Duma Key Trivia Quiz

Answer: Right arm

When Edgar Freemantle crushed his truck against a piece of heavy machinery at a worksite, it caused him to lose most of his right arm and risked a lifetime of severe mental impairment. Fortunately for him, the latter was recoverable, but not without its strain. In the months following the accident, Edgar's pain management became a problem, crossing quickly into anger management. Before the two month mark, his wife, Pam, asked for a divorce.

Fearing a potential suicide risk, Edgar's psychiatrist, Dr. Kamen, told him to hold off on following through with his dark urge, instead suggesting that he make like a severe AA member and take a 'geographical', moving himself somewhere new and taking up a hobby that could occupy his mind. The full change in scenery, he noted, could save his life.

And with that, Edgar sold his things, split all of his funds with his ex-wife and two daughters, and moved down to Duma Key, Florida, taking a year's lease in a house (referred to as Big Pink) on the Gulf of Mexico. And the changes in his life, including his physical healing, were noticeable almost instantly. Taking up sketching, there was an almost uncanny way in which his artwork had the ability to ease back his pain. He started with sunsets across the horizon over the Gulf...only to find that phantom sensations in his missing right arm were starting to occur.

Answer: Her engagement

Over the weeks, Edgar's pain lessened while his enthusiasm for his drawing evolved into larger pieces and painting. Continuing his sunset sketches he occasionally made scenes of striking brilliance, all while his right arm continued to itch. When Christmas approached, he planned for his daughter, Ilse, to visit and deliver some unexpected good news. That night, Edgar had the urge to draw, and listening to the sound of the surf hitting the shells beneath his house, he created the image of a man buying a ring from a jeweller's. When Ilse arrived for the holiday, she revealed that she was engaged. Edgar wouldn't tell his daughter that he knew, not only about the engagement, but the potential challenges her relationship might face.

Before Ilse departed, Edgar took a drive with her further along Duma Key, passing the gated house down the beach and finding it owned by an older woman seated out front with her firearm. An unnatural turn of events followed; while Ilse had to return to Big Pink feeling uncannily ill, Edgar felt the itch to paint. He would end up making another beach scene, this time depicting several wrongly-coloured tennis balls.

After researching other amputees online and learning about several unexplained abilities they'd obtained in losing their limbs, Edgar decided to perform an experiment. Calling his ex-wife, he asked her to send over her old gardening gloves, suggesting he wanted to paint them. When he received them, he painted something revelatory instead-- an image of her in bed not only with her new suitor, Max, but with his old colleague from back home. His almost psychic understanding of the situation was enough to put him off from experimenting again...at least for the time being.

Answer: Daughters

As Edgar's pain continued to lessen with his time on Duma, he found more and more reason to walk further along the beach every day, eventually coming closer and closer to a neighbour enjoying their days out on the sands of the Key. Eventually, he made it close enough for the introduction, determining the man out on his beach chair to be a gentleman by the name of Jerome Wireman, the live-in caretaker for the woman Edgar saw outside earlier, Miss Elizabeth Westlake, the owner of this part of Duma Key. At 85-years-old, he claimed, she was starting to face the onset of Alzheimers, but she was still quite the character.

On one evening, Edgar returned home to paint to see a vision of Tom Riley in his home, standing at the top of the stairs, coated in blood, missing an eye. Though it had yet to happen, he knew that Tom was preparing to commit suicide.

When Edgar told Wireman about it shortly after, the local suggested that Duma does weird things to people. The plot thickened when Edgar, meeting Elizabeth, determined that artists were always drawn to Duma-- even Salvador Dali painted at Big Pink. It seemed that Elizabeth might have been an artist at some point in her life; she and Wireman both agreed that Duma Key could magnify parts of peoples' innate abilities.

On that day, Edgar phoned Pam in an attempt to convince her to contact Tom and prevent him from committing suicide. Of course, Edgar's worries were more severe than that, especially after two more unnerving events, the first being his urge to paint Wireman preparing to shoot himself (a key to the seizures Edgar had witnessed his new friend having) and the second being an answering machine message from Miss Westlake telling him that his daughter, Ilse, should never come back. Duma Key, as she claimed, isn't a safe place for daughters, and he shouldn't let his art accumulate. Fortunately for Edgar, he visited the local gallery and they were eager to sign him on.

Answer: A bullet in his head

As the snowbirds started coming in the plot thickened. Edgar received a call from Pam about Tom and it turned out he was right; his old friend was planning on killing himself. The call only complicated things between the exes; Edgar painted her, at home, identifying things about her he couldn't possibly know.

