Duma Key (82 page)

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.

“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 canceled 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 lotería,”
I said, without thinking.

“Sí,”
he said. “
La
goddam
lotería.
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.