Duma Key

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?”

“Yes. And since it has no actual feet to stick up, that’s the square iron base you see. Charley marks the spot, amigos. But first we need to go to the barn.”

ii

I had no premonition of what was waiting for us inside the long, overgrown outbuilding, which was dark and stifling hot, and no idea that Wireman had drawn the Desert Eagle automatic until it went off.

The doors were the kind that slide open on tracks, but these would never slide again; they were rusted in place eight feet apart, and had been for decades. Gray-green Spanish Moss dangled down like a curtain, obscuring the top of the gap between the doors.

“What we’re looking f—” I began, and that was when the heron came flapping out with its blue eyes blazing, its long neck stretched forward, and its yellow beak snapping. It was getting itself into flight as soon as it cleared the doors, and I had no doubt that its target was my eyes. Then the Desert Eagle roared, and the bird’s mad blue glare disappeared along with the rest of its head, in a fine spray of blood. It hit me, light as a bundle of wires wrapped around a hollow core, then dropped at my feet. At the same instant I heard a high, silver scream of fury in my head.

It wasn’t just me, either. Wireman winced. Jack dropped the handles of the picnic basket and jammed the heels of his hands against his ears. Then it was gone.

“One dead heron,” Wireman said, his voice not quite steady. He prodded the bundle of feathers, then flipped it off my boots. “For God’s sake, don’t tell Fish and Wildlife. Shooting one of these’d probably cost me fifty grand and five years in jail.”

“How did you know?” I asked.

He shrugged. “What does it matter? You told me to shoot it if I saw it. You Lone Ranger, me Tonto.”

“But you had the gun out.”

“I had what Nan Melda might have called ‘an intuition’ when she was putting on her Mama’s silver bracelets,” Wireman said, unsmiling. “Something’s keeping an eye on us, all right, leave it at that. And after what happened to your daughter, I’d say we’re owed a little help. But we have to do our part.”

“Just keep your shootin iron handy while we do it,” I said.

“Oh, you can count on that.”

“And Jack? Can you figure out how to load the speargun?”

No problem there. We were a go for speargun.

iii

The interior of the barn was dark, and not just because the ridge of land between us and the Gulf cut off the direct light of the setting sun. There was still plenty of light in the sky, and there were plenty of cracks and chinks in the slate roof, but the vines had overgrown them. What light did enter from above was green and deep and untrustworthy.

The outbuilding’s central area was empty save for an ancient tractor sitting wheelless on the massive stumps of its axles, but in one of the equipment stalls, the light of our powerful flashlight picked out a few rusty, left-over tools and a wooden ladder leaning against the back wall. It was filthy and depressingly short. Jack tried climbing it while Wireman trained the light on him. He bounced up and down on the second rung, and we heard a warning creak.

“Stop bouncing on it and set it out by the door,” I said. “It’s a ladder, not a trampoline.”

“I dunno,” he said. “Florida’s not the ideal climate for preserving wooden ladders.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Wireman said.

Jack picked it up, grimacing at the dust and dead insects that showered down from the six filthy steps. “Easy for you to say. You won’t be the one climbing on it, not at your weight.”

“I’m the marksman of the group, niño,” Wireman said. “Each to his own job.” He was striving for airy, but he sounded strained and looked tired. “Where are the rest of the ceramic keglets, Edgar? Because I’m not seeing them.”

“Maybe in back,” I said.

I was right. There were perhaps ten of the ceramic Table Whiskey “keglets” at the very back of the outbuilding. I say perhaps because it was hard to tell. They had been smashed to bits.

iv

Surrounding the bigger chunks of white ceramic, and mixed in with them, were glittering heaps and sprays of glass. To the right of this pile were two old-fashioned wooden handcarts, both overturned. To the left, leaning against the wall, was a sledgehammer with a rusty business-end and patches of moss growing up the handle.

“Someone had a container-smashing party,” Wireman said. “Who do you think? Em?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably.”

