Duma Key

The morning after the show, Ilse tells Edgar that her fiancé Carson had an affair. Edgar advises Ilse to put the relationship on hold, but he also wants to warn Ilse to be very careful in general. Seeing her in the ship paintings has spooked Edgar. Edgar goes to the airport to see off his family and friends from Minnesota. Ilse’s flight is last. Edgar and she share a warm and happy hug and kiss before she leaves. Edgar wishes he could stayed with her a little longer—although he didn’t know it then, this would be the last time he would see his daughter.

Elizabeth’s funeral is to be held soon; she has bequeathed her entire fortune to Wireman. When Wireman and Jack were at Elizabeth’s hacienda clearing up her things, they found a red picnic basket. They brought it over to Big Pink, but found that the house had been ransacked. Jack and Wireman want to be with Edgar when he looks through the basket, because the break-in seems otherworldly. Wireman has told Jack all the eerie events that have been happening to Edgar.

At Big Pink, Edgar sees the floor of the entryway and living room covered in sand and shells. Three pairs of footsteps—two belonging to children and one to an adult—can be seen in the sand. The children’s tracks go upstairs to the studio, where on a canvas, in a childish hand, is written in red, “Where our sister” (485). Wireman believes the children are the ghosts of Tessie and Laura, Elizabeth’s drowned twin sisters. The sister to whom they refer is not Elizabeth because Elizabeth has always been on Duma Key, where the twins could find her. Maria and Hannah, both dead, were estranged from Elizabeth. The missing sister is possibly Adie. Wireman is scared and believes they should leave Duma, but Edgar says they cannot—Perse is awake and needs to be drowned back to sleep.

Edgar opens the red picnic basket. It is filled with Elizabeth’s artwork, starting with the first horizon line she drew in Interlude 1. From that early rudimentary image, the pictures soon become astonishingly sophisticated, featuring ordinary objects presented in surreal ways. The scariest two, at the bottom of the basket, are of a man who looks terrified and of a rotten ship with a woman in a red robe standing on its deck. The woman’s face has three eye sockets and a teeth-filled smile overruns her face. Jack thinks this is the ship of the dead. Edgar knows the ship and the woman are real. In the basket, there are also harpoons tipped with silver that can be loaded into a spear-pistol—weapons to kill the undead.

After Jack and Wireman leave, Edgar moves to his studio with the red basket. He examines Elizabeth’s pictures again and lets his mind range free. He sketches rapidly, experiencing Elizabeth’s early childhood memories (as described in the Interludes) through the drawings. He learns that it was not Perse who initially compelled Elizabeth to draw: Elizabeth’s early drawings were all her own. But Perse somehow found Elizabeth and decided to channel Elizabeth’s prodigious talent for her own foul ends. Perse spoke to Elizabeth through Noveen, the beloved doll who looked like Nan Melda. Edgar wants to draw Perse too but feels afraid.

He snaps out of his trance and comes downstairs into the living room. In front of him, a hundred yards from the beach is the Perse sailing on the gulf. For a moment, Edgar stops breathing in shock. He backs up to the kitchen to make a phone call and sees a man standing in the kitchen, his skull crushed and skin mottled. The figure advances on Edgar, saying, “Time to go” (511). Just then, Wireman enters the house. The man tells Wireman to leave and Wireman does so. But just as the ghoulish man claps a manacle on Edgar’s wrist to drag him away to the Perse, Wireman bursts back in with a silver candlestick and drives it into the man’s face. The undead man screams and disappears. Wireman takes Edgar to Elizabeth’s hacienda to stay the night.

Edgar senses that he was attacked by the ghost of Emery Paulson, Adie Eastlake’s husband. When Adie and Emery came back to Duma to search for the missing twins, Perse made sure they never left the island. Realizing that Perse is way more dangerous than they thought, Edgar and the others leave a message with the Scoto not to deliver any of the sold paintings. Edgar calls Riley to ask if he bought any sketches and gets a pre-recorded message. In a monotone, Riley says he plans to kill Pam because “she” (referring to Perse) has promised him a shipboard wedding after their deaths. Panicked, Edgar calls Pam, and learns from her that Riley is dead, having driven his car into a wall on his way to her place. Edgar thinks this was Riley’s moment of courage, in which he snapped out of his trance and decided to die by suicide rather than carry out Perse’s orders. Pam tells Edgar that Riley did buy a sketch from the gallery, as did Kamen. Edgar asks Pam to call Kamen and ask him to burn the sketch.

