might have had it in the trunk of her beat-up Mercedes when she dropped me at the hospital. From there she could have gone right to her place on Davis Islands to get her home protection automatic. Hell, it would have been on her way north.

That part I should have at least guessed. I had met her, after all, and I knew what she thought of my work.

“Pam, something very bad is happening on this island. I—”

“Do you think I care about that, Edgar? Or about why that woman did it? You got our daughter killed. I don’t ever want to talk to you again, I don’t want to see you again, and I’d rather poke out my eyes than ever have to look at another picture of yours. You should have died when that crane hit you.” There was an awful thoughtfulness in her voice. “That would have been a happy ending.”

There was a moment of silence, then once more the hum of an open line. I considered throwing the whole works across the room and against the wall, but the Edgar floating over my head said no. The Edgar floating over my head said that would perhaps give Perse too much pleasure. So I hung it up gently instead, and then for a minute I just stood there swaying on my feet, alive while my nineteen-year-old daughter was dead, not shot after all but drowned in her own bathtub by a mad art critic.

Then, slowly, I walked back out through the door. I left it open. There seemed no reason to lock it now. There was a broom meant for sweeping sand off the walk leaning against the side of the house. I looked at it and my right arm began to itch. I lifted my right hand and held it in front of my eyes. It wasn’t there, but when I opened it and closed it, I could feel it flex. I could also feel a couple of long nails biting into my palm. The others felt short and ragged. They must have broken off. Somewhere — perhaps on the carpet upstairs in Little Pink — were a couple of ghost fingernails.

“Go away,” I told it. “I don’t want you anymore, go away and be dead.”

It didn’t. It wouldn’t. Like the arm to which it had once been attached, the hand itched and throbbed and ached and refused to leave me.

“Then go find my daughter,” I said, and the tears began to flow. “Bring her back, why don’t you? Bring her to me. I’ll paint anything you want, just bring her to me.”

Nothing. I was just a one-armed man with a phantom itch. The only ghost was his own, drifting around just over his head, observing all this.

The creeping in my flesh grew worse. I picked the broom up, weeping now not just from grief but also from the horrible discomfort of that unreachable itch, then realized I couldn’t do what I needed to do — a one-armed man can’t snap a broomhandle over his knee. I leaned it against the house again and stomped it with my good leg. There was a snap, and the bristle end went flying. I held the jagged end up in front of my streaming eyes and nodded. It would do.

I went around the corner of the house toward the beach, a distant part of my mind registering the loud conversation of the shells beneath Big Pink as the waves dashed into the darkness there and then withdrew.

I had one fleeting thought as I reached the wet and shining hardpack, dotted here and there with tennis balls: The third thing Elizabeth had said to Wireman was You will want to, but you mustn’t .

“Too late,” I said, and then the string tethering the Edgar over my head broke. He floated away, and for a little while I knew no more.

I next remember Wireman coming along and picking me up. I remember walking a few steps, then recalling that Ilse was dead and collapsing to my knees. And the most shameful thing was that, even though I was heartbroken, I was also hungry. Starving.

I remember Wireman helping me in through the open door and telling me it was all a bad dream, that I’d been having the horrors, and when I told him no, it was true, Mary Ire had done it, Mary Ire had drowned Ilse in Ilse’s own bathtub, he had laughed and said that now he knew it. For one horrible moment I believed him.

I pointed to the answering machine. “Play the message,” I said, and went into the kitchen. Staggered into the kitchen. When Pam started in again — Edgar, the police called and they say Illy’s dead! — I was eating fistfuls of Frosted Mini-Wheats straight from the box. I had a queer sense of being part of a prepared slide. Soon I would be placed under a microscope and studied. In the other room, the message ended. Wireman cursed and played it again. I kept eating cereal. The time I’d spent on the beach before Wireman came along was missing. That part of my memory was as blank as my early hospital stay after my accident.