by Cave, Hugh
"You just said—"
"I mean, even if she was trying to tell it straight. So they saw something at three in the morning, or whatever. They must have at least been sleepy. It wasn't a ghost—or do you believe in such things? Do you?"
He was Italian, and she knew what a free-wheeling imagination he had. Especially in bed. "Of course I believe in ghosts," he said indignantly. "Or in spirits, certainly."
"Spirits of what?"
"The dead, for God's sake. How do we know some woman who drowned in the lake, or was drowned in the lake, isn't trying to come back? Answer me that!"
It wasn't going to be one of their finest evenings together, she thought dourly as she removed her dress, bra and panties in that order and watched him take off the last of his clothes. Damn. She wished the Ellstroms and Haydn Clay had kept their stupid mouths shut, or at least admitted they'd simply been taken in by some trick of the moonlight.
But there was something else to be considered. If the thing from the lake hadn't killed those two big, beautiful Great Danes, what had?
Nino sat on the bed and looked at her. "Let's try to work this out, baby. This apparition—"
"Listen, you big lug, I didn't come here to discuss the condo's ghost with you. I have to get back!"
He gazed solemnly at her face for a moment, then lay back and lifted his arms to her—his familiar invitation for her to lie on top of him. One of those big hands cupped her bottom again as their mouths and tongues blended; then the warmth of him crept into her and she began to rub herself against him.
"Getting warmed up for the game," they both called it now. With LeRoy, even in the best of times, it had never been like this but always cut and dried—on, off, and out. With him she had felt absolutely nothing and was fairly certain he could not have felt much more.
After a while the big man under her whispered against her lips, "Come on, baby," and she rose to her knees to make love with him. He had such long arms he could take hold of her feet in that position.
How many other women had ridden St. George with the bottoms of their feet in their lover's hands, she wondered. Not many, for sure. The trouble was, it made her come like a house afire, always before he did, and then he had to shift his grip to her waist and move her up and down until he came too. That was great, though. Like being afloat on a warm, heaving sea.
Spent, they lay beside each other with her head on his shoulder, and let half an hour drift by in silence. It was like that with them now. The questions had all been asked and answered. She knew what Nino desired from her; he knew what she needed from him. Everyone's life should be so simple, she thought. So fulfilling. But when he fell asleep with one of those big, gentle hands on her breast, she nudged him.
"Hey, I have to go."
"So soon?"
"We'll both fall asleep if I stay here. I wish we could."
"Me too, baby."
"But I can't." She rose on one elbow and touched her lips lightly to his mouth, then slid off the bed. While she was dressing, he leaned from the bed, pulled her to him, and pressed his lips against the front of her panties.
"Uh-uh, we haven't time," Connie said. "Bye, darling."
"So long, baby. Sunday, maybe?"
"I'll try. I'll call you."
She didn't want a drink at Mae Henig's. After what had just happened it would be boring to sit and talk about bridge. Anyway, LeRoy just might be really worried because of the talk about the dogs, and if allowed to fret too long could be reluctant to let her out again.
She had to ring Mae's bell and say thanks, of course; couldn't just step into the Continental and drive home. When she did so, and explained why she felt she shouldn't stop, Mae was obviously disappointed. "Don't tell me LeRoy believes that crazy tale about the lake thing."
"Well, I don't know, Mae. Maybe not. But something did kill those dogs."
"They were poisoned. You know that as well as I do."
"The vet said—"
"Who cares what the vet said? Someone got tired of having them mess up the common and put poison out for them. Something that would fool a vet."
"All right, Mae. But I'll still run along. Lee's been in a rotten mood all day and I don't want him mad at me. And Mae—"
"Yes?"
"Thanks. I don't know what I'd do without you."
They touched hands and Connie departed. The time was ten-forty, she noticed as she backed the car out of the driveway. No traffic at this hour. Off to her right now, as she made the turn onto Lakeshore Drive, the water lay dark and quiet. The moon, so bright the past few nights, was dim behind a veil of clouds. A sweet smell of night-blooming flowers rode the air flowing through the car's open windows.
