Stephen King - Duma Key

"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.

Mr. Blue Breeches wasn't like the frogs we'd seen back on the road, either. Those had been all Elizabeth, and there'd been no malevolence about them. The lawn jockey, however... he might originally have come from little Libbit's battered head, but I had an idea that Perse had long since appropriated him for her own purposes. If anyone got this close to Elizabeth's first home, there it was, all ready to scare the intruder away. Into a stay at the nearest lunatic asylum, maybe.

Which meant there might be something here to find, after all.

Jack looked nervously toward where the sunken path - which really did look as if it had been big enough to accommodate a cart or even a truck, once upon a time - dropped down and out of sight. "Will it be back?"

"It doesn't matter, muchacho, " Wireman said. "It's not real. That picnic basket, on the other hand, needs to be carried. So mush. On, you huskies."

"Just looking at it made me feel like I was losing my mind," Jack said. "Do you understand that, Edgar?"

"Of course. Libbit had a very powerful imagination, back in the day."

"What happened to it, then?"

"She forgot how to use it."

"Jesus," Jack said. "That's horrible."

"Yes. And I think that kind of forgetting is easy. Which is even more horrible."

Jack bent down, picked up the basket, then looked at Wireman. "What's in here? Gold bars?"

Wireman grabbed the bag of food and smiled serenely. "I packed a few extras."

We worked our way up the overgrown driveway, keeping an eye out for the lawn jockey. It did not return. At the top of the porch steps, Jack set the picnic basket down with a little sigh of relief. From behind us came a flurry and flutter of wings.

We turned and saw a heron alight on the driveway. It could have been the same one that had been giving me the cold-eye from El Palacio' s tennis court. Certainly the gaze was the same: blue and sharp and without an ounce of pity.

"Is that real?" Wireman asked. "What do you think, Edgar?"

"It's real," I said.

"How do you know?"

I could have pointed out that the heron was casting a shadow, but for all I knew, the lawn jockey had been casting one, as well; I had been too amazed to notice. "I just do. Come on, let's go inside. And don't bother knocking. This isn't a social call."

xiii

"Uh, this could be a problem," Jack said.

The veranda was deeply shadowed by mats of hanging Spanish Moss, but once our eyes had adjusted to the gloom, we could see a thick and rusty chain encircling the double doors. Not one but two padlocks hung down from it. The chain had been run through hooks on either jamb.

Wireman stepped forward for a closer look. "You know," he said, "Jack and I might be able to snap one or both of those hooks right off. They've seen better days."

"Better years, " Jack said.

"Maybe," I said, "but the doors themselves are almost certainly locked, and if you go rattling chains and snapping hooks, you're going to disturb the neighbors."

"Neighbors?" Wireman asked.

I pointed straight up. Wireman and Jack followed my finger and saw what I already had: a large colony of brown bats sleeping in what looked like a vast hanging cloud of cobweb. I glanced down and saw the porch was not just coated but plated with guano. It made me very glad I was wearing a hat.

When I looked up again, Jack Cantori was at the foot of the steps. "No way, baby," he said. "Call me a chicken, call me a candy-ass, call me any name in the book, I'm not going there. With Wireman it's snakes. With me it's bats. Once-" He looked like he had more to say, maybe a lot, but didn't know how to say it. He took another step back, instead. I had a moment to contemplate the eccentricity of fear: what the weird jockey hadn't been able to accomplish (close, but that only counts in horseshoes), a colony of sleeping brown bats had. For Jack, at least.

Wireman said, "They can carry rabies, muchacho - did you know that?"

I nodded. "I think we should look for the tradesman's entrance."

xiv

We made our way slowly along the side of the house, Jack in the lead and carrying the red picnic basket. His shirt was dark with sweat, but he no longer showed the slightest sign of nausea. He should have; probably we all should have. The stench from the pool was nearly overpowering. Thigh-high grass whickered against our pants; stiff fiddlewood stems poked at our ankles. There were windows, but unless Jack wanted to try standing on Wireman's shoulders, they were all too high.