Chapter 14

Wolf Lake, October 1966

How impossibly clumsy; how like Frazier Nunley to fall out of the boat. The picture of the fat clown toppling over the side was so ludicrous that Frazier almost laughed in the split second before he hit the water.

The shock of the icy lake snapped him back to reality. The waters closed over him, and the universal rules of time and space were suspended as he sank.

The seconds he spent underwater seemed to drag into minutes, marked off by his hammering heartbeats. Long minutes of icy darkness with no direction - no up or down, no sense of movement. Just water. Cold lake water in his eyes, his nose, filling his mouth, stopping his lungs. In his ears, a rushing, clanging roar.

Then he broke the surface. Frazier gulped at the precious air, coughed, coughed some more. He struggled to get his arms moving, but they were still bound behind him at the wrists.

Without his glasses he saw the empty rowboat as a blurry oblong shape just six feet away. It bobbed gently, invitingly, offering safety. And life. Short seconds ago that boat had seemed a cruel prison. Now what wouldn't he give to be returned to it.

He began to go down again. He tried to gain some upward momentum by kicking, but the sodden folds of his costume and the awkward clown feet dragged him down in the water. The lake closed over him again.

You're drowning, his mind screamed. Think, idiot! You've got to do something or you're going to die!

With an agonizing effort of will Frazier stilled the thrashing of his limbs. He fought to keep from drawing in another lungful of water. He knew the natural buoyancy of his body would eventually take him to the top again. He had to stop fighting.

Tiny lights blinked on and off before his eyes in the depths of the dark water as Frazier fought back panic.

When does my life flash in front of my eyes? God, how boring that would be. I'd rather watch reruns of The Flintstones.

Frazier giggled foolishly, and in doing so pulled more lake water into his aching lungs.

I'm losing it. Getting light-headed. Got to fight to stay lucid. No hope if I get hysterical now.

Once more his head broke through the surface of the lake into the night air. He could make out a smear of light on the shore. That would be the Hartman cabin, where the party was going on. It was no more than the length of a football field away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Frazier opened his mouth to shout, but all that came out was a sputtering, squeaking cough.

And he was under again.

Down for the third time. That was all a drowning person was allowed. Was that fact or was it myth? Was he dying? Frazier's mind could not accept, could not conceive its own nonexistence.

As he slowly sank into the depths Frazier concentrated as he never had before. He cleared his mind of all extraneous thoughts - all images and sensations from the outside world - and focused on a pinprick of blue directly in front of his forehead. Millimeter by agonizing millimeter the spot of blue expanded until it became his secret window. While his body, wrapped in the ludicrous clown suit, rolled slowly in the currents of the lake, Frazier's mind moved out and through the window and rocketed toward the lights onshore.

Up through the dark trees and into the big cabin. On the first floor the Halloween patty was a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds. The walls vibrated, the floor thumped with the rhythm of the music. Ghouls and monsters cavorted with warty hags and undead creatures from the grave. Demons and devils laughed and screamed and danced and drank, and the music played louder and louder.

Frazier's disembodied mind bounced from one of the revelers to another like a pinball. With no voice and no power of touch, how could he reach anybody? Tell them he was out there in the lake drowning?

Across the room a staggering figure in a gorilla suit pawed at a female vampire who pushed him away to dance with a laughing ghoul. Frazier had no trouble recognizing the boy under the gorilla disguise. Alec McDowell. Alec was as responsible as anyone for his terrible crisis. Perhaps a bond of some sort might let him get through.

* * *

Alec McDowell watched blearily as the vampire gyrated out of his grasp. Nice ass, but not much in the way of tits. Still, he wouldn't mind grappling with her. He tried to follow the girl and her partner but reeled helplessly from one side of the dance floor to the other, bumping into dancers, falling down, getting up, laughing.

He was, he thought dimly, having the best time of his life. How stupid he'd been to be timid about drinking with the other guys. Drinking was fun. He should have tried it a long time ago.

Alec shuffled toward the bar and sat down hard on the floor. The dancers whirled around the fallen gorilla, ignoring him. Alec looked up at them, grinning behind the mask, and waved. Nobody waved back.

Another beer, that's what he needed. Alec struggled to rise. Something like a wisp of cold air touched the back of his neck under the mask. Where the hell could that have come from? A huge fire crackled in the hearth, and he was, if anything, uncomfortably hot in the heavy gorilla suit.

And yet, for an instant he had felt deathly cold. The cold of the grave. Of the deep, deep waters of Wolf Lake.

