When he looked back, Deke’s arms were straight up. He wasn’t Nixon anymore; now he was a football ref signaling that the extra point had been good.
Deke’s head appeared to be sitting on the boards.
His eyes were still open.
His tongue was still sticking out.
“Oh Ceesco,” Randy muttered, and looked away again. His arms and shoulders were shrieking now, but still he held her in his arms. He looked at the far side of the lake. The far side of the lake was dark. Stars unrolled across the black sky, a spill of cold milk somehow suspended high in the air.
Minutes passed. He’ll be gone now. You can look now. Okay, yeah, all right. But don’t look. Just to be safe, don’t look. Agreed? Agreed. Most definitely. So say we all and so say all of us.
So he looked anyway and was just in time to see Deke’s fingers being pulled down. They were moving—probably the motion of the water under the raft was being transmitted to the unknowable thing which had caught Deke, and that motion was then being transmitted to Deke’s fingers. Probably, probably. But it looked to Randy as if Deke was waving to him. The Cisco Kid was waving adios. For the first time he felt his mind give a sickening wrench—it seemed to cant the way the raft itself had canted when all four of them had stood on the same side. It righted itself, but Randy suddenly understood that madness—real lunacy—was perhaps not far away at all.
Deke’s football ring—All-Conference, 1981—slid slowly up the third finger of his right hand. The starlight rimmed the gold and played in the minute gutters between the engraved numbers, 19 on one side of the reddish stone, 81 on the other. The ring slid off his finger. The ring was a little too big to fit down through the crack, and of course it wouldn’t squeeze.
It lay there. It was all that was left of Deke now. Deke was gone. No more dark-haired girls with sloe eyes, no more flicking Randy’s bare rump with a wet towel when Randy came out of the shower, no more breakaway runs from midfield with fans rising to their feet in the bleachers and cheerleaders turning hysterical cartwheels along the sidelines. No more fast rides after dark in the Camaro with Thin Lizzy blaring “The Boys Are Back in Town” out of the tape deck. No more Cisco Kid.
There was that faint rasping noise again—a roll of canvas being pulled slowly through a slit of a window.
Randy was standing with his bare feet on the boards. He looked down and saw the cracks on either side of both feet suddenly filled with slick darkness. His eyes bulged. He thought of the way the blood had come spraying from Deke’s mouth in an almost solid rope, the way Deke’s eyes had bugged out as if on springs as hemorrhages caused by hydrostatic pressure pulped his brain.
It smells me. It knows I’m here. Can it come up? Can it get up through the cracks? Can it? Can it?
He stared down, unaware of LaVerne’s limp weight now, fascinated by the enormity of the question, wondering what the stuff would feel like when it flowed over his feet, when it hooked into him.
The black shininess humped up almost to the edge of the cracks (Randy rose on tiptoes without being at all aware he was doing it), and then it went down. That canvasy slithering resumed. And suddenly Randy saw it on the water again, a great dark mole, now perhaps fifteen feet across. It rose and fell with the mild wavelets, rose and fell, rose and fell, and when Randy began to see the colors pulsing evenly across it, he tore his eyes away.
He put LaVerne down, and as soon as his muscles unlocked, his arms began to shake wildly. He let them shake. He knelt beside her, her hair spread across the white boards in an irregular dark fan. He knelt and watched that dark mole on the water, ready to yank her up again if it showed any signs of moving.
He began to slap her lightly, first one cheek and then the other, back and forth, like a second trying to bring a fighter around. LaVerne didn’t want to come around. LaVerne did not want to pass Go and collect two hundred dollars or take a ride on the Reading. LaVerne had seen enough. But Randy couldn’t guard her all night, lifting her like a canvas sack every time that thing moved (and you couldn’t look at the thing too long; that was another thing). He had learned a trick, though. He hadn’t learned it in college. He had learned it from a friend of his older brother’s. This friend had been a paramedic in Nam, and he knew all sorts of tricks—how to catch head lice off a human scalp and make them race in a matchbox, how to cut cocaine with baby laxative, how to sew up deep cuts with ordinary needle and thread. One day they had been talking about ways to bring abysmally drunken folks around so these abysmally drunken people wouldn’t puke down their own throats and die, as Bon Scott, the lead singer of AC/DC, had done.
“You want to bring someone around in a hurry?” the friend with the catalogue of interesting tricks had said. “Try this.” And he told Randy the trick which Randy now used.
He leaned over and bit LaVerne’s earlobe as hard as he could.
Hot, bitter blood squirted into his mouth. LaVerne’s eyelids flew up like windowshades.
She screamed in a hoarse, growling voice and struck out at him. Randy looked up and saw the far side of the thing only; the rest of it was already under the raft. It had moved with eerie, horrible, silent speed.
He jerked LaVerne up again, his muscles screaming protest, trying to knot into charley horses. She was beating at his face. One of her hands struck his sensitive nose and he saw red stars.
“Quit it!” he shouted, shuffling his feet onto the boards. “Quit it, you bitch, it’s under us again, quit it or I’ll fucking drop you, I swear to God I will!” Her arms immediately stopped flailing at him and closed quietly around his neck in a drowner’s grip. Her eyes looked white in the swimming starlight.
“Stop it!” She didn’t. “Stop it, LaVerne, you’re choking me!” Tighter. Panic flared in his mind. The hollow clunk of the barrels had taken on a duller, muffled note—it was the thing underneath, he supposed.
“I can’t breathe!” The hold loosened a little.
“Now listen. I’m going to put you down. It’s all right if you—” But put you down was all she had heard. Her arms tightened in that deadly grip again. His right hand was on her back. He hooked it into a claw and raked at her. She kicked her legs, mewling harshly, and for a moment he almost lost his balance. She felt it. Fright rather than pain made her stop struggling.
“Stand on the boards.”
“No!” Her air puffed a hot desert wind against his cheek.
“It can’t get you if you stand on the boards.”
“No, don’t put me down, it’ll get me, I know it will, I know—” He raked at her back again. She screamed in anger and pain and fear. “You get down or I’ll drop you, LaVerne.” He lowered her slowly and carefully, both of them breathing in sharp little whines—oboe and flute. Her feet touched the boards. She jerked her legs up as if the boards were hot.
“Put them down!” He hissed at her. “I’m not Deke, I can’t hold you all, night!”
“Deke—”
“Dead.” Her feet touched the boards. Little by little he let go of her. They faced each other like dancers. He could see her waiting for its first touch. Her mouth gaped like the mouth of a goldfish.
“Randy,” she whispered. “Where is it?”
“Under. Look down.” She did. He did. They saw the blackness stuffing the cracks, stuffing them almost all the way across the raft now. Randy sensed its eagerness, and thought she did, too.
“Randy, please—”
“Shhhh.” They stood there.
Randy had forgotten to strip off his watch when he ran into the water, and now he marked off fifteen minutes. At a quarter past eight, the black thing slid out from under the raft again. It drew about fifteen feet off and then stopped as it had before.
“I’m going to sit down,” he said.
“No!”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m going to sit down and you’re going to watch it. Just remember to keep looking away. Then I’ll get up and you sit down. We go like that. Here.” He gave her his watch. “Fifteen-minute shifts.”
“It ate Deke,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m cold.”