For the first time I started to wonder if she was going to beat us after all. We had some daylight left, but less than I had expected and far less than I was comfortable with. And now… in what were we going to drown her china simulacrum? A fucking Evian water bottle? It wasn’t a bad idea, in a way — they were plastic, and according to the environmentalists, the damned things are going to last forever — but a china figure would never fit through the hole in the top.

“So what’s the fallback position?” Wireman asked. “The gas tank of that old John Deere? Will that do?”

The thought of trying to drown Perse in the old tractor’s gas tank made me cold all over. It was probably nothing but rusty lace. “No. I don’t think that will work.”

He must have heard something close to panic in my voice, because he gripped my arm. “Take it easy. We’ll think of something.”

“Sure, but what?”

“We’ll take her back up to Heron’s Roost, that’s all. There’ll be something there.”

But in my mind’s eye I kept seeing how the storms had dealt with the mansion that had once dominated this end of Duma Key, turning it into little more than a façade. Then I wondered how many containers we actually would find there, especially with just forty minutes or so before dark came and the Perse sent a landing-party to end our meddling. God, to have forgotten such an elementary item as a water-tight container!

“Fuck!” I said. I kicked a pile of shards and sent them flying. “Fuck!”

“Easy, vato. That won’t help.”

No, it wouldn’t. And she’d like me angry, wouldn’t she? The old angry Edgar would be easy to manipulate. I tried to get hold of myself, but the I can do this mantra wasn’t working. Still, it was all I had. And what do you do when you can’t use anger to fall back on? You admit the truth.

“All right,” I said. “But I don’t have a clue.”

“Relax, Edgar,” Jack said, and he was smiling. “That part’s gonna be okay.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Trust me on this,” he said.

v

As we stood looking at Charley the Lawn Jockey in light that was now taking on a definite purple cast, a nonsense couplet from an old Dave Van Ronk blues occurred to me: “Mama bought a chicken, thought it was a duck; Sat it on the table with the legs stickin up.” Charley wasn’t a chicken or a duck, but his legs, ending not in shoes but a dark iron pedestal, were indeed sticking up. His head, however, was gone. It had crashed down through a square of ancient moss- and vine-covered boards.

“What’s that, muchacho?” Wireman asked. “Do you know?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a cistern,” I said. “I’m hoping not a septic tank.”

Wireman shook his head. “He wouldn’t have put them in a shitheap no matter how bad his mental state was. Never in a million years.”

Jack looked from Wireman to me, his young face full of horror. “Adriana’s down there? And the nanny?”

“Yes,” I said. “I thought you understood that. But the most important thing is that Perse’s down there. And the reason I think it’s a cistern is—”

“Elizabeth would have insisted on making sure the bitch was in a watery grave,” Wireman said grimly. “A fresh-watery one.”

vi

Charley was heavy, and the boards covering the hole in the high grass were more rotten than the steps of the ladder. Of course they were; unlike the ladder, the wooden cap had been directly exposed to the elements. We worked carefully in spite of the thickening shadows, not knowing how deep it was beneath. At last I was able to push the troublesome jockey far enough to one side so that Wireman and Jack could grab the slightly cocked blue legs. I stepped onto the rotted wooden cap in doing so; someone had to, and I was the lightest. It bent under my weight, gave out a long, warning groan, puffed up sour air.

“Get off it, Edgar!” Wireman yelled, and at the same instant Jack cried, “Grab it, oh whore, it’s gonna fall through!”

They seized Charley as I stepped off the sagging cap, Wireman around the bent knees and Jack around the waist. For a moment I thought it was going to drop through anyway, dragging them both along. Then they gave a combined shout of effort and tumbled over backward with the lawn jockey on top of them. Its grinning face and red cap were covered with huge lumbering beetles. Several dropped off onto Jack’s straining face, and one fell directly into Wireman’s mouth. He screamed, spat it out, and leaped to his feet, still spitting and rubbing his lips. Jack was beside him a moment later, dancing around him in a circle and brushing the bugs off his shirt.

