Duma Key(194)
Melda grabs the Mister's arm, sinking her hand deep into the bicep, and speaks to him as she has never spoken to a white man in her life.
She says Give a help, you son of a bitch! 'Fore he drownds her!
She yanks him forward. He comes. She doesn't wait to see if he keeps on or freezes up again, and she has forgotten all about Libbit; all she can think about is Adie. She has to stop the Emery-thing from dragging her into the water, and she has to do it before the dead babby-uns can get there to help him.
She cries Turn loose! Turn loose of her!
Flying down the beach with her skirt belling out behind. Emery has gotten Adie in almost up to her waist. Adie is now fighting, but she's also choking. Melda flounders toward them and throws herself on the pallid corpse who has his wife by the throat. He screams when Melda's left arm, the one with the bracelets on it, touches him. It is a bubbling sound, as if his throat is full of water. He writhes in Melda's grip like a fish, and she rakes him with her fingernails. Flesh sloughs away beneath them with sickening ease, but no blood flows from the pale wounds. His eyes roll in their sockets, and they are like the eyes of a dead carp in the moonlight.
He pushes Adriana away so he can grapple with the harpy that has attacked him, the harpy with the cold, repelling fire on its arm.
Adie wails No, Nanny, stop, you're hurting him!
Adie flounders forward to pull Melda off, or at least separate them, and that's the moment when John Eastlake, standing shin-deep in the Gulf, fires the harpoon pistol. The triple-bladed bit takes his oldest daughter high in the throat, and she stands bolt-upright, with two inches of steel poking out in front of her and four more jutting out behind, just below the base of her skull.
John Eastlake shrieks Adie, no! Adie, I DIDN'T MEAN TO!
Adie turns toward the sound of her father's voice and actually begins to walk toward him, and that is all Nan Melda has time to see. Adie's dead husband is trying to tear itself free of her grip, but she doesn't want to let it go; she wants to end its terrible half-life and perhaps by doing so warn off the two baby-horrors before they can get too close. And she thinks (so far as she can think) that she can do that, because she has seen a smoldering scorch-mark on the thing's pale, wet cheek and understands that her bracelet has made it.
Her silver bracelet.
The thing reaches for her, its wrinkled mouth yawning in what might be either fear or fury. Behind her, John Eastlake is screaming his daughter's name, over and over.
Melda snarls You done this! and when the Emery-thing seizes her, she lets it.
You and the bitch been runnin you, she would add, but its white hands close on her throat as they closed on poor Adie's, and she can only gurgle. Her left arm is free, however, the one with the bracelets on it, and that arm feels very powerful. She draws it back and swings it forward in a great arc, connecting with the right side of the Emery-thing's head.
The result is spectacular. The creature's skull caves in under the blow, as if a little immersion had turned that hard cage to candy. But it's still hard, all right; one of the shards that comes poking through the mat of Emery's hair slashes her forearm deep, and blood goes pattering down into the water that surges around them.
Two shadows pass her, one on her left, one on her right.
Lo- Lo cries Daddy! in her new silver voice.
Tessie cries Daddy, help us!
The Emery-thing is trying to get away from Melda now, floundering and splashing, wanting no more to do with her. Melda jabs the thumb of her powerful left hand in its right eye, feeling something cold, like toad-guts under a rock, come squishing out. Then she whirls around, staggering, as the rip tries to pull her feet from under her.
She reaches out with her left hand and seizes Lo-Lo by the scruff of her neck and pulls her backward. " You ain't! " she grunts, and Lo-Lo comes flailing with a cry of surprise and agony... and no cry like that ever came from no little girl's throat, Melda knows.
John howls Melda, stop it!
He's kneeling in the last thin run of the surf with Adie before him. The harpoon's shaft juts up from her throat.
Melda, leave my girls alone!
She has no time to listen, although she spares a thought for Libbit why has Libbit not drowned the china figure? Or did it not work? Has the thing Libbit calls Percy stopped her somehow? Melda knows it's all too possible; Libbit is powerful, but Libbit is still only a child.
No time to think of that. She reaches out for the other undead, for Tessie, but her right hand isn't like her left, there's no silver to guard it, and Tessie turns with a snarl and bites. Melda is aware of thin shooting pain but not that two fingers and part of a third have been bitten off and now float in the water beside the pallid child. There's too much adrenaline whipping through her for that.
Over the top of the hill, where the bootleggers sometimes tote pallets laden with liquor, a small sickle moon rises, casting further thin radiance on this nightmare. By its light, Melda sees Tessie turn back to her father; sees Tessie hold out her arms again.
Daddy! Daddy, please help us! Nan Melda's gone crazy!
Melda doesn't think. She reaches across her body and seizes the child by hair she has washed and braided a thousand times.
John Eastlake screams MELDA, NO!
Then, as he picks up the dropped harpoon pistol and casts about on the sand near his dead daughter's body for the remaining shaft, another voice calls. This one comes from behind Melda, from the ship anchored out there on the caldo.