Skeleton Crew - By Stephen King Page 0,128

are planning to flood the earth with sludge.

They are planning break-ins.

They have got physicians

advocating weird sex positions.

They are making addictive laxatives

and suppositories that burn.

They know how to put out the sun

with blowguns.

I pack myself in ice—have I told you that?

It obviates their infrascopes.

I know chants and I wear charms.

You may think you have me but I could destroy you

any second now.

Any second now.

Any second now.

Would you like some coffee, my love?

Did I tell you I can’t go out no more?

There’s a man by the door

in a raincoat.

The Raft

It was forty miles from Horlicks University in Pittsburgh to Cascade Lake, and although dark comes early to that part of the world in October and although they didn’t get going until six o’clock, there was still a little light in the sky when they got there. They had come in Deke’s Camaro. Deke didn’t waste any time when he was sober. After a couple of beers, he made that Camaro walk and talk.

He had hardly brought the car to a stop at the pole fence between the parking lot and the beach before he was out and pulling off his shirt. His eyes were scanning the water for the raft. Randy got out of the shotgun seat, a little reluctantly. This had been his idea, true enough, but he had never expected Deke to take it seriously. The girls were moving around in the back seat, getting ready to get out.

Deke’s eyes scanned the water restlessly, side to side (sniper’s eyes, Randy thought uncomfortably), and then fixed on a point.

“It’s there!” he shouted, slapping the hood of the Camaro. “Just like you said, Randy! Hot damn! Last one in’s a rotten egg!”

“Deke—” Randy began, resetting his glasses on his nose, but that was all he bothered with, because Deke was vaulting the fence and running down the beach, not looking back at Randy or Rachel or LaVerne, only looking out at the raft, which was anchored about fifty yards out on the lake.

Randy looked around, as if to apologize to the girls for getting them into this, but they were looking at Deke—Rachel looking at him was all right, Rachel was Deke’s girl, but LaVerne was looking at him too and Randy felt a hot momentary spark of jealousy that got him moving. He peeled off his own sweatshirt, dropped it beside Deke’s, and hopped the fence.

“Randy!” LaVerne called, and he only pulled his arm forward through the gray twilit October air in a come-on gesture, hating himself a little for doing it—she was unsure now, perhaps ready to cry it off. The idea of an October swim in the deserted lake wasn’t just part of a comfortable, well-lighted bull-session in the apartment he and Deke shared anymore. He liked her, but Deke was stronger. And damned if she didn’t have the hots for Deke, and damned if it wasn’t irritating.

Deke unbuckled his jeans, still running, and pushed them off his lean hips. He somehow got out of them all the way without stopping, a feat Randy could not have duplicated in a thousand years. Deke ran on, now only wearing bikini briefs, the muscles in his back and buttocks working gorgeously. Randy was more than aware of his own skinny shanks as he dropped his Levi’s and clumsily shook them free of his feet—with Deke it was ballet, with him burlesque.

Deke hit the water and bellowed, “Cold! Mother of Jesus!” Randy hesitated, but only in his mind, where things took longer—that water’s forty-five degrees, fifty at most, his mind told him. Your heart could stop. He was pre-med, he knew that was true ... but in the physical world he didn’t hesitate at all. He leaped it, and for a moment his heart did stop, or seemed to; his breath clogged in his throat and he had to force a gasp of air into his lungs as all his submerged skin went numb. This is crazy, he thought, and then: But it was your idea, Pancho. He began to stroke after Deke.

The two girls looked at each other for a moment. LaVerne shrugged and grinned. “If they can, we can,” she said, stripping off her Lacoste shirt to reveal an almost transparent bra. “Aren’t girls supposed to have an extra layer of fat?”

Then she was over the fence and running for the water, unbuttoning her cords. After a moment Rachel followed her, much as Randy had followed Deke.

The girls had come over to the apartment at midafternoon —on Tuesdays a one-o’clock