Skeleton Crew (42 page)

“I’m afraid,” Rachel said.

“Of an
oil slick?”
LaVerne asked incredulously, and then laughed. The urge to hit her swept over Randy again—to just swing a big roundhouse open-handed blow through the air, to wipe that look of half-assed hauteur from her face and leave a mark on her cheek that would bruise in the shape of a hand.

“Let’s see you swim back, then,” Randy said.

LaVerne smiled indulgently at him. “I’m not ready to go,” she said, as if explaining to a child. She looked up at the sky, then at Deke. “I want to watch the stars come out.”

Rachel was a short girl, pretty, but in a gamine, slightly insecure way that made Randy think of New York girls—you saw them hurrying to work in the morning, wearing their smartly tailored skirts with slits in the front or up one side, wearing that same look of slightly neurotic prettiness. Rachel’s eyes always sparkled, but it was hard to tell if it was good cheer that lent them that lively look or just free-floating anxiety.

Deke’s tastes usually ran more to tall girls with dark hair and sleepy sloe eyes, and Randy saw it was now over between Deke and Rachet—whatever there had been, something simple and maybe a little boring on his part, something deep and complicated and probably painful on hers. It was over, so cleanly and suddenly that Randy almost heard the snap: a sound like dry kindling broken over a knee.

He was a shy boy, but he moved to Rachel now and put an arm around her. She glanced up at him briefly, her face unhappy but grateful for his gesture, and he was glad he had improved the situation for her a little. That similarity bobbed into his mind again. Something in her face, her looks—

He first associated it with TV game shows, then with commercials for crackers or wafers or some damn thing. It came to him then—she looked like Sandy Duncan, the actress who had played in the revival of
Peter Pan
on Broadway.

“What is that thing?” she asked. “Randy? What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

He glanced at Deke and saw Deke looking at him with that familiar smile that was more loving familiarity than contempt ... but the contempt was there, too. Maybe Deke didn’t even know it, but it was. The expression said
Here goes ole worry-wart Randy, pissing in his didies again.
It was supposed to make Randy mumble an
addition—It’s
probably
nothing, Don’t worry about it, It’ll go away.
Something like that. He didn’t. Let Deke smile. The black patch on the water scared him. That was the truth.

Rachel stepped away from Randy and knelt prettily on the comer of the raft closest to the thing, and for a moment she triggered an even clearer memory-association: the girl on the White Rock labels.
Sandy Duncan on the White Rock labels,
his mind amended. Her hair, a close-cropped, slightly coarse blond, lay wetly against her finely shaped skull. He could see goosebumps on her shoulder blades above the white band of her bra.

“Don’t fall in, Rache,” LaVerne said with bright malice.

“Quit it, LaVerne,” Deke said, still smiling.

Randy looked from them, standing in the middle of the raft with their arms loosely around each other’s waists, hips touching lightly, and back at Rachel. Alarm raced down his spine and out through his nerves like fire. The black patch had halved the distance between it and the comer of the raft where Rachel was kneeling and looking at it. It had been six or eight feet away before. Now the distance was three feet or less. And he saw a strange look in her eyes, a round blankness that seemed queerly like the round blankness of the thing in the water.

Now it’s Sandy Duncan sitting on a White Rock label and pretending to be hypnotized by the rich delicious flavor of Nabisco Honey Grahams,
he thought idiotically, feeling his heart speed up as it had in the water, and he called out, “Get away from there, Rachel!”

Then everything happened very fast—things happened with the rapidity of fireworks going off. And yet he saw and heard each thing with perfect, hellish clarity. Each thing seemed caught in its own little capsule.

LaVerne laughed—on the quad in a bright afternoon hour it might have sounded like any college girl’s laugh, but out here in the growing dark it sounded like the arid cackle of a witch making magic in a pot.

“Rachel, maybe you better get b—” Deke said, but she interrupted him, almost surely for the first time in her life, and indubitably for the last.

“It has colors!” she cried in a voice of utter, trembling wonder. Her eyes stared at the black patch on the water with blank rapture, and for just a moment Randy thought he saw what she was talking about—colors, yeah, colors, swirling in rich, inward-turning spirals. Then they were gone, and there was only dull, lusterless black again. “Such beautiful colors!”

