Duma Key

There were well over a hundred pictures in all. She might only have been a child, but she had also been unbottling. Two or three more storm pictures... maybe the Alice that had uncovered Eastlake's treasure-trove, maybe just a big thunderstorm, it was impossible to say for sure... then the Gulf... the Gulf again, this time with flying fish the size of dolphins... the Gulf with pelicans that appeared to have rainbows in their mouths... the Gulf at sunset... and...

I stopped, my breath caught in my throat.

Compared with many of the others I'd gone through, this one was dead simple, just the silhouette of a ship against the dying light, caught at the tipping-point between day and dark, but its simplicity was what gave it its power. Certainly I'd thought so when I drew the same thing on my first night in Big Pink. Here was the same cable, stretched taut between the bow and what might in Elizabeth's time have been called a Marconi tower, creating a brilliant orange triangle. Here was the same upward shading of light, orange to blue. There was even the same scribbly, not-quite-careless overlay of color that made the ship - skinnier than mine had been - look like a phantom out there, trudging its way north.

"I drew this," I said faintly.

"I know," Wireman said. "I've seen it. You called it Hello."

I thumbed deeper, hurrying through big bunches of watercolors and colored pencil drawings, knowing what I would eventually find. And yes, near the bottom I came to Elizabeth's first picture of the Perse. Only she had drawn it new, a slim three-masted beauty with sails furled, standing in on the blue-green waters of the Gulf beneath a trademark Elizabeth Eastlake sun, the kind that shoots off long happy-rays of light. It was a wonderful piece of work, almost begging for a calypso sound-track.

But unlike her other paintings, it also felt false.

"Keep going, muchacho."

The ship... the ship... family, four of them, anyway, standing on the beach with their hands linked like paperdolls and those big Elizabeth happysmiles... the ship... the house, with what looked like a Negro lawn jockey standing on its head... the ship, that gorgeous white swallow... John Eastlake...

John Eastlake screaming... blood running from his nose and one eye...

I stared at it, mesmerized. It was a child's watercolor, but it had been executed with hellish skill. It depicted a man who looked insane with terror, grief, or both.

"My God, " I said.

"One more, muchacho, " Wireman said. "One more to go."

I flicked back the picture of the screaming man. Old dried watercolors rattled like bones. Beneath the screaming father was the ship again, only this time it really was my ship, my Perse. Elizabeth had painted it at night, and not with a brush - I could still see the ancient dried prints of her child's fingers in the swirls of gray and black. This time it was as if she had finally seen through the Perse 's disguise. The boards were splintered, the sails drooping and full of holes. Around her, blue in the light of a moon that did not smile or send out happy-rays, hundreds of skeleton arms rose from the water in a dripping salute. And standing on the foredeck was a baggy, pallid thing, vaguely female, wearing a decayed something that might have been a cloak, a winding shroud... or a robe. It was the red-robe, my red-robe, only seen from the front. Three empty sockets peered from its head, and its grin outran the sides of its face in a crazy jumble of lips and teeth. It was far more horrible than my Girl and Ship paintings, because it went straight to the heart of the matter without any pause for the mind to catch up. This is everything awful, it said. This is everything you ever feared to find waiting in the dark. See how its grin races off its face in the moonlight. See how the drowned salute it.

"Christ," I said, looking up at Wireman. "When, do you think? After her sisters -?"

"Must have been. Must have been her way of coping with it, don't you think?"

"I don't know," I said. Part of me was trying to think of my own girls, and part of me was trying not to. "I don't know how a kid - any kid - could come up with something like that."

"Race memory," Wireman said. "That's what the Jungians would say."

"And how did I end up painting this same fucking ship? Maybe this same fucking creature, only from the back? Do the Jungians have any theories about that?"

"It doesn't say Perse on Elizabeth's," Jack pointed out.

"She would have been four," I said. "I doubt if the name would have made much of an impression on her." I thought of her earlier pictures - the ones where this boat had been a beautiful white lie she had believed for a little while. "Especially once she saw what it really was."

"You talk as if it were real," Wireman said.