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 Rachel—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-wan Randy, pissing in his duties 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 closecropped, 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 corner 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!”
“Rachel!” 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.
“Ra—” 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.
LaVerne 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. / 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.”