Duma Key - Stephen King

"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.

"What's happening?" Wireman called.

"Getting there!" I called back. Blood dribbled into my left eye, stinging, and I blinked it away. I tried to think of Illy, my If-So-Girl, and was horrified to realize I couldn't remember her face. "Little slag, little horrock, we're working it out."

"What?"

" Snag! Little snag, little hold-up! You fucking deaf, Wearman?"

Was the flashlight sleeve tilting? I feared it was. Water could be running over my hand and I might now be too numb to feel it. But if the sleeve wasn't tilting and I tried to correct, I'd make matters worse.

If water's running out, her head will be above the surface again in a matter of seconds. And then it'll be all over. You know that, right?

I knew. I sat in the dark with my arm up, afraid to do anything. Bleeding and waiting. Time had been cancelled and memory was a ghost.

"Here it is," Jack said at last. "It's caught in someone's ribs. Wait... got it."

"Thank God," I said. "Thank Christ." I could see him in front of me, a dim shape with one knee between my awkwardly bent legs, planted in the litter of disarranged bones that had once been part of John Eastlake's eldest daughter. I held the flashlight sleeve out. "Screw it on. Gently does it, because I can't hold it straight much longer."

"Luckily," he said, "I have two hands." And he put one of his over mine, steadying the water-filled flashlight as he began screwing the cap back on. He paused only once, to ask me why I was crying.

"Relief," I said. "Go on. Finish. Hurry."

When it was done, I took the capped flashlight from him. It wasn't as heavy as when it had been filled with D-cells, but I didn't care about that. What I cared about was making sure that the lid was screwed down tight. It seemed to be. I told Jack to have Wireman check it again when he got back up.

"Will do," he said.

"And try not to break any more rungs. I'm going to need them all."

"You get past the broken one, Edgar, and we'll haul you the rest of the way."

"Okay, and I won't tell anyone you tore out the seat of your pants."

At that he actually laughed. I watched the dark shape of him go up the ladder, taking a big stride to get past the broken rung. I had a moment of doubt accompanied by a terrible vision of tiny china hands unscrewing the flashlight cap from the inside - yes, even though I was sure the fresh water had immobilized her - but Jack didn't cry out or come tumbling back down, and the bad moment passed. There was a circle of brighter darkness above my head, and eventually he reached it.

When he was up and out, Wireman called down: "Now you, muchacho. "

"In a minute," I said. "Are your girlfriends gone?"

"Ran away. Shore leave over, I guess."

"And Emery?"

"That you need to see for yourself, I think. Come on up."

I repeated, "In a minute."

I leaned my head back against the moss-slimy coral, closed my eyes, and reached out. I kept reaching until I touched something smooth and round. Then my first two fingers slipped into an indentation that was almost certainly an eyesocket. And since I was sure it had been Adriana's skull Jack had crushed -

All's ending as well as can be at this end of the island, I told Nan Melda. And this isn't much of a grave, but you may not be in it much longer, my dear.

"May I keep your bracelets? There might be more to do."

Yes. I was afraid I had another thing coming.

"Edgar?" Wireman sounded worried. "Who you talking to?"

"The one who really stopped her," I said.

And because the one who really stopped her did not tell me she would have her bracelets back, I kept them on and began the slow and painful work of getting to my feet. Dislodged bone-fragments and bits of moss-encrusted ceramic showered down around my feet. My left knee - my good one - felt swollen and tight against the torn cloth of my pants. My head was throbbing and my chest was on fire. The ladder looked at least a mile high, but I could see the dark shapes of Jack and Wireman hanging over the rim of the cistern, waiting to grab me when - if - I managed to haul myself into grabbing-range.

I thought: There's a three-quarter moon tonight, and I can't see it until I get out of this hole in the ground.

So I got started.

xiii

The moon had risen fat and yellow above the eastern horizon, casting its glow on the lush jungle growth that overbore the south end of the Key and gilding the east side of John Eastlake's ruined mansion, where he had once lived with his housekeeper and his six girls - happily enough, I suppose, before Libbit's tumble from the pony-trap changed things.

It also gilded the ancient, coral-encrusted skeleton that lay on the mattress of trampled vines Jack and Wireman had uprooted to free the cistern cap. Looking at Emery Paulson's remains, a snatch of Shakespeare from my high school days recurred, and I spoke it aloud: "Full fathom five thy father lies... those are pearls that were his eyes."

Jack shivered violently, as if stroked by a keen wet wind. He actually clutched himself. This time he got it.

Wireman bent and picked up one thin, trailing arm. It snapped in three without a sound. Emery Paulson had been in the caldo a long, long time. There was a harpoon sticking through the shelly harp of his ribs. Wireman retrieved it now, having to work the tip free of the ground in order to take it back.

"How'd you keep the Twins from Hell off you with the spear-pistol unloaded?" I asked.

Wireman jabbed the harpoon in his hand like a dagger.

Jack nodded. "Yeah. I grabbed one out of his belt and did the same. I don't know how long it would have worked over the long haul, though - they were like mad dogs."

Wireman replaced the silver-tipped harpoon he'd used on Emery in his belt. "Speaking of the long haul, we might consider another storage container for your new doll. What do you think, Edgar?"

