Duma Key - Stephen King

I slapped myself across the face hard enough to bring water to my left eye and the ship was still right there. I realized that if it was there - truly there - then Jack would be able to see it from the boardwalk at El Palacio. There was a phone on the far side of the living room, but from where I was standing, the one on the kitchen counter was closer. And it had the advantage of being right under the light switches. I wanted lights, especially the ones in the kitchen, those good hard fluorescents. I backed out of the living room, not taking my eyes off the ship, and hit all three switches with the back of my hand. The lights came on, and I lost sight of the Perse - of everything beyond the Florida room - in their bright, no-nonsense glare. I reached for the phone, then stopped.

There was a man in my kitchen. He was standing by my refrigerator. He was wearing soaked rags that might once have been blue jeans and the kind of shirt that's called a boat-neck. What appeared to be moss was growing on his throat, cheeks, forehead, and forearms. The right side of his skull was crushed in. Petals of bone protruded through the lank foliage of his dark hair. One of his eyes - the right - was gone. What remained was a spongy socket. The other was an alien, disheartening silver that had nothing to do with humanity. His feet were bare, swollen, purple, and burst through to the bone at the ankles.

It grinned at me, lips splitting as they drew back, revealing two lines of yellow teeth set into old black gums. It raised its right arm, and here I saw what must have been another relic of the Perse. It was a manacle. One old and rusty circlet was clamped around the thing's wrist. The other one hung open like a loose jaw.

The other one was for me.

It emitted a loose hissing sound, perhaps all its decayed vocal cords could produce, and began to walk toward me under the bright no-nonsense fluorescents. It left footprints on the hardwood floor. It cast a shadow. I could hear a faint creaking and saw it was wearing a soaked leather belt - rotten, but for the time being, still holding.

A queer soft paralysis had come over me. I was conscious, but I couldn't run even though I understood what that open manacle meant, and what this thing was: a one-man press gang. He would clamp me and take me aboard yonder frigate, or schooner, or barquentine, or whatever-the-hell-it-was. I would become part of the crew. And while there might not be cabin boys on the Perse, I thought there were at least two cabin girls, one named Tessie and one named Lo-Lo.

You have to run. At least clock it one with the phone, for Christ's sake!

But I couldn't. I was like a bird hypnotized by a snake. The best I could do was to take one numb step backward into the living room... then another... then a third. Now I was in the shadows again. It stood in the kitchen doorway with the white light of the fluorescents striking across its damp and rotted face and throwing its shadow across the living room carpet. Still grinning. I considered closing my eyes and trying to wish it away, but that wasn't going to work; I could smell it, like a Dumpster behind a restaurant that specializes in fish dinners. And -

"Time to go, Edgar."

- it could talk, after all. The words were slushy but understandable.

It took a step into the living room. I took another of my numb steps backward, knowing in my heart it would do no good, that compensation wasn't enough, that when it got tired of playing it would simply dart forward and clamp that iron manacle on my wrist and drag me, screaming, down to the water, down to the caldo largo, and the last sound I'd hear on the living side would be the grating conversation of the shells under the house. Then the water would fill my ears.

I took another step back just the same, not sure I was even moving toward the door, only hoping, then another... and a hand fell on my shoulder.

I shrieked.

vii

"What the fuck is that thing?" Wireman whispered in my ear.

"I don't know," I said, and I was sobbing. Sobbing with fear. "Yes I do. I do know. Look out at the Gulf, Wireman."

"I can't. I don't dare take my eyes off it."

But the thing in the doorway had seen Wireman now - Wireman who'd come in through the open door just as it had itself, Wireman who had arrived like the cavalry in a John Wayne Western - and had stopped three steps inside the living room, its head slightly lowered, the manacle swinging back and forth from its outstretched arm.

"Christ," Wireman said. "That ship! The one in the paintings!"

"Go on," the thing said. "We have no business with you. Go on, and you may live."

"It's lying," I said.

"Tell me something I don't know," Wireman said, then raised his voice. He was standing just behind me, and he almost blew out my eardrum. " Leave! You're trespassing! "

The drowned young man made no reply, but it was every bit as fast as I had feared. At one moment it was standing three steps inside the living room. At the next it was right in front of me, and I had only the vaguest, flickering impression of it crossing the distance between. Its smell - rot and seaweed and dead fish turning to soup in the sun - bloomed and became overwhelming. I felt its hands, freezing cold, close over my forearm, and cried out in shock and horror. It wasn't the cold, it was how soft they were. How flabby. That one silver eye peered at me, seeming to drill into my brain, and for a moment there was a sensation of being filled with pure darkness. Then the manacle clamped on my wrist with a flat hard clacking sound.

