Duma Key - Stephen King

Oh, some of that old ability may still remain - like scar-tissue on the dura of the brain from an old injury (caused by falling out of a pony-trap, let's say) - and you might have to find ways to let that out once in awhile, to express it like a build-up of pus from an infection that will never quite heal. So you get interested in other people's art. You become, in fact, a patron of the arts. And if that's still not enough? Why, maybe you begin to collect china figures and buildings. You begin to build yourself a China Town. No one will call creating such tableaux art, but it's certainly imaginative, and the regular exercise of the imagination - its visual aspect in particular - is enough to make it stop.

Make what stop?

The itch, of course.

That damnable itch.

I scratched at my right arm, passed through it, and for the ten thousandth time found only my ribs. I flipped back the cover of my pad to the first sheet.

Start with a blank surface.

It called to me, as I was sure such blank sheets had once called to her.

Fill me up. Because white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember. Make. Show. Draw. And when you do, the itch will go away. For awhile the confusion will subside.

Please stay on the Key, she had said. No matter what happens. We need you.

I thought that might be true.

I sketched quickly. Just a few strokes. Something that could have been a cart. Or possibly a pony-trap, standing still and waiting for the pony.

"They lived here happily enough," I told the empty studio. "Father and daughters. Then Elizabeth fell out of the pony-trap and started to draw, the off-season hurricane exposed the debris field, the little girls drowned. Then the rest of them pop off to Miami, and the trouble stops. And, when they came back nearly twenty-five years later..."

Beneath the pony-trap I printed FINE. Paused. Added AGAIN. FINE AGAIN.

Fine, the shells whispered far below. Fine again.

Yes, they had been fine, John and Elizabeth had been fine. And after John died, Elizabeth had continued being fine. Fine with her art shows. Fine with her chinas. Then things had for some reason begun to change again. I didn't know if the deaths of Wireman's wife and daughter had been a part of that change, but I thought they might have been. And about his arrival and mine on Duma Key I thought there was no question. I had no rational reason for believing that, but I did.

Things on Duma Key had been okay... then strange... then for a long time they'd been okay again. And now...

She's awake.

The table is leaking.

If I wanted to know what was happening now, I had to know what had happened then. Dangerous or not, I had to.

ii

I picked up her first drawing, which wasn't a drawing at all but just an uncertain line running across the middle of the paper. I took it in my left hand, closed my eyes, and then pretended I was touching it with my right, just as I had with Pam's HANDS OFF gardening gloves. I tried to see my right fingers running over that hesitant line. I could - sort of - but I felt a kind of despair. Did I mean to do this with all of the pictures? There had to be twelve dozen, and that was a conservative estimate. Also, I wasn't exactly being overwhelmed with psychic information.

Take it easy. Rome wasn't built in an hour.

I decided a little Radio Free Bone couldn't hurt and might help. I got up, holding the ancient piece of paper in my right hand, and of course it went fluttering to the floor because there was no right hand. I bent to pick it up, thinking I had the saying wrong, the saying was Rome wasn't built in a day.

But Melda says nour.

I stopped, holding the sheet of paper in my left hand. The hand the crane hadn't been able to get to. Was that an actual memory, something that had come drifting out of the picture, or just something I'd made up? Just my mind, trying to be obliging?

"It's not a picture," I said, looking at the hesitant line.

No, but it tried to be a picture.

My ass went back onto the seat of my chair with a thump. It wasn't a voluntary act of sitting; it was more a case of my knees losing their lock and letting go. I looked at the line, then out the window. From the Gulf to the line. From the line to the Gulf.

She had tried to draw the horizon. It had been her first thing.

Yes.

I picked up my pad and seized one of her pencils. It didn't matter which one as long as it was hers. It felt too big, too fat, in my hand. It also felt just right. I began to draw.

On Duma Key, it was what I did best.

iii

I sketched a child sitting on a potty chair. Her head was bandaged. She had a drinking glass in one hand. Her other arm was slung around her father's neck. He was wearing a strap-style undershirt and had shaving cream on his cheeks. Standing in the background, just a shadow, was the housekeeper. No bracelets in this sketch, because she didn't always wear them, but the kerchief was wrapped around her head, the knot in front. Nan Melda, the closest thing to a mother Libbit ever knew.

Libbit?

Yes, that was what they called her. What she called herself. Libbit, little Libbit.

"The littlest one of all," I murmured, and flicked back the first page of the sketch-pad. The pencil - too short, too fat, unused for over three-quarters of a century - was the perfect tool, the perfect channel. It began to move again.

