Stephen King - Duma Key

He says What is it, Melda Lou?

She says You got to come right away.

He looks at her from his streaming eyes with a calm and infuriating stupidity. Come where?

She says To the beach. And bring at-ere.

She points to the harpoon pistol, which hangs on the wall, along with several short harpoons. The tips are steel, not silver, and the shafts are heavy. She knows; hasn’t she carried them in the basket enough times?

He says What are you talking about?

She says I cain’t be takin time to explain. You got to come to the beach right now, less you want to lose another one.

He goes. He doesn’t ask which daughter, or inquire again why he should want the harpoon pistol; he just snatches it off the wall, takes two of the harpoons in his other hand, and strides out through the open study door, first beside Melda and then ahead of her. By the time he reaches the kitchen, where Melda has last seen Adie, he’s at a full-out run and she is falling behind even though she’s running herself, holding her skirts before her in both hands. And is she surprised by this sudden break in his torpor, this sudden galvanizing action? No. Because, despite the blanket of his grief, the Mister has also known that something here is wrong and going wronger all the time.

The back door stands open. An evening breeze frisks in, stirring it back farther on its hinges… only now it’s actually a night breeze. Sunset is dying. There will still be light on Shade Beach, but here at Heron’s Roost, dark has already come. Melda dashes across the back porch and sees the Mister already on the path to the beach. He’s only a shadow. She looks around for Libbit, but of course she doesn’t see her; if Libbit is doing what she is supposed to be doing, then she’s already on her way to the swimming pool with her heart-box under her arm.

The heart-box with the monster inside it.

She runs after the Mister and catches him at the bench, where the path drops down to the beach. He is standing there, frozen. In the west, the last of the sunset is a sullen orange line that will soon be gone, but there is enough light for her to see Adie at the edge of the water, and the man who is wading to greet her.

Adriana screams Emery! She sounds mad with joy, as if he’s been gone a year instead of a day.

Melda shouts No, Ade, keep away from him! from beside the frozen, gaping man, but she knows Adie will pay no attention, and she doesn’t; Adie runs to her husband.

John Eastlake says What — and that’s all.

He’s broken free of his torpor long enough to run this far, but now he’s frozen again. Is it because he sees the two other forms, farther out but also wading toward shore? Wading in water that should be over their heads? Melda thinks not. She thinks he is still staring at his oldest daughter as the dim figure of the man coming out of the water reaches for her with his dripping arms and lays hold of her neck with his dripping hands, first choking off her glad cries and then dragging her into the surge.

Out there in the Gulf, waiting, ticking back and forth on the mild swell like a clock that tells time in years and centuries rather than minutes and hours, is the black hulk of Perse’s ship.

Melda grabs the Mister’s arm, sinking her hand deep into the bicep, and speaks to him as she has never spoken to a white man in her life.

She says Give a help, you son of a bitch! ’Fore he drownds her!

She yanks him forward. He comes. She doesn’t wait to see if he keeps on or freezes up again, and she has forgotten all about Libbit; all she can think about is Adie. She has to stop the Emery-thing from dragging her into the water, and she has to do it before the dead babby-uns can get there to help him.

She cries Turn loose! Turn loose of her!

Flying down the beach with her skirt belling out behind. Emery has gotten Adie in almost up to her waist. Adie is now fighting, but she’s also choking. Melda flounders toward them and throws herself on the pallid corpse who has his wife by the throat. He screams when Melda’s left arm, the one with the bracelets on it, touches him. It is a bubbling sound, as if his throat is full of water. He writhes in Melda’s grip like a fish, and she rakes him with her fingernails. Flesh sloughs away beneath them with sickening ease, but no blood flows from the pale wounds. His eyes roll in their sockets, and they are like the eyes of a dead carp in the moonlight.

He pushes Adriana away so he can grapple with the harpy that has attacked him, the harpy with the cold, repelling fire on its arm.

Adie wails No, Nanny, stop, you’re hurting him!

Adie flounders forward to pull Melda off, or at least separate them, and that’s the moment when John Eastlake, standing shin-deep in the Gulf, fires the harpoon pistol. The triple-bladed bit takes his oldest daughter high in the throat, and she stands bolt-upright, with two inches of steel poking out in front of her and four more jutting out behind, just below the base of her skull.

John Eastlake shrieks Adie, no! Adie, I DIDN’T MEAN TO!

Adie turns toward the sound of her father’s voice and actually begins to walk toward him, and that is all Nan Melda has time to see. Adie’s dead husband is trying to tear itself free of her grip, but she doesn’t want to let it go; she wants to end its terrible half-life and perhaps by doing so warn off the two baby-horrors before they can get too close. And she thinks (so far as she can think) that she can do that, because she has seen a smoldering scorch-mark on the thing’s pale, wet cheek and understands that her bracelet has made it.

Her silver bracelet.

The thing reaches for her, its wrinkled mouth yawning in what might be either fear or fury. Behind her, John Eastlake is screaming his daughter’s name, over and over.

Melda snarls You done this! and when the Emery-thing seizes her, she lets it.

You and the bitch been runnin you, she would add, but its white hands close on her throat as they closed on poor Adie’s, and she can only gurgle. Her left arm is free, however, the one with the bracelets on it, and that arm feels very powerful. She draws it back and swings it forward in a great arc, connecting with the right side of the Emery-thing’s head.

The result is spectacular. The creature’s skull caves in under the blow, as if a little immersion had turned that hard cage to candy. But it’s still hard, all right; one of the shards that comes poking through the mat of Emery’s hair slashes her forearm deep, and blood goes pattering down into the water that surges around them.

Two shadows pass her, one on her left, one on her right.

Lo-Lo cries Daddy! in her new silver voice.

Tessie cries Daddy, help us!

The Emery-thing is trying to get away from Melda now, floundering and splashing, wanting no more to do with her. Melda jabs the thumb of her powerful left hand in its right eye, feeling something cold, like toad-guts under a rock, come squishing out. Then she whirls around, staggering, as the rip tries to pull her feet from under her.

She reaches out with her left hand and seizes Lo-Lo by the scruff of her neck and pulls her backward. “ You ain’t! ” she grunts, and Lo-Lo comes flailing with a cry of surprise and agony… and no cry like that ever came from no little girl’s throat, Melda knows.

John howls Melda, stop it!

He’s kneeling in the last thin run of the surf with Adie before him. The harpoon’s shaft juts up from her throat.