Duma Key

How to Draw a Picture (X)

Be prepared to see it all. If you want to create — God help you if you do, God help you if you can — don’t you dare commit the immorality of stopping on the surface. Go deep and take your fair salvage. Do it no matter how much it hurts.

You can draw two little girls — twins — but anyone can do that. Don’t stop there just because the rest is a nightmare. Do not neglect to add the fact that they are standing thigh-deep in water that should be over their heads. A witness — Emery Paulson, for instance — could see this if he looked, but so many people aren’t prepared to see what is right in front of their eyes.

Until, of course, it’s too late.

He’s come down to the beach to smoke a cigar. He can do this on the back porch or on the veranda, but some strong compulsion has urged him down the rutted road Adie calls Drunkard’s Boulevard and then down the steeper, sandy path to the beach. This voice has suggested his cigar will taste better here. He can sit on a fallen log the waves have cast up and watch the after-ashes of the sunset, as orange fades to tangerine and the stars go blue. The Gulf will look pleasant in such light, the voice suggests, even if the Gulf has had the bad taste to mark the beginning of his marriage by swallowing two of his beloved’s little sisters.

But there’s more to watch than just a sunset, it seems. There’s a ship out there. It’s an old-fashioned one, a pretty, slim-hulled thing with three masts and furled sails. Instead of sitting on the log, he walks down the beach to where the dry sand becomes wet and firm and packed, marveling at that swallow-shape against the fading sunset. Some trick of the air makes it seem as if the day’s last red is shining right through the hull.

He is thinking this when the first cry comes, chiming in his head like a silver bell: Emery!

And then comes another: Emery, help! The undertow! The rip!

That is when he sees the girls, and his heart gives a springing leap. It seems to rise all the way to his throat before falling back into place, where it dashes double-time. The unlit cigar tumbles from his fingers.

Two little girls, and they look just the same. They appear to be wearing identical jumpers, and although Emery should not be able to distinguish colors in this dying light, he can: one jumper is red, with an L on the front; the other is blue, with a T.

The rip! the girl with the T on her jumper calls, holding out her arms in supplication.

The undertow! calls the girl with the L.

And although neither girl appears to be in the slightest danger of drowning, Emery doesn’t hesitate. His joy won’t let him hesitate, nor his bright certainty that this is a miracle opportunity: when he turns up with the twins, his previously distant father-in-law will change his tune in a hurry. And the silver chimes those voices ring in his head, they urge him forward, too. He rushes to rescue Adie’s sisters, to gather the lost girls in and splash with them to shore.

Emery! That’s Tessie, her eyes dark in her china-pale face… but her lips are red.

Emery, hurry! That’s Laura, with her dripping white hands held out to him and her lank curls pasted against her white cheeks.

He cries I’m coming, girls! Hold on!

Splashing toward them, now up to his shins, now his knees.

He cries Fight it! as though they are doing anything but standing there in water that is only thigh-deep on them, although he’s now up to his own thighs and he’s six feet and two inches tall.

The water of the Gulf — still chilly in mid-April — is up to his chest when he reaches them, when he reaches out to them, and when they seize him with hands that are stronger than any little girls’ hands should be; by the time he’s close enough to see the silvery gleam in their glazed eyes and smell the salty, dead-fish aroma coming from their rotting hair, it’s too late. He struggles, his cries of joy and his entreaties to fight the undertow turning first to yells of protest and then to screams of horror, but by then it is far too late. The screams do not last long, in any case. Their small hands have become cold claws digging deep into his flesh as they pull him deeper, and the water fills his mouth, drowning his screams. He sees the ship against the last cold ashes of the sunset, and — how did he not see it before? how did he not know? — realizes it is a hulk, a plague ship, a deathship. Something is waiting for him there, something in a shroud, and he would scream if he could, but now the water fills his eyes and there are other hands, ones that feel like nothing but stripped radiations of bone, closing around his ankles. A talon pulls off a shoe, then tweaks a toe… as if it means to play “This little piggy went to market” with him as he drowns.

As Emery Paulson drowns.