Duma Key: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “He doesn’t call it a wreck,” I said.

  “It wasn’t,” Wireman said. “There was no boat. He didn’t find one, and neither did the dozens of people who helped him try to recover the bodies of his little girls. Only detritus. They would have found a wreck if there was a wreck to find; the water on the southwest end of the Key is no more than twenty-five feet deep all the way out to what remains of Kitt Reef, and it’s pretty clear now. Back then it was like turquoise glass.”

  “Any theories about how it came to be there?”

  “Sure. The best is that some boat close to foundering came blowing in a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years before, shedding shit as it came. Or maybe the crew was tossing stuff overboard to stay afloat. They made repairs after the storm was over and went on their way. It would explain why there was a swath of detritus for Eastlake to find, and also why none of it was particularly valuable. Treasure would have stayed with the ship.”

  “And the reef wouldn’t have ripped the keel out of a boat that got blown in here back in the 1700s? Or 1600s?”

  Wireman shrugged. “Chris Shannington says no one knows what the geography of Kitt Reef might have been a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  I looked at the spread-out loot. The smiling middle daughters. The smiling Daddy, who was soon going to have to buy himself a new bathing costume. And I suddenly decided he hadn’t been sleeping with the nanny. No. Even a mistress would have told him he couldn’t have a newspaper photo of himself taken in that old thing. She would have found a tactful reason, but the real one was right in front of me, after all these years; even with less-than-perfect vision in my right eye, I could see it. He was too fat. Only he didn’t see it, and his daughters didn’t see it, either. Loving eyes did not see.

  Too fat. Something there, wasn’t there? Some A that practically demanded a B.

  “I’m surprised he talked about what he found at all,” I said. “If you happened on stuff like this today and then blabbed to Channel 6, half of Florida would show up in their little putt-putts, hunting for doubloons and pieces of eight with metal detectors.”

  “Ah, but this was another Florida,” Wireman said, and I remembered Mary Ire using the same phrase. “John Eastlake was a rich man, and Duma Key was his private preserve. Besides, there were no doubloons, no pieces of eight—just moderately interesting junk uncovered by a freak storm. For weeks he went down and dived where that debris was scattered on the floor of the Gulf—and it was close in, according to Shannington; at low tide, you could practically wade to it. And sure, he was probably keeping an eye out for valuables. He was a rich man, but I don’t think that vaccinates a man against the treasure-bug.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sure it doesn’t.”

  “The nanny would have gone with him on his treasure-hunting expeditions. The three still-at-home girls, too: the twins and Elizabeth. Maria and Hannah were back at their boarding school in Bradenton, and big sis had run off to Atlanta. Eastlake and his little ones probably had picnics down there.”

  “How often?” I began to see where this was going.

  “Often. Maybe every day while the debris field was at its richest. They wore a path from the house to what was called Shade Beach. It was half a mile, if that.”

  “A path two adventurous little girls could follow on their own.”

  “And one day did. To everyone’s sorrow.” He swept the pictures back into the folder. “There’s a story here, muchacho, and I suppose it’s marginally more interesting than a little girl swallowing a marble, but a tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I’ll take A Midsummer Night’s Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.”

  He brooded a moment.

  “What probably happened is that one day in April of 1927, when Tessie and Laura were supposed to be napping, they decided to get up, sneak down the path, and go hunting for treasure at Shade Beach. Probably they meant to do no more than wade in as far as their knees, which is all they were permitted to do—one of the stories quotes John Eastlake as saying that, and Adriana backed him up.”

  “The married daughter who came back.”

  “Right. She and her new husband returned a day or two before the search for the bodies was officially called off. That’s according to Shannington. Anyway, one of the little girls maybe saw something gleaming a little further out and started to flounder. Then—”

  “Then her sister tried to save her.” Yes, I could see it. Only I saw Lin and Ilse as they’d been when they were small. Not twins, but for three or four golden years nearly inseparable.

  Wireman nodded. “And then the rip took em both. Had to’ve been that way, amigo; that’s why the bodies weren’t found. Off they went, heigh-ho for the caldo largo.”

  I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant by the rip, then remembered a painting by Winslow Homer, romantic but of undeniable power: Undertow.

  The intercom on the wall beeped, startling us both. Wireman struck the folder with his arm as he turned around, knocking photocopies and faxes everywhere.

  “Mr. Wireman!” It was Annmarie Whistler. “Mr. Wireman, are you there?”

  “I’m here,” Wireman said.

  “Mr. Wireman?” She sounded agitated. Then, as if to herself: “Jesus, where are you?”

  “The fucking button,” he muttered, and went to the wall unit, not quite running. He pushed the button. “I’m here. What’s wrong? What’s happened? Did she fall?”

  “No!” Annmarie cried. “She’s awake! Awake and aware! She’s asking for you! Can you come?”

  “Right away,” he said, and turned to me, grinning. “Do you hear that, Edgar? Come on!” He paused. “What are you looking at?”

  “These,” I said, and held out the two pictures of Eastlake in his bathing dress: the one where he was surrounded by all his daughters, and the one taken two years later, where he was flanked by just Maria and Hannah.