She reached for it—out and down—her white arm, marbled with gooseflesh, her hand, held out to it, meaning to touch; he saw she had bitten her nails ragged.

He sensed the raft tilt in the water as Deke moved toward them. He reached for Rachel at the same time, meaning to pull her back, dimly aware that he didn’t want Deke to be the one to do it.

Then Rachel’s hand touched the water—her forefinger only, sending out one delicate ripple in a ring—and the black patch surged over it. Randy heard her gasp in air, and suddenly the blankness left her eyes. What replaced it was agony.

The black, viscous substance ran up her arm like mud ... and under it, Randy saw her skin dissolving. She opened her mouth and screamed. At the same moment she began to tilt outward. She waved her other hand blindly at Randy and he grabbed for it. Their fingers brushed. Her eyes met his, and she still looked hellishly like Sandy Duncan. Then she fell outward and splashed into the water.

The black thing flowed over the spot where she had landed.

“What happened?”
LaVerne was screaming behind them.
“What happened? Did she fall in? What happened to her?”

Randy made as if to dive in after her and Deke pushed him backwards with casual force. “No,” he said in a frightened voice that was utterly unlike Deke.

All three of them saw her flail to the surface. Her arms came up, waving—no, not arms. One arm. The other was covered with a black membrane that hung in flaps and folds from something red and knitted with tendons, something that looked a little like a rolled roast of beef.

“Help!”
Rachel screamed. Her eyes glared at them, away from them, at them, away—her eyes were like lanterns being waved aimlessly in the dark. She beat the water into a froth.
“Help it hurts please help it hurts IT HURTS IT HURRRRR-”

Randy had fallen when Deke pushed him. Now he got up from the boards of the raft and stumbled forward again, unable to ignore that voice. He tried to jump in and Deke grabbed him, wrapping his big arms around Randy’s thin chest.

“No, she’s dead,” he whispered harshly. “Christ, can’t you see that? She’s
dead,
Pancho.”

Thick blackness suddenly poured across Rachel’s face like a drape, and her screams were first muffled and then cut off entirely. Now the black stuff seemed to bind her in crisscrossing ropes. Randy could see it sinking into her like acid, and when her jugular vein gave way in a dark, pumping jet, he saw the thing send out a pseudopod after the escaping blood. He could not believe what he was seeing, could not understand it ... but there was no doubt, no sensation of losing his mind, no belief that he was dreaming or hallucinating.

LaVeme was screaming. Randy turned to look at her just in time to see her slap a hand melodramatically over her eyes like a silent movie heroine. He thought he would laugh and tell her this, but found he could not make a sound.

He looked back at Rachel. Rachel was almost not there anymore.

Her struggles had weakened to the point where they were really no more than spasms. The blackness oozed over her—
bigger now,
Randy thought,
it’s bigger, no question about it
—with mute, muscular power. He saw her hand beat at it; saw the hand become stuck, as if in molasses or on flypaper; saw it consumed. Now there was a sense of her form only, not in the water but in the black thing, not turning but being turned, the form becoming less recognizable, a white flash—bone, he thought sickly, and turned away, vomiting helplessly over the side of the raft.

LaVerne was still screaming. Then there was a dull
whap!
and she stopped screaming and began to snivel.

He hit her,
Randy thought.
I was going to do that, remember?

He stepped back, wiping his mouth, feeling weak and ill. And scared. So scared he could think with only one tiny wedge of his mind. Soon he would begin to scream himself. Then Deke would have to slap him, Deke wouldn’t panic, oh no, Deke was hero material for sure.
You gotta be a football hero ... to get along with the beautiful girls,
his mind sang cheerfully. Then he could hear Deke talking to him, and he looked up at the sky, trying to clear his head, trying desperately to put away the vision of Rachel’s form becoming blobbish and inhuman as that black thing ate her, not wanting Deke to slap him the way he had slapped LaVerne.

He looked up at the sky and saw the first stars shining up there—the shape of the Dipper already clear as the last white light faded out of the west. It was nearly seven-thirty.

