Duma Key - Stephen King

"Yeah, but I thought... the German measles story..."

"Let me see the photos," I said.

Jack reached into his back pocket and produced some Polaroids. He shuffled through them and handed me four, which I dealt out on the kitchen table like a short hand of solitaire. I grabbed one of the Artisan pads and quickly began sketching the photo that showed the cogs and chains under the opening drawbridge - it was just a dinky little one-lane thing - the most clearly. My right arm continued to itch: a low, sleepy crawl.

"The German measles story was genius," I said. "It will keep almost everyone away. But almost isn't good enough. Mary wouldn't have stayed away from my daughter if someone had told her Illy had chicken p - Fuck! " My eyes had blurred, and a line that should have been true wandered off into falsehood.

"Take it easy, Edgar," Wireman said.

I glanced at the clock. 11:58 now. The drawbridge would go up at noon; it always did. I blinked away the tears and went back to my sketch. Machinery spun itself into existence from the point of the Venus Black, and even now, with Ilse gone, the fascination of seeing something real emerge from nothing - like a shape drifting out of a fogbank - stole over me. And why not? When better? It was refuge.

"If she's got someone to attack us with and the drawbridge is out of commission, she'll just send them around to the Don Pedro Island footbridge," Wireman said.

Without looking up from my drawing, I said: "Maybe not. A lot of people don't know about the Sunshine Walkway, and I'm positive Perse doesn't."

"Why?"

"Because it was built in the fifties, you told me that, and she was sleeping then."

He considered this a moment, then said, "You think she can be beaten, don't you?"

"Yes, I do. Not killed, maybe, but put back to sleep."

"Do you know how?"

Find the leak in the table and fix it, I almost said... but that made no sense.

"Not yet. There are more of Libbit's pictures at the other house. The one at the south end of the key. They'll tell us where Perse is and tell me what to do."

"How do you know there are more?"

Because there have to be, I would have said, but just then the noon horn went. A quarter of a mile down the road, the drawbridge between Duma Key and Casey Key - the only north link between us and the coast - was going up. I counted to twenty, putting Mississippi between each number as I had when I was a child. Then I erased the biggest cog in my drawing. There was a sensation when I did it - in the missing arm, yes, but also centered between and just above my eyes - of doing some lovely piece of precision work.

"Okay," I said.

"Can we go now?" Wireman asked.

"Not quite yet," I said.

He glanced at the clock, then back at me. "I thought you were in a hurry, amigo. And given what we saw in here last night, I know that I am. So what else?"

"I need to draw you both," I said.

iv

"I'd love to have you do a picture of me, Edgar," Jack said, "and I'm sure my mom would be totally blissed out - but I think Wireman's right. We ought to get going."

"Have you ever been to the south end of the Key, Jack?"

"Uh, no."

Of that I'd been almost sure. But as I tore the picture of the drawbridge machinery off the top of my pad, I looked at Wireman. In spite of the lead that now seemed to be lining my heart and emotions, I found that this was something I really wanted to know. "What about you? Ever been down to the original Heron's Roost for a little poke-and-pry?"

"Actually, no." Wireman went to the window and looked out. "Drawbridge is still up - I can see the western leaf against the sky from here. So far, so good."

I was not to be diverted so easily. "Why not?"

"Miss Eastlake advised against it," he said, still not turning from the window. "She said the environment was bad. Groundwater, flora, even the air. She said the Army Air Corps did testing off the south end of Duma during World War II and managed to poison that end of the island, which is probably why the foliage grows so rank in most places. She said the poison oak is maybe the worst in America - worse than syphilis before penicillin is how she put it. Takes years to get rid of, if you rub up against it. Looks like it's gone, then it comes back. And it's everywhere. So she said."

This was mildly interesting, but Wireman still hadn't actually answered my question. So I asked it again.

"She also claimed there are snakes," he said, finally turning around. "I have a horror of snakes. Have ever since I was a little boy and woke up one morning on a camping trip with my folks to discover I was sharing my sleeping bag with a milkie. It had actually worked its way into my undershirt. It sprayed me with musk. I thought I was fucking poisoned. Are you satisfied?"

"Yes," I said. "Did you tell her that story before or after she told you about the snake infestation on the south end?"

Stiffly, he said: "I don't remember." Then he sighed. "Probably before. I see what you're saying - she wanted to keep me away."

I didn't say it, you did, I thought. What I said was, "It's mostly Jack I'm worried about. But it's better to be safe."