Edgar, Wireman, and Jack discuss Perse. They think the spirit may be an ancient malevolent divinity. Perse may be a derivation of Persephone, but to Edgar the spirit seems much older than Greek mythology, “something far older and more monstrous” (528). Perse is hungry for souls, which is why Edgar always feels ravenous after one of his drawing spells. Elizabeth’s memories tell Edgar that she tried to stop Perse before the twins drowned by drawing and erasing Perse’s pictures. This made Perse angry so she killed the twins to punish Elizabeth. Perse now wants to kill Edgar’s loved ones to punish him for prying into her existence. Meanwhile, Pam calls with the bad news that Kamen has died from a heart attack. Ilse is unreachable on the phone.

One must look for the “picture inside the picture” (537), the subtext in ordinary things. Edgar did not, which is why he missed the fact that the dread he felt when he saw Carson’s picture was not about Carson at all—it was actually fear about Ilse’s death. At some level, he knew that it would be Ilse, his beloved daughter, whom Perse would target when Edgar failed her.

Edgar wakes up in the hacienda with the bad feeling that he has forgotten something vital. He is puzzled, because all the sketches his friends bought have been burned, and the rest of the sold paintings are still in the gallery. His heart sinks when he realizes he has only been thinking of the art sold during the show. But Ilse took home The End of the Game, the painting featuring a little girl and many green tennis balls, on her first visit to Florida. Edgar calls Ilse, who answers in a sleepy voice. At first, Ilse refuses to believe it is Edgar calling her, because “she” (Perse) told Ilse in her dream that Edgar is dead. Edgar manages to convince Ilse it is him, and asks her to burn the sketch on her gas stove. Ilse does so, but the sketch gives her a paper cut. Ilse feels exhausted and wants to sleep. She hangs up.

Edgar thinks the danger to Ilse has been averted, though he feels he should have asked her to disinfect the cut, which Ilse said felt more like a bite. Edgar brainstorms on how to stop Perse, remembering Elizabeth’s advice that she must be drowned. He goes for a walk on the beach and looks out at the sea. Bright green tennis balls roll towards him on the tide. Sensing something has gone horribly wrong, Edgar rushes back to the house. He has a message from Pam on his phone. Ilse is dead. Mary Ire, the art critic, came to Ilse’s apartment, poured salt into the running bathtub, drowned Ilse in salt water, and then shot herself. Pam accuses Edgar of getting Ilse killed. She wishes Edgar had died when the crane hit him.

Edgar wanders out on the beach again, numb. He draws a picture of Ilse in the sand, numbly noting that this is what Elizabeth had asked him not to do, even though he would be tempted.

Wireman finds Edgar collapsed on the beach and takes him inside. Edgar tells him Mary Ire must have bought a Girl and Ship painting. Because of her clout as an art critic, the gallery must have let her take the painting home the night of the show. Edgar will grieve for Ilse later, but he first wants to defeat Perse. Edgar wants no one but his two friends to be on the island when he puts his plan in action. Wireman spreads the rumor he, Edgar, and Jack have contracted German measles, so the island is quarantined.

Edgar senses he needs to draw a portrait of Wireman and Jack for answers. Then, Edgar, Wireman, and Jack head to the south part of the island, taking the portraits, the red basket, food and water, drawing materials, one of Elizabeth’s shotguns, and the loaded spear pistol. On the way, Jack is overcome by nausea, just like Ilse was. Through the thick foliage, they reach the gate of Heron’s Roost, the first Eastlake house. Over the gate is scratched the Latin phrase “Hell invokes Hell” (648): John left it as a warning for visitors when he chained up the house and left it for good in 1951. The top half of the house has been destroyed. As the men head into the verandah, they spot a heron on a branch, exactly like the one in Elizabeth’s paintings. An alligator creeps out of the slimy pool. Wireman blows off its head with the shotgun. They also see a lawn jockey walk towards them, a derogatory caricature of a Black man, which Nan Melda had used to scare Elizabeth. It came to life seemingly because of Elizabeth’s powerful imagination.