Floater

by Gary Brandner

  “It was just a thought. There’s got to be some explanation for what’s been happening to you.”

  “The only explanations I can think of, I don’t like.” She turned to look at the glowing red numbers of the digital alarm clock. “I hope Nicole’s all right.”

  “She’s staying with somebody, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. She has a friend home from summer school, and her parents were going to take Nicole for the weekend. When she wanted to go over there tonight, I said okay. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of being worried about her. Then maybe I was just being selfish in wanting to spend this night with you.”

  “A little selfish doesn’t hurt,” he said. “Nicole will be fine.”

  They were quiet while Johnny Carson brought on a nervous author to close the show.

  Brendan said, “I have another suggestion.”

  “About what?”

  “About the peculiar happenings at your house.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Lindy said.

  “Poltergeist.”

  “Come on, Brendan.”

  “Maybe it’s a little farfetched, but this whole business is something outside everyday reality. Think about it. Poltergeists are mischievous ghosts that toss objects around, break things, make pests of themselves.”

  “But they’re not supposed to hurt anybody, are they?”

  “Nicole wasn’t really hurt. Just her vanity.”

  “But messing with my computer?”

  “So you’ve got a high-tech poltergeist. If they can break dishes, who says they can’t fool with microchips? Besides, you’ve got the main ingredient necessary for a poltergeist — an adolescent girl in the house.”

  Lindy was thoughtful for a moment. “It’s an interesting idea, but I just can’t buy ghosts. I quit believing a long time ago in anything I couldn’t grab hold of. Anyway, I never heard of a poltergeist being so calculating. I mean the invitation, the crazy talk from Nicole, the message on the screen — they were all aimed at getting me back to Wolf River.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re so reluctant to go back.”

  Lindy took his hand, kissed the palm, and placed it over her breast. She said, “Darling, are we going to spend the whole night talking?”

  He started to protest, but she eased him down on his back. She kissed his mouth and let her hand roam down over his long, firm body. He wasn’t ready for her at first, but she stroked him the way she knew he liked and felt his erection grow under her touch.

  He kissed her throat and moved his lips down over the swell of her breast. He took the nipple in his mouth and flicked it with the tip of his tongue.

  Lindy sighed and gave herself over to the pleasure of being stroked and kissed by her man. When he touched her between her legs she was moist and eager for him.

  Almost from the beginning their lovemaking had been creative, sometimes wild. Neither was cramped by inhibitions, and they were attuned to each other’s preferences. Tonight, however, Lindy wanted no tricks, no fancy stuff. She just wanted to lie on her back and be taken.

  Sensing her mood, Brendan moved over her, gently spread her thighs apart, and entered her. He braced his hands on the mattress and leaned back at the waist, sliding slowly in and out of her. Lindy kept her eyes open, watching him, enjoying the pleasure reflected in his face.

  He began to stroke faster. Lindy felt the climax rising in her body. She reached up to take hold of Brendan’s shoulders and pull his full weight down on her.

  She screamed.

  Instead of Brendan’s smooth, muscular back, her hands gripped a rough, scaly surface that squirmed under her touch. Where the strong, loving face of her man had been a moment ago, inches away from her own, she now saw the slavering, slime-covered, lizard-tongued face of a demon such as had never walked the earth. Its loathsome touch was all over her body … inside her. The stench of it seared her nostrils.

  Lindy could not stop screaming.

  Then everything snapped back into place. Brendan, on his knees, was gripping her by the shoulders, his face contorted with alarm.

  “Lindy! Lindy, for God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

  For a long moment her throat was too dry to speak. She stared up at Brendan, afraid to blink lest he vanish again and the odious monster take his place. Then all of a sudden she let go. Sobs wracked her body. Brendan held her close, gently stroking her hair until the crying fit subsided. It took a long time.

  • • •

  Over cups of hot, strong coffee in Brendan’s kitchen she tried to describe the unearthly thing she had seen for that terrible endless moment in bed.

  “I don’t know what it was,” she said. “Hallucination, delusion, vision, premonition. I only know if I had had to look at it for a minute longer I would have gone screaming mad.”

  Brendan refilled her cup. “Do you think this is somehow related to all the other stuff that’s been happening to you?”

  “I’m sure it is,” she said.

  “Then maybe it’s time for you to tell me about Wolf River and what happened to you there.”

  “Yes, darling, I think maybe it is.” She drew a deep breath and began. “Twenty years ago I had this little Hummel figure of a shepherdess I kept on my dresser ….”

