Duma Key: A Novel

by Stephen King

  Jack offered his hand—the left one, the boy was a learner—and then decided a hug was in order, after all. In my ear he whispered, “Give me the flashlight, boss.”

  In his I whispered back: “Can’t. Sorry.”

  I started along the path to the back of the house, the one that would take me to the boardwalk. At the end of that boardwalk, a thousand or so years ago, I’d met the big man I was now leaving behind. He had been sitting under a striped umbrella. He had offered me iced green tea, very cooling. And he had said, So—the limping stranger arriveth at last.

  And now he goeth, I thought.

  I turned back. They were watching me.

  “Muchacho!” Wireman called.

  I thought he was going to ask me to come back so we could think about this a little more, talk it over a little more. But I had underestimated him.

  “Vaya con Dios, mi hombre.”

  I gave him a final wave and walked around the corner of the house.

  iii

  So then I took my last Great Beach Walk, as limping and painful as my first ones along that shell-littered shore. Only those had been by the rosy light of early morning, when the world was at its most still, the only things moving the mild lap of the waves and the brown clouds of peeps that fled before me. This was different. Tonight the wind roared and the waves raged, not alighting on the shore but committing suicide on it. The rollers farther out were painted chrome, and several times I thought I saw the Perse from the corner of my eye, but each time I turned to look, there was nothing. Tonight there was nothing on my part of the Gulf but moonlight.

  I lurched along, flashlight gripped in my hand, thinking of the day I had walked here with Ilse. She had asked me if this was the most beautiful place on earth and I had assured her that no, there were at least three others that were more beautiful … but I couldn’t remember what I’d told her those others were, only that they were hard to spell. What I remembered most clearly was her saying I deserved a beautiful place, and time to rest. Time to heal.

  Tears started to come then, and I let them. I had the flashlight in the hand I could have used to wipe them away, so I just let them come.

  iv

  I heard Big Pink before I actually saw it. The shells under the house had never been so loud. I walked a little farther, then stopped. It was just ahead of me now, a black shape where the stars were blotted out. Another forty or fifty slow, limping paces, and moonlight began to fill in the details. All the lights were out, even the ones I almost always left on in the kitchen and Florida room. That could have been a power outage caused by the wind, but I didn’t think that was it.

  I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we’re mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations.

  And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

  I walked on, leaving tracks behind me that featured one dragging foot. The blacked-out hulk of Big Pink grew closer. It wasn’t ruined like Heron’s Roost, but tonight it was haunted. Tonight there was a ghost waiting. Or maybe something a little more solid.

  The wind gusted and I looked left, into its pushing force. The ship was out there now, all right, lightless and silent, its sails so many flapping rags in the wind, waiting.

  Might as well go, the shells said as I stood in the moonlight, now less than twenty yards from my house. Wipe the blackboard clean—it can be done, no one knows it better than you—and just sail away. Leave this sadness behind. If you want to play you gotta pay. And the best part?

  “The best part is I don’t have to go alone,” I said.

  The wind gusted. The shells murmured. And from the blackness under the house, where that bony bed lay six feet deep, a darker shadow slipped free and stepped into the moonlight. It stood bent over for a moment, as if considering, and then began to come toward me.

  She began to come toward me. But not Perse; Perse had been drowned to sleep.

  Ilse.

  v

  She didn’t walk; I didn’t expect her to walk. She shambled. It was a miracle—a black one—that she could move at all.

  After that last phone call with Pam (you couldn’t call it a conversation, exactly), I’d gone out Big Pink’s back door and snapped the handle off the broom I used to sweep sand from the walk leading to the mailbox. Then I’d gone around to the beach, down to where the sand was wet and shining. I hadn’t remembered what came after that, because I didn’t want to. Obviously. Only now I did, now I had to, because now my handiwork was standing in front of me. It was Ilse, yet not Ilse. Her face was there, then it blurred and it wasn’t. Her form was there, then it slipped toward shapelessness before firming up again. Little pieces of dead sea oats and bits of shell dropped from her cheeks and chest and hips and legs as she moved. The moonlight picked out an eye that was heartbreakingly clear, heartbreakingly hers, and then it was gone, only to reappear again, shining in the moonlight.

