Stephen King - Duma Key

"Yes."

"And you're sure nobody else in the family bought paintings."

She took maybe ten seconds to consider. It was agony. At last she said, "No. I'm positive." You better be, Panda, I thought. "But Angel and Helen Slobotnik bought one. Mailbox with Flowers, I believe it's called."

I knew the one she was talking about. It was actually titled Mailbox with Oxeyes. And I thought that one was harmless, I thought that one was probably all mine, but still...

"They didn't take it, did they?"

"No, because they were going to Orlando first, fly home from there. They also asked that it be framed and shipped." No questions now, only answers. She sounded younger - like the Pam I had married, the one who'd kept my books back in those pre-Tom days. "Your surgeon - can't remember his name-"

"Todd Jamieson." I said it automatically. If I'd paused to think, I wouldn't have been able to remember.

"Yes, him. He also bought a painting, and arranged for shipment. He wanted one of those spooky Girl and Ship ones, but they were spoken for. He settled for a conch-shell floating on the water."

Which could be trouble. All the surreal ones could be trouble.

"Bozie bought two of the sketches, and Kamen bought one. Kathi Green wanted one, but said she couldn't afford it." A pause. "I thought her husband was sort of a dork."

I would have given her one if she'd asked, I thought.

Wireman spoke up again. "Listen to me now, Pam. You've got work to do."

"All right." A little fog still in her voice, but mostly sharp. Mostly right there.

"You need to call Bozeman and Kamen. Do it right away."

"Okay."

"Tell them to burn those sketches."

A slight pause, then: "Burn the sketches, okay, got it."

"As soon as we're off the phone," I put in.

A touch of annoyance: "I said I got that, Eddie."

"Tell them I'll reimburse them their purchase price times two, or give them different sketches, whichever they want, but that those sketches aren't safe. They are not safe. Have you got that?"

"Yep, I'll do it right now." And she finally asked a question. The question. "Eddie, did that Hello picture kill Tom?"

"Yes. I need a callback."

I gave her the phone number. Pam sounded like she was crying again, but still repeated it back perfectly.

"Pam, thank you," Wireman said.

"Yeah," Jack added. "Thanks, Mrs. Freemantle."

I thought she'd ask who that was, but she didn't. "Edgar, do you promise the girls will be okay?"

"If they didn't take any of my pictures with them, they'll be fine."

"Yes," she said. "Your goddamned pictures. I'll call back."

And she was gone, without a goodbye.

"Better?" Wireman asked when I hung up.

"I don't know," I said. "I hope to God it is." I pressed the heel of my hand first against my left eye, then against my right. "But it doesn't feel better. It doesn't feel fixed."

xiii

We were quiet for a minute. Then Wireman asked, "Was Elizabeth falling out of that pony-trap really an accident? What's your best guess?"

I tried to clear my mind. This stuff was important, too.

"My best guess is that it was. When she woke up, she suffered from amnesia, aphasia, and God knows what else as a result of brain injuries that were beyond diagnosis in 1925. Painting was more than her therapy; she was a genuine prodigy, and she was her own first great artwork. The housekeeper - Nan Melda - was also amazed. There was that story in the paper, and presumably everyone who read it was amazed over breakfast... but you know how people are-"

"What amazes you at breakfast is forgotten by lunch," Wireman said.

"Jesus," Jack said, "if I'm as cynical as you two when I get old, I think I'll turn in my badge."

"That's Jesus- Krispies to you, son," Wireman said, and actually laughed. It was a stunned sound, but there. And that was good.

"Everyone's interest began to wane," I said. "And that was probably true for Elizabeth, as well. I mean, who gets bored quicker than a three-year-old?"

"Only puppies and parakeets," Wireman said.

"A creative burn at three," Jack said, bemused. "Fucking awesome concept."

"So she started to... to..." I stopped, for a moment unable to go on.

"Edgar?" Wireman asked quietly. "All right?"

I wasn't, but I had to be. If I wasn't, Tom would only be the beginning. "It's just that he looked good at the gallery. Good, you know? Like he'd put it all together again. If not for her meddling-"

"I know," Wireman said. "Drink some of your water, muchacho."

I drank some of my water, and forced myself back to the business at hand. "She started to experiment. She went from pencils to fingerpaints to watercolors in - I think - a period of weeks. Plus some of the pictures in the picnic basket were done in fountain-pen, and I'm pretty sure some were done with house-paint, which I'd been meaning to try myself. It has a look when it dries-"

"Save it for your art-class, muchacho, " Wireman said.

"Yeah. Yeah." I drank some more water. I was starting to get back on track. "She started to experiment with different media, too. If that's the right word; I think it is. Chalk on brick. Sand-drawings on the beach. One day she painted Tessie's face on the kitchen counter in melted ice cream."

Jack was leaning forward, hands clasped between his muscular thighs, frowning. "Edgar... this isn't just blue-sky? You saw this?"

"In a way. Sometimes it was actual seeing. Sometimes it was more like a... a wave that came out of her pictures, and from using her pencils."

"But you know it's true."

"I know."

"She didn't care if the pictures lasted or not?" Wireman asked.

"No. The doing mattered more. She experimented with media, and then she started to experiment with reality. To change it. And that's when Perse heard her, I think, when she started messing with reality. Heard her and woke up. Woke up and started calling."