“Water!” Wireman bellowed. “Gimme the water, one of em got in my mouth, I could feel it crawling on my fucking tongue!”

“No water,” I said, rummaging in the considerably depleted bag. Now on my knees, I could smell the air rising through the ragged hole in the cap far better than I wanted to. It was like air from a newly breached tomb. Which, of course, it was. “Pepsi.”

“Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, Pepsi,” Jack said. “No Coke.” He laughed dazedly.

I handed Wireman a can of soda. He stared at it unbelievingly for a moment, then raked back the pull tab. He took a mouthful, spat it out in a brown and foamy spray, took another, then spat that one out. The rest of the can he drank in four long swallows.

“Ay, caramba,” he said. “You’re a hard man, Van Gogh.”

I was looking at Jack. “What do you think? Can we shift it?”

Jack studied it, then fell on his knees and began to tear away the vines clinging to the sides. “Yeah,” he said. “But we gotta get rid of this shit.”

“We should have brought a crowbar,” Wireman said. He was still spitting. I didn’t blame him.

“Wouldn’t have helped, I don’t think,” Jack said. “The wood’s too rotted. Help me, Wireman.” And when I fell on my knees beside him: “Don’t bother, boss. This is a job for guys with two arms.”

I felt another flash of anger at that — the old anger was very close now — and quelled it as best I could. I watched them work their way around the circular cap, tearing away the vines and the weeds as the light faded from the sky. A single bird cruised by with its wings folded. It was upside-down. You saw something like that and felt like checking into the nearest nuthouse. Preferably for a long stay.

The two of them were working opposite each other, and as Wireman neared the place where Jack had begun and Jack neared the place where Wireman had begun, I said: “Is that speargun loaded, Jack?”

He looked up. “Yes. Why?”

“Because this is going to be a photo finish after all.”

vii

Jack and Wireman knelt on one side of the cap. I knelt on the other. Above us, the sky had deepened to an indigo that would soon be violet. “My count,” Wireman said. “Uno… dos… TRES!” They pulled and I pushed as well as I could with my remaining arm. That was pretty well, because my remaining arm had grown strong during my months on Duma Key. For a moment the cap resisted. Then it slid toward Wireman and Jack, revealing a crescent of darkness — a black and welcoming smile. This thickened to a half-moon, then a full circle.

Jack stood up. So did Wireman. He was checking his hands for more bugs. “I know how you feel,” I said, “but I don’t think we have time for you to do a full delousing.”

“Point taken, but unless you’ve chewed on one of those maricones, you don’t know how I feel.”

“Tell us what to do, boss,” Jack said. He was looking uneasily into the pit, from which that sallow stench was still issuing.

“Wireman, you have fired the speargun — right?”

“Yes, at targets. With Miss Eastlake. Didn’t I say I was the marksman of the group?”

“Then you’re on guard. Jack, shine that light.”

I could see by his face that he didn’t want to, but there was no choice — until this was done, there’d be no going back. And if it wasn’t done, there’d never be any going back.

Not by the land route, at least.

He picked up the long-barreled flashlight, clicked it on, and shone the powerful beam down into the hole. “Ah, God,” he whispered.

It was indeed a cistern lined with coral rock, but at some point during the last eighty years the ground had shifted, a fissure had opened — probably at the very bottom — and the water inside had leaked out. What we saw in the flashlight’s beam was a damp, moss-lined gullet eight or ten feet deep and about five feet in diameter. Lying at the bottom, entwined in an embrace that had lasted eighty years, were two skeletons dressed in rotten rags. Beetles crawled busily around them. Whitish toads — small boys — hopped on the bones. A harpoon lay beside one skeleton. The tip of the second harpoon was still buried in Nan Melda’s yellowing spine.

The light began to sway. Because the young man holding it was swaying.

“Don’t you faint on us, Jack!” I said sharply. “That’s an order!”