  The Ilse shambling toward me was made of sand.

  “Daddy,” she said. Her voice was dry, with a grating undertone—as if there were shells caught in there somewhere. I supposed there were.

  You will want to, but you mustn’t, Elizabeth had said … but sometimes we can’t help ourselves.

  The sand-girl held out her arm. The wind gusted and the fingers at the end of the hand blurred as fine grains blew off them and thinned them to bones. More sand skirled up from around her and the hand fattened again. Her features shifted like a landscape under rapidly passing summer clouds. It was fascinating … hypnotic.

  “Give me the flashlight,” she said. “Then we’ll go on board together. On the ship I can be the way you remember me. Or … you don’t have to remember anything.”

  The waves were on the march. Under the stars they roared in, one after the other. Under the moon. Under Big Pink, the shells spoke loudly: my voice, arguing with itself. Bring the buddy. I win. Sit in the chum. You win. Here in front of me stood Ilse made of sand, a shifting houri by the light of a three-quarter moon, her features never the same from one second to the next. Now she was Illy at nine; now she was Illy at fifteen, headed out on her first real date; now she was Illy as she’d looked getting off the plane in December, Illy the college girl with an engagement ring on her finger. Here stood the one I’d always loved the best—wasn’t that why Perse had killed her?—with her hand held out for the flashlight. The flashlight was my boarding pass for a long cruise on forgetful seas. Of course that part might be a lie … but sometimes we have to take a chance. And usually we do. As Wireman says, we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

  “Mary brought salt with her,” I said. “Bags and bags of salt. She put it in the tub. The police want to know why. But they’d never believe the truth, would they?”

  She stood before me with the thundering, incoming waves behind her. She stood there blowing away and re-forming from the sand beneath her, around her. She stood there and said nothing, only holding her arm outstretched to take what she had come for.

  “Drawing you in the sand wasn’t enough. Even Mary drowning you wasn’t enough. She had to drown you in salt water.” I glanced down at the flashlight. “Perse told her just what to do. From my picture.”

  “Give it to me, Daddy,” the shifting sand-girl said. Her hand was still held out. Only with the wind blowing, sometimes it was a claw. Even with sand feeding up from the beach to keep it plump, sometimes it was a claw. “Give it to me and we can go.”

  I sighed. Some things were inevitable, after all. “All right.” I took a step toward her. Another of Wireman’s sayings occurred to me: In the end we wear out our worries. “All right, Miss Cookie. But it’ll cost
you.”

  “Cost me what?” Her voice was the sound of sand against a window. The grating sound of the shells. But it was also Ilse’s voice. My If-So-Girl.

  “Just a kiss,” I said, “while I’m still alive to feel it.” I smiled. I couldn’t feel my lips—they were numb—but I could feel the muscles around them stretching. Just a little. “I suppose it will be a sandy one, but I’ll pretend you’ve been playing on the beach. Making castles.”

  “All right, Daddy.”

  She came closer, moving in a queer shamble-drift that wasn’t walking, and up close the illusion collapsed entirely. It was like bringing a painting close to your eyes and watching as the scene—portrait, landscape, still life—collapses into nothing but strokes of color, most with the marks of the brush still embedded in them. Ilse’s features disappeared. What I saw where they had been was nothing but a furious cyclone of sand and tiny bits of shell. What I smelled wasn’t skin and hair but only salt water.

  Pallid arms reached for me. Membranes of sand smoked off them in the wind. The moon shone through them. I held up the flashlight. It was short. And its barrel was plastic rather than stainless steel.

  “You might want a look at this before you go giving away kisses, though,” I said. “It came from the glove compartment of Jack Cantori’s car. The one with Perse inside is locked in Elizabeth’s safe.”

