Stephen King - Duma Key

Wireman laughed without humor. “Wireman likes it, niño .” Then he bent to me. “Now go on. Bitch or birch, drown her and let’s have done with her.”

The fourth rung snapped. The ladder tilted, and I fell off with the flashlight still clamped between my side and my stump, first shining up at the darkening sky, then illuminating lumps of coral coated with moss. My head connected with one of these and I saw stars. A moment later I was lying on a jagged bed of bones and staring into Adriana Eastlake Paulson’s eternal grin. One of those pallid toads leaped at me from between her mossy teeth and I batted at it with the barrel of the flashlight.

“Muchacho!” Wireman shouted, and Jack added, “Boss, are you all right!”

I was bleeding from the scalp — I could feel it running down my face in warm streams — but I thought I was okay; certainly I had been through worse in the Land of a Thousand Lakes. And the ladder, although aslant, was still standing. I looked to my right and there was the moss-covered Table Whiskey keg we’d come all this way to find. There were two toads on it now instead of one. They saw me looking and leaped into my face, eyes bulging, mouths gaping. I had no doubt that Perse wished they had teeth, like Elizabeth’s big boy. Ah, the good old days.

“I’m okay,” I said, batting the toads away and struggling to sit up. Bones broke beneath me and all around me. Except… no. They didn’t break. They were too old and damp to break. They first bent, then popped. “Send down the water. It’s okay to drop it in the bag, just try not to hit me in the head with it.”

I looked at Nan Melda.

I’m going to take your silver bracelets, I told her, but it’s not stealing. If you’re somewhere close and can see what I’m doing, I hope you’ll think of it as sharing. A kind of passing-on.

I slipped them off her remains and put them on my own left wrist, raising my arm and letting gravity slide them up to the catch-point. Above me, Jack was hanging head-down into the cistern. “Watch out, Edgar!”

The bag came down. One of the bones I’d broken in my fall punched through the plastic and water came trickling out. I yelled in fright and anger, opened the bag, looked inside. Only a single plastic bottle had been punctured. The other two were still whole. I turned to the moss-covered ceramic keg, slipped my hand into the thicket of slime under it, and worked it free. It didn’t want to come, but the thing inside had taken my daughter and I meant to have it. Finally it rolled toward me, and when it did, a good-sized chunk of coral slipped away on the other side of it and thudded to the muddy bottom of the cistern.

I shone the light on the keg. There was only a thin scum of moss on the side that had been facing the wall, and I could see the highlander in his kilt, one foot raised behind him as he did his fling. I could also see a jagged crack running straight down the keg’s curved side. That chunk of coral had made it when it fell out of the wall. The keg which Libbit had filled from the swimming pool back in 1927 had been leaking ever since that chunk had struck it, and now it was almost dry.

I could hear something rattling inside.

I’ll kill you if you don’t stop, but if you do, I’ll let you go. You and your friends.

I felt my lips skin back in a grin. And had Pam seen a grin like that when my hand closed around her neck? Of course she had. “You shouldn’t have killed my daughter.”

Stop now or I’ll take the other one, too.

Wireman called down, and the desperation in his voice was naked. “Venus just popped, amigo . I take that as a bad sign.”

I was sitting against one damp wall, with coral poking into my back and bones poking into my side. Movement was restricted, and in some other country my hip was throbbing badly — not screaming yet, but probably soon. I had no idea how I was supposed to climb the ladder again in such condition, but I was too angry to worry about it.

“Pardon me, Miss Cookie,” I murmured to Adie, and stuck the butt of the flashlight in her bony mouth. Then I took the ceramic keg in both hands… because both hands were there. I bent my good leg, pushing bones and muck to either side with the heel of my boot, lifted the keg into the dusty beam of light, and brought it down on my upraised knee. It cracked again, releasing a little flood of sludgy water, but didn’t break.

Perse screamed inside it and I felt my nose begin to bleed. And the light from the flash changed. It turned red . In that scarlet glow, the skulls of Adie Paulson and Nan Melda gaped and grinned at me. I looked at the moss-covered walls of this filthy throat into which I’d climbed of my own free will and saw other faces: Pam’s… Mary Ire’s, twisted in rage as she brought the butt of her gun down on Ilse’s head… Kamen’s, filled with terminal surprise as he dropped with his thunderclap heart attack… Tom, twisting the wheel of his car to send it hurtling into concrete at seventy miles an hour.

Worst of all, I saw Monica Goldstein, screaming You killed my doggy!

“Edgar, what’s happening?” That was Jack, a thousand miles away.

I thought of Shark Puppy on The Bone, singing “Dig.” I thought of telling Tom, That man died in his pick-up .

Then put me in your pocket and we’ll go together, she said. We’ll sail together into your real other life, and all the cities of the world will be at your feet. You’ll live long… I can arrange that… and you’ll be the artist of the age. They’ll rank you with Goya. With Leonardo.

“Edgar?” There was panic in Wireman’s voice. “People are coming from the beach side. I think I hear them. This is bad, muchacho .”

You don’t need them. We don’t need them. They’re nothing but… nothing but crew.

Nothing but crew . At that, the red rage descended over my mind even as my right hand began to slip out of existence again. But before it could go completely… before I lost my grip on either my fury or the damned cracked keg…

“Stick it up your friend, you dump birch,” I said, and raised the keg over my throbbing, upthrust knee again. “Stick it in the buddy.” I brought it down as hard as I could on that bony knob. There was a pain, but less than I had been prepared for… and in the end, that’s usually the way, don’t you think? “Stick it up your fucking chum .”

The keg didn’t break; already cracked, it simply burst, showering my jeans with murky wetness from the inch or so of water that had still been left inside. And a small china figure tumbled out: a woman wrapped in a cloak and a hood. The hand clasping the edges of the cloak together at her neck was not really a hand at all, but a claw. I snatched the thing up. I had no time to study it — they were coming now, I had no doubt of that, coming for Wireman and Jack — but there was long enough to see that Perse was extraordinarily beautiful. If, that was, you could ignore the claw hand and the disquieting hint of a third eye beneath the hair that had tumbled out from beneath her hood and over her brow. The thing was also extremely delicate, almost translucent. Except when I tried to snap it between my hands, it was like trying to snap steel.

“Edgar!” Jack screamed.

“Keep them back!” I snapped. “You have to keep them back!”

I tucked her into the breast pocket of my shirt, and immediately felt a sickening warmth begin to spread through to my skin. And it was thrumming . My untrustworthy mojo arm was gone again, so I stuck a bottle of Evian water between my side and my stump, then spun off the cap. I repeated this clumsy and time-consuming process with the other bottle.