He was right. Somehow I couldn't imagine Perse spending the next eighty years in the barrel of a Garrity flashlight. I was already wondering how thin the shield between the battery case and the lens housing might be. And the rock that had fallen out of the cistern wall and cracked the Table Whiskey keg: had that been an accident... or a final victory of mind over matter after years of patient work? Perse's version of digging through the wall of her cell with a sharpened spoonhandle?

Still, the flashlight had served its purpose. God bless Jack Cantori's practical mind. No - that was too chintzy. God bless Jack.

"There's a custom silversmith in Sarasota," Wireman said. " Mexicano muy talentoso. Miss Eastlake has - had - a few pieces of his stuff. I bet I could commission him to make a watertight tube big enough to hold the flashlight. That'd give us what insurance companies and football coaches call double coverage. It'd be pricey, but so what? Barring probate snags, I'm going to be an extremely wealthy man. Caught a break there, muchacho."

"La loter a," I said, without thinking.

"S ," he said. " La goddam loter a. Come on, Jack. Help me tip Emery into the cistern."

Jack grimaced. "Okay, but I... I really don't want to touch it."

"I'll help with Emery," I said. "You hold onto the flashlight. Wireman? Let's do this."

The two of us rolled Emery into the hole, then threw in the pieces of him that broke off - or as many as we could find. I still remember his stony coral grin as he tumbled into the dark to join his bride. And sometimes, of course, I dream about it. In these dreams I hear Adie and Em calling up to me from the dark, asking me if I wouldn't like to come down and join them. And sometimes in those dreams I do. Sometimes I throw myself into that dark and stinking throat just to make an end to my memories.

These are the dreams from which I wake up screaming, thrashing at the dark with a hand that is no longer there.

xiv

Wireman and Jack slid the cap into position again, and then we went back to Elizabeth's Mercedes. That was a slow, painful walk, and by the end of it I really wasn't walking at all; I was lurching. It was as if the clock had been rolled back to the previous October. I was already thinking of the few Oxycontin tablets I had waiting for me back at Big Pink. I would have three, I decided. Three would do more than kill the pain; with luck they would also pound me into at least a few hours of sleep.

Both of my friends asked if I didn't want to sling an arm around them. I refused. This wasn't going to be my last walk tonight; I had made up my mind about that. I still didn't have the last piece of the puzzle, but I had an idea. What had Elizabeth told Wireman? You will want to but you mustn't.

Too late, too late, too late.

The idea wasn't clear. What was clear was the sound of the shells. You could hear that sound from anywhere inside Big Pink, but to get the full effect, you really had to come up on the place from outside. That was when they sounded the most like voices. So many nights I had wasted painting when I could have been listening.

Tonight I would listen.

Outside the pillars, Wireman paused. "Abyssus abyssum invocat," he said.

"Hell invokes Hell," Jack said, and sighed.

Wireman looked at me. "Think we'll have any trouble negotiating the road home?"

"Now? No."

"And are we done here?"

"We are."

"Will we ever come again?"

"No," I said. I looked at the ruined house, dreaming in the moonlight. Its secrets were out. I realized we'd left little Libbit's heart-shaped box behind, but maybe that was for the best. Let it stay here. "No one will come here anymore."

Jack looked at me, curious and a little afraid. "How can you know that?"

"I know," I said.

21 - The Shells by Moonlight

i

We had no trouble negotiating the road home. The smell was still there, but it was better now - partly because a good wind was getting up, blowing in off the Gulf, and partly because it was just... better now.

The courtyard lights of El Palacio were on a timer, and they looked wonderful, twinkling out of the dark. Inside the house, Wireman went methodically from room to room, turning on more lights. Turning on all the lights, until the house where Elizabeth had spent most of her life glowed like an ocean-liner coming into port at midnight.

When El Palacio was lit to the max, we took turns in the shower, passing the water-filled flashlight from hand to hand like a baton as we did so. Someone was always holding it. Wireman went first, then Jack, then me. After showering, each of us was inspected by the other two, then scrubbed with hydrogen peroxide where any skin was broken. I was the worst, and when I finally put my clothes back on, I stung all over.

I was finishing with my boots, laboriously tying them one-handed, when Wireman came into the guest bedroom looking grave. "There's a message you need to hear on the machine downstairs. From the Tampa Police. Here, let me help you."

He went down on one knee before me and began tightening my laces. I saw without surprise that the gray in his hair had advanced... and suddenly a bolt of alarm went through me. I reached out and grabbed his meaty shoulder. "The flashlight! Does Jack-"

"Relax. He's sitting in Miss Eastlake's old China Parlor, and he's got it on his lap."

I hurried, nevertheless. I don't know what I expected to find - the room empty, the unscrewed flashlight lying on the rug in a puddle of dampness, maybe, or Jack sex-changed into the three-eyed, claw-handed bitch that had come falling out of the old cracked keg - but he was only sitting there with the flashlight, looking troubled. I asked if he was all right. And I took a good look at his eyes. If he was going... wrong... I thought I'd see it in his eyes.

"I'm fine. But that message from the cop..." He shook his head.

"Well, let's hear it."

A man identifying himself as Detective Samson said that he was trying to reach both Edgar Freemantle and Jerome Wireman, to ask some questions about Mary Ire. He particularly wanted to speak to Mr. Freemantle, if he had not left for Rhode Island or Minnesota - where, Samson understood, the body of his daughter was being transported for burial.