Duma Key - Stephen King

I put my pencil back in the little belt-pack and zipped it closed. "Jack?" Speaking quietly. His eyes were closed, and sweat still stood out on his cheeks and forehead, but I thought his breathing had slowed. "How are you now? Any better?"

"Yeah," he said without opening his eyes. "What'd you do?"

"Well, as long as it's just the three of us, we might as well call it what it is: magic. A little counterspell I tossed your way."

Wireman reached over my shoulder, picked up the pad, studied the picture, and nodded. "I'm beginning to believe she should have left you alone, muchacho."

I said, "It was my daughter she should have left alone."

x

We stayed where we were for five minutes, letting Jack get his second wind. At last he said he felt able to go on. His color was back. I wondered if we would have run into the same problems if we had gone around by water.

"Wireman, have you seen any fishing boats anchored off the south end of the Key?"

He considered. "You know, I haven't. They usually stay on the Don Pedro side of the strait. That's odd, isn't it?"

"It's not odd, it's fucking sinister," Jack said. "Like this road." It was down to nothing but a strip. Seagrape and banyan branches scraped along the sides of the slowly trundling Mercedes, making hellish screee ing sounds. The road, lumped upward with tunneling roots and broken down to gravel and potholes in some places, continued to bend inland, and now it had also begun to climb.

We crept along, mile after slow mile, with the leaves and branches slapping and whacking. I kept expecting the road to break down entirely, but the thick interlacing foliage overhead had protected it from the elements to some degree, and it never quite did. The banyans gave way to an oppressive forest of Brazilian Peppers, and there we saw our first wildlife: a huge bobcat that stood for a moment in the rubbly remains of the road, hissing at us with its ears laid flat, then fled into the underbrush. A little farther on, a dozen plump black caterpillars fell onto the windshield and burst open, spreading gummy guts that the wipers and washer-fluid could do little to clear; they only spread the remains around until looking out through the windshield was like looking out of an eye with a cataract on it.

I told Jack to stop. I got out, opened the trunk, and found a little supply of clean rags. I used one to wipe the windshield, being careful to don a pair of the gloves Wireman had found - I was already wearing a hat. But so far as I could tell, they were only caterpillars; messy, but not supernatural.

"Not bad," Jack said from the open driver's-side window. "Now I'll pop the hood so you can check the-" He stopped, looking beyond me.

I turned. The road was down to little more than a path, cluttered with old chunks of asphalt and overgrown with Creeping Oxeye. Crossing it about thirty yards up was a line of five frogs the size of Cocker Spaniel puppies. The first three were a brilliant solid green that rarely if ever occurs in nature; the fourth was blue; the fifth was a faded orange that might once have been red. They were smiling, but there was something fixed and weary about those smiles. They were hopping slowly, as if their hoppers were almost busted. Like the bobcat, they reached the underbrush and disappeared into it.

"What the blue fuck were those?" Jack asked.

"Ghosts," I said. "Leftovers from a little girl's powerful imagination. And they won't last much longer, from the look of them." I got back in. "Go on, Jack. Let's ride while we can."

He began to creep forward again. I asked Wireman what time it was.

"A little past two."

We were able to ride all the way to the gate of the first Heron's Roost. I never would have bet on it, but we did. The foliage closed in one final time - banyans and scrub pines choked with gray beards of Spanish Moss - but Jack bulled the Mercedes through, and all at once the undergrowth drew back. Here the elements had washed the tar away completely and the end of the road was only a rutty memory, but it was good enough for the Mercedes, which jounced and bucketed up a long hill toward two stone pillars. A great unruly hedge, easily eighteen feet high and God knew how thick, ran away from the pillars on either side; it had also begun to spread fat green fingers down the hill toward the jungle growth. There were gates, but they stood rusty and halfway open. I didn't think the Mercedes would quite fit.

This last stretch of road was flanked on both sides by ancient Australian pines of imposing height. I looked for upside-down birds and saw none. I saw none of the rightside-up variety, either, for that matter, although I could now hear the faint buzz of insects.

Jack stopped at the gate and looked at us apologetically. "This old girl ain't fitting through that."

We got out. Wireman paused to look at the ancient, lichen-encrusted plaques fixed to the pillars. The one on the left said HERON'S ROOST. The one on the right said EASTLAKE, but below it something else had been scratched, as if with the point of a knife. Once it might have been hard to read, but the lichen growing from the little cuts gouged in the metal made it stand out: Abyssus abyssum invocat.

"Any idea what that means?" I asked Wireman.