In the near distance, again to her right as she approached the turn to the condominium, she could see lights in some of the apartments. Not many at this hour, of course. Most of the residents had gone to sleep and, anyway, not all the units were occupied. Some owners went north when winter ended.
But wait. What in the name of God was rising from the weedy shallows ahead of her?
She slowed the car and leaned over the wheel to peer through the windshield. The glass was smeared and hard to see through because those pesky little insects, the love bugs, had arrived ahead of schedule this year, and of course LeRoy hadn't bothered to wipe the dead ones off the car after driving to town this morning. Was it the distortion from the bug-spattered glass that made her think she was seeing a blob of mist floating toward the road?
Or was it mist? The kind you sometimes saw in the mornings was atmospheric; she knew that. It usually covered all or most of the lake. This was almost human in size and shape and becoming more so every moment.
Yes, it possessed a head and a body, legs and arms, legs that appeared to be walking now, not drifting or floating, and arms that reached out for something.
For what?
They could be reaching for her, she suddenly realized. Though still on the strip of grass between the lake and the road, the thing had changed direction and was heading for the car. When the edge of the headlight glare touched it, it seemed to absorb the light and glow from within. For some reason—perhaps because of the ring she wore—she thought of the inner fire of an opal.
Now it was in the road!
The shuddering moan of terror she heard then was from her own wide-open mouth as she sucked in a breath. Her hands tightened so fiercely on the wheel that her knuckles cracked. Everything she had heard about the lake thing at the cocktail party came rushing back to her, filling her with panic. She screamed, but no sound came out.
The thing was striding straight toward her.
Connie's right foot fumbled for the brake pedal and brought the car to a lurching halt. She groped for the control that would run the automatic windows up, then panicked further at the thought of sealing herself in the car while under attack. Should she floor the gas pedal and try to get past the thing or would it somehow stop her if she tried?
All at once she had a mental picture of the two Great Danes lying dead in the road only a few hundred yards from here. Maybe they, too, had panicked at the sight of this unnatural thing and tried to get past it in a foolish race for home.
What, dear God, should she do?
The thing slowly approached, swaying slightly from side to side now as though actually made of mist and affected by the slight breeze from the lake. But if made of mist, why did it seem so human? So malevolently human.
Connie flung the door open and hurled herself out of the car. A heel caught. Hitting the road on hands and knees, she skidded to its edge, leaving skin from palms and kneecaps on the blacktop. Sobbing now, scarcely knowing what she was doing, she rose staggering to her feet and began running in the direction she had come from.
Running, she screamed for help until the sound broke into fragments and her voice became only a whimper. And she kept turning her head to see what was happening behind her.
What was happening was that the thing from the lake was shapeless again. At least, it was less
human in outline and floating again rather than walking. It floated so swiftly now, just above the blacktop, that she knew she could not outdistance it no matter how desperately she tried.
And now she felt a thing that reduced all the rest of what was happening to insignificance. From the depths of the misty blob pursuing her, some irresistible force was reaching out for her, touching her like an icy hand, clawing its way into her and turning her to ice. Some force she sensed was evil, wholly evil, and bent on destroying her in some hideous way.
"Oh God," she sobbed. "Oh God, help me!"
Fleeing from such a pursuer was senseless. Faced with that terrible truth at last, she whirled and thrust out her hands in a hopeless effort to keep the apparition at bay. But it would not be denied. In a final swift convulsion the mist leaped forward to engulf her.
Anyone passing—though no one did pass at that time —would surely have thought her last awful shrieks, fading away to silence, were emanating from the heart of the misty blob itself.
4
The Pool
It was the talk of the weekly cocktail party, of course.
