Duma Key(99)

I win, you win.

A huge flash of lightning lit my window purple-white, and a great whooping gust of gale rode that electricity in from the Gulf, driving rain against the glass so hard I thought (in the part of my mind still capable of thought) that it must surely break. A munitions dump exploded directly overhead. And beneath me the murmur of the shells had become the gossip of dead things telling secrets in bone voices. How could I not have heard that before? Dead things, yes! A ship had come here, a ship of the dead with rotted sails, and it had offloaded living corpses. They were under this house, and the storm had brought them to life. I could see them pushing up through the boneyard blanket of the shells, pallid jellies with green hair and seagull eyes, crawling over each other in the dark and talking, talking, talking. Yes! Because they had a lot to catch up on, and who knew when the next storm might come and bring them to life again?

Yet still I painted. I did it in terror and in the dark, my arm moving up and down so that for a little while there I seemed to actually be conducting the storm. I couldn't have stopped. And at some point, Wireman Looks West was done. My right arm told me so. I slashed my initials EF in the lower left corner and then broke the brush in two, using both hands to do it. The pieces I dropped on the floor. I staggered away from my easel, crying out for whatever was going on to stop. And it would; surely it would; the picture was done and surely now it would.

I came to the head of the stairs and looked down, and there at the bottom were two small dripping figures. I thought: Apple, orange. I thought, I win, you win. Then the lightning flashed and I saw two girls of about six, surely twins and surely Elizabeth Eastlake's drowned sisters. They wore dresses that were plastered to their bodies. Their hair was plastered to their cheeks. Their faces were pale horrors.

I knew where they had come from. They had crawled out of the shells.

They started up the stairs toward me, hand in hand. Thunder exploded a mile overhead. I tried to scream. I couldn't. I thought, I am not seeing this. I thought, I am.

"I can do this," one of the girls said. She spoke in the voice of the shells.

"It was red," the other girl said. She spoke in the voice of the shells. They were halfway up now. Their heads were little more than skulls with wet hair draggling down the sides.

"Sit in the char, " they said together, like girls chanting a skip-rope rhyme... but they spoke in the voice of the shells. "Sit in the burn."

They reached up for me with terrible fishbelly fingers.

I fainted at the head of the stairs.

xx

The telephone was ringing. That was my Telephone Winter.

I opened my eyes and groped for the bedside lamp, wanting light right away because I'd just had the worst nightmare of my life. Instead of finding the lamp, my fingers struck a wall. At the moment they did, I became aware that my head was cocked at a strange, painful angle against that same wall. Thunder rumbled but faint and sullen; it was going-away thunder now and that was enough to bring everything back with painful, frightening clarity. I wasn't in bed. I was in Little Pink. I had fainted because -

My eyes flew open. My ass was on the landing, my legs trailing down the stairs. I thought of the two drowned girls no, it was more, it was an instant of total, brilliant recall and shot to my feet without feeling my bad hip at all. My concentration was fixed entirely on the three light-switches at the head of the stairs, but even as my fingers found them I thought: Won't work, the storm will have knocked out the power.

But they did work, banishing the dark in the studio and the stairwell. I had a nasty moment when I saw sand and water at the foot of the stairs, but the light reached far enough for me to see that the front door had blown open.

Surely it had just blown open.

In the living room, the phone quit and the answering machine kicked in. My recorded voice invited the caller to leave a message at the sound of the beep. The caller was Wireman.

"Edgar, where are you?" I was too disoriented to tell if I was hearing excitement, dismay, or terror in his voice. "Call me, you need to call me right away!" And then a click.

I went downstairs one tentative step at a time, like a man in his eighties, and made the lights my first priority: living room, kitchen, both bedrooms, Florida room. I even turned on the lights in the bathrooms, reaching into the darkness to do it, bracing myself in case something cold and wet and draped in seaweed should reach back. Nothing did. With all the lights on, I relaxed enough to realize I was hungry again. Starving. It was the only time I felt that way after working on Wireman's portrait... but of course, that last session had been a lulu.

I stooped to examine the mess that had blown in through the open door. Just sand and water, the water already beading atop the wax my housekeeper used to keep the cypress gleaming. There was some dampness on the lower stair risers, which were carpeted, but dampness was all it was.

I wouldn't admit to myself that I'd been looking for footprints.

I went to the kitchen, made a chicken sandwich, and gobbled it standing at the counter. I grabbed a beer from the fridge to wash it down. When the sandwich was gone, I ate the remains of the previous day's salad, more or less floating in Newman's Own French. Then I went into the living room to call El Palacio. Wireman answered on the first ring. I was prepared to tell him I'd been outside, looking to see if the storm had done any damage to the house, but my whereabouts at the time of his call were the last thing on Wireman's mind. Wireman was crying and laughing.