  The thing froze, and when it did, the wind off the Gulf tore away the last semblance of humanity. In that moment I was confronting nothing but a whirling sand-devil. I took no chances, however; it had been a long day, and I had no intention of taking chances, especially if my daughter were somewhere … well, somewhere else … and waiting for her final rest. I swung my arm as hard as I could, the flashlight clamped in my fist and Nan Melda’s silver bracelets sliding down my arm to my wrist. I had cleaned them carefully in the kitchen sink at El Palacio, and they jingled.

  I had one of the silver-tipped harpoons stuck in my belt, behind my left hip, for good measure, but I didn’t need it. The sand-devil exploded outward and upward. A scream of rage and pain went through my head. Thank God it was brief, or I think it would have torn me apart. Then there was nothing but the sound of the shells under Big Pink and a brief dimming of the stars over the dunes to my right as the last of the sand blew away in a disorganized flurry. The Gulf was once more empty except for the moon-gilded rollers, marching in toward shore. The Perse had gone, if it had ever been there.

  The strength ran out of my legs and I sat down with a thump. Maybe I’d end up doing the Crawly-Gator the rest of the way, after all. If so, Big Pink wasn’t far. Right now I thought I’d just sit here and listen to the shells. Rest a little. Then maybe I’d be able to get up and walk those last twenty yards or so, go in, and call Wireman. Tell him I was all right. Tell him it was done, that Jack could come and pick me up.

  But for now I would just sit here and listen to the shells, which no longer seemed to be talking in my voice, or anyone else’s. Now I would just sit here by myself on the sand, and look out at the Gulf, and think about my daughter, Ilse Marie Freemantle, who had weighed six pounds and four ounces at birth, whose first word had been dog, who had once brought home a large brown balloon crayoned on a piece of construction paper, shouting exultantly, “I drawed a pitcher of you, Daddy!”

  Ilse Marie Freemantle.

  I remember her well.

  22—June

  i

  I piloted the skiff out to the middle of Lake Phalen and killed the motor. We drifted toward the little orange marker I’d left there. A few pleasure boats buzzed back and forth on the glass-smooth surface, but no sailboats; the day was perfectly still. There were a few kids in the playground area, a few people in the picnic area, and a few on the nearest hiking trail skirting the water. On the whole, though, for a lake that’s actually within the city limits, the area was almost empty.

  Wireman—looking strangely un-Florida in a fisherman’s hat and a Vikings pullover—commented on this.

  “School’s still in,” I said. “Give it another couple of weeks and there’ll be boats buzzing everywhere.”

  He looked uneasy. “Does that make this the right place for her, muchacho? I mean, if a fisherman should net her up—”

  “No nets allowed on Lake Phalen,” I said, “and there are few rods and reels. This lake is pretty much for pleasure-boaters. And swimmers, in close to shore.” I bent and picked up the cylinder the Sarasota silversmith had made. It was three feet long, with a screw-down top at one end. It was filled with fresh water, and the water-filled flashlight was inside that. Perse was sealed in double darkness, and sleeping in a double blanket of fresh water. Soon she would be sleeping even deeper.

  “This is a beautiful thing,” I said.

  “That it is,” Wireman agreed, watching the afternoon sun flash from the cylinder as I turned it over in my hand. “And nothing on it to catch a hook. Although I’d still feel easier about dumping it in a lake up around the Canadian border.”

  “Where someone really might come along dragging a net,” I said. “Hide in plain sight—it’s not a bad policy.”

  Three young women in a sportabout went buzzing by. They waved. We waved back. One of them yelled, “We love cute guys!” and all three of them laughed.

  Wireman tipped them a smiling salute, then turned back to me. “How deep is it out here? Do you know? That little orange flag suggests you do.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. I did a little research on Lake Phalen—probably overdue, since Pam and I have owned the place on Aster Lane going on twenty-five years. The average depth is ninety-one feet … except out here, where there’s a fissure.”

