Duma Key(157)

"Christ," Wireman said. "That ship! The one in the paintings!"

"Go on," the thing said. "We have no business with you. Go on, and you may live."

"It's lying," I said.

"Tell me something I don't know," Wireman said, then raised his voice. He was standing just behind me, and he almost blew out my eardrum. " Leave! You're trespassing! "

The drowned young man made no reply, but it was every bit as fast as I had feared. At one moment it was standing three steps inside the living room. At the next it was right in front of me, and I had only the vaguest, flickering impression of it crossing the distance between. Its smell rot and seaweed and dead fish turning to soup in the sun bloomed and became overwhelming. I felt its hands, freezing cold, close over my forearm, and cried out in shock and horror. It wasn't the cold, it was how soft they were. How flabby. That one silver eye peered at me, seeming to drill into my brain, and for a moment there was a sensation of being filled with pure darkness. Then the manacle clamped on my wrist with a flat hard clacking sound.

" Wireman! " I screamed, but Wireman was gone. He was running away from me, across the room, as fast as he could.

The drowned thing and I were chained together. It dragged me toward the door.

viii

Wireman was back just before the dead man could pull me over the threshold. He had something in his hand that looked like a blunt dagger. For a moment I thought it must be one of the silver harpoons, but that was only a powerful bit of wishful thinking; the silver harpoons were upstairs with the red picnic basket. "Hey!" he said. "Hey, you! Yeah, I'm talking to you! Cojudo de puta madre! "

Its head snapped around as fast as the head of a snake about to strike. Wireman was almost as fast. Holding the blunt object in both hands, he drove it into the thing's face, striking home just above the right eyesocket. The thing shrieked, a sound that went through my head like shards of glass. I saw Wireman wince and stagger back; saw him struggle to hold onto his weapon and drop it to the sandy floor of the entryway. It didn't matter. The man-thing which had seemed so solid spun into insubstantiality, clothes and all. I felt the manacle around my wrist also lose its solidity. For a moment I could still see it and then it was only water, dripping onto my sneakers and the carpet. There was a larger wet patch where the demon sailor had been only a moment before.

I felt thicker warmth on my face and wiped blood from my nose and off my upper lip. Wireman had fallen over a hassock. I helped him up and saw his nose was bleeding, too. A line of blood also ran down the side of his throat from his left ear. It rose and fell with the rapid beat of his heart.

"Christ, that scream, " he said. "My eyes are watering and my ears are ringing like a motherf*cker. Can you hear me, Edgar?"

"Yes," I said. "Are you all right?"

"Other than thinking I just saw a dead guy disappear in f**king front of me? I guess so." He bent down, picked the blunt cylinder off the floor, and kissed it. "Glory be to God for dappled things," he said, then barked laughter. "Even when they're not dappled."

It was a candlestick. The tip, where you were supposed to stick your candle, looked dark, as if it had touched something very hot instead of something cold and wet.

"There are candles in all Miss Eastlake's rentals, because we lose the power out here all the time," Wireman said. "We have a gennie at the big house, but the other places don't, not even this one. But unlike the smaller houses, this one does have candlesticks from the big house, and they just happen to be silver."

"And you remembered that," I said. Marveled, really.

He shrugged, then looked at the Gulf. So did I. There was nothing there but moonlight and starlight on the water. For now, at least.

Wireman gripped my wrist. His fingers closed over it where the manacle had been, and my heart jumped. "What?" I said, not liking the new fear I saw in his face.

"Jack," he said. "Jack's alone at El Palacio. "

We took Wireman's car. In my terror, I'd never noticed the headlights or heard it pull in beside my own.

ix

Jack was okay. There had been a few calls from old friends of Elizabeth's, but the last one had come at quarter of nine, an hour and a half before we came bursting in, bloody and wide-eyed, Wireman still waving the candlestick. There had been no intruders at El Palacio, and Jack hadn't seen the ship that had been anchored for awhile in the Gulf off Big Pink. Jack had been eating microwave popcorn and watching Beverly Hills Cop on an old videotape.

He listened to our story with mounting amazement, but no real disbelief; this was a young man, I had to remind myself, that had been raised on shows like The X-Files and Lost. Besides, it fit with what he'd been told earlier. When we were done, he took the candlestick from Wireman and examined the tip, which looked like the burnt filament in a dead lightbulb.

"Why didn't it come for me?" he asked. "I was alone, and totally unprepared."

"I don't want to bruise your self-esteem," I said, "but I don't think you're exactly a priority to whoever's running this show."

Jack was looking at the narrow red mark on my wrist. "Edgar, is that where-"

I nodded.

"Fuck," Jack said in a low voice.

"Have you figured out what's going on?" Wireman asked me. "If she sent that thing after you, she must think you have, or that you're close."