Duma Key

  It was one of the Table Whiskey kegs, now little more than a hump under a heavy shag of moss. One of those white toads was crouched on it. It looked up at me, lids nictitating malevolently.

  Wireman glanced at his watch. "We have . . . I'm thinking maybe fifteen minutes before sundown. Could be a little more, could be less. So . . . ?"

  "So Jack puts the ladder into the hole, and down I go."

  "Edgar . . . mi amigo . . . you have just one arm."

  "She took my daughter. She murdered Ilse. You know this is my job."

  "All right." Wireman looked at Jack. "Which leaves the watertight container question."

  "Don't worry," he said, then picked up the ladder and handed me the flash. "Shine it down there, Edgar. I need both hands for what I'm doing."

  It seemed to take him forever to get the ladder placed to his satisfaction, but finally the feet were on the bottom, between the bones of Nan Melda's outstretched arm (I could still see the silver bracelets, although now overgrown with moss) and one of Adie's legs. The ladder was really very short, and the top rung was two feet below ground-level. That was all right; Jack could steady me to begin with. I thought of asking him again about the container for the china figure, then didn't. He seemed completely at ease on that score, and I decided to trust him all the way. It was really too late to do otherwise.

  In my head a voice, very low, almost meditative, said: Stop now and I'll let you go free.

  "Never," I said.

  Wireman looked at me without surprise. "You heard it, too, huh?"

  viii

  I lay on my stomach and backed into the hole. Jack gripped my shoulders. Wireman stood beside him with the loaded harpoon pistol in his hands and the three extra silvertips stuck in his belt. Between them, the flashlight lay on the ground, spraying a bright light into a tangle of uprooted weeds and vines.

  The stench of the cistern was very strong, and I felt a tickling on my shin as something scurried up my leg. I should have tucked my pants cuffs into the tops of my boots, but it was a little late to go back and start over.

  "Do you feel the ladder?" Jack asked. "Are you there yet?"

  "No, I . . ." Then my foot touched the top rung. "There it is. Hang on."

  "I've gotcha, don't worry."

  Come down here and I'll kill you.

  "Go on and try," I said. "I'm coming for you, you birch, so take your best shot."

  I felt Jack's hands tighten spasmodically on my shoulders. "Jesus, boss, are you s--"

  "I'm sure. Just hold on."

  There were half a dozen rungs on the ladder. Jack was able to hold onto my shoulders until I'd gotten down three, and then I was chest-deep. He offered me the flashlight. I shook my head. "Use it to spot me."

  "You don't get it. You don't need it for light, you need it for her."

  For a minute I still didn't get it.

  "Unscrew the lens cap. Take out the batteries. Put her inside. I'll hand you down the water."

  Wireman laughed without humor. "Wireman likes it, nino." Then he bent to me. "Now go on. Bitch or birch, drown her and let's have done with her."

  ix

  The fourth rung snapped. The ladder tilted, and I fell off with the flashlight still clamped between my side and my stump, first shining up at the darkening sky, then illuminating lumps of coral coated with moss. My head connected with one of these and I saw stars. A moment later I was lying on a jagged bed of bones and staring into Adriana Eastlake Paulson's eternal grin. One of those pallid toads leaped at me from between her mossy teeth and I batted at it with the barrel of the flashlight.

  "Muchacho!" Wireman shouted, and Jack added, "Boss, are you all right!"

  I was bleeding from the scalp--I could feel it running down my face in warm streams--but I thought I was okay; certainly I had been through worse in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. And the ladder, although aslant, was still standing. I looked to my right and there was the moss-covered Table Whiskey keg we'd come all this way to find. There were two toads on it now instead of one. They saw me looking and leaped into my face, eyes bulging, mouths gaping. I had no doubt that Perse wished they had teeth, like Elizabeth's big boy. Ah, the good old days.

  "I'm okay," I said, batting the toads away and struggling to sit up. Bones broke beneath me and all around me. Except . . . no. They didn't break. They were too old and damp to break. They first bent, then popped. "Send down the water. It's okay to drop it in the bag, just try not to hit me in the head with it."

  I looked at Nan Melda.

