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“We’re treasure hunters.” I was panting now. “Maybe we’ll even see King Kong, like in the movie. How about that, you little rascals?”
Ahead I could see the triangle of heaped shells where Rattlesnake Key ended. Beyond it was Daylight Pass, with its eternal whirlpool. Andy said that eddy had dug the bed of the pass deep there. I didn’t remember how deep, sixteen feet, maybe. But those heaped shells between me and the water were a problem. The stroller would get bogged down in them for sure, and crawling across them were a couple of snakes I didn’t believe were illusions, or ghosts. They were too there. Leftovers from the great snake hunt? Newcomers? It didn’t matter.
Jake, not begging but commanding: Take us back! Take us back or you’ll be sorry!
I’m sorry already, I thought. I couldn’t say it aloud; I didn’t have enough breath left. My heart was running amok. I expected it to simply burst like an over-inflated balloon at any second.
To my horror, the twins were swimming into existence. Their men’s bodies were too big for the stroller’s double seats, but were in them, just the same. Their swollen children’s heads turned to look at me, eyes black and malevolent, the red pepper of snakebites stippling their cheeks and foreheads. As if they were suffering from an apocalyptic case of chickenpox.
This pair of snakes was real, all right. Their bodies made a dry shushing sound as their sinuous S-curves spiraled through the shells. Their tails rattled—dry bones in a gourd.
Jake: Bite ’im, bite ’im good!
Joe: Bite ’im, make him stop! Make him take us back!
When they struck, it felt like BBs hitting the rubber galoshes. Or maybe hailstones. The stroller finally stuck fast, wheels-deep in shells. The men-children inside it were twisted around, staring at me, but it seemed they couldn’t get out. At least not yet. One of the rattlers was gripping my right foot through the galosh, its head spiraling up. Because the stroller was stuck anyway—beached, so to speak—I let it go in favor of the snake pole. I plunged it down, hoping not to give myself a nasty gash but knowing I couldn’t afford to hesitate. I caught a loop with the hook and flung the snake toward the water. The other struck at my left galosh. For one moment I saw its black eyes staring up at me and thought they were the same eyes as the ones looking at me from the stroller. Then I brought the hook down and speared it behind its triangular head. When I raised the snake pole I felt its tail thwap my shoulder, perhaps looking for a grip. It didn’t find one. I flung it. For one moment it was a writhing scribble against the sky, then it was in the water.
The stroller was rocking back and forth as the things inside it—visible yet ephemeral—struggled to get out. They still couldn’t. The stroller was their link to the world, and to me. I couldn’t push it any further, so I dropped the snake pole and tipped it over. I heard them scream as they hit the shells, and then they were gone. By that I mean I could no longer
(see us, see us)
see them, but they were still there. I could hear Jake shrieking and Joe crying. Sobbing, really, as he had probably sobbed when he realized he was covered with rattlesnakes and his too-short life was ending. Those sounds made me sorry—I was sure my son had also cried while he and Donna were broiling in that Pinto—but that didn’t stop me. I had to finish what I started, if I could.
Gasping, I dragged the stroller toward the pass. Toward the whirlpool.
Jake: No! No! You’re supposed to take care of us! Roll us! Push us! Dress us! No!
His brother only shrieked with terror.
I was twenty feet from the water’s edge when flames burst up all around me. They weren’t real, they had no heat, but I could smell kerosene. The stench was so strong it made me cough. The coughing turned into gagging. The blinding white heaps of shells were gone, replaced by a carpet of burning snakes. They weren’t real, either, but I could hear the popcorn sound of their rattles bursting in the heat. They struck at me with heads that weren’t there.
I reached the water. I could push the stroller in, but that wouldn’t be good enough. They might be able to get the haunted thing out, just as they’d somehow managed to get it from the Bell house to Greg’s. But I’ve been told that men or even women—small women—are sometimes able to lift cars off their trapped children. And once upon a time, a woman named Donna Trenton had fought a 150-pound St. Bernard with nothing but a baseball bat… and won. If she could do that, surely I could do this.
That stroller didn’t weigh 150, but it might have gone 30. If the things had been in it, and if they’d also had actual weight, I never could have lifted it even to my waist. But they didn’t. I hoisted it by the struts above the back wheels. I twisted my hips to the right, producing an audible creaking from my back. I turned the other way and slung the stroller like the world’s clumsiest discus. It splashed down only five feet from the edge of the shell beach. Not far enough, but the current from Calypso Bay was running strong with the ebbing tide. The stroller, tilting this way and that, was pulled into the whirlpool. They were in it again. Maybe they had to be in it. I got one more look at those terrible faces before they were carried away. When the stroller came back around it was sinking, the seats underwater. Its occupants were gone. One of the shirts floated away, then the other. I heard a final shriek of anger in my head; that was Jake Bell, the stronger of the two. The next time the stroller came around on its watery carousel, only the handles were above water. The time after, it was gone except for a watery sunflash three or four feet down.
The flames were also gone. And the burning snakes. Only the stench of kerosene remained. A pair of blue shorts floated toward me. I picked up the snake pole, hooked them, and flung them out into the Gulf.
My back creaked again. I bent over, trying to soothe it. When I straightened up and looked across Daylight Pass, I saw a lot more than a few masses of floating green. Duma Key was there. It looked as real as the hand that had risen out of the tub of snakes, or the horrible hybrid beings lying in the guest room bed. I could see palm trees and a pink house standing on stilts. And I could see a man. He was tall, dressed in jeans and a plain white cotton shirt. He waved to me.
Oh my God, Donna said in the seconds before she died. You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!
I waved back. I think he smiled, but I can’t be sure because by then my eyes were filled with tears, making liquid prisms that quadrupled the brightness of the sun. When I wiped them away, Duma Key was gone and so was he.
It took only ten minutes to roll the pram down to the end of the Key. Or maybe it was fifteen—I was a little too busy to check my watch. Returning to the gazebo and the boardwalk took me three quarters of an hour because my back kept seizing up. I undressed as I went, pulling off the gloves, peeling off the sweatshirt, kicking off the galoshes, sitting down on the sand long enough to pull off the jeans. Doing those things wasn’t as painful as walking, but they hurt plenty. So did getting up after shucking the jeans, but I was lighter. And the horrible rat-run of thoughts in my mind was gone. For me that made the back pain—which continues to this day—a fair trade. I walked the rest of the way wearing only my shorts.
Back in the house I found Tylenol in Greg’s medicine cabinet and took three. The pills didn’t kill the pain, but at least muted it. I slept for four hours—dreamless, blessed sleep. When I woke up, my back was so stiff that I had to make a plan—Step A, Step B, Step C—to sit up, get off the bed, and on my feet. I took a hot shower and that helped some. I couldn’t face using a towel, so I air-dried.
Downstairs—step by wincing step—I thought of calling Pelley, but I didn’t want to talk to him. No more than the fucking man in the fucking moon, Donna would have said.
I called Zane instead. He asked how he could help me and I said I was calling to report a missing stroller. “Did someone from your department—Pelley, maybe—finally decide to come and pick it up?”
“Huh. I don’t think so. Let me check and call you back.”
Which he did, eventually, and told me no one from the County Sheriff’s office had picked up the stroller. No reason to, really, he said.
“Whoever brought it up here twice must have finally taken it back to her place,” I said.
He agreed. And that was where the matter of the haunted stroller ended.
