Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

“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!” LaVeme 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 corner 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’11 hear us yelling tomorrow. We’re hardly in the middle of the Australian Outback, are we, Randy?” Randy said nothing. “Are we?”

“You know where we are,” Randy said. “You know as well as I do. We turned off Route 41, we came up eight miles of back road—”

“Cottages every fifty feet—”

“Summer cottages. This is October. They’re empty, the whole bucking funch of them. We got here and you had to drive around the damn gate, NO TRESPASSING signs every fifty feet—”

“So? A caretaker—” Deke was sounding a little pissed now, a little off-balance. A little scared? For the first time tonight, for the first time this month, this year, maybe for the first time in his whole life? Now there was an awesome thought—Deke loses his fear-cherry. Randy was not sure it was happening, but he thought maybe it was… and he took a perverse pleasure in it.

“Nothing to steal, nothing to vandalize,” he said. “If there’s a caretaker, he probably pops by here on a bimonthly basis.”

“Hunters—”

“Next month, yeah,” Randy said, and shut his mouth with a snap. He had also succeeded in scaring himself.

“Maybe it’ll leave us alone,” LaVerne said. Her lips made a pathetic, loose little smile.

“Maybe it’ll just… you know… leave us alone.” Deke said, “Maybe pigs will—” “It’s moving,” Randy said.

LaVerne leaped to her feet. Deke came to where Randy was and for a moment the raft tilted, scaring Randy’s heart into a gallop and making LaVerne scream again. Then Deke stepped back a little and the raft stabilized, with the left front corner (as they faced the shoreline) dipped down slightly more than the rest of the raft.

It came with an oily, frightening speed, and as it did, Randy saw the colors Rachel had seen—fantastic reds and yellows and blues spiraling across an ebony surface like limp plastic’ or dark, lithe Naugahyde. It rose and fell with the waves and that changed the colors, made them swirl and blend. Randy realized he was going to fall over, fall right into it, he could feel himself tilting out— With the last of his strength he brought his right fist up into his own nose—the gesture of a man stifling a cough, only a little high and a lot hard. His nose flared with pain, he felt blood run warmly down his face, and then he was able to step back, crying out: “Don’t look at it! Deke!

Don’t look right at it, the colors make you loopy!”

“It’s trying to get under the raft,” Deke said grimly. “What’s this shit, Pancho?” Randy looked—he looked very carefully. He saw the thing nuzzling the side of the raft, flattening to a shape like half a pizza. For a moment it seemed to be piling up there, thickening, and he had an alarming vision of it piling up enough to run onto the surface of the raft.

Then it squeezed under. He thought he heard a noise for a moment—a rough noise, like a roll of canvas being pulled through a narrow window—but that might have only been nerves.

“Did it go under?” LaVerne said, and there was something oddly nonchalant about her tone, as if she were trying with all her might to be conversational, but she was screaming, too.

“Did it go under the raft? Is it under us?”

“Yes,” Deke said. He looked at Randy. “I’m going to swim for it right now,” he said. “If it’s under there I’ve got a good chance.”

“No!” LaVerne screamed. “No, don’t leave us here, don’t—”

“I’m fast,” Deke said, looking at Randy, ignoring LaVerne completely. “But I’ve got to go while it’s under there.” Randy’s mind felt as if it was whizzing along at Mach two—in a greasy, nauseating way it was exhilarating, like the last few seconds before you puke into the slipstream of a cheap carnival ride. There was time to hear the barrels under the raft clunking hollowly together, time to hear the leaves on the trees beyond the beach rattling dryly in a little puff of wind, time to wonder why it had gone under the raft.

“Yes,” he said to Deke. “But I don’t think you’ll make it.”

“I’ll make it,” Deke said, and started toward the edge of the raft.

He got two steps and then stopped.

His breath had been speeding up, his brain getting his heart and lungs ready to swim the fastest fifty yards of his life and now his breath stopped like the rest of him, simply stopped in the middle of an inhale. He turned his head, and Randy saw the cords in his neck stand out.

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