Edgar continued to improve his artistic capabilities in the next month, but as the season passed, local events revealed more about Duma's powers and Wireman's past. After Wireman put off trips to the doctor to address his seizures, he called Edgar to let him know he'd gone blind in one of his eyes. As he later explained to Edgar, he did, in fact, try to commit suicide after the deaths of his wife and daughter. When he shot himself in the head, the gun misfired, leaving him with a bullet still lodged inside. There would be no way to remove it, and no one would know how long he would have left. He would tell Edgar that Duma would keep his own abilities in tune as long as he remained there.

Returning Wireman back to Elizabeth's, Edgar would be met with some advice from the older woman, specifically that he should stay at Duma Key, no matter what happened in the near future. Duma Key needed him.

All during this time, the county reeled from the death of local girl Tina Garibaldi who, while at the mall, was abducted and killed by a car wash worker from the nearby community by the name of George 'Candy' Brown. When Edgar dropped off Wireman and headed home, he watched the news on TV when he got the overwhelming urge to paint. The next morning he awoke to the news that Candy had died in jail before his trial, having suffocated the night before. Checking the painting he created, Edgar discovered that the canvas depicted Candy and Tina, but the former was drawn without a nose or a mouth.

Answer: Yes

After the news dropped, Edgar was certain he killed Candy Brown using his abilities, and it's with that in mind that he decided to commit to a test of his powers. Stealing one of Wireman's x-rays, he spent one night painting his neighbour's brain with the gulf in the background. Interestingly, the next morning was the first time since the accident that Wireman woke up without a debilitating headache. It was with that that Edgar decided to paint Wireman's portrait in full.

Committing to a showing at the local gallery with Wireman as his agent, Edgar had gallery owner Dario and his associate stop by to take stock of the pieces to be exhibited. Once the contract was signed, they determined he had more than forty pieces already ready to go-- too much to keep on Duma Key. They chalked it up to his unbottling; older artists sometimes have an outpouring of work to make up for the years. To Edgar's dismay, however, Dario also set him up to speak in a lecture in Sarasota about his process.

A couple nights after the visit, Edgar encountered a raging thunderstorm and painted through the inclement weather, at times believing he could see the bone white spectre of his missing arm in the flashes of lightning. It came to him, then, that the shells he could hear in the surf under Big Pink were actually the bones of dead men, landed here from the rotted ship he'd been painting for weeks. As he finished his painting-- 'Wireman Looks West'-- he left his upstairs room to find the dead, but animated corpses of two young twin girls climbing his stairs in hand. They wouldn't be there by morning, even if his front door was left open.

Edgar woke up after the storm to the phone ringing. It was Wireman, this time calling to tell him that his blindness had disappeared. His eyesight returned in a blaze of heat during the storm. It wasn't coincidence that Edgar had finished the man's portrait. The next morning, they would discover that while Wireman's sight had returned, his perceptive powers seemed to have vanished with his ailment.

Answer: A ship

As the exhibition neared, Edgar put off giving any answers, and Wireman, as his de facto agent, had to go behind his back to start booking guests and provide answers. It's only when Pam started getting involved that Edgar realized how much he'd held back out of nervousness. After formally inviting his family (and friends and former colleauges), he set to work thinking of an honest story to give at Sarasota-- one that could even have touched on the supernatural, considering.

And when Edgar finally hit the stage for the lecture-- one he would title 'The View From Duma'-- it was eloquent and successful, chronicling his struggles, accident, and newfound talent.

When his former therapist, Dr. Kamen, surprised Edgar at the event, he brought with him a gift, a new doll, like his old therapy doll, Reba, to join the other. Interestingly, the gift was one recommended by Ilse, and Edgar believed that the idea for it might have been implanted into her mind by Duma Key. From that moment he realized he could not bring both of his children to Duma at the same time-- for their own safety.

Edgar also provided an interview to local art enthusiast Mary Ire who, during their chat at her house, noted that Elizabeth was allegedly the artist child prodigy herself. It pushed Edgar to start looking back into the history of Elizabeth and the Key, recalling that she once advised him to look for the red picnic basket in the attic. It was a symbol that kept coming up in his mind, compelling itself to the canvas. Wireman would help in the search for answers too, explaining that Elizabeth's house, El Palacio, was actually built in the image of another structure on the Key that was lost to time in the overgrowth deeper along the road.

