Stephen King - Duma Key

I wasn’t… but I would have to be.

For Ilse.

“Show me your pictures,” I whispered, and that red mouth swallowed me whole.

Be prepared to see it all. If you want to create — God help you if you do, God help you if you can — don’t you dare commit the immorality of stopping on the surface. Go deep and take your fair salvage. Do it no matter how much it hurts.

You can draw two little girls — twins — but anyone can do that. Don’t stop there just because the rest is a nightmare. Do not neglect to add the fact that they are standing thigh-deep in water that should be over their heads. A witness — Emery Paulson, for instance — could see this if he looked, but so many people aren’t prepared to see what is right in front of their eyes.

Until, of course, it’s too late.

He’s come down to the beach to smoke a cigar. He can do this on the back porch or on the veranda, but some strong compulsion has urged him down the rutted road Adie calls Drunkard’s Boulevard and then down the steeper, sandy path to the beach. This voice has suggested his cigar will taste better here. He can sit on a fallen log the waves have cast up and watch the after-ashes of the sunset, as orange fades to tangerine and the stars go blue. The Gulf will look pleasant in such light, the voice suggests, even if the Gulf has had the bad taste to mark the beginning of his marriage by swallowing two of his beloved’s little sisters.

But there’s more to watch than just a sunset, it seems. There’s a ship out there. It’s an old-fashioned one, a pretty, slim-hulled thing with three masts and furled sails. Instead of sitting on the log, he walks down the beach to where the dry sand becomes wet and firm and packed, marveling at that swallow-shape against the fading sunset. Some trick of the air makes it seem as if the day’s last red is shining right through the hull.

He is thinking this when the first cry comes, chiming in his head like a silver bell: Emery!

And then comes another: Emery, help! The undertow! The rip!

That is when he sees the girls, and his heart gives a springing leap. It seems to rise all the way to his throat before falling back into place, where it dashes double-time. The unlit cigar tumbles from his fingers.

Two little girls, and they look just the same. They appear to be wearing identical jumpers, and although Emery should not be able to distinguish colors in this dying light, he can: one jumper is red, with an L on the front; the other is blue, with a T .

The rip! the girl with the T on her jumper calls, holding out her arms in supplication.

The undertow! calls the girl with the L .

And although neither girl appears to be in the slightest danger of drowning, Emery doesn’t hesitate. His joy won’t let him hesitate, nor his bright certainty that this is a miracle opportunity: when he turns up with the twins, his previously distant father-in-law will change his tune in a hurry. And the silver chimes those voices ring in his head, they urge him forward, too. He rushes to rescue Adie’s sisters, to gather the lost girls in and splash with them to shore.

Emery! That’s Tessie, her eyes dark in her china-pale face… but her lips are red.

Emery, hurry! That’s Laura, with her dripping white hands held out to him and her lank curls pasted against her white cheeks.

He cries I’m coming, girls! Hold on!

Splashing toward them, now up to his shins, now his knees.

He cries Fight it! as though they are doing anything but standing there in water that is only thigh-deep on them, although he’s now up to his own thighs and he’s six feet and two inches tall.

The water of the Gulf — still chilly in mid-April — is up to his chest when he reaches them, when he reaches out to them, and when they seize him with hands that are stronger than any little girls’ hands should be; by the time he’s close enough to see the silvery gleam in their glazed eyes and smell the salty, dead-fish aroma coming from their rotting hair, it’s too late. He struggles, his cries of joy and his entreaties to fight the undertow turning first to yells of protest and then to screams of horror, but by then it is far too late. The screams do not last long, in any case. Their small hands have become cold claws digging deep into his flesh as they pull him deeper, and the water fills his mouth, drowning his screams. He sees the ship against the last cold ashes of the sunset, and — how did he not see it before? how did he not know? — realizes it is a hulk, a plague ship, a deathship. Something is waiting for him there, something in a shroud, and he would scream if he could, but now the water fills his eyes and there are other hands, ones that feel like nothing but stripped radiations of bone, closing around his ankles. A talon pulls off a shoe, then tweaks a toe… as if it means to play “This little piggy went to market” with him as he drowns.

As Emery Paulson drowns.

Someone was yelling in the dark. It sounded like Make him stop screaming . Then there was a flat hard whacking sound and the dark lit up deep red, first on one side, then in the back. The red rolled toward the front of the darkness like a cloud of blood in water.

“You hit him too hard,” someone said. Was that Jack?

“Boss? Hey, boss!” Somebody was shaking me, so I still had a body. Probably that was good. Jack was shaking me. Jack who ? I could get it, but I had to think sideways. His name was like someone on The Weather Channel —

More shaking. Rougher. “ Muchacho! You there?”

My head bonked something, and I opened my eyes. Jack Cantori was kneeling to my left, his face tight and scared. It was Wireman in front of me, on his feet but bending over, shaking me like a daiquiri. The doll was lying face-down on my lap. I batted her aside with a grunt of disgust — oh you nasty man, indeed. Noveen landed in the pile of dead wasps with a papery rustle.

Suddenly the places she’d taken me began to come back: hell’s own tour. The path to Shade Beach that Adriana Eastlake had called (much to her father’s fury) Drunkard’s Boulevard. The beach itself, and the horrible things that had happened there. The pool. The cistern.

“His eyes are open,” Jack said. “Thank God. Edgar, do you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said. My voice was hoarse from screaming. I wanted food, but first I wanted to pour something down my burning throat. “Thirsty — can you help a brother out?”

Wireman handed me one of the big bottles of Evian water. I shook my head. “Pepsi.”

“You sure, muchacho ? Water might be—”

“Pepsi. Caffeine.” That wasn’t the only reason, but it would do.

Wireman put the Evian back and gave me a Pepsi. It was warm, but I chugged half of it, burped, then drank again. I looked around and saw only my friends and a length of dirty hallway. That was not good. In fact, it was terrible. My hand — I was definitely back to one again — was stiff and throbbing, as if I had been using it steadily for at least two hours, so where were the drawings? I was terrified that without the drawings, everything would fade the way dreams do upon waking. And I had risked more than my life for that information. I had risked my sanity.

I struggled, trying to get to my feet. A bolt of pain went through my head where I’d bumped it against the wall. “Where are the pictures? Please tell me there are pictures!”