“I’m okay, boss.” But his eyes were huge, glassy, and behind the flashlight — still not quite steady in his hand — his face was parchment white. “Really.”

“Good. Shine it down there again. No, left. A little more… there.”

It was one of the Table Whiskey kegs, now little more than a hump under a heavy shag of moss. One of those white toads was crouched on it. It looked up at me, lids nictitating malevolently.

Wireman glanced at his watch. “We have… I’m thinking maybe fifteen minutes before sundown. Could be a little more, could be less. So…?”

“So Jack puts the ladder into the hole, and down I go.”

“Edgar… mi amigo… you have just one arm.”

“She took my daughter. She murdered Ilse. You know this is my job.”

“All right.” Wireman looked at Jack. “Which leaves the watertight container question.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, then picked up the ladder and handed me the flash. “Shine it down there, Edgar. I need both hands for what I’m doing.”

It seemed to take him forever to get the ladder placed to his satisfaction, but finally the feet were on the bottom, between the bones of Nan Melda’s outstretched arm (I could still see the silver bracelets, although now overgrown with moss) and one of Adie’s legs. The ladder was really very short, and the top rung was two feet below ground-level. That was all right; Jack could steady me to begin with. I thought of asking him again about the container for the china figure, then didn’t. He seemed completely at ease on that score, and I decided to trust him all the way. It was really too late to do otherwise.

In my head a voice, very low, almost meditative, said: Stop now and I’ll let you go free.

“Never,” I said.

Wireman looked at me without surprise. “You heard it, too, huh?”

viii

I lay on my stomach and backed into the hole. Jack gripped my shoulders. Wireman stood beside him with the loaded harpoon pistol in his hands and the three extra silvertips stuck in his belt. Between them, the flashlight lay on the ground, spraying a bright light into a tangle of uprooted weeds and vines.

The stench of the cistern was very strong, and I felt a tickling on my shin as something scurried up my leg. I should have tucked my pants cuffs into the tops of my boots, but it was a little late to go back and start over.

“Do you feel the ladder?” Jack asked. “Are you there yet?”

“No, I…” Then my foot touched the top rung. “There it is. Hang on.”

“I’ve gotcha, don’t worry.”

Come down here and I’ll kill you.

“Go on and try,” I said. “I’m coming for you, you birch, so take your best shot.”

I felt Jack’s hands tighten spasmodically on my shoulders. “Jesus, boss, are you s—”

“I’m sure. Just hold on.”

There were half a dozen rungs on the ladder. Jack was able to hold onto my shoulders until I’d gotten down three, and then I was chest-deep. He offered me the flashlight. I shook my head. “Use it to spot me.”

“You don’t get it. You don’t need it for light, you need it for her.”

For a minute I still didn’t get it.

“Unscrew the lens cap. Take out the batteries. Put her inside. I’ll hand you down the water.”

Wireman laughed without humor. “Wireman likes it, niño.” Then he bent to me. “Now go on. Bitch or birch, drown her and let’s have done with her.”

ix

The fourth rung snapped. The ladder tilted, and I fell off with the flashlight still clamped between my side and my stump, first shining up at the darkening sky, then illuminating lumps of coral coated with moss. My head connected with one of these and I saw stars. A moment later I was lying on a jagged bed of bones and staring into Adriana Eastlake Paulson’s eternal grin. One of those pallid toads leaped at me from between her mossy teeth and I batted at it with the barrel of the flashlight.

“Muchacho!” Wireman shouted, and Jack added, “Boss, are you all right!”

I was bleeding from the scalp — I could feel it running down my face in warm streams — but I thought I was okay; certainly I had been through worse in the Land of a Thousand Lakes. And the ladder, although aslant, was still standing. I looked to my right and there was the moss-covered Table Whiskey keg we’d come all this way to find. There were two toads on it now instead of one. They saw me looking and leaped into my face, eyes bulging, mouths gaping. I had no doubt that Perse wished they had teeth, like Elizabeth’s big boy. Ah, the good old days.

