Duma Key (61 page)

I flicked it up. Beneath was this:

After that, the pictures
became
pictures, growing in technique and sophistication with a speed that was beyond belief. Unless, that was, you happened to be a guy like Edgar Freemantle, who had done little more than doodle until an accident on a building site had taken his arm, crushed his skull, and nearly ended his life.

She had drawn fields. Palms. The beach. A gigantic black face, round as a basketball, with a smiling red mouth—probably Melda the housekeeper, although this Melda looked like an overgrown child in extreme close-up. Then more animals—raccoons, a turtle, a deer, a bobcat—that were naturally sized, but walking on the Gulf or flying through the air. I found a heron, executed in perfect detail, standing on the balcony railing of the house she had grown up in. Directly below it was another watercolor of the same bird, only this time it was hovering upside-down over the swimming pool. The gimlet eyes staring out of the picture were the same shade as the pool itself.
She was doing what I've been doing,
I thought, and my skin began to creep again.
Trying to re-invent the ordinary, make it new by turning it into a dream.

Would Dario, Jimmy, and Alice cream their jeans if they saw these? I thought there was no doubt.

Here were two little girls—Tessie and Laura, surely
—with great big pumpkin smiles that deliberately overran the edges of their faces.

Here was a Daddy bigger than the house beside which he stood—had to be the first Heron's Roost—smoking a cigar the size of a rocket. A smoke-ring circled the moon overhead.

Here were two girls in dark green jumpers on a dirt road with schoolbooks balanced on their heads the way some African native girls balanced their pots: Maria and Hannah, no doubt. Behind them came a line of frogs. In defiance of perspective, the frogs grew larger rather than smaller.

Next came Elizabeth's
Smiling Horses
phase. There were a dozen or more. I leafed through them, then turned back to one and tapped it. “This is the one that was in the newspaper article.”

Wireman said, “Go a little deeper. You ain't seen nuthin yet.”

More horses . . . more family, rendered in pencil or charcoal or in jolly watercolors, the family members almost always with their hands linked like paperdolls . . . then a storm, the water in the swimming pool lashed into waves, the fronds of a palm pulled into ragged banners by the wind.

There were well over a hundred pictures in all. She might only have been a child, but she had also been unbottling. Two or three more storm pictures . . . maybe the Alice that had uncovered Eastlake's treasure-trove, maybe just a big thunderstorm, it was impossible to say for sure . . . then the Gulf . . . the Gulf again, this time with flying fish the size of dolphins . . . the Gulf with pelicans that appeared to have rainbows in their mouths . . . the Gulf at sunset . . . and . . .

I stopped, my breath caught in my throat.

Compared with many of the others I'd gone through, this one was dead simple, just the silhouette of a ship against the dying light, caught at the tipping-point between day and dark, but its simplicity was what gave it its power. Certainly I'd thought so when I drew the same thing on my first night in Big Pink. Here was the same cable, stretched taut between the bow and what might in Elizabeth's time have been called a Marconi tower, creating a brilliant orange triangle. Here was the same upward shading of light, orange to blue. There was even the same scribbly, not-quite-careless overlay of color that made the ship—skinnier than mine had been—look like a phantom out there, trudging its way north.

“I drew this,” I said faintly.

“I know,” Wireman said. “I've seen it. You called it
Hello
.”

I thumbed deeper, hurrying through big bunches of watercolors and colored pencil drawings, knowing what I would eventually find. And yes, near the bottom I came to Elizabeth's first picture of the
Perse
. Only she had drawn it new, a slim three-masted beauty with sails furled, standing in on the blue-green waters of the Gulf beneath a trademark Elizabeth Eastlake sun, the kind that shoots off long happy-rays of light. It was a wonderful piece of work, almost begging for a calypso soundtrack.

But unlike her other paintings, it also felt false.

“Keep going,
muchacho
.”

The ship . . . the ship . . . family, four of them, anyway, standing on the beach with their hands linked like paperdolls and those big Elizabeth happysmiles . . . the ship . . . the house, with what looked like a
Negro lawn jockey standing on its head . . . the ship, that gorgeous white swallow . . . John Eastlake . . .

John Eastlake
screaming
 . . . blood running from his nose and one eye . . .

I stared at it, mesmerized. It was a child's watercolor, but it had been executed with hellish skill. It depicted a man who looked insane with terror, grief, or both.

“My
God,
” I said.

“One more,
muchacho,
” Wireman said. “One more to go.”

I flicked back the picture of the screaming man. Old dried watercolors rattled like bones. Beneath the screaming father was the ship again, only this time it really was my ship, my
Perse
. Elizabeth had painted it at night, and not with a brush—I could still see the ancient dried prints of her child's fingers in the swirls of gray and black. This time it was as if she had finally seen through the
Perse
's disguise. The boards were splintered, the sails drooping and full of holes. Around her, blue in the light of a moon that did not smile or send out happy-rays, hundreds of skeleton arms rose from the water in a dripping salute. And standing on the foredeck was a baggy, pallid thing, vaguely female, wearing a decayed something that might have been a cloak, a winding shroud . . . or a robe. It was the red-robe,
my
red-robe, only seen from the front. Three empty sockets peered from its head, and its grin outran the sides of its face in a crazy jumble of lips and teeth. It was far more horrible than my
Girl and Ship
paintings, because it went straight to the heart of the matter without any pause for the mind to catch up.
This is everything awful,
it said.
This is everything you ever feared to find waiting in the dark. See
how its grin races off its face in the moonlight. See how the drowned salute it
.