"Indeed I do. It's a warning often given to new lawyers after they pass their bar exams. The liberal translation is 'One misstep leads to another.' The literal translation is 'Hell invokes Hell.'" He looked at me bleakly, then back at the message below the family name. "I have an idea that might have been John Eastlake's final verdict before leaving this version of Heron's Roost forever."

Jack reached out to touch the jagged motto, then seemed to think better of it.

Wireman did it for him. "The verdict, gentlemen... and rendered in the law's own language. Come on. Sunset at 7:15, give or take, and daylight's a fleeting thing. We take turns with the picnic basket. It's one heavy puta."

xi

But before we went anywhere, we paused inside the gate for a good look at Elizabeth's first home on Duma Key. My immediate reaction was dismay. Somewhere in the back of my mind had been a clear narrative thread: we'd enter the house, go upstairs, and find what had been Elizabeth's bedroom in those long-ago days when she'd been known as Libbit. There my missing arm, sometimes known as Edgar Freemantle's Divine Psychic Dowser, would lead me to a left-behind steamer trunk (or perhaps only a humble crate). Inside would be more drawings, the missing drawings, the ones that would tell me where Perse was and solve the riddle of the leaky table. All before sundown.

A pretty tale, and only one problem with it: the top half of Heron's Roost no longer existed. The house was on an exposed knoll, and its upper stories had been torn completely away in some long-ago storm. The ground floor still stood, but it was engulfed in gray-green vines which had also swarmed up the pillars in front. Spanish Moss hung from the eaves, turning the veranda into a cave. The house was ringed with shattered orange tiles, all that remained of the roof. They poked up like giants' teeth from the swale of weeds that had replaced the lawn. The last twenty-five yards of the shell drive had been buried in strangler fig. So had the tennis court and what might once have been a child's playhouse. More vines crept up the sides of the long, barnlike outbuilding behind the court and scrabbled along what remained of the playhouse's shingles.

"What's that?" Jack was pointing between the tennis court and the main house. There a long rectangle of evil black soup simmered in the afternoon sun. Most of the bug-drone seemed to be coming from that direction.

"Now? I'd call it a tarpit," Wireman said. "Back in the Roaring Twenties, I imagine the Eastlake family called it their swimming pool."

"Imagine taking a dip in that, " Jack said, and shuddered.

The pool was surrounded by willows. Behind it was another thick stand of Brazilian Peppers, and -

"Wireman, are those banana trees?" I asked.

"Yep," he said. "And probably full of snakes. Ugh. Look on the west side, Edgar."

On the Gulf side of Heron's Roost, the snarl of weeds, vines, and creepers that had once been John Eastlake's lawn gave way to sea oats. The breeze was good and the view was better, making me realize that the one thing you rarely got in Florida was height. Here we had just enough to make it seem like the Gulf of Mexico was at our feet. Don Pedro Island was to our left, Casey Key dreaming away in a blue-gray haze to our right.

"Drawbridge is still up," Jack said, sounding amused. "They're really having problems this time."

"Wireman," I said. "Look down there, along that old path. Do you see there?"

He followed my pointing finger. "The rock outcropping? Sure, I see it. Not coral, I don't think, although I'd have to get a little closer to be sure - what about it?"

"Quit being a geologist for a minute and just look. What do you see?"

He looked. They both did. It was Jack who got it first. "A profile?" Then he said it again, without the hesitation. "A profile."

I nodded. "We can only see the forehead, the indentation of the eyesocket, and the top of the nose from here, but I bet if we were on the beach, we'd see a mouth, as well. Or what passed for one. That's Hag's Rock. And Shade Beach right below it, I'll bet you anything. Where John Eastlake went on his treasure-hunting expeditions."

"And where the twins drowned," Wireman added. "That's the path they walked to get there. Only..."

He fell silent. The breeze tugged at our hair. We looked at the path, still visible after all these years. Little feet going down to swim hadn't done that. A footpath between Heron's Roost and Shade Beach would have disappeared in five years, maybe only two.

"That's no path," Jack said, reading my mind. "That used to be a road. Not paved, but a road, just the same. Why would anybody want a road between their house and the beach, when it couldn't have been more than a ten-minute walk?"

Wireman shook his head. "Don't know."

"Edgar?"

"Not a clue."

"Maybe he found more stuff on the bottom than just a few trinkets," Jack said.

"Maybe, but-" I caught movement in the tail of my eye - something dark - and turned toward the house. I saw nothing.

"What is it?" Wireman asked.

"Probably nerves," I said.

The breeze, which had been coming at us from the Gulf, switched slightly and puffed out of the south instead. It brought a stench of putridity with it.

Jack recoiled, grimacing. "What the fuck is that!"

