“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’ll 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 comer (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. ”