  I'm going to take your silver bracelets, I told her, but it's not stealing. If you're somewhere close and can see what I'm doing, I hope you'll think of it as sharing. A kind of passing-on.

  I slipped them off her remains and put them on my own left wrist, raising my arm and letting gravity slide them up to the catch-point. Above me, Jack was hanging head-down into the cistern. "Watch out, Edgar!"

  The bag came down. One of the bones I'd broken in my fall punched through the plastic and water came trickling out. I yelled in fright and anger, opened the bag, looked inside. Only a single plastic bottle had been punctured. The other two were still whole. I turned to the moss-covered ceramic keg, slipped my hand into the thicket of slime under it, and worked it free. It didn't want to come, but the thing inside had taken my daughter and I meant to have it. Finally it rolled toward me, and when it did, a good-sized chunk of coral slipped away on the other side of it and thudded to the muddy bottom of the cistern.

  I shone the light on the keg. There was only a thin scum of moss on the side that had been facing the wall, and I could see the highlander in his kilt, one foot raised behind him as he did his fling. I could also see a jagged crack running straight down the keg's curved side. That chunk of coral had made it when it fell out of the wall. The keg which Libbit had filled from the swimming pool back in 1927 had been leaking ever since that chunk had struck it, and now it was almost dry.

  I could hear something rattling inside.

  I'll kill you if you don't stop, but if you do, I'll let you go. You and your friends.

  I felt my lips skin back in a grin. And had Pam seen a grin like that when my hand closed around her neck? Of course she had. "You shouldn't have killed my daughter."

  Stop now or I'll take the other one, too.

  Wireman called down, and the desperation in his voice was naked. "Venus just popped, amigo. I take that as a bad sign."

  I was sitting against one damp wall, with coral poking into my back and bones poking into my side. Movement was restricted, and in some other country my hip was throbbing badly--not screaming yet, but probably soon. I had no idea how I was supposed to climb the ladder again in such condition, but I was too angry to worry about it.

  "Pardon me, Miss Cookie," I murmured to Adie, and stuck the butt of the flashlight in her bony mouth. Then I took the ceramic keg in both hands . . . because both hands were there. I bent my good leg, pushing bones and muck to either side with the heel of my boot, lifted the keg into the dusty beam of light, and brought it down on my upraised knee. It cracked again, releasing a little flood of sludgy water, but didn't break.

  Perse screamed inside it and I felt my nose begin to bleed. And the light from the flash changed. It turned red. In that scarlet glow, the skulls of Adie Paulson and Nan Melda gaped and grinned at me. I looked at the moss-covered walls of this filthy throat into which I'd climbed of my own free will and saw other faces: Pam's . . . Mary Ire's, twisted in rage as she brought the butt of her gun down on Ilse's head . . . Kamen's, filled with terminal surprise as he dropped with his thunderclap heart attack . . . Tom, twisting the wheel of his car to send it hurtling into concrete at seventy miles an hour.

  Worst of all, I saw Monica Goldstein, screaming You killed my doggy!

  "Edgar, what's happening?" That was Jack, a thousand miles away.

  I thought of Shark Puppy on The Bone, singing "Dig." I thought of telling Tom, That man died in his pick-up.

  Then put me in your pocket and we'll
go together, she said. We'll sail together into your real other life, and all the cities of the world will be at your feet. You'll live long . . . I can arrange that . . . and you'll be the artist of the age. They'll rank you with Goya. With Leonardo.

  "Edgar?" There was panic in Wireman's voice. "People are coming from the beach side. I think I hear them. This is bad, muchacho."

  You don't need them. We don't need them. They're nothing but . . . nothing but crew.

  Nothing but crew. At that, the red rage descended over my mind even as my right hand began to slip out of existence again. But before it could go completely . . . before I lost my grip on either my fury or the damned cracked keg . . .

  "Stick it up your friend, you dump birch," I said, and raised the keg over my throbbing, upthrust knee again. "Stick it in the buddy." I brought it down as hard as I could on that bony knob. There was a pain, but less than I had been prepared for . . . and in the end, that's usually the way, don't you think? "Stick it up your fucking chum."

