Stephen King - Duma Key

These are the dreams from which I wake up screaming, thrashing at the dark with a hand that is no longer there.

Wireman and Jack slid the cap into position again, and then we went back to Elizabeth’s Mercedes. That was a slow, painful walk, and by the end of it I really wasn’t walking at all; I was lurching. It was as if the clock had been rolled back to the previous October. I was already thinking of the few Oxycontin tablets I had waiting for me back at Big Pink. I would have three, I decided. Three would do more than kill the pain; with luck they would also pound me into at least a few hours of sleep.

Both of my friends asked if I didn’t want to sling an arm around them. I refused. This wasn’t going to be my last walk tonight; I had made up my mind about that. I still didn’t have the last piece of the puzzle, but I had an idea. What had Elizabeth told Wireman? You will want to but you mustn’t .

Too late, too late, too late.

The idea wasn’t clear. What was clear was the sound of the shells. You could hear that sound from anywhere inside Big Pink, but to get the full effect, you really had to come up on the place from outside. That was when they sounded the most like voices. So many nights I had wasted painting when I could have been listening.

Tonight I would listen.

Outside the pillars, Wireman paused. “Abyssus abyssum invocat,” he said.

“Hell invokes Hell,” Jack said, and sighed.

Wireman looked at me. “Think we’ll have any trouble negotiating the road home?”

“Now? No.”

“And are we done here?”

“We are.”

“Will we ever come again?”

“No,” I said. I looked at the ruined house, dreaming in the moonlight. Its secrets were out. I realized we’d left little Libbit’s heart-shaped box behind, but maybe that was for the best. Let it stay here. “No one will come here anymore.”

Jack looked at me, curious and a little afraid. “How can you know that?”

“I know,” I said.

We had no trouble negotiating the road home. The smell was still there, but it was better now — partly because a good wind was getting up, blowing in off the Gulf, and partly because it was just… better now.

The courtyard lights of El Palacio were on a timer, and they looked wonderful, twinkling out of the dark. Inside the house, Wireman went methodically from room to room, turning on more lights. Turning on all the lights, until the house where Elizabeth had spent most of her life glowed like an ocean-liner coming into port at midnight.

When El Palacio was lit to the max, we took turns in the shower, passing the water-filled flashlight from hand to hand like a baton as we did so. Someone was always holding it. Wireman went first, then Jack, then me. After showering, each of us was inspected by the other two, then scrubbed with hydrogen peroxide where any skin was broken. I was the worst, and when I finally put my clothes back on, I stung all over.

I was finishing with my boots, laboriously tying them one-handed, when Wireman came into the guest bedroom looking grave. “There’s a message you need to hear on the machine downstairs. From the Tampa Police. Here, let me help you.”

He went down on one knee before me and began tightening my laces. I saw without surprise that the gray in his hair had advanced… and suddenly a bolt of alarm went through me. I reached out and grabbed his meaty shoulder. “The flashlight! Does Jack—”

“Relax. He’s sitting in Miss Eastlake’s old China Parlor, and he’s got it on his lap.”

I hurried, nevertheless. I don’t know what I expected to find — the room empty, the unscrewed flashlight lying on the rug in a puddle of dampness, maybe, or Jack sex-changed into the three-eyed, claw-handed bitch that had come falling out of the old cracked keg — but he was only sitting there with the flashlight, looking troubled. I asked if he was all right. And I took a good look at his eyes. If he was going… wrong… I thought I’d see it in his eyes.

“I’m fine. But that message from the cop…” He shook his head.

“Well, let’s hear it.”

A man identifying himself as Detective Samson said that he was trying to reach both Edgar Freemantle and Jerome Wireman, to ask some questions about Mary Ire. He particularly wanted to speak to Mr. Freemantle, if he had not left for Rhode Island or Minnesota — where, Samson understood, the body of his daughter was being transported for burial.

“I’m sure Mr. Freemantle is in a state of bereavement,” Samson said, “and I’m sure these are really Providence P.D.’s questions, but we know Mr. Freemantle did a newspaper interview with the Ire woman recently, and I volunteered to talk with him and yourself, Mr. Wireman, if possible. I can tell you over the phone what Providence is most curious about, if this message tape doesn’t run out…” It didn’t. And the last piece fell into place.

“Edgar, this is crazy,” Jack said. It was the third time he’d said it, and he was beginning to sound desperate. “Totally nuts.” He turned to Wireman. “You tell him!”

“Un poco loco,” Wireman agreed, but I knew the difference between poco and muy even if Jack didn’t.

We were standing in the courtyard, between Jack’s sedan and Elizabeth’s old Mercedes. The moon had risen higher; so had the wind. The surf was pounding the shore, and a mile away, the shells under Big Pink would be discussing all sorts of strange things: muy asustador . “But I think I could talk all night and still not change his mind.”

“Because you know I’m right,” I said.

“ Tu perdón, amigo, you might be right,” he said. “I’ll tell you one thing: Wireman intends to get down on his fat and aging knees and pray you are.”

Jack looked at the flashlight in my hand. “At least don’t take that, ” he said. “Excuse my French, boss, but you’re fucking crazy to take that!”

“I know what I’m doing,” I said, hoping to God it was true. “And stay here, both of you. Don’t try to follow me.” I raised the flashlight and pointed it at Wireman. “You’re on your honor.”

“All right, Edgar. My honor’s a tattered thing, but I swear on it. One practical question: are you sure two Tylenol will be enough to get you down the beach to your house on your feet, or are you going to wind up doing the Crawly-Gator?”

“I’ll get there upright.”

“And you’ll call when you do.”

“I’ll call.”

He opened his arms then, and I stepped into them. He kissed me on both cheeks. “I love you, Edgar,” he said. “You’re a hell of a man. Sano como una manzana. ”

“What does that one mean?”

He shrugged. “Stay healthy. I think.”

Jack offered his hand — the left one, the boy was a learner — and then decided a hug was in order, after all. In my ear he whispered, “Give me the flashlight, boss.”

In his I whispered back: “Can’t. Sorry.”

I started along the path to the back of the house, the one that would take me to the boardwalk. At the end of that boardwalk, a thousand or so years ago, I’d met the big man I was now leaving behind. He had been sitting under a striped umbrella. He had offered me iced green tea, very cooling. And he had said, So — the limping stranger arriveth at last .

And now he goeth, I thought.

I turned back. They were watching me.

“Muchacho!” Wireman called.

I thought he was going to ask me to come back so we could think about this a little more, talk it over a little more. But I had underestimated him.