  Wireman relaxed and pushed his cap back a little from his brow. “Ah, Edgar. Wireman thinks you’re still el zorro—still the fox.”

  “Maybe sí, maybe no, but there’s three hundred and eighty feet of water under that little orange flag. Three hundred and eighty at least. A hell of a lot better than a twelve-foot cistern thumbed into a coral splinter on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “Amen.”

  “You look well, Wireman. Rested.”

  He shrugged. “That Gulfstream’s the way to fly. No standing in line at security, no one pawing through your carry-on to make sure you didn’t turn your little shitass can of Foamy into a bomb. And for once in my life I managed to fly north without a stop at fucking Atlanta. Thanks … although I could have afforded it myself, it looks like.”

  “You settled with Elizabeth’s relatives, I take it?”

  “Yep. Took your suggestion. Offered them the house and the north end of the Key in exchange for the cash and securities. They thought that was a hell of a deal, and I could see their lawyers thinking, ‘Wireman is a lawyer, and today he has a fool for a client.’ ”

  “Guess I ain’t the only zorro in this boat.”

  “I’ll end up with over eighty million bucks in liquid assets. Plus various keepsakes from the house. Including Miss Eastlake’s Sweet Owen cookie-tin. Think she was trying to tell me something with that, ’chacho?”

  I thought of Elizabeth popping various china figures into the tin and then insisting Wireman throw it in the goldfish pond. Of course she had been trying to tell him something.

  “The rels got the north end of Duma Key, development value … well, sky’s the limit. Ninety million?”

  “Or so they think.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, turning somber. “So they think.” We sat in silence for a little while. He took the cylinder from me. I could see my face in its side, but distorted by the curve. I didn’t mind looking at it that way, but I very rarely look at myself in a mirror anymore. It’s not that I’ve aged; I don’t care for the Freemantle fellow’s eyes these days. They have seen too much.

  “How’s your wife and daughter?”

  “Pam’s out in California with her mother. Melinda’s back in France. She stayed with Pam for awhile after Illy’s funeral, but then she went back. I think it was the right call. She’s getting on with
it.”

  “What about you, Edgar? Are you getting on with it?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t Scott Fitzgerald say there are no second acts in American life?”

  “Yep, but he was a washed-up drunk when he said it.” Wireman put the cylinder at his feet and leaned forward. “Listen to me, Edgar, and listen good. There are actually five acts, and not just in American lives—in every life that’s fully lived. Same as in every Shakespearian play, tragedy and comedy alike. Because that’s what our lives are made up of—comedy and tragedy.”

  “For me, the yuks have been in short supply just lately,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “but Act Three has potential. I’m in Mexico now. Told you, right? Beautiful little mountain town called Tamazunchale.”

  I gave it a try.

  “You like the way it rolls off your tongue. Wireman can see that you do.”

  I smiled. “It do have a certain ring to it.”

  “There’s this rundown hotel for sale there, and I’m thinking about buying it. It’d take three years of losses to put that kind of operation on a paying basis, but I’ve got a fat money-belt these days. I could use a partner who knows something about building and maintenance, though. Of course, if you’re still concentrating on matters artistic …”

  “I think you know better.”

  “Then what do you say? Let us marry our fortunes together.”

  “Simon and Garfunkel, 1969,” I said. “Or thereabouts. I don’t know, Wireman. I can’t decide now. I do have one more picture to paint.”

  “Indeed you do. Just how big is this storm going to be?”

  “Dunno. But Channel 6 is gonna love it.”

  “Plenty of warning, though, right? Property damage is fine, but no one gets killed.”

  “No one gets killed,” I agreed, hoping this would be true, but once that phantom limb was given free rein, all bets were off. That’s why my second career had to end. But there would be this one final picture, because I meant to be fully avenged. And not just for Illy; for Perse’s other victims, as well.