Free Duma Key by Stephen King

want your mother to scalp us both bald,” I said. “What I want is for you to stay right where you are and TCB, darlin. I’ll stay in touch.”
    â€œÂ â€™Kay. But take care of yourself. No stupid shit.”
    â€œNo stupid shit. Roger that, Houston.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œNever mind.”
    â€œI still want to hear you promise, Dad.”
    For one terrible and surpassingly eerie moment I saw Ilse at eleven, Ilse dressed in a Girl Scout’s uniform and looking at me with Monica Goldstein’s shocked eyes. Before I could stop the words, I heard myself saying, “Promise. Big swear. Mother’s name.”
    She giggled. “Never heard that one before.”
    â€œThere’s a lot about me you don’t know. I’m a deep one.”
    â€œIf you say so.” A pause. Then: “Love you.”
    â€œLove you, too.”
    I put the phone gently back into its cradle and stared at it for a long time.
    vii
    Instead of showering, I walked down the beach to the water. I quickly discovered my crutch was no helpon the sand—was, in fact, a hindrance—but once I was around the corner of the house, the water’s edge was less than two dozen steps away. That was easy if I went slow. The surge was mild, the incoming wavelets only inches high. It was hard to imagine this water whipped into a destructive hurricane frenzy. Impossible, actually. Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine.
    That was one of his better ones.
    I turned to go back to the house, then paused. There was just enough light to see a deep carpet of shells—a drift of shells—under the jutting Florida room. At high tide, I realized, the front half of my new house would be almost like the foredeck of a ship. I remembered Jack saying I’d get plenty of warning if the Gulf of Mexico decided to eat the place, that I’d hear it groaning. He was probably right . . . but then, I was also supposed to get plenty of warning on a job site when a heavy piece of equipment was backing up.
    I limped back to where my crutch leaned against the side of the house and took the short plank walk around to the door. I thought about the shower and took a bath instead, going in and coming out in the careful sidesaddle way Kathi Green had shown me in my other life, both of us dressed in bathing suits, me with my right leg looking like a badly butchered cut of meat. Now the butchery was in the past; my body was doing its miracle work. The scars would last a lifetime, but even they were fading. Already fading.
    Dried off and with my teeth brushed, I crutched into the master bedroom and surveyed the king, now divested of decorative pillows. “Houston,” I said, “we have bed.”
    â€œRoger, Freemantle,” I replied. “You are go for bed.”
    Sure, why not? I’d never sleep, not after that whopper of a nap, but I could lie down for awhile. My leg still felt pretty good, even after my expedition to the water, but there was a knot in my lower back and another at the base of my neck. I lay down. No, sleep was out of the question, but I turned off the lamp anyway. Just to rest my eyes. I’d lie there until my back and neck felt better, then dig a paperback out of my suitcase and read.
    Just lie here for awhile, that was . . .
    I got that far, and then I was gone again. There were no dreams.
    viii
    I slipped back to some sort of consciousness in the middle of the night with my right arm itching and my right hand tingling and no idea of where I was, only that from below me something vast was grinding and grinding and grinding . At first I thought it was machinery, but it was too uneven to be machinery. And too organic, somehow. Then I thought of teeth, but nothing had teeth that vast. Nothing in the known world, at least.
    Breathing, I thought, and that seemed right, but what kind of animal made such a vast grinding sound when it