  The keg didn't break; already cracked, it simply burst, showering my jeans with murky wetness from the inch or so of water that had still been left inside. And a small china figure tumbled out: a woman wrapped in a cloak and a hood. The hand clasping the edges of the cloak together at her neck was not really a hand at all, but a claw. I snatched the thing up. I had no time to study it--they were coming now, I had no doubt of that, coming for Wireman and Jack--but there was long enough to see that Perse was extraordinarily beautiful. If, that was, you could ignore the claw hand and the disquieting hint of a third eye beneath the hair that had tumbled out from beneath her hood and over her brow. The thing was also extremely delicate, almost translucent. Except when I tried to snap it between my hands, it was like trying to snap steel.

  "Edgar!" Jack screamed.

  "Keep them back!" I snapped. "You have to keep them back!"

  I tucked her into the breast pocket of my shirt, and immediately felt a sickening warmth begin to spread through to my skin. And it was thrumming. My untrustworthy mojo arm was gone again, so I stuck a bottle of Evian water between my side and my stump, then spun off the cap. I repeated this clumsy and time-consuming process with the other bottle.

  From overhead, Wireman cried out in a voice that was almost steady: "Stay back! This is tipped with silver! I'll use it!"

  The response to this was clear, even at the bottom of the cistern. "Do you think you can reload fast enough to shoot all three of us?"

  "No, Emery," Wireman responded. He spoke as if to a child, and his voice had firmed all the way. I never loved him so much as I did then. "I'll settle for you."

  Now came the hard part, the terrible part.

  I began unscrewing the cap of the flashlight. On the second turn, the light went out and I was in nearly perfect darkness. I dumped the D-batteries from the flashlight's steel sleeve, then fumbled for the first bottle of Evian. My fingers closed on it, and I poured it in, working by feel. I had no idea how much the flashlight would hold, and thought one bottle would fill it all the way to the top. I was wrong. I was reaching for the second one when full night must have come to Duma Key. I say that because that was when the china figure in my pocket came to life.

  x

  Any time I doubt that last mad passage in the cistern, all I have to do is look at the traffic-jam of white scars on the left side of my chest. Anyone seeing me naked wouldn't notice them particularly; because of my accident, I am a roadmap of scars, and that small white bundle tends to get lost among the gaudier ones. But these were made by the teeth of a living doll. One that chewed through my shirt and skin and into the muscle beneath.

  One that meant to chew all the way to my heart.

  xi

  I almost knocked the second bottle of water over before managing to pick it up. That was mostly from surprise, but there was plenty of pain as well, and I cried out. I felt fresh blood begin to flow, this time running down inside my shirt to the crease between my torso and my belly. She was twisting in my pocket, writhing in my pocket, her teeth sinking in and biting and plowing, digging deeper, deeper. I had to tear her out, and I ripped away a good chunk of bloody shirt and flesh with her. The figure had lost that smooth, cool feel. It was hot now, and writhing in my hand.

  "Come on!" Wireman yelled from up above. "Come on, you want it?"

  She sank her tiny china teeth, sharp as needles, into the webbing of flesh between my thumb and first finger. I howled. She might have gotten away then in spite of all my fury and determination, but Nan Melda's bracelets slid down, and I could feel her cringing away from them, deeper into my palm. One leg actually slithered out between my second finger and my ring finger. I squeezed all my fingers together, pinning it. Pinning her. Her movements grew sluggish. I can't swear that one of the bracelets was touching her--it was pitch black--but I'm almost positive it was.

  From above me came the hollow compressed-air CHOW of the harpoon pistol, and then a scream that seemed to rip through my brains. Below it--behind it--I could hear Wireman shouting, "Get in back of me, Jack! Take one of the--" Then no more, just the sound of grunting cries from my friends and the angry, unearthly laughter of two long-dead children.

  I had the flashlight's barrel clasped between my knees, and I didn't need anyone to tell me that anything could go wrong in the dark, especially for a one-armed man. I would have only one chance. Under conditions like that, it's best not to hesitate.

  No! Stop! Don't do th--

  I dropped her in, and one result was immediate: above me, the children's angry laughter turned to shrieks of surprised horror. Then I heard Jack. He sounded hysterical and half-insane, but I was never so glad to hear anyone in my life.

