excitement, Randy noted Deke’s grin—reckless and a little crazy. The two of them had been rooming together for three years now—the Jock and the Brain, Cisco and Pancho, Batman and Robin—and Randy recognized that grin. Deke wasn’t kidding; he meant to do it. In his head he was already halfway there.
Forget it, Cisco—not me. The words rose to his lips, but before he could say them LaVeme was on her feet, the same cheerful, loony look in her own eyes (or maybe it was just too much beer). “I’m up for it!”
“Then let’s go!” Deke looked at Randy. “Whatchoo say, Pancho?”
He had looked at Rachel for a moment then, and saw something almost frantic in her eyes—as far as he himself was concerned, Deke and La Verne could go out to Cascade Lake together and plow the back forty all night; he would not be delighted with the knowledge that they were boffing each other’s brains out, yet neither would he be surprised. But that look in the other girl’s eyes, that haunted look—
“Ohhh, Ceesco!” Randy cried.
“Ohhhh, Pancho!” Deke cried back, delighted.
They slapped palms.
Randy was halfway to the raft when he saw the black patch on the water. It was beyond the raft and to the left of it, more out toward the middle of the lake. Five minutes later the light would have failed too much for him to tell it was anything more than a shadow ... if he had seen it at all. Oil slick? he thought, still pulling hard through the water, faintly aware of the girls splashing behind him. But what would an oil slick be doing on an October-deserted lake? And it was oddly circular, small, surely no more than five feet in diameter—
“Whoooo!” Deke shouted again, and Randy looked toward him. Deke was climbing the ladder on the side of the raft, shaking off water like a dog. “Howya doon, Pancho?”
“Okay!” he called back, pulling harder. It really wasn’t as bad as he had thought it might be, not once you got in and got moving. His body tingled with warmth and now his motor was in overdrive. He could feel his heart putting out good revs, heating him from the inside out. His folks had a place on Cape Cod, and the water there was worse than this in mid-July.
“You think it’s bad now, Pancho, wait’ll you get out!” Deke yelled gleefully. He was hopping up and down, making the raft rock, rubbing his body.
Randy forgot about the oil slick until his hands actually grasped the rough, white-painted wood of the ladder on the shore side. Then he saw it again. It was a little closer. A round dark patch on the water, like a big mole, rising and falling on the mild waves. When he had first seen it the patch had been maybe forty yards from the raft. Now it was only half that distance.
How can that be? How—
Then he came out of the water and the cold air bit his skin, bit it even harder than the water had when he first dived in. “Ohhhhhh, shit!” He yelled, laughing, shivering in his Jockey shorts.
“Pancho, you ees some kine of beeg asshole,” Deke said happily. He pulled Randy up. “Cold enough for you? You sober yet?”
“I’m sober! I’m sober!” He began to jump around as Deke had done, clapping his arms across his chest and stomach in an X. They turned to look at the girls.
Rachel had pulled ahead of LaVerne, who was doing something that looked like a dog paddle performed by a dog with bad instincts.
“You ladies okay?” Deke bellowed.
“Go to hell, Macho City!” LaVerne called, and Deke broke up again.
Randy glanced to the side and saw that odd dark circular patch was even closer—ten yards now, and still coming. It floated on the water, round and regular, like the top of a large steel drum, but the limber way it rode the swells made it clear that it was not the surface of a solid object. Fear, directionless but powerful, suddenly seized him.
“Swim!” he shouted at the girls, and bent down to grasp Rachel’s hand as she reached the ladder. He hauled her up. She bumped her knee hard—he heard the thud clearly.
“Ow! Hey! What—”
LaVerne was still ten feet away. Randy glanced to the side again and saw the round thing nuzzle the offside of the raft. The thing was as dark as oil, but he was sure it wasn’t oil—too dark, too thick, too even.