  ROMAN

  Dinner at the Dixon house in Bellevue was baked Columbia River salmon with lemon caper sauce, creamy scalloped potatoes, fresh baby peas with pearl onions, and sourdough biscuits. There was a shrimp and mushroom salad, and for dessert, German chocolate cake.

  Roman leaned back, took a sip of rich dark coffee, and lit a cigarette. If Stephanie could do one thing in the world, she could cook. He was full, and he had the beginning of a headache. He let his belt out a notch and promised himself to start going more regularly to the gym.

  The boys left the table early and got out of the house to go wherever it was they went. That suited Roman just fine. The less he saw of the loutish Brian and the skinny, weak-eyed Eric, the better he liked it. The good news was that at seventeen and eighteen they would soon be out of his house for good. God willing.

  Roman let the cigarette butt hiss out in a puddle of coffee in his saucer. Might as well break the news to Stephanie that he was leaving for a couple of days, and let her get her bitching out of the way.

  Stephanie got up and started clearing the dishes away. Roman took hold of her wrist. “What’s your hurry, Steph?”

  “The dishes won’t wash themselves.”

  Damn near, he thought, with the expensive dishwashing equipment he had installed last winter.

  He said, “Sit down a while. Let’s talk.”

  “Talk?” She looked at him suspiciously.

  “Why not? We don’t talk much anymore, the two of us.”

  “That’s for sure.” She sat down uneasily in the chair vacated by Eric. “What was it you wanted to talk about.”

  Something happened to the light in the dining room, as though a momentary shadow had passed over. Roman blinked and looked across at his wife. By God, she didn’t look half bad in this queer light.

  “Well?” she prompted.

  “Nothing earthshaking. Something came up and I’ve got to go out of town tomorrow for a few days.”

  “Out of town where?”

  Her voice had altered too. The words she said didn’t matter; there was a smoky softness to her tone that stirred something in Roman that had long been dormant around his wife.

  He realized she was looking at him, waiting for him to speak. “Uh, Chicago,” he said, remembering the fiction he had prepared. “Midland Sport Scene is closing two of their outlets there. I’ve got a chance to pick up most of their stock at a good price.”

  Roman cocked his head and squinted. Stephanie was growing younger and more desirable before his eyes. She had not been much of a looker even when he married her twelve years ago, but right now she was damn near beautiful.

  “This trip came up pretty suddenly, didn’t it?”

  He couldn’t concen
trate. “You know something, Steph, you really look great tonight.’

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Stone sober. One beer before dinner. Are you wearing your hair different or what?”

  He got out of his chair and walked over to her. Lord, she even smelled different. All summer and spice. He felt a stirring in his crotch.

  “The only thing different about my hair is I haven’t had it done in two weeks.”

  He didn’t hear what she was saying. In the strange soft-focus light of the dining room his bony, shapeless, sour-dispositioned wife had somehow turned into this absolutely ravishing woman. Roman wanted her now as he had not wanted any woman since he was a horny adolescent. He took hold of her hands, unbelievably soft and cool, and pulled her gently to her feet.

  “You know what we ought to do?” he said.

  “What?” The word was a whispered caress.

  “We ought to go to bed.”

  “Now?”

  “Hell yes, now. We’re alone in the house, no kids to come yelling for Mom. We can get crazy. What do you say, Steph?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Jesus, woman, don’t I look serious?” He took her hand down and held it against his hard cock. “Doesn’t that feel serious?”

  She looked up at him, her eyes clear and deep and bright. He wanted to lose himself in those eyes, in that body. God, he wanted her. Roman pulled his wife against him and kissed her openmouthed, the way he had never kissed her even before they were married.

  Abruptly the light in the room brightened. A gust of stale fish breath hit Roman’s nostrils. His tongue scraped against Stephanie’s bridgework.

  “You disgusting pig,” she said, snatching her hand away from his wilting cock. “What happened, did one of your office whores cut you off so you had to come sniffing around for something at home?”

  Roman stumbled backward a step. Jesus, God, how could he have put his tongue into that ugly slash of a mouth? And what crazy trick of the lighting a moment ago made him see this sour husk of a witch as some kind of desirable woman?

  He spun away from her and headed for the den.

  “Where are you going?” she demanded.

  “For a drink.”

  “I could have guessed that.” She followed him to the archway that separated the dining room and living room. “Does Daddy know you’re going to Chicago on a buying trip?”

  “Fuck Daddy. There are some things I can handle myself.”

