Stephen King - Duma Key

“Relax, muchacho, right here.” Wireman stepped aside and showed me a semi-tidy stack of Artisan sheets. “You were drawing like a madman, tearing them off your pad as you went. I took em and stacked em up.”

“All right. Good. I need to eat. I’m starving.” And this felt like the literal truth.

Jack looked around uneasily. The front corridor, which had been filled with afternoon light when I took Noveen from Jack and went bye-bye down a black hole, was now dimmer. Not dark — not yet, and when I looked up I could see the sky overhead was still blue — but it was clear that the afternoon was either gone or almost gone.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Quarter past five,” Wireman said. He didn’t have to glance at his watch, which told me he’d been keeping close track. “Sunset’s still a couple of hours away. Give or take. So if they only come out at night—”

“I think they do. That’s enough time, and I still need to eat. We can get out of this ruin. We’re done with the house. We may need a ladder, though.”

Wireman raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask; he only said, “If there is one, it’s probably in the barn. Which seems to have stood up to Father Time pretty well, actually.”

“What about the doll?” Jack asked. “Noveen?”

“Put her back in Elizabeth’s heart-box and bring her along,” I said. “She deserves a place at El Palacio, with the rest of Elizabeth’s things.”

“What’s our next stop, Edgar?” Wireman asked.

“I’ll show you, but one thing first.” I pointed to the gun in his belt. “That thing’s still loaded, right?”

“Absolutely. Fresh clip.”

“If the heron comes back, I still want you to shoot it. Make it a priority.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s her,” I said. “Perse’s been using it to watch us.”

We left the ruin the way we’d entered it and found a Florida early evening full of clear light. The sky above was cloudless. The sun cast a brilliant silver sheen across the Gulf. In another hour or so that track would begin to tarnish and turn to gold, but not yet.

We trudged along the remains of Drunkard’s Boulevard, Jack carrying the picnic basket, Wireman the bag containing the food and the Artisan pads. I had my drawings. Sea oats whispered at our pants legs. Our shadows trailed long behind us toward the wreck of the mansion. Far ahead, a pelican saw a fish, folded its wings, and dropped like a dive-bomber. We did not see the heron, nor were we visited by Charley the Lawn Jockey. But when we reached the crest of the ridge, where the path had once sloped down along dunes that were now eroded and steep, we saw something else.

We saw the Perse.

She lay at anchor three hundred yards out. Her spotless sails were furled. She rolled from side to side on the swell, ticking like a clock. From here we could read the entire name painted on her starboard side: Persephone . She appeared deserted, and I was sure she was — in the daytime, the dead stayed dead. But Perse wasn’t dead. Worse luck for us.

“My God, it could have sailed right out of your paintings,” Jack breathed. There was a stone bench to the right of the path, barely visible for the bushes growing around it and the vines snaking over its flat seat. He dropped onto it, gaping out at the boat.

“No,” I said. “I painted the truth. You’re seeing the mask it wears in the daytime.”

Wireman stood beside Jack, shading his eyes against the sun. Then he turned to me. “Do they see it over on Don Pedro? They don’t, do they?”

“Maybe some do,” I said. “The terminally ill, the schizos currently ditching their medicine…” That made me think of Tom. “But it’s here for us, not them. We’re meant to leave Duma Key on it tonight. The road will be closed to us once the sun goes down. The living dead may all be out there on Persephone, but there are things in the jungle. Some — like the lawn jockey — are things that Elizabeth created as a little girl. There are others that have come since Perse woke up again.” I paused. I didn’t like to say the rest, but I did. I had to. “I imagine I’m responsible for some of those. Every man has his nightmares.”

I thought of the skeleton arms reaching up in the moonlight.

“So,” Wireman said harshly. “The plan is for us to leave by boat, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Press gang? Like in jolly old England?”

“Pretty much.”

“I can’t do that,” Jack said. “I get seasick.”

I smiled and sat down beside him. “Sea voyages aren’t in the plan, Jack.”

“Good.”

“Can you open that chicken for me, and tear me off a leg?”

He did as I asked, and they watched, fascinated, as I devoured first one leg, then the other. I asked if anyone wanted the breast, and when they both said no, I ate that, too. Halfway through it I thought of my daughter, lying pale and dead in Rhode Island. I kept on eating, doing it methodically, wiping my greasy hands on my jeans between bites. Ilse would have understood. Not Pam and probably not Lin, but Illy? Yes. I was frightened of what lay ahead, but I knew Perse was frightened, too. If she hadn’t been, she would not have tried so hard to keep us out. On the contrary, she would have welcomed us in.

“Time’s wasting, muchacho, ” Wireman said. “Daylight fleets.”

“I know,” I said. “And my daughter’s dead forever. I’m still starving, though. Is there anything sweet? Cake? Cookies? A motherfucking HoHo?”

There wasn’t. I settled for another Pepsi and a few cucumber strips dipped in ranch dressing, which to me has always looked and tasted like slightly sweetened snot. At least my headache was fading. The images that had come to me in the dark — the ones that had been waiting all those years inside Noveen’s rag-stuffed head — were also fading, but I had my own pictures to refresh them. I wiped my hands a final time and put the stack of torn and wrinkled sheets on my lap: the family album from hell.

“Keep an eye out for that heron,” I told Wireman.

He looked around, glanced at the deserted ship ticking back and forth out there on the mild swell, then looked back at me. “Wouldn’t the spear-pistol be better for Big Bird? With one of the silver harpoons attached?”

“No. The heron’s something she just rides, the way a man rides a horse. She’d probably like it if we wasted one of the silvertips on it, but Perse is done getting what she likes.” I smiled without humor. “That part of the lady’s career is over.”

Wireman made Jack get up so he could strip the vines from the bench. Then we sat there, three unlikely warriors, two in their fifties and one barely out of his teens, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico on one side and a ruined mansion on the other. The red basket and mostly depleted food-bag were at our feet. I thought I had twenty minutes to tell them what I knew, even half an hour, and that would still leave enough time.

I hoped.

“Elizabeth’s connection with Perse was closer than mine,” I said. “Much more intense than mine. I don’t know how she stood it. Once she had the china figure, she saw everything, whether she was there or not. And she drew everything. But the worst pictures she burned before she left this place.”

“Like the picture of the hurricane?” Wireman asked.

“Yes. I think she was afraid of their power, and she was right to be afraid. But she saw it all. And the doll stored it all up. Like a psychic camera. In most cases, I just saw what Elizabeth saw and drew what Elizabeth drew. Do you understand that?”

They both nodded.

“Start with this path, which was once a road. It went from Shade Beach to the barn.” I pointed to the long, vine-coated outbuilding where I hoped we would find a ladder. “I don’t think the bootlegger who wore it into the coral was Dave Davis, but I’m confident he was one of Davis’s business associates, and that a fair amount of hooch came onto the Florida Suncoast by way of Duma Key. From Shade Beach to John Eastlake’s barn, then across to the mainland. Mostly top-shelf stuff headed for a couple of jazz clubs in Sarasota and Venice, stored as a favor to Davis.”