"Perfume from the pool would be my guess," Wireman said. "Jack, I love the smell of sludge in the morning."

"Yeah, but it's afternoon."

Wireman gave him a duh look, then turned to me. "What do you think, muchacho? On we go?"

I took a quick inventory. Wireman had the red basket; Jack had the bag with the food in it; I had my art supplies. I wasn't sure just what we were going to do if the rest of Elizabeth's drawings had blown away in the storm that had torn the roof off the ruin just ahead (or if there were no more pictures), but we had come this far and we had to do something. Ilse insisted on that, from my bones and heart.

"Yes," I said. "On we go."

xii

We had reached the point where the driveway began to be overgrown with strangler fig when I saw that black thing go flickering through the high tangle of weeds to the right of the house. This time Jack saw it, too.

"Someone's there," he said.

"I didn't see anyone," Wireman said. He set down the picnic basket and armed sweat from his brow. "Switch with me awhile, Jack. You take the basket and I'll take the food. You're young and strong. Wireman's old and used up. He'll die soo - holy shit what's that! "

He staggered back from the basket and would have fallen if I hadn't caught him around the waist. Jack shouted with surprise and horror.

The man came bursting from the undergrowth just ahead on our left. There was no way he could have been there - Jack and I had glimpsed him fifty yards away only seconds before - but he was. He was a black man but not a human being. We never mistook him for an actual human being. For one thing, his legs, cocked and clad in blue breeches, did not move as he passed in front of us. Nor did he stir the thick mat of strangler fig springing up all around him. Yet his lips grinned; his eyes rolled with jolly malevolence. He wore a peaked cap with a button on top, and that was somehow the worst.

I thought if I had to look at that cap for long, it would drive me mad.

The thing disappeared into the grass on our right, a black man in blue breeches, about five and a half feet tall. The grass was no more than five feet high, and simple mathematics said he had no business disappearing into it, but he did.

A moment later he - it - was on the porch, grinning at us like De Ole Family Retainer, and then, with no pause, he - it - was at the bottom of the steps, and once more darting into the weeds, grinning at us all the time.

Grinning at us from beneath its cap.

Its cap was RED.

Jack turned to flee. There was nothing on his face but mindless, blabbering panic. I let go of Wireman to grab him, and if Wireman had also decided to flee, I think that would have been the end of our expedition; I had only the one arm, after all, and couldn't restrain them both. Couldn't restrain either of them, if they really meant to turn tail.

Terrified as I was, I never even came close to running. And Wireman, God bless him, stood his ground, watching with his mouth hung open as the black man next appeared from the grove of banana trees between the pool and the outbuilding.

I got Jack by the belt and yanked him back. I couldn't slap him in the face - I had no hand to slap with - and so I settled for shouting. " It's not real! It's her nightmare! "

"Her... nightmare?" Something like comprehension dawned in Jack's eyes. Or maybe just a little consciousness. I'd settle for that.

"Her nightmare, her boogeyman, whatever she was afraid of when the lights went out," I said. "It's just another ghost, Jack."

"How do you know?"

"For one thing, it's flickering like an old movie," Wireman said. "Look at it."

The black man was gone, then there again, this time in front of the rust-encrusted ladder leading up to the pool's diving platform. It grinned at us from beneath its red cap. Its shirt, I saw, was as blue as its breeches. It slid from place to place with its unmoving legs always cocked in the same position, like a figure in a shooting gallery. It was gone again, then appeared on the porch. A moment later it was in the driveway, almost directly in front of us. Looking at it made my head hurt, and it still made me afraid... but only because she had been afraid. Libbit.

The next time it showed itself, it was on the double-rutted path to the Shade Beach, and this time we could see the Gulf shining through its blouse and breeches. It winked out of sight, and Wireman began to laugh hysterically.

"What?" Jack turned to him. Almost turned on him. " What? "

"It's a fuckin lawn jockey!" Wireman said, laughing harder than ever. "One of those black lawn jockeys that are now so politically verboten, blown up to three, maybe four times its normal size! Elizabeth's boogeyman was the house lawn jockey!"

He tried to say more, but couldn't. He leaned over, laughing so hard he had to brace his hands on his knees. I saw the joke, but couldn't share it... and not only because my daughter was dead in Rhode Island. Wireman was only laughing now because at first he had been as frightened as Jack and I, as frightened as Libbit must have been. And why had she been frightened? Because someone, quite likely by accident, had put the wrong idea in her imaginative little head. My money was on Nan Melda, and - maybe - a bedtime story meant only to soothe a child who was still fretful from her head injury. Maybe even insomniac. Only this bedtime story had lodged in the wrong place, and grown TEEF.