Duma Key

I heard Big Pink before I actually saw it. The shells under the house had never been so loud. I walked a little farther, then stopped. It was just ahead of me now, a black shape where the stars were blotted out. Another forty or fifty slow, limping paces, and moonlight began to fill in the details. All the lights were out, even the ones I almost always left on in the kitchen and Florida room. That could have been a power outage caused by the wind, but I didn't think that was it.

I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we're mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations.

And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red ). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

I walked on, leaving tracks behind me that featured one dragging foot. The blacked-out hulk of Big Pink grew closer. It wasn't ruined like Heron's Roost, but tonight it was haunted. Tonight there was a ghost waiting. Or maybe something a little more solid.

The wind gusted and I looked left, into its pushing force. The ship was out there now, all right, lightless and silent, its sails so many flapping rags in the wind, waiting.

Might as well go, the shells said as I stood in the moonlight, now less than twenty yards from my house. Wipe the blackboard clean - it can be done, no one knows it better than you - and just sail away. Leave this sadness behind. If you want to play you gotta pay. And the best part?

"The best part is I don't have to go alone," I said.

The wind gusted. The shells murmured. And from the blackness under the house, where that bony bed lay six feet deep, a darker shadow slipped free and stepped into the moonlight. It stood bent over for a moment, as if considering, and then began to come toward me.

She began to come toward me. But not Perse; Perse had been drowned to sleep.

Ilse.

v

She didn't walk; I didn't expect her to walk. She shambled. It was a miracle - a black one - that she could move at all.

After that last phone call with Pam (you couldn't call it a conversation, exactly), I'd gone out Big Pink's back door and snapped the handle off the broom I used to sweep sand from the walk leading to the mailbox. Then I'd gone around to the beach, down to where the sand was wet and shining. I hadn't remembered what came after that, because I didn't want to. Obviously. Only now I did, now I had to, because now my handiwork was standing in front of me. It was Ilse, yet not Ilse. Her face was there, then it blurred and it wasn't. Her form was there, then it slipped toward shapelessness before firming up again. Little pieces of dead sea oats and bits of shell dropped from her cheeks and chest and hips and legs as she moved. The moonlight picked out an eye that was heartbreakingly clear, heartbreakingly hers, and then it was gone, only to reappear again, shining in the moonlight.

The Ilse shambling toward me was made of sand.

"Daddy," she said. Her voice was dry, with a grating undertone - as if there were shells caught in there somewhere. I supposed there were.

You will want to, but you mustn't, Elizabeth had said... but sometimes we can't help ourselves.

The sand- girl held out her arm. The wind gusted and the fingers at the end of the hand blurred as fine grains blew off them and thinned them to bones. More sand skirled up from around her and the hand fattened again. Her features shifted like a landscape under rapidly passing summer clouds. It was fascinating... hypnotic.

"Give me the flashlight," she said. "Then we'll go on board together. On the ship I can be the way you remember me. Or... you don't have to remember anything."

The waves were on the march. Under the stars they roared in, one after the other. Under the moon. Under Big Pink, the shells spoke loudly: my voice, arguing with itself. Bring the buddy. I win. Sit in the chum. You win. Here in front of me stood Ilse made of sand, a shifting houri by the light of a three-quarter moon, her features never the same from one second to the next. Now she was Illy at nine; now she was Illy at fifteen, headed out on her first real date; now she was Illy as she'd looked getting off the plane in December, Illy the college girl with an engagement ring on her finger. Here stood the one I'd always loved the best - wasn't that why Perse had killed her? - with her hand held out for the flashlight. The flashlight was my boarding pass for a long cruise on forgetful seas. Of course that part might be a lie... but sometimes we have to take a chance. And usually we do. As Wireman says, we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.