Stephen King - Duma Key

“It would be nice to think so, anyway. Let’s see if there’s anything else.”

It seemed at first there wasn’t. We poked around all the downstairs rooms and found nothing but near-disaster when my foot plunged through the flooring in what must once have been the dining room. Wireman and Jack were quick, however, and at least it was my bad leg that went down; I had my good one to brace myself with.

There was no hope of checking above ground-level. The staircase went all the way up, but beyond the landing and a single ragged length of rail beside it, there was only blue sky and the waving fronds of one tall cabbage palm. The second floor was a remnant, the third complete toast. We started back toward the kitchen and our makeshift step-down to the outside world with nothing to show for our exploration but an ancient note announcing a booze delivery. I had an idea what cera might mean, but without knowing where Perse was, the idea was useless.

And she was here.

She was close.

Why else make it so fucking hard to get here?

Wireman was in the lead, and he stopped so suddenly I ran into him. Jack ran into me, whacking me in the butt with the picnic basket.

“We need to check the stairs,” Wireman said. He spoke in the tone of a man who can’t believe he has been such a dumb cluck.

“I beg pardon?” I asked.

“We need to check the stairs for a ha-ha. I should have thought of that first thing. I must be losing it.”

“What’s a ha-ha?” I asked.

Wireman was turning back. “The one at El Palacio is four steps up from the bottom of the main staircase. The idea — she said it was her father’s — was to have it close to the front door in case of fire. There’s a lockbox inside it, and nothing much inside the lockbox now but a few old souvenirs and some pictures, but once she kept her will and her best pieces of jewelry in there. Then she told her lawyer. Big mistake. He insisted she move all that stuff to a safe deposit box in Sarasota.”

We were at the foot of the stairs now, back near the hill of dead wasps. The stink of the house was thick around us. He turned to me, his eyes gleaming. “ Muchacho, she also kept a few very valuable china figures in that box.” He surveyed the wreck of the staircase, leading up to nothing but senseless shattery and blue sky beyond. “You don’t suppose… if Perse is something like a china figure that John fished off the bottom of the Gulf… you don’t suppose she’s hidden right here, in the stairs?”

“I think anything’s possible. Be careful. Very .”

“I’ll bet you anything that there’s a ha-ha,” he said. “We repeat what we learn as children.”

He brushed away the dead wasps with his boot — they made a whispery, papery sound — and then knelt at the foot of the stairs. He examined the first stair riser, then the second, then the third. When he got to the fourth, he said: “Jack, give me the flashlight.”

It was easy to tell myself that Perse wasn’t hiding in a secret compartment under the stairs — that would be too easy — but I remembered the chinas Elizabeth liked to secrete in her Sweet Owen cookie-tin and felt my pulse speed up as Jack rummaged in the picnic basket and brought out the monster flashlight with the stainless steel barrel. He slapped it into Wireman’s hand like a nurse handing a doctor an instrument at the operating table.

When Wireman trained the light on the stair, I saw the minute gleam of gold: tiny hinges set at the far end of the tread. “Okay,” he said, and handed back the flashlight. “Put the beam on the edge of the tread.”

Jack did as told. Wireman reached for the lip of the riser, which was meant to swing up on those tiny hinges.

“Wireman, just a minute,” I said.

He turned to me.

“Sniff it first,” I said.

“Say what ?”

“Sniff it. Tell me if it smells wet.”

He sniffed the stair with the hinges at the back, then turned to me again. “A little damp, maybe, but everything in here smells that way. Want to be a little more specific?”

“Just open it very slowly, okay? Jack, shine the light directly inside. Look for wetness, both of you.”

“Why, Edgar?” Jack asked.

“Because the Table is leaking, she said so. If you see a ceramic container — a bottle, a jug, a keg — that’s her. It’ll almost certainly be cracked, and maybe broken wide open.”

Wireman pulled in a breath, then let it out. “Okay. As the mathematician said when he divided by zero, here goes nothing.”

He tried to lift the stair, with no result.

“It’s locked. I see a tiny slot… must have been a hell of a small key—”

“I’ve got a Swiss Army knife,” Jack offered.

“Just a minute,” Wireman said, and I saw his lips tighten down as he applied upward pressure with his fingertips. A vein stood out in the hollow of his temple.

“Wireman,” I started, “be carefu—”

Before I could finish, the lock — old and tiny and undoubtedly rotted with rust — snapped. The stair-tread flew up and tore off at the hinges. Wireman tumbled backward. Jack caught him, and then I caught Jack in a clumsy one-armed hug. The big flashlight hit the floor but didn’t break; its bright beam rolled, spotlighting that grisly pile of dead wasps.

“Holy shit,” Wireman said, regaining his feet. “Larry, Curly, and Moe.”

Jack picked up the flashlight and shone it into the hole in the stairs.

“What?” I asked. “Anything? Nothing? Talk!”

“Something, but it’s not a ceramic bottle,” he said. “It’s a metal box. Looks like a candy box, only bigger.” He bent down.

“Maybe you better not,” Wireman said.

But it was too late for that. Jack reached in all the way up to his elbow, and for one moment I was sure his face would lengthen in a scream as something battened on his arm and yanked him down to the shoulder. Then he straightened again. In his hand he held a heart-shaped tin box. He held it out to us. On the top, barely visible beneath speckles of rust, was a pink-cheeked angel. Below that, in old-fashioned script, these painted words:

Jack looked at us questioningly.

“Go on,” I said. It wasn’t Perse — I was positive of that now. I felt both disappointed and relieved. “You found it; go on and open it.”

“It’s the drawings,” Wireman said. “It must be.”

I thought so, too. But it wasn’t. What Jack lifted out of the rusty old heart-shaped box was Libbit’s dolly, and seeing Noveen was like coming home.

Ouuuu, her black eyes and scarlet smiling mouth seemed to be saying. Ouuu, I been in there all that time, you nasty man.

When I saw her come out of that box like a disinterred corpse out of a crypt, I felt a terrible, helpless horror come stealing through me, beginning at the heart and radiating outward, threatening to first loosen all my muscles and then unknit them completely.

“Edgar?” Wireman asked sharply. “All right?”

I did my best to get hold of myself. Mostly it was the thing’s toothless smile. Like the jockey’s cap, that smile was red . And as with the jockey’s cap, I felt that if I looked at it too long, it would drive me mad. That smile seemed to insist that everything which had happened in my new life was a dream I was having in some hospital ICU while machines kept my twisted body alive a little while longer… and maybe that was good, for the best, because it meant nothing had happened to Ilse.