  "That's right, go on and run! Before your fucking ship sails and leaves you behind!"

  Now I had a delicate problem. I had taken hold of the flashlight in my remaining hand, and she was inside . . . but the cap was somewhere in here with me, and I couldn't see it. Nor did I have another hand to feel around with.

  "Wireman!" I called. "Wireman, are you there?"

  After a moment long enough to first seed four kinds of fear and then start them growing, he answered: "Yeah, muchacho. Still here."

  "All right?"

  "One of em scratched me and it ought to be disinfected, but otherwise, yeah. Basically I think we both are."

  "Jack, can you come down here? I need a hand." And then, sitting there crooked among the bones with the water-filled shell of the flashlight held up like the Statue of Liberty's torch, I began to laugh.

  Some things are just so true you have to.

  xii

  My eyes had adjusted enough for me to make out a dark shape seeming to float down the side of the cistern--Jack, descending the ladder. The sleeve of the flashlight was thrumming in my hand--weak, but definitely thrumming. I pictured a woman drowning in a narrow steel tank and pushed the image away. It was too much like what had happened to Ilse, and the monster I had imprisoned was nothing like Ilse.

  "There's a rung missing," I said. "If you don't want to die down here, you want to be careful as hell."

  "I can't die tonight," he said in a thin and shaking voice I never would have identified as his. "I have a date tomorrow."

  "Congratulations."

  "Thank y--"

  He missed the rung. The ladder shifted. For a moment I was sure he was going to come down on top of me, on top of the upheld flashlight. The water would spill out, she would spill out, and it all would have been for nothing.

  "What's happening?" Wireman shouted from above us. "What the fuck's happening?"

  Jack settled back against the wall, one hand gripping a lucky chunk of coral that he happened to find at the last crucial second. I could see one of his legs plunged down like a piston to the next intact rung, and there was a healthy ripping sound. "Man," he whispered. "Man oh man oh fucking man."

  "What's happening?" Wireman nearly roared.

  "Jack Cantori ripped out the seat of his pants," I said. "Now shut up a minute.
Jack, you're almost there. She's in the flashlight, but I've only got the one hand and I can't pick up the cap. You have to come down and find it. I don't care if you step on me, just don't bump the flashlight. Okay?"

  "O-Okay. Jesus, Edgar, I thought I was gonna go ass over teapot."

  "So did I. Come down now. But slowly."

  He came down, first stepping on my thigh--it hurt--and then putting his foot on one of the empty Evian bottles. It crackled. Then he stepped on something that broke with a damp pop, like a defective noisemaker.

  "Edgar, what was that?" He sounded on the verge of tears. "What--"

  "Nothing." I was pretty sure it had been Adie's skull. His hip thumped the flashlight. Cold water slopped over my wrist. Inside the metal sleeve, something bumped and turned. Inside my head, a terrible black-green eye--the color of water at the depth just before all light fails--also turned. It looked at my most secret thoughts, at the place where anger surpasses rage and becomes homicide. It saw . . . then bit down. The way a woman would bite into a plum. I will never forget the sensation.

  "Watch it, Jack--close quarters. Like a midget submarine. Careful as you can."

  "I'm freaking out, boss. Little touch of claustrophobia."

  "Take a deep breath. You can do this. We'll be out soon. Do you have matches?"

  He didn't. Nor a lighter. Jack might not be averse to six beers on a Saturday night, but his lungs were smoke-free. Thus there ensued a long, nightmarish space of minutes--Wireman says no more than four, but to me it seemed thirty, thirty at least--during which Jack knelt, felt among the bones, stood, moved a little, knelt again, felt again. My arm was getting tired. My hand was going numb. Blood continued to run from the wounds on my chest, either because they were slow in clotting or because they weren't clotting at all. But my hand was the worst. All feeling was leaving it, and soon I began to believe I was no longer holding the flashlight sleeve at all, because I couldn't see it and I was losing the sense of it against my skin. The feeling of weight in my hand had been swallowed by the tired throb of my muscles. I had to fight the urge to rap the metal sleeve against the side of the cistern to make sure I still had it, even though I knew if I did, I might drop it. I began to think that the cap must be lost in the maze of bones and bone fragments, and Jack would never find it without a light.