Duma Key(178)

"Yes," I said. "On we go."

xii

We had reached the point where the driveway began to be overgrown with strangler fig when I saw that black thing go flickering through the high tangle of weeds to the right of the house. This time Jack saw it, too.

"Someone's there," he said.

"I didn't see anyone," Wireman said. He set down the picnic basket and armed sweat from his brow. "Switch with me awhile, Jack. You take the basket and I'll take the food. You're young and strong. Wireman's old and used up. He'll die soo holy shit what's that! "

He staggered back from the basket and would have fallen if I hadn't caught him around the waist. Jack shouted with surprise and horror.

The man came bursting from the undergrowth just ahead on our left. There was no way he could have been there Jack and I had glimpsed him fifty yards away only seconds before but he was. He was a black man but not a human being. We never mistook him for an actual human being. For one thing, his legs, cocked and clad in blue breeches, did not move as he passed in front of us. Nor did he stir the thick mat of strangler fig springing up all around him. Yet his lips grinned; his eyes rolled with jolly malevolence. He wore a peaked cap with a button on top, and that was somehow the worst.

I thought if I had to look at that cap for long, it would drive me mad.

The thing disappeared into the grass on our right, a black man in blue breeches, about five and a half feet tall. The grass was no more than five feet high, and simple mathematics said he had no business disappearing into it, but he did.

A moment later he it was on the porch, grinning at us like De Ole Family Retainer, and then, with no pause, he it was at the bottom of the steps, and once more darting into the weeds, grinning at us all the time.

Grinning at us from beneath its cap.

Its cap was RED.

Jack turned to flee. There was nothing on his face but mindless, blabbering panic. I let go of Wireman to grab him, and if Wireman had also decided to flee, I think that would have been the end of our expedition; I had only the one arm, after all, and couldn't restrain them both. Couldn't restrain either of them, if they really meant to turn tail.

Terrified as I was, I never even came close to running. And Wireman, God bless him, stood his ground, watching with his mouth hung open as the black man next appeared from the grove of banana trees between the pool and the outbuilding.

I got Jack by the belt and yanked him back. I couldn't slap him in the face I had no hand to slap with and so I settled for shouting. " It's not real! It's her nightmare! "

"Her... nightmare?" Something like comprehension dawned in Jack's eyes. Or maybe just a little consciousness. I'd settle for that.

"Her nightmare, her boogeyman, whatever she was afraid of when the lights went out," I said. "It's just another ghost, Jack."

"How do you know?"

"For one thing, it's flickering like an old movie," Wireman said. "Look at it."

The black man was gone, then there again, this time in front of the rust-encrusted ladder leading up to the pool's diving platform. It grinned at us from beneath its red cap. Its shirt, I saw, was as blue as its breeches. It slid from place to place with its unmoving legs always cocked in the same position, like a figure in a shooting gallery. It was gone again, then appeared on the porch. A moment later it was in the driveway, almost directly in front of us. Looking at it made my head hurt, and it still made me afraid... but only because she had been afraid. Libbit.

The next time it showed itself, it was on the double-rutted path to the Shade Beach, and this time we could see the Gulf shining through its blouse and breeches. It winked out of sight, and Wireman began to laugh hysterically.

"What?" Jack turned to him. Almost turned on him. " What? "

"It's a f**kin lawn jockey!" Wireman said, laughing harder than ever. "One of those black lawn jockeys that are now so politically verboten, blown up to three, maybe four times its normal size! Elizabeth's boogeyman was the house lawn jockey!"

He tried to say more, but couldn't. He leaned over, laughing so hard he had to brace his hands on his knees. I saw the joke, but couldn't share it... and not only because my daughter was dead in Rhode Island. Wireman was only laughing now because at first he had been as frightened as Jack and I, as frightened as Libbit must have been. And why had she been frightened? Because someone, quite likely by accident, had put the wrong idea in her imaginative little head. My money was on Nan Melda, and maybe a bedtime story meant only to soothe a child who was still fretful from her head injury. Maybe even insomniac. Only this bedtime story had lodged in the wrong place, and grown TEEF.

Mr. Blue Breeches wasn't like the frogs we'd seen back on the road, either. Those had been all Elizabeth, and there'd been no malevolence about them. The lawn jockey, however... he might originally have come from little Libbit's battered head, but I had an idea that Perse had long since appropriated him for her own purposes. If anyone got this close to Elizabeth's first home, there it was, all ready to scare the intruder away. Into a stay at the nearest lunatic asylum, maybe.

Which meant there might be something here to find, after all.

Jack looked nervously toward where the sunken path which really did look as if it had been big enough to accommodate a cart or even a truck, once upon a time dropped down and out of sight. "Will it be back?"