"The way I reconstruct it," said Bee Broderick, "a man who lives over there was returning home about eleven o'clock and saw the car standing empty in the road, with its lights on and the motor running. He got out to investigate but couldn't find anything to explain why it had been abandoned, so he drove on and discovered Connie lying at the road's edge a hundred yards or so farther on. He thought she must have got out of the car for some reason and been hit by another vehicle."
"You don't suppose he hit her himself and is just saying that?" Estelle Quigley offered.
"Nobody hit her, Estelle," said Bee. "This man—his name is Emmons--drove on home and phoned the police. They took her to the hospital, but she was dead on arrival. An autopsy revealed absolutely nothing."
"The way it was with the dogs," Nicola Helpin said.
"All I can say," injected Carl Helpin in his customary growl, "is that something damn queer is going on around here and we'd better get to the bottom of it quick. It only takes a little of this kind of thing to give a place a bad name and ruin resale values."
Not many had turned up at the pavilion this Wednesday. Since the tragedy five days ago, the police had been talking to Lakeside Manor's residents and many felt drained. Connie Abbott's husband, LeRoy, was under sedation in his apartment with a nurse in attendance—mostly because he had lost his wife, no doubt, but also because the investigation had disclosed that while Connie had pretended to be visiting Mae Henig that evening, she had actually gone from Mae's house to Nino Viotti's. To add to LeRoy's agony, this had come out in some of the newspaper accounts.
"And now," Bee Broderick said, "the police want to know if her having an affair with Nino had any bearing on what happened to her."
"But nobody, knew she was seeing him," someone said.
"Mae Henig did."
The police had been thorough. Hearing about the dogs, they questioned the animals' owner for most of an afternoon, but he was unable to name anyone who might have been sufficiently annoyed to kill them. Hearing about the "lake thing" supposedly seen by the Ellstroms and Haydn Clay, they questioned those three for most of another afternoon, after which they came with a boat on a trailer and spent a full day slowly cruising the shore and searching the marshy areas of the lake itself. When that turned up nothing of interest, they dragged the part of the lake from which the thing was said to have materialized. With intense curiosity the residents of the condominium watched them, but the dragging produced nothing.
"What I want to know," said Pearl Gautier at the pavilion party, "is how someone can die and they can't tell what caused it. For heaven's sake, I talked to Connie before she went out that night, and she was absolutely all right. We were going to Lakeland in the morning."
No one responded. Tom Broderick turned to Will Platt, who had come to the gathering just to listen. "Will, is this one of your kind of mysteries? Something unexplainable?"
"I have no idea."
Will's tone must have implied annoyance, for the older man put a hand out to touch him on the arm. "I'm sorry. I was forgetting you have a mystery of your own."
"It's all right, Tom. No offense." At this point, deciding he was not going to learn anything because no one knew anything, Will Platt quietly left the group and walked back to the building, where to relieve his tenseness he ignored the elevator, climbed the stairs to his top-floor apartment, and poured himself half a glass of bourbon.
In Lakeside Manor for the next few days some people were more active than others. Jerome and Ruby Ellstrom spent much of their time on their veranda, discussing what they thought they had seen earlier and watching with keen interest the behavior of their next-door neighbor, Haydn Clay.
The condominium owned a number of rowboats and a canoe. In one of the boats Clay seemed to be repeating, day after day, what the police had done. Not the dragging, but the patient exploration of the weeds and shallows from one end of the lake to the other. In a body of water the size of Heron Lake this was no small job.
"He's going to have sunstroke," Ruby Ellstrom predicted. "He ought to have sense enough to wear a hat. Doesn't he know our Florida sun at all?"
Her husband shrugged. "Who knows what he knows? About all anyone can tell you is that he came here from Los Angeles, same as Carl Helpin."
Haydn Clay was about sixty, of average height and build, silver haired and articulate. Reservedly friendly with all in the building, he seemed to find genuine companionship only with manager Ed Lawson, who was a widower. Big Ed sometimes shared the boat with him now as he explored the lake. At times Ed rowed, at times he peered through binoculars as the craft prowled the edges of marshy areas it could not penetrate.