I sketched the little girl in a room. Books appeared on the wall behind her and it was a study. Daddy's study. The bandage was wound around her head. She was at a desk. She was wearing what looked like a housecoat. She had a

( ben- cil )

pencil in her hand. One of the colored pencils? Probably not - not then, not yet - but it didn't matter. She had found her thing, her focus, her m tier. And how hungry it made her! How ravenous!

She thinks I will have more paper, please.

She thinks I am ELIZABETH.

"She literally drew herself back into the world," I said, and my body broke out in gooseflesh from head to toe - for hadn't I done the same? Hadn't I done exactly the same, here on Duma Key?

I had more work to do. I thought it was going to be a long and exhausting evening, but I felt I was on the verge of great discoveries, and what I felt wasn't fright - not then - but a kind of copper-mouthed excitement.

I bent down and picked up Elizabeth's third drawing. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth. Moving with greater and greater speed. Sometimes I stopped to draw, but mostly I didn't have to. The pictures were forming in my head, now, and the reason I didn't have to put them down on paper seemed clear to me: Elizabeth had already done that work, long ago, when she had been recovering from the accident that nearly killed her.

In the happy days before Noveen began to talk.

iv

At one point during my interview with Mary Ire, she said discovering in my middle age that I could paint with the best of them must have been like having someone give me the keys to a souped-up muscle car - a Roadrunner or a GTO. I said yes, it was like that. At another point she said it must have been like having someone give me the keys to a fully furnished house. A mansion, really. I said yes, like that, too. And if she had gone on? Said it must have been like inheriting a million shares of Microsoft stock, or being elected ruler for life of some oil-rich (and peaceful) emirate in the mideast? I would have said yeah, sure, you bet. To soothe her. Because those questions were about her. I could see the longing look in her eyes when she asked them. They were the eyes of a kid who knows the closest she's ever going to get to realizing her dream of the high trapeze is sitting on the bleachers at the Saturday matinee performance. She was a critic, and lots of critics who aren't called to do what they write about grow jealous and mean and small in their disappointment. Mary wasn't like that. Mary still loved it all. She drank whiskey from a water-glass and wanted to know what it was like when Tinker Bell flew out of nowhere and tapped you on the shoulder and you discovered that, even though you were on the wrinkle-neck side of fifty, you had suddenly gained the ability to fly past the face of the moon. So even though it wasn't like having a fast car or being handed the keys to a fully furnished house, I told her it was. Because you can't tell anyone what it's like. You can only talk around it until everyone's exhausted and it's time to go to sleep.

But Elizabeth had known what it was like.

It was in her drawings, then in her paintings.

It was like being given a tongue when you had been mute. And more. Better. It was like being given back your memory, and a person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you. Even from that first line - that incredibly brave first line meant to show where the Gulf met the sky - she had understood that seeing and memory were interchangeable, and had set out to mend herself.

Perse hadn't been in it. Not at first.

I was sure of that.

v

For the next four hours, I slipped in and out of Libbit's world. It was a wonderful, frightening place to be. Sometimes I scribbled words - The gift is always hungry, start with what you know - but mostly it was pictures. Pictures were the real language we shared.

I understood her family's quick arc from amazement to acceptance to boredom. It had happened partly because the girl was so prolific, maybe more because she was part of them, she was their little Libbit, and there's always that feeling that no good can come out of Nazareth, isn't there? But their boredom only made her hunger stronger. She looked for new ways to wow them, sought new ways of seeing.

And found them, God help her.

I drew birds flying upside-down, and animals walking on the swimming pool.

I drew a horse with a smile so big it ran off the sides of its face. I thought it was right around then that Perse had entered the picture. Only -

"Only Libbit didn't know it was Perse," I said. "She thought-"

I thumbed back through her drawings, almost to the beginning. To the round black face with the smiling mouth. At first glance I had dismissed this one as Elizabeth's portrait of Nan Melda, but I should have known better - it was a child's face, not a woman's. A doll's face. Suddenly my hand was printing NOVEEN beside it in strokes so hard that Elizabeth's old canary-yellow pencil snapped on the last stroke of the second N. I threw it on the floor and grabbed another.

It was Noveen that Perse had spoken through first, so as not to frighten her little genius. What could be less threatening than a little black girl-dolly who smiled and wore a red kerchief around her head, just like the beloved Nan Melda?

And was Elizabeth shocked or frightened when the doll began to speak on its own? I didn't think so. She might have been fiercely talented in that one narrow way, but she was still only a child of three.

