Stephen King - Duma Key

Then his lunch. At last he collapsed back against the seat. He thought I looked like a snowbird again? That was sort of funny, because on that early afternoon in mid-April, Jack Cantori was as pale as March in Minnesota. Instead of twenty-one, he looked a sickly forty-five. It must have been the tuna salad, Ilse had said, but it hadn’t been the tuna. Something from the sea, all right, but not the tuna.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The smell, I guess — that rotten jungle smell—” His chest hitched, he made a gurk sound deep in his throat, and leaned out the door again. That time he missed his hold on the steering wheel, and if I hadn’t grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back, he would have gone sprawling face-first into his own whoop.

He leaned back, eyes closed, face wet with sweat, panting rapidly.

“We better take him back to El Palacio, ” Wireman said. “I don’t like to lose the time — hell, I don’t like to lose him — but this shit ain’t right.”

“As far as Perse’s concerned, it’s exactly right,” I said. Now my bad leg was itching almost as much as my arm. It felt like electricity. “It’s her little poison belt. How about you, Wireman? How’s your gut?”

“Fine, but my bad eye — the one that used to be bad — is itching like a bastard, and my head’s kind of humming. Probably from that damn radio.”

“It’s not the radio. And the reason it’s getting to Jack and not to us is because we’ve been… well… call it immunized. Sort of ironic, isn’t it?”

Behind the wheel, Jack groaned.

“What can you do for him, muchacho ? Anything?”

“I think so. I hope so.”

I had my pads on my lap and my pencils and erasers in a belt-pack. Now I flipped to the picture of Jack and found one of my art-gum erasers. I took away his mouth and the lower arcs of his eyes, all the way up to the corners. The itching in my right arm was fiercer than ever, and I actually had no doubt that what I planned to do would work. I summoned up the memory of Jack’s smile in my kitchen — the one I’d asked him to give me while thinking of something particularly good — and drew it quickly with my Midnight Blue pencil. It took no more than thirty seconds (the eyes were really the key, when it comes to smiles, they always are), but those few lines changed the whole idea of Jack Cantori’s face.

And I got something I hadn’t expected. As I drew, I saw him kissing a girl in a bikini. No, more than saw. I could feel her smooth skin, even a few little grains of sand nestling in the hollow at the small of her back. I could smell her shampoo and taste a faint ghost of salt on her lips. I knew her name was Caitlin and he called her Kate.

I put my pencil back in the little belt-pack and zipped it closed. “Jack?” Speaking quietly. His eyes were closed, and sweat still stood out on his cheeks and forehead, but I thought his breathing had slowed. “How are you now? Any better?”

“Yeah,” he said without opening his eyes. “What’d you do?”

“Well, as long as it’s just the three of us, we might as well call it what it is: magic. A little counterspell I tossed your way.”

Wireman reached over my shoulder, picked up the pad, studied the picture, and nodded. “I’m beginning to believe she should have left you alone, muchacho .”

I said, “It was my daughter she should have left alone.”

We stayed where we were for five minutes, letting Jack get his second wind. At last he said he felt able to go on. His color was back. I wondered if we would have run into the same problems if we had gone around by water.

“Wireman, have you seen any fishing boats anchored off the south end of the Key?”

He considered. “You know, I haven’t. They usually stay on the Don Pedro side of the strait. That’s odd, isn’t it?”

“It’s not odd, it’s fucking sinister,” Jack said. “Like this road.” It was down to nothing but a strip. Seagrape and banyan branches scraped along the sides of the slowly trundling Mercedes, making hellish screee ing sounds. The road, lumped upward with tunneling roots and broken down to gravel and potholes in some places, continued to bend inland, and now it had also begun to climb.

We crept along, mile after slow mile, with the leaves and branches slapping and whacking. I kept expecting the road to break down entirely, but the thick interlacing foliage overhead had protected it from the elements to some degree, and it never quite did. The banyans gave way to an oppressive forest of Brazilian Peppers, and there we saw our first wildlife: a huge bobcat that stood for a moment in the rubbly remains of the road, hissing at us with its ears laid flat, then fled into the underbrush. A little farther on, a dozen plump black caterpillars fell onto the windshield and burst open, spreading gummy guts that the wipers and washer-fluid could do little to clear; they only spread the remains around until looking out through the windshield was like looking out of an eye with a cataract on it.

I told Jack to stop. I got out, opened the trunk, and found a little supply of clean rags. I used one to wipe the windshield, being careful to don a pair of the gloves Wireman had found — I was already wearing a hat. But so far as I could tell, they were only caterpillars; messy, but not supernatural.

“Not bad,” Jack said from the open driver’s-side window. “Now I’ll pop the hood so you can check the—” He stopped, looking beyond me.

I turned. The road was down to little more than a path, cluttered with old chunks of asphalt and overgrown with Creeping Oxeye. Crossing it about thirty yards up was a line of five frogs the size of Cocker Spaniel puppies. The first three were a brilliant solid green that rarely if ever occurs in nature; the fourth was blue; the fifth was a faded orange that might once have been red. They were smiling, but there was something fixed and weary about those smiles. They were hopping slowly, as if their hoppers were almost busted. Like the bobcat, they reached the underbrush and disappeared into it.

“What the blue fuck were those ?” Jack asked.

“Ghosts,” I said. “Leftovers from a little girl’s powerful imagination. And they won’t last much longer, from the look of them.” I got back in. “Go on, Jack. Let’s ride while we can.”

He began to creep forward again. I asked Wireman what time it was.

“A little past two.”

We were able to ride all the way to the gate of the first Heron’s Roost. I never would have bet on it, but we did. The foliage closed in one final time — banyans and scrub pines choked with gray beards of Spanish Moss — but Jack bulled the Mercedes through, and all at once the undergrowth drew back. Here the elements had washed the tar away completely and the end of the road was only a rutty memory, but it was good enough for the Mercedes, which jounced and bucketed up a long hill toward two stone pillars. A great unruly hedge, easily eighteen feet high and God knew how thick, ran away from the pillars on either side; it had also begun to spread fat green fingers down the hill toward the jungle growth. There were gates, but they stood rusty and halfway open. I didn’t think the Mercedes would quite fit.

This last stretch of road was flanked on both sides by ancient Australian pines of imposing height. I looked for upside-down birds and saw none. I saw none of the rightside-up variety, either, for that matter, although I could now hear the faint buzz of insects.

Jack stopped at the gate and looked at us apologetically. “This old girl ain’t fitting through that.”

We got out. Wireman paused to look at the ancient, lichen-encrusted plaques fixed to the pillars. The one on the left said HERON’S ROOST. The one on the right said EASTLAKE, but below it something else had been scratched, as if with the point of a knife. Once it might have been hard to read, but the lichen growing from the little cuts gouged in the metal made it stand out: Abyssus abyssum invocat.