“Oh Ceeesco,” he managed. “We are in beeg trouble thees time, I theeenk.”

“What is it?” His hand fell on Randy’s shoulder, gripping and twisting painfully. “It ate her, did you see that?
It ate
her, it fucking
ate her up!
What
is
it?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t you hear me before?”

“You’re
supposed
to know, you’re a fucking brain-ball, you take all the fucking science courses!” Now Deke was almost screaming himself, and that helped Randy get a little more control.

“There’s nothing like that in any science book I ever read,” Randy told him. “The last time I saw anything like that was the Halloween Shock-Show down at the Rialto when I was twelve.”

The thing had regained its round shape now. It floated on the water ten feet from the raft.

“It’s bigger,” LaVerne moaned.

When Randy had first seen it, he had guessed its diameter at about five feet. Now it had to be at least eight feet across.

“It’s bigger because it ate Rachel!”
LaVerne cried, and began to scream again.

“Stop that or I’m going to break your jaw,” Deke said, and she stopped—not all at once, but winding down the way a record does when somebody turns off the juice without taking the needle off the disc. Her eyes were huge things.

Deke looked back at Randy. “You all right, Pancho?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“My man.” Deke tried to smile, and Randy saw with some alarm that he was succeeding—was some part of Deke enjoying this? “You don’t have any idea at all what it might be?”

Randy shook his head. Maybe it was an oil slick, after all ... or had been, until something had happened to it. Maybe cosmic rays had hit it in a certain way. Or maybe Arthur Godfrey had pissed atomic Bisquick all over it, who knew? Who
could
know?

“Can we swim past it, do you think?” Deke persisted, shaking Randy’s shoulder.

“No!”
LaVerne shrieked.

“Stop it or I’m gonna smoke you, LaVerne,” Deke said, raising his voice again. “I’m not kidding.”

“You saw how fast it took Rachel,” Randy said.

“Maybe it was hungry then,” Deke answered. “But maybe now it’s full.”

Randy thought of Rachel kneeling there on the comer of the raft, so still and pretty in her bra and panties, and felt his gorge rise again.

“You try it,” he said to Deke.

Deke grinned humorlessly. “Oh Pancho.”

“Oh Ceesco. ”

“I want to go home,” LaVerne said in a furtive whisper. “Okay?”

Neither of them replied.

“So we wait for it to go away,” Deke said. “It came, it’ll go away.”

“Maybe,” Randy said.

Deke looked at him, his face full of a fierce concentration in the gloom. “Maybe? What’s this maybe shit?”

“We came, and it came. I saw it come—like it smelled us. If it’s full, like you say, it’ll go. I guess. If it still wants chow—” He shrugged.

Deke stood thoughtfully, head bent. His short hair was still dripping a little.

“We wait,” he said. “Let it eat fish.”

 

Fifteen minutes passed. They didn’t talk. It got colder. It was maybe fifty degrees and all three of them were in their underwear. After the first ten minutes, Randy could hear the brisk, intermittent clickety-click of his teeth. LaVerne had tried to move next to Deke, but he pushed her away—gently but firmly enough.

“Let me be for now,” he said.

So she sat down, arms crossed over her breasts, hands cupping her elbows, shivering. She looked at Randy, her eyes telling him he could come back, put his arm around her, it was okay now.

He looked away instead, back at the dark circle on the water. It just floated there, not coming any closer, but not going away, either. He looked toward the shore and there was the beach, a ghostly white crescent that seemed to float. The trees behind it made a dark, bulking horizon line. He thought he could see Deke’s Camaro, but he wasn’t sure.

“We just picked up and went,” Deke said.

“That’s right,” Randy said.

“Didn’t tell anyone.”

“No.”

“So no one knows we’re here.”

“No.”

“Stop it!” LaVerne shouted. “Stop it, you’re scaring me!”

“Shut your pie-hole,” Deke said absently, and Randy laughed in spite of himself—no matter how many times Deke said that, it always slew him. “If we have to spend the night out here, we do. Somebody’ll hear us yelling tomorrow. We’re hardly in the middle of the Australian Outback, are we, Randy?”