" Me? " Jack looked startled. "I don't have anything against snakes. And I know what poison oak and poison ivy look like. I was a Boy Scout."

"Trust me on this," I said, and began to sketch him. I worked quickly, resisting the urge to go into detail... as part of me seemed to want to do. While I was working, the first angry car horn began to honk on the coast side of the drawbridge.

"Sounds to me like the drawbridge is stuck again," Jack said.

"Yes," I agreed, not looking up from my drawing.

v

I sped along even more quickly with Wireman's sketch, but I again found myself having to fight the urge to fall into the work... because when I was in the work, the pain and grief were at bay. The work was like a drug. But there would be only so much daylight, and I didn't want to meet Emery again any more than Wireman did. What I wanted was for this to be over and for the three of us to be off-island - far off-island - by the time those sunset colors started to rise out of the Gulf.

"Okay," I said. I had done Jack in blue and Wireman in blaze orange. Neither was perfect, but I thought both sketches caught the essentials. "There's just one more thing."

Wireman groaned. " Edgar! "

"Nothing I need to draw," I said, and flipped the cover of the pad closed on the two sketches. "Just smile for the artist, Wireman. But before you do, think of something that makes you feel particularly good."

"Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack."

His brow furrowed... then smoothed out. He smiled. As always, it lit up his whole face and made him a new man.

I turned to Jack. "Now you."

And because I really did feel that he was the more important of the two, I watched him very closely when he did.

vi

We didn't have a four-wheel drive, but Elizabeth's old Mercedes sedan seemed a reasonable substitute; it was built like a tank. We drove to El Palacio in Jack's car, and parked just inside the gate. Jack and I switched our supplies over to the SEL 500. Wireman's job was the picnic basket.

"A few other things while you're in there, if you can," I said. "Bug-spray, and a really good flashlight. Have you got one of those?"

He nodded. "There's an eight-cell job in the gardening shed. It's a searchlight."

"Good. And Wireman?"

He gave me a what now look - the exasperated kind you do mostly with your eyebrows - but said nothing.

"The spear-pistol?"

He actually grinned. "S , se or. Para fijaciono."

While he was gone, I stood leaning against the Mercedes, looking at the tennis court. The door at the far end had been left open. Elizabeth's semi-domesticated heron was inside, standing by the net. It looked at me with accusing blue eyes.

"Edgar?" Jack touched my elbow. "Okay?"

I was not okay, and wouldn't be okay for a long time again. But...

I can do this, I thought. I have to do this. She does not get to win.

"Fine," I said.

"I don't like it that you're so pale. You look like you did when you first came here." Jack's voice cracked on the last couple of words.

"I'm fine," I said again, and briefly cupped the back of his neck. I realized that, other than shaking his hand, it was probably the only time I had touched him.

Wireman came out clutching the handles of the picnic basket in both hands. He had three long-billed hats stacked on his head. John Eastlake's harpoon pistol was tucked under his arm. "Flashlight's in the basket," he said. "Ditto Deep Woods Off, and three pairs of gardening gloves I found in the shed."

"Brilliant," I said.

" S . But it's quarter of one, Edgar. If we're going, can we please go?"

I looked at the heron on the tennis court. It stood by the net, as still as a hand on a broken clock, and looked back at me pitilessly. That was all right; it is, for the most part, a pitiless world.

"Yes," I said. "Let's go."

vii

Now I had memory. It was no longer in perfect working order, and to this day I sometimes get confused about names and the order in which certain things happened, but every moment of our expedition to the house at the south end of Duma Key remains clear in my mind - like the first movie that ever amazed me or the first painting that ever took my breath away ( The Hailstorm, by Thomas Hart Benton). Yet at first I felt cold, divorced from it all, like a slightly jaded patron of the arts looking at a picture in a second-rate museum. It wasn't until Jack found the doll inside the staircase going up to nowhere that I started to realize I was in the picture instead of just looking at it. And that there was no going back for any of us unless we could stop her. I knew she was strong; if she could reach all the way to Omaha and Minneapolis to get what she wanted, then all the way to Providence to keep it, of course she was strong. And still I underestimated her. Until we were actually in that house at the south end of Duma Key, I didn't realize how strong Perse was.

viii

I wanted Jack to drive, and Wireman to sit in the back seat. When Wireman asked why, I said I had my reasons, and I thought they'd become apparent in short order. "And if I'm wrong about that," I added, "no one will be any more delighted than me."

