Duma Key (79 page)

The back door stands open. An evening breeze frisks in, stirring it back farther on its hinges
 . . . 
only now it's actually a night breeze. Sunset is dying. There will still be
light on Shade Beach, but here at Heron's Roost, dark has already come. Melda dashes across the back porch and sees the Mister already on the path to the beach. He's only a shadow. She looks around for Libbit, but of course she
doesn't see her; if Libbit is doing what she is supposed to be doing, then she's already on her way to the swimming pool with her heart-box under her arm.

The heart-box with the monster inside it.

She runs after the Mister and catches him at the bench, where the path drops down to the beach. He is standing there, frozen. In the west, the last of the sunset is a sullen orange line that will soon be gone, but there is enough light for her to see Adie at the edge of the water, and the man who is wading to greet her.

Adriana screams
Emery!
She sounds mad with joy, as if he's been gone a year instead of a day.

Melda shouts
No, Ade, keep away from him!
from beside the frozen, gaping man, but she knows Adie will pay no attention, and she
doesn't; Adie runs to her husband.

John Eastlake says
What—
and that's all.

He's broken free of his torpor long enough to run this far, but now he's frozen again. Is it because he sees the two other forms, farther out but also wading toward shore? Wading in water that should be over their heads? Melda thinks not. She thinks he is still staring at his oldest daughter as the dim figure of the man coming out of the water reaches for her with his dripping arms and lays hold of her neck with his dripping hands, first choking off her glad cries and then dragging her into the surge.

Out there in the Gulf, waiting, ticking back and forth on the mild swell like a clock that tells time in years and centuries rather than minutes and hours, is the black hulk of Perse's ship.

Melda grabs the Mister's arm, sinking her hand deep
into the bicep, and speaks to him as she has never spoken to a white man in her life.

She says
Give a help, you son of a bitch! 'Fore he drownds her!

She yanks him forward. He comes. She
doesn't wait to see if he keeps on or freezes up again, and she has forgotten all about Libbit; all she can think about is Adie. She has to stop the Emery-thing from dragging her into the water, and she has to do it before the dead babby-uns can get there to help him.

She cries
Turn loose! Turn loose of her!

Flying down the beach with her skirt belling out behind. Emery has gotten Adie in almost up to her waist. Adie is now fighting, but she's also choking. Melda flounders toward them and throws herself on the pallid corpse who has his wife by the throat. He screams when Melda's left arm, the one with the bracelets on it, touches him. It is a bubbling sound, as if his throat is full of water. He writhes in Melda's grip like a fish, and she rakes him with her fingernails. Flesh sloughs away beneath them with sickening ease, but no blood flows from the pale wounds. His eyes roll in their sockets, and they are like the eyes of a dead carp in the moonlight.

He pushes Adriana away so he can grapple with the harpy that has attacked him, the harpy with the cold, repelling fire on its arm.

Adie wails
No, Nanny, stop, you're hurting him!

Adie flounders forward to pull Melda off, or at least separate them, and that's the moment when John Eastlake, standing shin-deep in the Gulf, fires the harpoon pistol. The triple-bladed bit takes his oldest daughter high in the throat, and she stands bolt-upright, with two inches of steel poking out in front of her and four more jutting out behind, just below the base of her skull.

John Eastlake shrieks
Adie, no! Adie, I DIDN'T MEAN TO!

Adie turns toward the sound of her father's voice and actually begins to walk toward him, and that is all Nan Melda has time to see. Adie's dead husband is trying to tear itself free of her grip, but she
doesn't want to let it go; she wants to end its terrible half-life and perhaps by doing so warn off the two baby-horrors before they can get too close. And she thinks (so far as she
can
think) that she can do that, because she has seen a smoldering scorch-mark on the thing's pale, wet cheek and understands that her bracelet has made it.

Her silver bracelet.

The thing reaches for her, its wrinkled mouth yawning in what might be either fear or fury. Behind her, John Eastlake is screaming his daughter's name, over and over.

Melda snarls
You done this!
and when the Emery-thing seizes her, she lets it.

You and the bitch been runnin you,
she would add, but its white hands close on her throat as they closed on poor Adie's, and she can only gurgle. Her left arm is free, however, the one with the bracelets on it, and that arm feels very powerful. She draws it back and swings it forward in a great arc, connecting with the right side of the Emery-thing's head.

The result is spectacular. The creature's skull caves in under the blow, as if a little immersion had turned that hard cage to candy. But it's still hard, all right; one of the shards that comes poking through the mat of Emery's hair slashes her forearm deep, and blood goes pattering down into the water that surges around them.

Two shadows pass her, one on her left, one on her right.

Lo-Lo cries
Daddy!
in her new silver voice.

Tessie cries
Daddy, help us!

The Emery-thing is trying to get away from Melda now, floundering and splashing, wanting no more to do with her. Melda jabs the thumb of her powerful left hand in its right eye, feeling something cold, like toad-guts under a rock, come squishing out. Then she whirls around, staggering, as the rip tries to pull her feet from under her.

She reaches out with her left hand and seizes Lo-Lo by the scruff of her neck and pulls her backward.
“You ain't!
” she grunts, and Lo-Lo comes flailing with a cry of surprise and agony
 . . . 
and no cry like that ever came from no little girl's throat, Melda knows.

John howls
Melda, stop it!

He's kneeling in the last thin run of the surf with Adie before him. The harpoon's shaft juts up from her throat.

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.

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?”