"Perse was with the rest of that junk Eastlake found, wasn't she?" Wireman asked.

"Elizabeth thought it was a doll. The best doll ever. But they couldn't be together until she was strong enough."

"Which she are you talking about?" Jack asked. "Perse or the little girl?"

"Probably both. Elizabeth was just a kid. And Perse... Perse had been asleep for a long time. Sleeping under the sand, full fathom five."

"Very poetic," Jack said, "but I don't know exactly what you're talking about."

"Neither do I," I said. "Because her I don't see. If Elizabeth drew pictures of Perse, she destroyed them. I find it suggestive that she turned to collecting china figures in her old age, but maybe that's just a coincidence. What I know is that Perse established a line of communication with the child, first through her drawings, then through her up-to-then favorite doll, Noveen. And Perse instituted a kind of... well, exercise program. I don't know what else you'd call it. She persuaded Elizabeth to draw things, and those things would happen in the real world."

"She's been playing the same game with you, then," Jack said. "Candy Brown."

"And my eye," Wireman said. "Don't forget fixing my eye."

"I'd like to think that was all me," I said... but had it been? "There have been other things, though. Small things, mostly... using some of my pictures as a crystal ball..." I trailed off. I didn't really want to go there, because that road led back to Tom. Tom who should have been fixed.

"Tell us the rest of what you found out from her pictures," Wireman said.

"All right. Start with that out-of-season hurricane. Elizabeth summoned it up, probably with help from Perse."

"You've got to be shitting me," Jack said.

"Perse told Elizabeth where the debris was, and Elizabeth told her father. Among the litter was a... let's say there was a china figure, maybe a foot high, of a beautiful woman." Yes, I could see that. Not the details, but the figure. And the empty, pupil-less pearls that were her eyes. "It was Elizabeth's prize, her fair salvage, and once it was out of the water, it really went to work."

Jack spoke very softly. "Where would a thing like that have come from to begin with, Edgar?"

A phrase rose to my lips, from where I don't know, only that it wasn't my own: There were elder gods in those days; kings and queens they were. I didn't say it. I didn't want to hear it, not even in that well-lighted room, so I only shook my head.

"I don't know. And I don't know what country's flag that ship might have been flying when it blew in here, maybe scraping its hull open on the top of Kitt Reef and spilling some of its cargo. I don't know much of anything for sure... but I think that Perse has a ship of her own, and once she was free of the water and completely welded to Elizabeth Eastlake's powerful child's mind, she was able to call it."

"A ship of the dead," Wireman said. His face was childlike with fear and wonder. Outside, a wind shook the massed foliage in the courtyard; the rhododendrons nodded their heads and we could hear the steady, sleepy sound of the waves pounding the shore. I had loved that sound ever since coming to Duma Key, and I still loved it, but now it frightened me, too. "A ship called... what? Persephone?"

"If you like," I said. "It's certainly crossed my mind that Perse was Elizabeth's way of trying to say that. It doesn't matter; we're not talking Greek mythology here. We're talking about something far older and more monstrous. Hungry, too. That much it does have in common with vampires. Only hungry for souls, not blood. At least that's what I think. Elizabeth had her new 'doll' for no more than a month, and God knows what life was like at the first Heron's Roost during that time, but it couldn't have been good."

"Did Eastlake have the silver harpoons made then?" Wireman asked.

"I can't tell you. There's so much I don't know, because what I do know comes from Elizabeth, and she was little more than an infant. I have no sense of what happened in her other life, because by then she'd quit drawing. And if she remembered the time when she did-"

"She was doing her best to forget it," Jack finished.

Wireman looked glum. "By the end, she was well on her way to forgetting everything."

I said, "Remember the pictures where everybody seems to be wearing these big, loopy drug-addict grins? That was Elizabeth, trying to remake the world she remembered. The pre-Perse world. A happier one. In the days before her twin sisters drowned, she was one scared kid, but she was afraid to say anything, because she felt that the things going wrong were all her fault."

"What things?" It was Jack.

"I don't know exactly, but there's one picture of an old-timey Negro lawn jockey standing on his head, and I think that stands for everything. I think that for Elizabeth, in those last days, everything seemed to be standing on its head." There was more than that to the lawn jockey - I was almost positive - but I didn't know what, and this probably wasn't the time to chase after it, anyway. "I think in the days before and just after Tessie and Laura drowned, the family might almost have been prisoners at Heron's Roost."

"And only Elizabeth would have known why?" Wireman asked.

"I don't know." I shrugged. "Nan Melda might have known some of it. Probably knew some of it."

"Who was at that house during the period after the treasure-find and before the drownings?" Jack asked.

I thought about it. "I suppose Maria and Hannah might have come home from school for a weekend or two, and Eastlake could have been away on business for part of March and April. The ones who were surely there that whole time were Elizabeth, Tessie, Laura, and Nan Melda. And Elizabeth tried to draw her new 'friend' out of existence." I licked my lips. They were very dry. "She did it with her colored pencils, the ones in the basket. This was just before Tessie and Laura drowned. Maybe the night before. Because their drownings were punishment, right? The way Tom killing Pam was supposed to be my punishment, for prying. I mean, you see that?"