“Christ,” I said, looking up at Wireman. “When, do you think? After her sisters—?”

“Must have been. Must have been her way of coping with it, don't you think?”

“I don't know,” I said. Part of me was trying to think of my own girls, and part of me was trying not to. “I don't know how a kid—any kid—could come up with something like that.”

“Race memory,” Wireman said. “That's what the Jungians would say.”

“And how did I end up painting this same fucking ship? Maybe this same fucking
creature,
only from the back? Do the Jungians have any theories about that?”

“It doesn't say
Perse
on Elizabeth's,” Jack pointed out.

“She would have been four,” I said. “I doubt if the name would have made much of an impression on her.” I thought of her earlier pictures—the ones where this boat had been a beautiful white lie she had believed for a little while. “Especially once she saw what it really was.”

“You talk as if it were real,” Wireman said.

My mouth was very dry. I went to the bathroom, drew myself a glass of water, and drank it down. “I don't know what I believe about this,” I said, “but I have a general rule of thumb in life, Wireman. If one person sees a thing, it could be a hallucination. If two people see it, chances of reality improve exponentially. Elizabeth and I both saw the
Perse
.”

“In your
imaginations,
” Wireman said. “In your
imaginations
you saw it.”

I pointed to Wireman's face and said, “You've seen what my imagination can do.”

He didn't reply, but he nodded. He was very pale.

“You said, ‘Once she saw what it really was,' ” Jack said. “If the boat in that picture is real, what is it, exactly?”

“I think you know,” Wireman said. “I think we all do; it's pretty damned hard to miss. We're just afraid to say it out loud. Go on, Jack. God hates a coward.”

“Okay, it's a ship of the dead,” Jack said. His voice was flat in my clean, well-lighted studio. He put his hands to his head and raked his fingers slowly through his hair, making it wilder than ever. “But I'll tell you something, you guys:—if that's what's coming for me in the end, I sort of wish I'd never been born in the first place.”

x

I set the thick stack of drawings and watercolors aside on the carpet, delighted to get the last two out of my sight. Then I looked at what had been under her pictures, weighing the picnic basket down.

It was ammo for the spear-pistol. I lifted one of the stubby harpoons out. It was about fifteen inches long, and quite heavy. The shaft was steel, not aluminum—I wasn't sure aluminum had even been used in the nineteen-twenties. The business-end was triple-bladed, and although the blades were tarnished, they looked sharp. I touched the ball of my finger to one, and a tiny bead of blood appeared on the skin instantly.

“You ought to disinfect that,” Jack said.

“Yes indeed,” I said. I turned the thing over in the afternoon sun, sending reflections bounding around the walls. The short harpoon had its own ugly beauty, a paradox perhaps reserved exclusively for certain weapons of efficiency.

“This wouldn't go very far in water,” I said. “Not as heavy as it is.”

“You'd be surprised,” Wireman said. “The gun fires off a spring
and
a CO
₂
cartridge. She bangs pretty good. And back in those days, short range was enough. The Gulf teemed with fish, even close in. If Eastlake wanted to shoot something, he could usually do it at point blank range.”

“I don't understand these tips,” I said.

Wireman said, “Nor do I. She had at least a dozen harpoons, including four mounted on the wall in the library, and none of them are like these.”

Jack had gone into the bathroom and come back with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Now he took the harpoon I was holding and examined the triple-bladed tip. “What is it? Silver?”

Wireman made his thumb and forefinger into a gun and pointed it at him. “Hold your cards, but Wireman thinks you have scored a Bingo.”

“And you don't
get
that?” Jack asked.

Wireman and I looked at each other, then at Jack again.

“You haven't been watching the right movies,” he said. “Silver bullets are what you use to kill were-wolves. I don't know if silver works on vampires or not, but obviously
somebody
thought it did. Or that it might.”

“If you're suggesting Tessie and Laura Eastlake are
vampires,” Wireman said, “they must have built up a hell of a thirst since 1927.” He looked at me, expecting corroboration.

“I think Jack's onto something,” I said. I took the bottle of peroxide, dipped the finger I'd pricked into it, and splashed the bottle up and down a couple of times.

“Man-law,” Jack said, grimacing.

“Not unless you were planning to drink it,” I said, and after a moment's consideration Jack and I both burst out laughing.

“Huh?” Wireman asked. “I don't get it.”

“Never mind,” Jack said, still grinning. Then he grew serious again. “But there are no such things as vampires, Edgar. There could be ghosts, I'll give you that much—I think almost everyone believes there could be ghosts—but there's no such thing as vampires.” He brightened as an idea struck him. “Besides, it takes a vampire to make a vampire. The Eastlake twins
drowned
.”

I picked up the short harpoon again, turning it from side to side, making the reflection from the tarnished tip tumble along the wall. “Still, this is suggestive.”

“Really,” Jack agreed.

“So's the unlocked door you found when you brought the picnic basket,” I said. “The tracks. The canvas that was lifted out of the rack and put onto the easel.”

“You saying it was the crazy librarian after all,
amigo
?”

“No. Just that . . .” My voice cracked, broke. I had to take another sip of water before I could say what needed saying. “Just that maybe vampires aren't the only things that come back from the dead.”

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked. “Zombies?”

I thought of the
Perse
with her rotting sails. “Let's say deserters.”

xi

“Are you sure you want to be here alone tonight, Edgar?” Wireman asked. “Because I'm not sure it's such a great idea. Especially with that stack of old pictures for company.” He sighed. “You have succeeded in giving Wireman a first-class case of the willies.”