During one of Elizabeth's more lucid moments, she asked Edgar if he'd painted the ship yet. Realizing that he had, she told him to sell them all off to different people. Even then, it might not have been a safe bet. In any case, she said, they could speak about Duma in a week, after his show, so that he could revel in his success for a little longer. That night, Edgar called the gallery and told them to mark his ship paintings as 'to sell'-- all but the most recent one, which he felt he needed to keep for himself.

Answer: Elizabeth

The night of the show would be one of Edgar's fondest memories. As his friends and family surrounded him and walked the gallery, every single painting and sketch would be sold, bringing his sum total of earnings to half a million dollars. None of them, he would only realize in hindsight, knew his career would be at its start and its practical end.

It's Pam who confronted Edgar about his 'Girl and Ship' series, recognizing Ilse in a number of them, even as a distant figure. They were unable to unpack this fact though, when Elizabeth's unexpected arrival turned heads. And with that, Edgar took her on a tour of (nearly) all the works he'd created since his time on Duma Key, many of which were indisputably masterpieces. All she could say, looking through his earlier works was the cryptic phrase "she has grown so strong."

Elizabeth's amazement would turn to horror quickly, however, when she laid eyes on the 'Girl and Ship' series. Though Ilse appeared in many of the paintings, at least one of them depicted Elizabeth's eldest sister. As they gazed at his most recent painting-- one that he avoided selling-- he and Ilse noticed the ghoulish faces depicted in the water of the ship's wake. Perse, Elizabeth claimed, had awakened, drawing them all to Duma.

It all took a turn for the worse when Elizabeth suffered a violent stroke at the exhibition. Though she would be rushed to the hospital, she would be declared dead upon her arrival. Mary Ire, driving him to the emergency room shortly after, would hand Edgar an envelope containing some missing info about the Eastlakes, notably that Elizabeth may have been an art prodigy herself in her youth, shortly after a severe head injury. It only created more links to Duma; Edgar quickly drew comparison to his own injuries and Wireman's shot to the head.

At the hospital, Wireman would relay Elizabeth's last words of wisdom-- a series of cryptic sentences: "The table is leaking"; You will want to but you mustn't"; "Drown her back to sleep." It would be her final warnings to the pair for the days to come.

Answer: Spears

The day after the show, Edgar's friends and family peeled off to their respective lives at home, sparing him from having to keep his loved ones away from Duma Key by force. While Pam returned to Wisconsin (suggesting that he leave Duma to protect himself), Melinda headed back to Paris with her boyfriend and Ilse flew back to an exam. Edgar didn't know it, but he wouldn't see Ilse again.

Heading back to the Key and reuniting with Wireman and Jack, the men informed Edgar of a break-in at Big Pink. Though nothing was taken, the entrants left two things behind: their footprints, leading to his art space, and a message scrawled on a waiting canvas simply saying 'WHERE OUR SISTER'.

When they finally opened Nan Melda's picnic basket they found plenty of concerning contents. Although the basket contained all of Elizabeth's childhood drawings (many of which were that of an artistic savant), they pointed to the obvious issue-- that Perse, the Ship of the Dead, featured in her work at four years old. Underneath the drawings they also found ammunition for the spear pistol-- spears cast in silver.

The discovery wasn't as terrifying as what came next though. Heading down to his kitchen, Edgar spotted the sails of the ship from his paintings on the Gulf horizon, and there in front of his refrigerator was an undead ghoul-- that of a long-drowned man. Though Edgar is nearly manacled to the corpse and dragged from his home, Wireman arrives just in time, banishing it with a bash from a silver candlestick.

When Edgar finally came to terms with the power his paintings possessed, he started making calls to everyone he could, attempting to prevent the art from shipping out from the gallery. Though none of the larger paintings had shipped, he realized that even his sketches were dangerous; a call to Tom confirmed this as his former friend claimed to be headed out to kill Pam, intending to marry her when they were both on board the waiting ship. Edgar quickly phoned Pam in an attempt to protect her, enlisting his ex-wife to call the other guests and burn their pictures. Some would be able to with ease, but others, like Dr. Kamen, would already be dead.

It came to Edgar's mind that Perse's power had likely been there not only since the beginning of his time on Duma Key, but well before Elizabeth's. From her work he could determine that Perse spoke to her through her doll, Noveen, telling her to draw. It likely resulted in the hurricane that swept through the region back in her childhood. The answers, he knew, were likely on the south side of Duma at Heron's Roost-- the only spot he knew was trying to keep people out.