"Do you suppose they're looking for that 'gator they said they saw?" Jerome Ellstrom asked his wife.
"I think they're trying to find the thing we saw," she said. "The thing I think killed Connie Abbott and those two dogs. And you know something? I believe if we keep our eyes open we just might see it again . . . though I'm not at all sure I want to." She frowned at him. "Do you want to?"
"No, I don't."
She hesitated. "We felt something when we saw it, didn't we, Jerry? I mean really."
"I know I did. I'm still feeling it."
"Then you don't think we ought to . . ."
"No, I don't."
But they did for a while. For five nights they attempted a vigil, sometimes sitting quietly on their veranda until as late as two in the morning. They were not young, however, and when the hours began to tell on them they returned to their usual routine of going to bed early. Then, if their fears would let them, they made their usual quiet love before dropping off to sleep. But now it was a different kind of sleep, full of dreams and anxious awakenings.
Will Platt, meanwhile, had met the new owner, Lynn Kimball, a second time.
It had been Will's custom, one abandoned only briefly when his wife disappeared, to go to the pool every afternoon and swim thirty or forty laps to keep himself in shape. A swimmer in college, he was still good at it and enjoyed it, especially after a morning at the typewriter. Did teachers of "creative writing"—whatever that was —ever tell their students that inspiration consisted mainly of gluing one's butt to a chair and assaulting a typewriter until one's shoulders felt like wire coat-hangers?
This afternoon, when he arrived at the pool, she was there before him. Alone.
And lovely.
How old was she, really? Not his age, surely, with a figure like hers. Yet most people who bought into Lakeside Manor were either retired or contemplating retirement. This was central Florida, a rural region of vast orange groves, lakes to water them, and small towns. No work for outsiders, or at least very little.
"Hi," he said as she surfaced close to where he stood at the pool's edge. "Mind if I join you?"
"Not at all." Lovely voice, like a girl's. "I was just going to quit, it's so lonely here."
&nbs
p; He dived in, swam the length of the pool under water and returned to her with an easy crawl. "I'm Willard Platt. Will."
"I know. We were introduced at the pavilion before I moved in."
"I didn't think you'd remember."
"I'm Lynne Kimball."
"I know."
She laughed, and he felt instantly at ease with her. "You swim well," she said.
"Used to, maybe. Not anymore."
"Shall we do a few laps?"
If he swam well, she swam better, or at least more gracefully. It pleased him to watch her as they did four lengths of the pool together. Lovely, he thought again. A perfect little body, beautiful legs, dainty feet. The feet created half the commotion his did, and her arms moved seemingly without effort, yet she easily kept up with him.
They stopped at the deep end and clung side by side to the tiled gutter. "What did Ed Lawson mean when he said if I heard a typewriter in the night, it would be you scaring your readers?" she asked.
"I live over you."
"I know that. I mean—"
"Oh, that. Well, most of my work is fantasy. What's known now as dark fantasy."
"I like that kind of thing. You wrote a novel about Haiti and voodoo called Darkling, didn't you?"
He nodded.
"I've read it," she said. "Bought it in Jamaica, at a bookshop in Mandeville. I remember thinking whoever wrote it must have spent a lot of time in the islands."
"I have."
"What's your latest?"
"A sequel to that, more or less, but it won't be out until July. The latest to come out was a collection of shorter fantasy things I did some years ago for various magazines."
"Called what?"
"Not After Midnight."
"I'd like to read it."
"I'm not sure you ought to, after what's been happening around here. A woman alone."
She laughed, but was quickly solemn again. "What has been happening here, in your opinion? I mean, what killed those dogs, Mr. Platt?"
"Will, please. I can't imagine what killed them. Had there been only one dog, I might have thought someone who knew him walked up and pulled a plastic bag over his head to smother him. But unless two people did the dogs in . . ." He shrugged. "How about another lap or two?"