" Wireman! " I screamed, but Wireman was gone. He was running away from me, across the room, as fast as he could.

The drowned thing and I were chained together. It dragged me toward the door.

viii

Wireman was back just before the dead man could pull me over the threshold. He had something in his hand that looked like a blunt dagger. For a moment I thought it must be one of the silver harpoons, but that was only a powerful bit of wishful thinking; the silver harpoons were upstairs with the red picnic basket. "Hey!" he said. "Hey, you! Yeah, I'm talking to you! Cojudo de puta madre! "

Its head snapped around as fast as the head of a snake about to strike. Wireman was almost as fast. Holding the blunt object in both hands, he drove it into the thing's face, striking home just above the right eyesocket. The thing shrieked, a sound that went through my head like shards of glass. I saw Wireman wince and stagger back; saw him struggle to hold onto his weapon and drop it to the sandy floor of the entryway. It didn't matter. The man-thing which had seemed so solid spun into insubstantiality, clothes and all. I felt the manacle around my wrist also lose its solidity. For a moment I could still see it and then it was only water, dripping onto my sneakers and the carpet. There was a larger wet patch where the demon sailor had been only a moment before.

I felt thicker warmth on my face and wiped blood from my nose and off my upper lip. Wireman had fallen over a hassock. I helped him up and saw his nose was bleeding, too. A line of blood also ran down the side of his throat from his left ear. It rose and fell with the rapid beat of his heart.

"Christ, that scream, " he said. "My eyes are watering and my ears are ringing like a motherfucker. Can you hear me, Edgar?"

"Yes," I said. "Are you all right?"

"Other than thinking I just saw a dead guy disappear in fucking front of me? I guess so." He bent down, picked the blunt cylinder off the floor, and kissed it. "Glory be to God for dappled things," he said, then barked laughter. "Even when they're not dappled."

It was a candlestick. The tip, where you were supposed to stick your candle, looked dark, as if it had touched something very hot instead of something cold and wet.

"There are candles in all Miss Eastlake's rentals, because we lose the power out here all the time," Wireman said. "We have a gennie at the big house, but the other places don't, not even this one. But unlike the smaller houses, this one does have candlesticks from the big house, and they just happen to be silver."

"And you remembered that," I said. Marveled, really.

He shrugged, then looked at the Gulf. So did I. There was nothing there but moonlight and starlight on the water. For now, at least.

Wireman gripped my wrist. His fingers closed over it where the manacle had been, and my heart jumped. "What?" I said, not liking the new fear I saw in his face.

"Jack," he said. "Jack's alone at El Palacio. "

We took Wireman's car. In my terror, I'd never noticed the headlights or heard it pull in beside my own.

ix

Jack was okay. There had been a few calls from old friends of Elizabeth's, but the last one had come at quarter of nine, an hour and a half before we came bursting in, bloody and wide-eyed, Wireman still waving the candlestick. There had been no intruders at El Palacio, and Jack hadn't seen the ship that had been anchored for awhile in the Gulf off Big Pink. Jack had been eating microwave popcorn and watching Beverly Hills Cop on an old videotape.

He listened to our story with mounting amazement, but no real disbelief; this was a young man, I had to remind myself, that had been raised on shows like The X-Files and Lost. Besides, it fit with what he'd been told earlier. When we were done, he took the candlestick from Wireman and examined the tip, which looked like the burnt filament in a dead lightbulb.

"Why didn't it come for me?" he asked. "I was alone, and totally unprepared."

"I don't want to bruise your self-esteem," I said, "but I don't think you're exactly a priority to whoever's running this show."

Jack was looking at the narrow red mark on my wrist. "Edgar, is that where-"

I nodded.

"Fuck," Jack said in a low voice.

"Have you figured out what's going on?" Wireman asked me. "If she sent that thing after you, she must think you have, or that you're close."

"I don't think anyone will ever know all of it," I said, "but I know who that thing was when it was alive."

"Who?" Jack was staring at me with wide eyes. We were standing in the kitchen and Jack was still holding the candlestick. Now he put it aside on the counter.