Answer: A doll

After the break-in and the fight with the ghoul, Edgar spent the night at El Palacio with Wireman, waking from a nightmare in the middle of the night. Fortunately, it allowed him to recall that Ilse asked for one of his pictures during her visit. He made the call to her, finally getting through, only to find that she was already under the thrall of the picture, mysteriously pinned to her bedroom wall before she could put it up. She explained, in a hazy tone, that she dreamed Edgar died. Although it was a struggle to do so, she burned the picture in her gas oven before Edgar hung up the phone, leaving her to go to bed.

Perse had other plans, however. Edgar headed back to Big Pink early in the morning to find the beach awash in tennis balls, a portent for the message left on his answering machine from Pam explaining that Ilse was murdered in the night. As he would discover, Mary Ire, who drove to New England directly after dropping Edgar off at the hospital, brought one of the Girl and Ship paintings home before collecting her gun, visiting Ilse, knocking her out, and drowning her in the bathtub. Mary ended up committing suicide shortly thereafter.

Despite the immense grief Edgar encountered, he knew that he, Wireman, and Jack had no choice but to depart for Heron's Roost with haste. After drawing out the drawbridge to Duma Key (to prevent anyone from coming across) and after drawing his companions to protect them, they drove onward into the dense forests of Duma's south end, pausing only once to protect Jack from the boundary Perse created to sicken trespassers. The trip would be eventful. Upon arriving and finding the old Eastlake mansion reduced to a single floor by years of hurricanes and abandonment, they noticed flickering creatures throughout the forest's edge, perhaps created by the magic of Elizabeth's drawings, and an alligator hidden away in the former freshwater pool, a guard that sprung to attack when they neared it.

Heading inside Heron's Roost proper, the trio would come across the answers they needed when they found a secret compartment beneath the stairs containing Elizabeth's childhood doll, Noveen. A kind of psychic camera, the story unfolded before them through Jack's surprise abilities in ventriloquy. Noveen, through him, would explain that Elizabeth's knock to the head brought Perse into their lives, enabling Elizabeth to draw her into existence, dredging up detritus in a storm that would reveal a small ceramic figuring containing unimaginable power.

It was Nan Melda's idea, once things went too far, that put a temporary end to the nightmare. Though Perse would take the Eastlakes away one by one, Nan Melda and Elizabeth managed to determine she was at her weakest in freshwater, and they planned to use the pool to seal her away. Elizabeth managed to do it, but via other means-- specifically 'drowning her' in a barrel of bootleg Scottish whiskey labeled 'Table Scotland'. It was no coincidence that "the table was leaking".

Answer: A flashlight

The truth, as Edgar would later determine, was much worse than Noveen let on. On the day Perse was last sealed away, Nan Melda and John Eastlake headed to the water in an attempt to save Adie, the eldest Eastlake, from joining her dead husband and the twins in their watery grave. The fight would end tragically; John, firing his speargun, would strike his daughter in the neck with a stray spear. Though Elizabeth would manage to seal the ceramic figure away, John killed Nan Melda in an unknowing attempt to save his already-dead daughters. Both Adie and Melda's bodies would be hidden on the premises.

Edgar would find their skeletons after hunting for the missing whiskey barrels, eventually determining that Elizabeth tossed the small keg into the property's underground cistern, the ceramic keg cracking over time as pieces of coral rained down upon it. Edgar would make it into the cistern at the same time as night fell, leaving his companions to fend off the ghoulish spirits of Emery and the twins on the surface. Finding the china figure, he was shocked to find it speaking to him, attempting to compel him into using its power. Instead, he would place it into the barrel of their flashlight, tossing it in and filling it with bottled water to suppress its powers. With the evil finally at bay, the ship would disappear from the shoreline and they would depart. No one would step foot on that part of Duma Key ever again.

The trio would return to El Palacio, but one last order of business would await Edgar who, returning alone, would come across one last obstacle-- his own daughter, formed from the sand and shells beneath Big Pink. He realized she would return, having drawn the conclusion from the news that Mary purchased bags of salt before drowning her in the tub and from Elizabeth's final words. Bringing her close, he would say his goodbye and strike her form with one of the silver spears.

In the aftermath of the events on Duma Key, Edgar and Wireman would have a silversmith fashion an airtight canister to contain the water-filled flashlight and the china doll inside. After sealing it properly, they would fly it to Wisconsin, dropping it into a rift in a deep lake, hopefully keeping it away for good. Wireman would invite Edgar down to Mexico for the next stage of their lives, and while Edgar intended to take him up on that offer, Wireman would pass away of a heart attack only two months later.

Before leaving Wisconsin, Edgar would use his power to make one last work of art: a storm rolling in over Duma Key, one that would wash the whole thing away.