“I’m okay,” I said, batting the toads away and struggling to sit up. Bones broke beneath me and all around me. Except… no. They didn’t break. They were too old and damp to break. They first bent, then popped. “Send down the water. It’s okay to drop it in the bag, just try not to hit me in the head with it.”

I looked at Nan Melda.

I’m going to take your silver bracelets, I told her, but it’s not stealing. If you’re somewhere close and can see what I’m doing, I hope you’ll think of it as sharing. A kind of passing-on.

I slipped them off her remains and put them on my own left wrist, raising my arm and letting gravity slide them up to the catch-point. Above me, Jack was hanging head-down into the cistern. “Watch out, Edgar!”

The bag came down. One of the bones I’d broken in my fall punched through the plastic and water came trickling out. I yelled in fright and anger, opened the bag, looked inside. Only a single plastic bottle had been punctured. The other two were still whole. I turned to the moss-covered ceramic keg, slipped my hand into the thicket of slime under it, and worked it free. It didn’t want to come, but the thing inside had taken my daughter and I meant to have it. Finally it rolled toward me, and when it did, a good-sized chunk of coral slipped away on the other side of it and thudded to the muddy bottom of the cistern.

I shone the light on the keg. There was only a thin scum of moss on the side that had been facing the wall, and I could see the highlander in his kilt, one foot raised behind him as he did his fling. I could also see a jagged crack running straight down the keg’s curved side. That chunk of coral had made it when it fell out of the wall. The keg which Libbit had filled from the swimming pool back in 1927 had been leaking ever since that chunk had struck it, and now it was almost dry.

I could hear something rattling inside.

I’ll kill you if you don’t stop, but if you do, I’ll let you go. You and your friends.

I felt my lips skin back in a grin. And had Pam seen a grin like that when my hand closed around her neck? Of course she had. “You shouldn’t have killed my daughter.”

Stop now or I’ll take the other one, too.

Wireman called down, and the desperation in his voice was naked. “Venus just popped, amigo. I take that as a bad sign.”

I was sitting against one damp wall, with coral poking into my back and bones poking into my side. Movement was restricted, and in some other country my hip was throbbing badly — not screaming yet, but probably soon. I had no idea how I was supposed to climb the ladder again in such condition, but I was too angry to worry about it.

“Pardon me, Miss Cookie,” I murmured to Adie, and stuck the butt of the flashlight in her bony mouth. Then I took the ceramic keg in both hands… because both hands were there. I bent my good leg, pushing bones and muck to either side with the heel of my boot, lifted the keg into the dusty beam of light, and brought it down on my upraised knee. It cracked again, releasing a little flood of sludgy water, but didn’t break.

Perse screamed inside it and I felt my nose begin to bleed. And the light from the flash changed. It turned red. In that scarlet glow, the skulls of Adie Paulson and Nan Melda gaped and grinned at me. I looked at the moss-covered walls of this filthy throat into which I’d climbed of my own free will and saw other faces: Pam’s… Mary Ire’s, twisted in rage as she brought the butt of her gun down on Ilse’s head… Kamen’s, filled with terminal surprise as he dropped with his thunderclap heart attack… Tom, twisting the wheel of his car to send it hurtling into concrete at seventy miles an hour.

Worst of all, I saw Monica Goldstein, screaming You killed my doggy!

“Edgar, what’s happening?” That was Jack, a thousand miles away.

I thought of Shark Puppy on The Bone, singing “Dig.” I thought of telling Tom, That man died in his pick-up.

Then put me in your pocket and we’ll go together, she said. We’ll sail together into your real other life, and all the cities of the world will be at your feet. You’ll live long… I can arrange that… and you’ll be the artist of the age. They’ll rank you with Goya. With Leonardo.

“Edgar?” There was panic in Wireman’s voice. “People are coming from the beach side. I think I hear them. This is bad, muchacho.”

You don’t need them. We don’t need them. They’re nothing but… nothing but crew.

