Duma Key

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.

It says You should never have interfered with me.

Melda, still holding the Tessie-thing by the hair (it fights and kicks, but she's hardly aware of it), spins clumsily in the water and sees her, standing at the rail of her ship in her cloak of red. Her hood is down, and Melda sees she is not even close to human, she is something other, something beyond human understanding. In the moonlight her face is ghastly and full of knowing.

Rising from the water, thin skeleton arms salute her.

The breeze blows apart the snakes of her hair; Melda sees the third eye in Perse's forehead; sees it seeing her, and all will to resist is snuffed out in an instant.

At that moment, however, the head of the bitch-goddess snaps around as if she has heard something or someone tiptoeing up behind her.

She cries What?

And then: No! Put that down! Put it down! YOU CAN'T DO THAT!

But apparently Libbit can - and has - because the shape of the thing at the ship's rail wavers, turns watery... and then becomes nothing but moonlight. The skeleton arms slither back beneath the water and are gone.

The Emery-thing is gone, too - disappeared - but the twins shriek together in shared pain and desolation at their abandonment.

Melda cries to the Mister It's goan be all right!

She turns the one she's had by the hair a-loose. She doesn't think it will want anything to do with the living, not now, not for awhile.

She cries Libbit's done done it! She -

John Eastlake shrieks GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY DAUGHTERS, YOU BAD NIGGER!

And he fires the harpoon pistol for the second time.

Do you see it strike home, piercing Nan Melda through? If so, the picture is complete.

Ah, God - the picture is complete.

20 - Perse

i

The picture - not the last full-blown Edgar Freemantle work of art, but the second-to-last - showed John Eastlake kneeling on Shade Beach with his dead daughter beside him and the sickle moon, just risen above the horizon, behind him. Nan Melda stood thigh-deep in the water, with one little girl on either side of her; their damp, upturned faces were drawn long in expressions of terror and rage. The shaft of one of those short harpoons protruded from between the woman's breasts. Her hands were clasped upon it as she looked unbelievingly at the man whose daughters she had tried so hard to protect, the man who had called her a bad nigger before taking her life.

"He screamed," I said. "He screamed until his nose bled. Until he bled from one eye. It's a wonder he didn't scream himself into a cerebral hemorrhage."

"There's no one on the ship," Jack said. "Not in this drawing, at least."

"No. Perse was gone. What Nan Melda hoped for actually happened. The business on the beach distracted the bitch just long enough for Libbit to take care of her. To drown her to sleep." I tapped Nan Melda's left arm, where I had drawn two quick arcs and made one tiny crisscross to indicate a reflection of weak moonlight. "And mostly because something told her to put on her mother's silver bracelets. Silver, like a certain candlestick." I looked at Wireman. "So maybe there is something on the bright side of the equation, looking out for us a little."

He nodded, then pointed to the sun. In another moment or two, it would touch the horizon, and the track of light beating across to us, now yellow, would deepen to pure gold. "But dark is when the bad things come out to play. Where is the china Perse now? Any idea where it ended up after all this on the beach?"

"I don't know exactly what happened after Eastlake killed Nan Melda, but I've got the general gist. Elizabeth..." I shrugged. "She'd shot her bolt, at least for awhile. Hit overload. Her father must've heard her screaming, and that's probably the only thing that could still bring him around. He must have remembered that, no matter how awful things were, he still had a live daughter at Heron's Roost. He might even have remembered that he had two more thirty or forty miles away. Which left him with a mess to clean up."

Jack pointed silently at the horizon, where the sun was now touching.