"Emery Paulson. Adriana Eastlake's husband. They came back from Atlanta to help with the search after Tessie and Laura went missing, that much is true, but they never left Duma Key again. Perse saw to that."

x

We went into the parlor where I had first met Elizabeth Eastlake. The long, low table was still there, but now it was empty. Its polished surface struck me as a pitch-perfect mockery of life.

"Where are they?" I asked Wireman. "Where are her chinas? Where's the Village?"

"I boxed everything up and put it in the summer-kitchen," he said, pointing vaguely. "No real reason, I just... I just couldn't... muchacho, would you like some green tea? Or a beer?"

I asked for water. Jack said he'd take a beer, if that was all right. Wireman set off to get them. He made it as far as the hallway before starting to cry. They were big, noisy sobs, the kind you can't stifle no matter how hard you try.

Jack and I looked at each other, then looked away. We said nothing.

xi

He was gone a lot longer than it usually takes to get two cans of beer and a glass of water, but when he came back, he had regained his composure.

"Sorry," he said. "I don't usually lose someone I love and poke a candlestick in a vampire's face in the same week. Usually it's one or the other." He shrugged his shoulders in an effort at insouciance. It was unsuccessful, but I had to give him points for trying.

"They're not vampires," I said.

"Then what are they?" he asked. "Expatiate."

"I can only tell you what her pictures told me. You have to remember that, no matter how talented she might have been, she was still only a child." I hesitated, then shook my head. "Not even that. Hardly more than a baby. Perse was... I guess you'd say Perse was her spirit-guide."

Wireman cracked his beer, sipped it, then leaned forward. "And what about you? Is Perse your spirit-guide, as well? Has she been intensifying what you do?"

"Of course she has," I said. "She's been testing the limits of my ability and extending them - I'm sure that's what Candy Brown was about. And she's been picking my material. That's what the Girl and Ship paintings were about."

"And the rest of your stuff?" Jack asked.

"Mostly mine, I think. But some of it-" I stopped, suddenly struck by a terrible idea. I put my glass aside and almost knocked it over. "Oh Christ."

"What?" Wireman asked. "For God's sake, what?"

"You need to get your little red book of phone numbers. Right now."

He went and got it, then handed me the cordless telephone. I sat for a moment with it in my lap, not sure who to call first. Then I knew. But there is one rule of modern life even more ironclad than the one which states that there's never a cop around when you need one: when you really need a human being, you always get the answering machine.

That's what I got at Dario Nannuzzi's home, at Jimmy Yoshida's, at Alice Aucoin's.

" Fuck! " I cried, slamming the disconnect button with my thumb when Alice's recorded voice started in with "I'm sorry I'm not here to take your call right now, but-"

"They're probably still celebrating," Wireman said. "Give it time, amigo, and it'll all quiet down."

"I don't have time!" I said. "Fuck! Shit! Fuck! "

He put a hand on mine, and spoke soothingly. "What is it, Edgar? What's wrong?"

"The pictures are dangerous! Maybe not all, but some, for sure!"

He thought about it, then nodded. "Okay. Let's think about this. The most dangerous ones are probably the Girl and Ship series, right?"

"Yes. I'm sure that's the case."

"They're almost certainly still at the gallery, waiting to be framed and shipped."

Shipped. Dear God, shipped. Even the word was scary. "I can't let that happen."

" Muchacho, getting sidetracked is what you can't let happen."

He didn't understand this wasn't a sidetrack. Perse could whistle up a great wind when she wanted to.

But she needed help.

I found the number of the Scoto and dialed it. I thought it was just possible that someone might be there, even at quarter of eleven on the night after the big shindig. But the ironclad rule held, and I got the machine. I waited impatiently, then pressed 9 to leave a general message.

"Listen, you guys," I said, "this is Edgar. I don't want you to send any of the paintings or drawings out until I tell you, okay? Not a single one. Just put a hold on em for a few days. Use any excuse you have to, but do it. Please. It's very important."

I broke the connection and looked at Wireman. "Will they?"

"Considering your demonstrated earning power? You bet. And you just spared yourself a long, involved conversation. Now can we get back to-"

"Not yet." My family and friends would be the most vulnerable, and the fact that they'd gone their separate ways afforded me no comfort. Perse had already demonstrated that her reach was long. And I had started meddling. I thought she was angry with me, or frightened of me, or both.

My first impulse was to call Pam, but then I remembered what Wireman had said about sparing myself a long, involved conversation. I consulted my own untrustworthy memory instead of Wireman's little book... and for once, under pressure, it came through.

But I'll get his answering machine, I thought. And I did, but at first I didn't know it.