Stephen King - Duma Key

Melda, leave my girls alone!

She has no time to listen, although she spares a thought for Libbit - why has Libbit not drowned the china figure? Or did it not work? Has the thing Libbit calls Percy stopped her somehow? Melda knows it's all too possible; Libbit is powerful, but Libbit is still only a child.

No time to think of that. She reaches out for the other undead, for Tessie, but her right hand isn't like her left, there's no silver to guard it, and Tessie turns with a snarl and bites. Melda is aware of thin shooting pain but not that two fingers and part of a third have been bitten off and now float in the water beside the pallid child. There's too much adrenaline whipping through her for that.

Over the top of the hill, where the bootleggers sometimes tote pallets laden with liquor, a small sickle moon rises, casting further thin radiance on this nightmare. By its light, Melda sees Tessie turn back to her father; sees Tessie hold out her arms again.

Daddy! Daddy, please help us! Nan Melda's gone crazy!

Melda doesn't think. She reaches across her body and seizes the child by hair she has washed and braided a thousand times.

John Eastlake screams MELDA, NO!

Then, as he picks up the dropped harpoon pistol and casts about on the sand near his dead daughter's body for the remaining shaft, another voice calls. This one comes from behind Melda, from the ship anchored out there on the caldo.

It says You should never have interfered with me.

Melda, still holding the Tessie-thing by the hair (it fights and kicks, but she's hardly aware of it), spins clumsily in the water and sees her, standing at the rail of her ship in her cloak of red. Her hood is down, and Melda sees she is not even close to human, she is something other, something beyond human understanding. In the moonlight her face is ghastly and full of knowing.

Rising from the water, thin skeleton arms salute her.

The breeze blows apart the snakes of her hair; Melda sees the third eye in Perse's forehead; sees it seeing her, and all will to resist is snuffed out in an instant.

At that moment, however, the head of the bitch-goddess snaps around as if she has heard something or someone tiptoeing up behind her.

She cries What?

And then: No! Put that down! Put it down! YOU CAN'T DO THAT!

But apparently Libbit can - and has - because the shape of the thing at the ship's rail wavers, turns watery... and then becomes nothing but moonlight. The skeleton arms slither back beneath the water and are gone.

The Emery-thing is gone, too - disappeared - but the twins shriek together in shared pain and desolation at their abandonment.

Melda cries to the Mister It's goan be all right!

She turns the one she's had by the hair a-loose. She doesn't think it will want anything to do with the living, not now, not for awhile.

She cries Libbit's done done it! She -

John Eastlake shrieks GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY DAUGHTERS, YOU BAD NIGGER!

And he fires the harpoon pistol for the second time.

Do you see it strike home, piercing Nan Melda through? If so, the picture is complete.

Ah, God - the picture is complete.

20 - Perse

i

The picture - not the last full-blown Edgar Freemantle work of art, but the second-to-last - showed John Eastlake kneeling on Shade Beach with his dead daughter beside him and the sickle moon, just risen above the horizon, behind him. Nan Melda stood thigh-deep in the water, with one little girl on either side of her; their damp, upturned faces were drawn long in expressions of terror and rage. The shaft of one of those short harpoons protruded from between the woman's breasts. Her hands were clasped upon it as she looked unbelievingly at the man whose daughters she had tried so hard to protect, the man who had called her a bad nigger before taking her life.

"He screamed," I said. "He screamed until his nose bled. Until he bled from one eye. It's a wonder he didn't scream himself into a cerebral hemorrhage."

"There's no one on the ship," Jack said. "Not in this drawing, at least."

"No. Perse was gone. What Nan Melda hoped for actually happened. The business on the beach distracted the bitch just long enough for Libbit to take care of her. To drown her to sleep." I tapped Nan Melda's left arm, where I had drawn two quick arcs and made one tiny crisscross to indicate a reflection of weak moonlight. "And mostly because something told her to put on her mother's silver bracelets. Silver, like a certain candlestick." I looked at Wireman. "So maybe there is something on the bright side of the equation, looking out for us a little."

He nodded, then pointed to the sun. In another moment or two, it would touch the horizon, and the track of light beating across to us, now yellow, would deepen to pure gold. "But dark is when the bad things come out to play. Where is the china Perse now? Any idea where it ended up after all this on the beach?"

"I don't know exactly what happened after Eastlake killed Nan Melda, but I've got the general gist. Elizabeth..." I shrugged. "She'd shot her bolt, at least for awhile. Hit overload. Her father must've heard her screaming, and that's probably the only thing that could still bring him around. He must have remembered that, no matter how awful things were, he still had a live daughter at Heron's Roost. He might even have remembered that he had two more thirty or forty miles away. Which left him with a mess to clean up."

Jack pointed silently at the horizon, where the sun was now touching.

"I know, Jack, but we're closer than you think." I shuffled the last sheet of paper to the top of the pile. It was the barest of sketches, but there was no mistaking that knowing smile. It was Charley the Lawn Jockey. I got to my feet and turned them away from the Gulf and the waiting ship, which was now silhouetted, black against gold. "Do you see it?" I asked them. " I saw it, on our way up from the house. The real jockey statue, I mean, not the projection we saw on our way in."