  “Never mind em now—didn’t you hear her? Miss Eastlake is back!” He booked for the door. I dropped his folder on the library table and followed him. I had made the connection—but only because I’d spent the last few months cultivating the art of seeing. Cultivating it strenuously.

  “Wireman!” I called. He’d gone the length of the dogtrot and was halfway up the staircase. I was limping as fast as I could and he was still pulling away. He waited for me, not very patiently. “Who told him the debris field was there?”

  “Eastlake? I assume he stumbled on it while pursuing his diving hobby.”

  “I don’t think so—he hadn’t been in that bathing suit for a long time. Diving and snorkeling may have been his hobby in the early twenties, but I think that around 1925, eating dinner became his chief diversion. So who told him?”

  Annmarie came out of a door near the end of the hall. There was a goofy, unbelieving grin on her face that made her look half her forty years.

  “Come on,” she said. “This is wonderful.”

  “Is she—”

  “She is,” came Elizabeth’s cracked but unmistakable voice. “Come in here, Wireman, and let me see your face while I still know it.”

  ix

  I lingered in the hall with Annmarie, not sure what to do, looking at the knickknacks and the big old Frederic Remington at the far end—Indians on ponies. Then Wireman called for me. His voice was impatient and rough with tears.

  The room was dim. The shades had all been drawn. Air conditioning whispered through a vent somewhere above us. There was a table next to her bed with a lamp on it. The shade was green glass. The bed was the hospital kind, and cranked up so she could almost sit. The lamp put her in a soft spotlight, with her hair loose on the shoulders of a pink dressing gown. Wireman sat beside her, holding her hands. Above her bed was the only painting in the room, a fine print of Edward Hopper’s Eleven AM, an archetype of loneliness waiting pa
tiently at the window for some change, any change.

  Somewhere a clock was ticking.

  She looked at me and smiled. I saw three things in her face. They hit me one after the other like stones, each one heavier than the last. The first was how much weight she’d lost. The second was that she looked horribly tired. The third was that she hadn’t long to live.

  “Edward,” she said.

  “No—” I began, but when she raised one hand (the flesh hanging down in a snow-white bag above her elbow), I stilled at once. Because here was a fourth thing to see, and it hit hardest of all—not a stone but a boulder. I was looking at myself. This was what people had seen in the aftermath of my accident, when I was trying to sweep together the poor scattered bits of my memory—all that treasure that looked like trash when it was spread out in such ugly, naked fashion. I thought of how I had forgotten my doll’s name, and I knew what was coming next.

  “I can do this,” she said.

  “I know you can,” I said.

  “You brought Wireman back from the hospital,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I was so afraid they’d keep him. And I would be alone.”

  I didn’t reply to this.

  “Are you Edmund?” she asked timidly.

  “Miss Eastlake, don’t tax yourself,” Wireman said gently. “This is—”

  “Hush, Wireman,” I said. “She can do this.”

  “You paint,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you painted the ship yet?”

  A curious thing happened to my stomach. It didn’t sink so much as it seemed to disappear and leave a void between my heart and the rest of my guts. My knees tried to buckle. The steel in my hip went hot. The back of my neck went cold. And warm, prickling fire ran up the arm that wasn’t there.

  “Yes,” I said. “Again and again and again.”

  “You’re Edgar,” she said.

  “Yes, Elizabeth. I’m Edgar. Good for you, honey.”

  She smiled. I guessed no one had called her honey in a long time. “My mind is like a tablecloth with a great big hole burned into it.” She turned to Wireman. “Muy divertido, sí?”

  “You need to rest,” he said. “In fact, you need to dormir como un tronco.”

  She smiled faintly. “Like a log. Yes. And I think when I wake up, I’ll still be here. For a little while.” She lifted his hands to her face and kissed them. “I love you, Wireman.”

  “I love you, too, Miss Eastlake,” he said. Good for him.

  “Edgar? … Is it Edgar?”

  “What do you think, Elizabeth?”

  “Yes, of course it is. You’re to have a show? Is that how we left things before my last …” She drooped her eyelids, as if to mime sleep.

  “Yes, at the Scoto Gallery. You really need to rest.”

  “Is it soon? Your show?”

  “In less than a week.”

  “Your paintings … the ship paintings … are they on the mainland? At the gallery?”

  Wireman and I exchanged a look. He shrugged.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good.” She smiled. “I’ll rest, then. Everything else can wait … until after you have your show. Your moment in the sun. Are you selling them? The ship pictures?”

  Wireman and I exchanged another look, and the message in his eyes was very clear: Don’t upset her.

  “They’re marked NFS, Elizabeth. That means—”

  “I know what it means, Edgar, I didn’t fall out of an orange tree yesterday.” Inside their deep pockets of wrinkles, caught in a face that was receding toward death, her eyes flashed. “Sell them. However many there are, you must sell them. And however hard it is for you. Break them up, send them to the four winds. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you do it?”

  I didn’t know if I would or not, but I recognized her signs of growing agitation from my own not-so-distant past. “Yes.” At that point, I would have promised her to jump to the moon in seven-league boots, if it would have eased her mind.