Noveen told her things to draw, and Elizabeth -

I grabbed my sketch-pad again. Drew a cake lying on the floor. Splattered on the floor. Little Libbit thought that prank was Noveen's idea, but it had been Perse, testing Elizabeth's power. Perse experimenting as I had experimented, trying to find out how powerful this new tool might be.

Next had come the Alice.

Because, her doll whispered, there was treasure and a storm would uncover it.

So not an Alice at all, not really. And not an Elizabeth, because she hadn't been Elizabeth yet - not to her family, not to herself. The big blow of '27 had been Hurricane Libbit.

Because Daddy would like finding a treasure. And because Daddy needed to think of something besides -

"She's made her bed," I said in a harsh voice that didn't sound like my own. "Let her sleep in it."

- besides how mad he was at Adie for running off with Emery, that Celluloid Collar.

Yes. That was how it had been on the south end of Duma Key, back in '27.

I drew John Eastlake - only it was just his fins showing against the sky, and the tip of his snorkel, and a shadow beneath. John Eastlake diving for treasure.

Diving for his youngest daughter's new doll, although he probably didn't believe it.

Beside one flipper I printed the words FAIR SALVAGE.

The images rose in my mind, clearer and clearer, as if they had been waiting all these years to be liberated, and I wondered briefly if every painting (and every implement used to make them), from those on the walls of caves in central Asia to the Mona Lisa, held such hidden memories of their making and makers, encoded in their strokes like DNA.

Swim n kick til I say stop.

I added Elizabeth to the picture of Diving Daddy, standing up to her chubby knees in the water, Noveen tucked under her arm. Libbit almost could have been the doll-girl in the sketch Ilse had demanded - the one I had titled The End of the Game.

And after he saw all those things, he hug me hug me hug me.

I made a hurried little sketch of John Eastlake doing just that, his facemask pushed up on top of his head. The picnic basket was nearby, on a blanket, and the speargun was resting on top of it.

He hug me hug me hug me.

Draw her, a voice whispered. Draw Elizabeth's fair salvage. Draw Perse.

But I wouldn't. I was afraid of what I might see. And what it might do to me.

And what about Daddy? What about John? How much had he known?

I flipped through her drawings to the picture of John Eastlake screaming, with blood running from his nose and one eye. He had known plenty. Probably too late, but he had known.

What exactly had happened to Tessie and Lo-Lo?

And to Perse, to shut her up for all those years?

What exactly was she? Not a doll, that much seemed sure.

I could have gone on - a picture of Tessie and Lo-Lo running down a path, some path, hand-in-hand, was already asking to be drawn - but I was beginning to come out of my half-trance and was scared almost to death. Besides, I thought I knew enough to be going on with; Wireman could help me figure out the rest, I was almost sure of it. I closed my sketch-pad. I put down that long-gone little girl's brown pencil - now just a nubbin - and realized I was hungry. Ravenous, in fact. But that kind of hangover wasn't new to me, and there was plenty to eat in the refrigerator.

vi

I went downstairs slowly, my head spinning with images - an upside-down heron with blue gimlet eyes, the smiling horses, the boat-size swim-fins on Daddy's feet - and I didn't bother with the living room lights. There was no need to; by April I could have navigated the route from the foot of the stairs to the kitchen in pitch blackness. By then I had made that solitary house with its chin jutting over the edge of the water my own, and in spite of everything, I couldn't imagine leaving it. Halfway across the room I stopped, looking out through the Florida room to the Gulf.

There, riding at anchor no more than a hundred yards from the beach, clear and unmistakable in the light of a quarter-moon and a million stars, was the Perse. Her sails had been furled, but nets of rope sagged from her ancient masts like spiderwebs. The shrouds, I thought. Those are its shrouds. She bobbed up and down like a long dead child's rotten toy. The decks were empty, so far as I could see - of both life and souvenirs - but who knew what might be belowdecks?

I was going to faint. At the same instant I realized this, I realized why: I had stopped breathing. I told myself to inhale, but for one terrible second, nothing happened. My chest remained as flat as a page in a closed book. When it rose at last, I heard a whooping sound. That was me, struggling to go on with life in a conscious state. I blew out the air I had just taken in and inhaled more, a little less noisily. Black specks flocked in front of my eyes in the dimness, then faded. I expected the ship out there to do the same - surely it had to be a hallucination - but it remained, perhaps a hundred and twenty feet long and a little less than half that in the beam. Bobbing on the waves. Rocking from side to side just a little, too. Bowsprit wagging like a finger, seeming to say Ouuu, you nasty man, you're in for it n -