Duma Key(161)

"A creative burn at three," Jack said, bemused. "Fucking awesome concept."

"So she started to... to..." I stopped, for a moment unable to go on.

"Edgar?" Wireman asked quietly. "All right?"

I wasn't, but I had to be. If I wasn't, Tom would only be the beginning. "It's just that he looked good at the gallery. Good, you know? Like he'd put it all together again. If not for her meddling-"

"I know," Wireman said. "Drink some of your water, muchacho."

I drank some of my water, and forced myself back to the business at hand. "She started to experiment. She went from pencils to fingerpaints to watercolors in I think a period of weeks. Plus some of the pictures in the picnic basket were done in fountain-pen, and I'm pretty sure some were done with house-paint, which I'd been meaning to try myself. It has a look when it dries-"

"Save it for your art-class, muchacho, " Wireman said.

"Yeah. Yeah." I drank some more water. I was starting to get back on track. "She started to experiment with different media, too. If that's the right word; I think it is. Chalk on brick. Sand-drawings on the beach. One day she painted Tessie's face on the kitchen counter in melted ice cream."

Jack was leaning forward, hands clasped between his muscular thighs, frowning. "Edgar... this isn't just blue-sky? You saw this?"

"In a way. Sometimes it was actual seeing. Sometimes it was more like a... a wave that came out of her pictures, and from using her pencils."

"But you know it's true."

"I know."

"She didn't care if the pictures lasted or not?" Wireman asked.

"No. The doing mattered more. She experimented with media, and then she started to experiment with reality. To change it. And that's when Perse heard her, I think, when she started messing with reality. Heard her and woke up. Woke up and started calling."

"Perse was with the rest of that junk Eastlake found, wasn't she?" Wireman asked.

"Elizabeth thought it was a doll. The best doll ever. But they couldn't be together until she was strong enough."

"Which she are you talking about?" Jack asked. "Perse or the little girl?"

"Probably both. Elizabeth was just a kid. And Perse... Perse had been asleep for a long time. Sleeping under the sand, full fathom five."

"Very poetic," Jack said, "but I don't know exactly what you're talking about."

"Neither do I," I said. "Because her I don't see. If Elizabeth drew pictures of Perse, she destroyed them. I find it suggestive that she turned to collecting china figures in her old age, but maybe that's just a coincidence. What I know is that Perse established a line of communication with the child, first through her drawings, then through her up-to-then favorite doll, Noveen. And Perse instituted a kind of... well, exercise program. I don't know what else you'd call it. She persuaded Elizabeth to draw things, and those things would happen in the real world."

"She's been playing the same game with you, then," Jack said. "Candy Brown."

"And my eye," Wireman said. "Don't forget fixing my eye."

"I'd like to think that was all me," I said... but had it been? "There have been other things, though. Small things, mostly... using some of my pictures as a crystal ball..." I trailed off. I didn't really want to go there, because that road led back to Tom. Tom who should have been fixed.

"Tell us the rest of what you found out from her pictures," Wireman said.

"All right. Start with that out-of-season hurricane. Elizabeth summoned it up, probably with help from Perse."

"You've got to be shitting me," Jack said.

"Perse told Elizabeth where the debris was, and Elizabeth told her father. Among the litter was a... let's say there was a china figure, maybe a foot high, of a beautiful woman." Yes, I could see that. Not the details, but the figure. And the empty, pupil-less pearls that were her eyes. "It was Elizabeth's prize, her fair salvage, and once it was out of the water, it really went to work."

Jack spoke very softly. "Where would a thing like that have come from to begin with, Edgar?"

A phrase rose to my lips, from where I don't know, only that it wasn't my own: There were elder gods in those days; kings and queens they were. I didn't say it. I didn't want to hear it, not even in that well-lighted room, so I only shook my head.

"I don't know. And I don't know what country's flag that ship might have been flying when it blew in here, maybe scraping its hull open on the top of Kitt Reef and spilling some of its cargo. I don't know much of anything for sure... but I think that Perse has a ship of her own, and once she was free of the water and completely welded to Elizabeth Eastlake's powerful child's mind, she was able to call it."

"A ship of the dead," Wireman said. His face was childlike with fear and wonder. Outside, a wind shook the massed foliage in the courtyard; the rhododendrons nodded their heads and we could hear the steady, sleepy sound of the waves pounding the shore. I had loved that sound ever since coming to Duma Key, and I still loved it, but now it frightened me, too. "A ship called... what? Persephone?"

"If you like," I said. "It's certainly crossed my mind that Perse was Elizabeth's way of trying to say that. It doesn't matter; we're not talking Greek mythology here. We're talking about something far older and more monstrous. Hungry, too. That much it does have in common with vampires. Only hungry for souls, not blood. At least that's what I think. Elizabeth had her new 'doll' for no more than a month, and God knows what life was like at the first Heron's Roost during that time, but it couldn't have been good."