Now where the hell did he get a thought like that?

Must be drunk.

Giggling, Alec crawled on hands and knees to a chair, and there pulled himself upright. Something buzzed around his head like a fly caught inside the gorilla mask. Alec flapped a hand against the gorilla ear, trying to shoo it away.

Suddenly he didn't feel so great anymore. His head pounded, his stomach rebelled. Sour vomit rose in his throat. Alec lurched for the door. He covered only three stumbling steps before the beer and chili and chips and onion dip came up and exploded through his mouth, splashing his face and fouling the inside of the gorilla head. He dropped to his knees, tearing at the mask as wave after wave of vile puke pumped up from his stomach and sluiced out his mouth. He pitched forward on his face and lay on the floor in his own slime.

Still retching, he made it to his hands and knees and crawled out through the door into the night air. The sudden chill crimped his stomach again and he collapsed.

* * *

Wild with panic, the mind of Frazier Nunley abandoned the hopeless Alec. With instinct born of desperation the floating mind shot up through the ceiling into a bedroom where two naked young bodies were locked together in passion.

* * *

I'm fucking her! Roman kept reminding himself. I'm actually fucking Lindy Grant!

She lay beneath him, not taking an overactive part in the connection, but with her legs willingly open, receiving him. A virgin. The first virgin Roman had ever had. They said if you were the first, the woman could never forget you.

He decided screwing a virgin wasn't really that much of a thrill. Kind of sloppy, as a matter of fact. But it would be good in the telling. Roman's thoughts were as much on the way he would tell the story to the other guys as on what he was actually doing.

Something cold tickled the back of his neck. At first Roman thought Lindy had decided to participate, but he opened his eyes to see her hands still at her sides. He shook his head and the cool touch went away.

He felt the climax coming, and tried to hold it until Lindy came too. That would make his story even better.

* * *

All Lindy could think of as she lay on her back under the hard-pumping Roman Dixon was There's got to be more to it than this.

After the first sharp pain, which was not as bad as she'd been led to believe, it was just a lot of sloppy thrusting and grunting. One of us, she thought, must be doing something wrong.

She wished he would get it over with. To speed things along she raked her nails down Roman's bare back, like the heroines did in the sexy paperback novels she sometimes read. It didn't do anything for her, but it made Roman moan, so she assumed he was enjoying it. With a little more practice she might make a good prostitute, Lindy thought with detached irony.

Suddenly she tensed. A chill that began at the base of her skull enveloped her body, and she shuddered. Roman mistaking her reaction for passion, renewed his thrusts. A high-pitched keening, like a mosquito, sang in Lindy's ears for a moment, then was gone. At the same time, Roman climaxed inside her, flooding her with his juices. Lindy clung to him with a sick feeling that something was terribly wrong. Gradually the feeling and the chill went away, and she felt nothing at all.

* * *

Finally he knew it was not going to work. Frazier could not reach a living soul, not even one of the three who had done this to him. Not the drunken slob that was Alec nor the grunting, rutting pair upstairs in the bed. Frazier had focused all the concentration he could muster on a cry for help directed at these three, tried desperately to somehow enter their consciousness, but he couldn't get through. He was sure there must be a way, if only he knew it. But there was no more time to try. No time at all.

Out of the cabin he flew, back through the dark fringe of evergreens, across the black waters to the empty rowboat bobbing so peacefully at anchor.

The water around the boat was empty and still. The disembodied mind scanned and searched the glistening surface. Nothing. That soft, lumpy, ill-favored body he had so reviled was nowhere to be seen. Oh, how lovely and safe and familiar that body would seem to him now.

Then a ripple showed on the dark water, and then something orange bubbled to the surface. Orange and green. The garish top of the clown suit.

The mind of Frazier Nunley shot toward the floating colors. Home. That poor shapeless body was his home. Let me in! he cried silently. I want to come back! But he could not enter. There was a barrier that he hadn't encountered before in his astral travels. His mind hovered over the ballooning clown suit as it rolled slowly in the water.

Then the face turned up toward the sky. His face. Poor astigmatic eyes wide and unseeing. No more need, ever, for the clumsy glasses. The mouth, slightly open, leaked water. No more junk food would rot those poor yellow teeth. The pimpled flesh was pale and cold. Acne cured forever.

Dead. Frazier Nunley is dead. I'm dead.

The floating mind was not strong enough to assimilate the terrible fact. The logical, orderly mind of Frazier Nunley exploded into madness. Screaming with no sound, it rocketed off into the night to a terrible, timeless void.