Jack backed onto the road and turned south. More out of curiosity than anything else, I punched on the radio and was rewarded with Billy Ray Cyrus, bellowing about his achy breaky heart. Jack groaned and reached for it, probably meaning to find The Bone. Before he could, Billy Ray was swallowed in a burst of deafening static.

" Jesus, turn it off! " Wireman yelped.

But first I turned it down. Reducing the volume made no difference. If anything, the static grew louder. I could feel it rattling the fillings of my teeth, and I punched the OFF button before my eardrums could start bleeding.

"What was that?" Jack asked. He had pulled over. His eyes were wide.

"Call it bad environment, why don't you," I said. "A little something left over from those Army Air Corps tests sixty years ago."

"Very funny," Wireman said.

Jack was looking at the radio. "I want to try it again."

"Be my guest," I told him, and placed my hand over my left ear.

Jack pushed the power button. The static that came roaring out of the Mercedes's four speakers this time seemed as loud as a jet fighter's engine. Even with my palm over one ear, it ripped through my head. I thought I heard Wireman yell, but I wasn't sure.

Jack pushed the power button again and the hellish blizzard of noise cut out. "I think we should skip the tunes," he said.

"Wireman? All right?" My voice seemed to be coming from far away, through a steady low ringing noise.

"Rockin," he said.

ix

Jack might have made it a little way beyond the point where Ilse got sick; maybe not. It was hard to tell once the growth got high. The road narrowed to a stripe, its surface humped and buckled by the roots running beneath it. The foliage had interlaced above us, blotting out most of the sky. It was like being in a living tunnel. The windows were rolled up, but even so, the car was filling with a green and fecund jungle smell.

Jack tested the old Mercedes's springs on a particularly egregious pothole, thumped up over a ridge in the pavement on the far side, then slammed to a stop and put the transmission in PARK.

"I'm sorry," he said. His mouth was quivering and his eyes were too big. "I'm-"

I knew perfectly well what he was.

Jack fumbled open the door, leaned out, and vomited. I'd thought the smell of the jungle (that's what it was once you were a mile past El Palacio ) was strong in the car, but what came rolling in with the door open was ten times headier, thick and green and viciously alive. Yet I did not hear a single bird calling in that mass of junk foliage. The only sound was Jack losing his breakfast.

Then his lunch. At last he collapsed back against the seat. He thought I looked like a snowbird again? That was sort of funny, because on that early afternoon in mid-April, Jack Cantori was as pale as March in Minnesota. Instead of twenty-one, he looked a sickly forty-five. It must have been the tuna salad, Ilse had said, but it hadn't been the tuna. Something from the sea, all right, but not the tuna.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know what's wrong with me. The smell, I guess - that rotten jungle smell-" His chest hitched, he made a gurk sound deep in his throat, and leaned out the door again. That time he missed his hold on the steering wheel, and if I hadn't grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back, he would have gone sprawling face-first into his own whoop.

He leaned back, eyes closed, face wet with sweat, panting rapidly.

"We better take him back to El Palacio, " Wireman said. "I don't like to lose the time - hell, I don't like to lose him - but this shit ain't right."

"As far as Perse's concerned, it's exactly right," I said. Now my bad leg was itching almost as much as my arm. It felt like electricity. "It's her little poison belt. How about you, Wireman? How's your gut?"

"Fine, but my bad eye - the one that used to be bad - is itching like a bastard, and my head's kind of humming. Probably from that damn radio."

"It's not the radio. And the reason it's getting to Jack and not to us is because we've been... well... call it immunized. Sort of ironic, isn't it?"

Behind the wheel, Jack groaned.

"What can you do for him, muchacho? Anything?"

"I think so. I hope so."

I had my pads on my lap and my pencils and erasers in a belt-pack. Now I flipped to the picture of Jack and found one of my art-gum erasers. I took away his mouth and the lower arcs of his eyes, all the way up to the corners. The itching in my right arm was fiercer than ever, and I actually had no doubt that what I planned to do would work. I summoned up the memory of Jack's smile in my kitchen - the one I'd asked him to give me while thinking of something particularly good - and drew it quickly with my Midnight Blue pencil. It took no more than thirty seconds (the eyes were really the key, when it comes to smiles, they always are), but those few lines changed the whole idea of Jack Cantori's face.

And I got something I hadn't expected. As I drew, I saw him kissing a girl in a bikini. No, more than saw. I could feel her smooth skin, even a few little grains of sand nestling in the hollow at the small of her back. I could smell her shampoo and taste a faint ghost of salt on her lips. I knew her name was Caitlin and he called her Kate.