They looked. "I don't," Wireman said, "and I think I would if it was there, muchacho. I know the grass is high, but that red cap should still stand out. Unless it's in one of the banana groves."

"Got it!" Jack cried, and actually laughed.

"The fuck you do, " Wireman said, stung. Then: "Where?"

"Behind the tennis court."

Wireman looked there, started to say he still didn't see it, then stopped. "I'll be a son of a bitch," he said. "The Christing thing's upside-down, isn't it?"

"Yes. And since it has no actual feet to stick up, that's the square iron base you see. Charley marks the spot, amigos. But first we need to go to the barn."

ii

I had no premonition of what was waiting for us inside the long, overgrown outbuilding, which was dark and stifling hot, and no idea that Wireman had drawn the Desert Eagle automatic until it went off.

The doors were the kind that slide open on tracks, but these would never slide again; they were rusted in place eight feet apart, and had been for decades. Gray-green Spanish Moss dangled down like a curtain, obscuring the top of the gap between the doors.

"What we're looking f-" I began, and that was when the heron came flapping out with its blue eyes blazing, its long neck stretched forward, and its yellow beak snapping. It was getting itself into flight as soon as it cleared the doors, and I had no doubt that its target was my eyes. Then the Desert Eagle roared, and the bird's mad blue glare disappeared along with the rest of its head, in a fine spray of blood. It hit me, light as a bundle of wires wrapped around a hollow core, then dropped at my feet. At the same instant I heard a high, silver scream of fury in my head.

It wasn't just me, either. Wireman winced. Jack dropped the handles of the picnic basket and jammed the heels of his hands against his ears. Then it was gone.

"One dead heron," Wireman said, his voice not quite steady. He prodded the bundle of feathers, then flipped it off my boots. "For God's sake, don't tell Fish and Wildlife. Shooting one of these'd probably cost me fifty grand and five years in jail."

"How did you know?" I asked.

He shrugged. "What does it matter? You told me to shoot it if I saw it. You Lone Ranger, me Tonto."

"But you had the gun out."

"I had what Nan Melda might have called 'an intuition' when she was putting on her Mama's silver bracelets," Wireman said, unsmiling. "Something's keeping an eye on us, all right, leave it at that. And after what happened to your daughter, I'd say we're owed a little help. But we have to do our part."

"Just keep your shootin iron handy while we do it," I said.

"Oh, you can count on that."

"And Jack? Can you figure out how to load the speargun?"

No problem there. We were a go for speargun.

iii

The interior of the barn was dark, and not just because the ridge of land between us and the Gulf cut off the direct light of the setting sun. There was still plenty of light in the sky, and there were plenty of cracks and chinks in the slate roof, but the vines had overgrown them. What light did enter from above was green and deep and untrustworthy.

The outbuilding's central area was empty save for an ancient tractor sitting wheelless on the massive stumps of its axles, but in one of the equipment stalls, the light of our powerful flashlight picked out a few rusty, left-over tools and a wooden ladder leaning against the back wall. It was filthy and depressingly short. Jack tried climbing it while Wireman trained the light on him. He bounced up and down on the second rung, and we heard a warning creak.

"Stop bouncing on it and set it out by the door," I said. "It's a ladder, not a trampoline."

"I dunno," he said. "Florida's not the ideal climate for preserving wooden ladders."

"Beggars can't be choosers," Wireman said.

Jack picked it up, grimacing at the dust and dead insects that showered down from the six filthy steps. "Easy for you to say. You won't be the one climbing on it, not at your weight."

"I'm the marksman of the group, ni o, " Wireman said. "Each to his own job." He was striving for airy, but he sounded strained and looked tired. "Where are the rest of the ceramic keglets, Edgar? Because I'm not seeing them."

"Maybe in back," I said.

I was right. There were perhaps ten of the ceramic Table Whiskey "keglets" at the very back of the outbuilding. I say perhaps because it was hard to tell. They had been smashed to bits.

iv

Surrounding the bigger chunks of white ceramic, and mixed in with them, were glittering heaps and sprays of glass. To the right of this pile were two old-fashioned wooden handcarts, both overturned. To the left, leaning against the wall, was a sledgehammer with a rusty business-end and patches of moss growing up the handle.

"Someone had a container-smashing party," Wireman said. "Who do you think? Em?"

"Maybe," I said. "Probably."

For the first time I started to wonder if she was going to beat us after all. We had some daylight left, but less than I had expected and far less than I was comfortable with. And now... in what were we going to drown her china simulacrum? A fucking Evian water bottle? It wasn't a bad idea, in a way - they were plastic, and according to the environmentalists, the damned things are going to last forever - but a china figure would never fit through the hole in the top.

"So what's the fallback position?" Wireman asked. "The gas tank of that old John Deere? Will that do?"

The thought of trying to drown Perse in the old tractor's gas tank made me cold all over. It was probably nothing but rusty lace. "No. I don't think that will work."

He must have heard something close to panic in my voice, because he gripped my arm. "Take it easy. We'll think of something."