Nothing but crew. At that, the red rage descended over my mind even as my right hand began to slip out of existence again. But before it could go completely… before I lost my grip on either my fury or the damned cracked keg…

“Stick it up your friend, you dump birch,” I said, and raised the keg over my throbbing, upthrust knee again. “Stick it in the buddy.” I brought it down as hard as I could on that bony knob. There was a pain, but less than I had been prepared for… and in the end, that’s usually the way, don’t you think? “Stick it up your fucking chum.”

The keg didn’t break; already cracked, it simply burst, showering my jeans with murky wetness from the inch or so of water that had still been left inside. And a small china figure tumbled out: a woman wrapped in a cloak and a hood. The hand clasping the edges of the cloak together at her neck was not really a hand at all, but a claw. I snatched the thing up. I had no time to study it — they were coming now, I had no doubt of that, coming for Wireman and Jack — but there was long enough to see that Perse was extraordinarily beautiful. If, that was, you could ignore the claw hand and the disquieting hint of a third eye beneath the hair that had tumbled out from beneath her hood and over her brow. The thing was also extremely delicate, almost translucent. Except when I tried to snap it between my hands, it was like trying to snap steel.

“Edgar!” Jack screamed.

“Keep them back!” I snapped. “You have to keep them back!”

I tucked her into the breast pocket of my shirt, and immediately felt a sickening warmth begin to spread through to my skin. And it was thrumming. My untrustworthy mojo arm was gone again, so I stuck a bottle of Evian water between my side and my stump, then spun off the cap. I repeated this clumsy and time-consuming process with the other bottle.

From overhead, Wireman cried out in a voice that was almost steady: “Stay back! This is tipped with silver! I’ll use it!”

The response to this was clear, even at the bottom of the cistern. “Do you think you can reload fast enough to shoot all three of us?”

“No, Emery,” Wireman responded. He spoke as if to a child, and his voice had firmed all the way. I never loved him so much as I did then. “I’ll settle for you.”

Now came the hard part, the terrible part.

I began unscrewing the cap of the flashlight. On the second turn, the light went out and I was in nearly perfect darkness. I dumped the D-batteries from the flashlight’s steel sleeve, then fumbled for the first bottle of Evian. My fingers closed on it, and I poured it in, working by feel. I had no idea how much the flashlight would hold, and thought one bottle would fill it all the way to the top. I was wrong. I was reaching for the second one when full night must have come to Duma Key. I say that because that was when the china figure in my pocket came to life.

x

Any time I doubt that last mad passage in the cistern, all I have to do is look at the traffic-jam of white scars on the left side of my chest. Anyone seeing me naked wouldn’t notice them particularly; because of my accident, I am a roadmap of scars, and that small white bundle tends to get lost among the gaudier ones. But these were made by the teeth of a living doll. One that chewed through my shirt and skin and into the muscle beneath.

One that meant to chew all the way to my heart.

xi

I almost knocked the second bottle of water over before managing to pick it up. That was mostly from surprise, but there was plenty of pain as well, and I cried out. I felt fresh blood begin to flow, this time running down inside my shirt to the crease between my torso and my belly. She was twisting in my pocket, writhing in my pocket, her teeth sinking in and biting and plowing, digging deeper, deeper. I had to tear her out, and I ripped away a good chunk of bloody shirt and flesh with her. The figure had lost that smooth, cool feel. It was hot now, and writhing in my hand.

“Come on!” Wireman yelled from up above. “Come on, you want it?”

She sank her tiny china teeth, sharp as needles, into the webbing of flesh between my thumb and first finger. I howled. She might have gotten away then in spite of all my fury and determination, but Nan Melda’s bracelets slid down, and I could feel her cringing away from them, deeper into my palm. One leg actually slithered out between my second finger and my ring finger. I squeezed all my fingers together, pinning it. Pinning her. Her movements grew sluggish. I can’t swear that one of the bracelets was touching her — it was pitch black — but I’m almost positive it was.

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 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 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.

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.