  “Even then they may not be safe,” she mused in an almost-horrified voice.

  “Stop, now,” I said, and patted her hand. “Stop thinking about this.”

  “All right. We’ll talk more after your show. The three of us. I’ll be stronger … clearer … and you, Edgar, will be able to pay attention. Do you have daughters? I seem to remember that you do.”

  “Yes, and they’re staying on the mainland with their mother. At the Ritz. That’s already arranged.”

  She smiled, but the corners drooped almost at once. It was as if her mouth were melting. “Crank me down, Wireman. I’ve been in the swamp … forty days and forty nights … so it feels … and I’m tired.”

  He cranked her down, and Annmarie came in with something in a glass on a tray. No chance Elizabeth was going to drink any of it; she had already corked off. Over her head, the loneliest girl in the world sat in a chair and looked out the window forever, face hidden by the fall of her hair, naked but for a pair of shoes.

  x

  For me, sleep was long in coming that night. It was after midnight before I finally slipped away. The tide had withdrawn, and the whispered conversation under the house had ceased. That didn’t stop the whispered voices in my head, however.

  Another Florida, Mary Ire whispered. That was another Florida.

  Sell them. However many there are, you must sell them. That was Elizabeth, of course.

  The grown Elizabeth. I heard another version of her, however, and because I had to make this voice up, what I heard was Ilse’s voice as it had been as a child.

  There’s treasure, Daddy, this voice said. You can get it if you put on your mask and snorkel. I can show you where to look.

  I drew a picture.

  xi

  I was up with the dawn. I thought I could go to sleep again, but not until I took one of the few Oxycontin pills I still had put aside, and until I made a telephone call. I took the pill, then dialed the Scoto and got the answering machine—there wouldn’t be a living person in the gallery for hours yet. Artistic types aren’t morning people.

  I pushed 11 for Dario Nannuzzi’s extension, and after the beep I said: “Dario, it’s Edgar. I’ve changed my mind about the Girl and Ship series. I want to sell them after all, okay? The only caveat is that they should all go to different people, if possible. Thanks.”

  I hung up and went back to bed. Lay there for fifteen minutes watching the overhead fan turn lazily and listening to the shells whisper beneath me. The pill was working, but I wasn’t drifting off. And I knew why.

  I knew exactly why.

  I got up again, hit redial, listened to the recorded message, then punched in Dario’s extension one more time. His recorded voice invited me to leave a message at the beep. “Except for No. 8,” I said. “That one is still NFS.”

  And why was it NFS?

  Not because it was genius, although I think it was. Not even because when I looked at it, it was—for me—like listening to the darkest part of my heart telling its tale. It was because I felt that something had let me live just to paint it, and that to sell it would be to deny my own life, and all the pain I had undergone to reclaim it.

  Yeah, that.

  “That one’s mine, Dario,” I said.

  Then I went back to bed, and that time I slept.

  How to Draw a Picture (VII)

  Remember that “seeing is believing” puts the cart before the horse. Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery. And besides—if you don’t believe what you see, who will believe your art?

  The trouble after the treasure all had to do with belief. Elizabeth was fiercely talented, but she was only a child—and with children, faith is a given. It’s part of the standard equipment. Nor are children, even the talented ones (especially the talented ones), in full possess
ion of their faculties. Their reason still sleeps, and the sleep of reason breeds monsters.

  Here’s a picture I never painted:

  Identical twins in identical jumpers, except one is red, with an L on the front, and the other is blue, with a T. The girls are holding hands as they run along the path that leads to Shade Beach. They call it that because for most of the day it’s in the shadow of Hag’s Rock. There are tear-tracks on their pale round faces, but they will soon be gone because by now they are too terrorized to cry.

  If you can believe this, you can see the rest.

  A giant crow flies slowly past them, upside-down, its wings outstretched. It speaks to them in their Daddy’s voice.

  Lo-Lo falls and cuts her knees on the shells. Tessie pulls her to her feet. They run on. It isn’t the upside-down talking crow they are afraid of, nor the way the sky sometimes lenses from blue to a sunset red before going back to blue; it is the thing behind them.

  The big boy.

  Even with its fangs it still looks a little like one of the funny frogs Libbit used to draw, but this one is ever so much bigger, and real enough to cast a shadow. Real enough to stink and shake the ground each time it jumps. They have been frightened by all sorts of things since Daddy found the treasure, and Libbit says they dassn’t come out of their room at night, or even look out their windows, but this is day, and the thing behind them is too real not to be believed, and it is gaining.

  The next time it’s Tessie who falls and Lo-Lo who pulls her up, casting a terrified glance behind her at the thing chasing them. It’s surrounded by dancing bugs it sometimes licks out of the air. Lo-Lo can see Tessie in one bulging, stupid eye. She herself is in the other.

  They burst onto the beach gasping and out of breath and now there’s nowhere to go but the water. Except maybe there is, because the boat is back again, the one they have seen more and more frequently in the last few weeks. Libbit says the boat isn’t what it seems, but now it’s a floating white dream of safety, and besides—there is no choice. The big boy is almost at their heels.