  He made it to the basement door and out of earshot before she could answer. Downstairs at the leather-padded bar he had put in himself, Roman poured bourbon into an old-fashioned glass. He drank thirstily, letting the whiskey burn its way down to his stomach.

  For a minute there, just for one brief minute he had relived a sexual excitement greater than anything he had known since … since high school. He drank again, and sat down on the bar stool. He let his thoughts drift back to his last year in Wolf River. It had started out as the happiest and ended as the most miserable year of his life.

  ALEC

  He sat leaning back in the chair with his pants down around his ankles, watching the top of Georgia’s blond head bob back and forth between his legs.

  Alec concentrated on the dark roots of her straw-colored hair and the tiny flakes of dandruff that clung to the individual hairs. He felt her lips glide expertly along his penis, but there was no arousal.

  After a while she pulled back and let his limp member slide out of her mouth with a wet little pop. She held it in one hand like a small sick animal and looked up at him. “Something the matter, honey?”

  The eternal woman’s question. What’s the matter? Hell, everything’s the matter, including the humiliating need for a man to stick his joint into a woman to ease the pressure in his testicles.

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he said.

  She kissed the head of his cock and looked at him again. “Want to keep trying?”

  “Let’s give it a rest,” he told her.

  Georgia got up off her knees and stood in front of him. She had thrown her imitation fur coat over the back of the sofa and was wearing a soft cotton tank top and leatherette miniskirt.

  Alec reached down to pull up his pants, but she stopped him.

  “Hey, we’re not quitting. Just taking a break.” She sat down in his lap, arranging his penis so she could rub it against the silky crotch of her panties. He didn’t feel anything, but she kept it up.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Alec could not help smiling. He might have been in some pop-psych therapy group instead of up in his apartment with a whore who worked out of a phone booth sitting in his naked lap.

  “I’m all talked out at the end of the day,” he said.

  “A lot of my clients like to talk,” she said. “Matter of fact, that’s all some of them want to do.” She gave his member a little squeeze to punctuate her joke. “Anything special bothering you?”

  He leaned back, slipped his hand under the miniskirt to massage Georgia’s smooth ass, and closed his eyes. “Some peculiar things have been happening to me lately,” he said in a dreamy voice. “Things I can’t explain. All I can think of is that somehow they’re connected to my hometown.”

  “Where’s that, honey?”

  “You’ll never have heard of it. Wolf River, Wisconsin.”

  “Funny name.”

  “Yes, isn’t it.”

  “You weren’t happy there?”

  Absently he rubbed the back of his head where the tension was.

  “Happy? No, no really. But it was bearable. At least until something happened … twenty years ago.”

  Alec opened his eyes and laughed. It was a bitter laugh at his own expense for having no confidante but an Eighth Avenue whore to tell his innermost thoughts to. But by Christ, it was working. He was getting a hard-on.

  Georgia stroked him happily. “See, honey? I told you it helps to talk about it. Should we get back to business?”

  “Mmmmm.” He nodded, keeping his eyes closed.

  Georgia returned to her kneeling position and took his cock back into her mouth with little professional sounds of pleasure. She began to work on him.

  Alec moved his buttocks rhythmically, enjoying the warm wet mouth sliding expertly up and down the length of his shaft. He began to breath harder. He opened his eyes and bent his head forward. He liked to watch her sucking him off.

  Alec’s eyes snapped wide. His jaw dropped. The smooth gray hair on the head that was eating him was not Georgia’s. The bony thumb and forefinger that circled the root of his cock were not the hands of a whore. He gave a strangled cry.

  Startled, the woman looked up at him, his penis still between her lips. The dry, wrinkled skin, the pale eyes behind bifocal glasses were nothing like he remembered, rather they were what she would have looked like had she lived another twenty years.

  “Jesus … Mother!”

  He pushed her away roughly and lurched out of the chair, trying to pull up his pants and get away from the awful apparition at the same time. He banged against the coffee table and fell facedown on the camel brown carpet.

  “Honey, what’s the matter?”

  Her hand was on his shoulder. He tried to jerk away. Frantically he rolled over and looked fearfully up to see … Georgia, the friendly whore from the phone booth, with the black roots and the dandruff flakes.

  Not a terrible ghost of his long-dead mother.

  “You gave me a scare, honey.”

  Alec scrambled to his feet and quickly buckled up his pants. He pulled a bill from his money clip and gave it to the woman.

  “Sure you don’t want to try again? We almost made it there.”

  “Forget it.”

  She looked at him questioningly for a moment, then, seeing that no explanation would be offered, she tucked the bill away and left the apartment.

  When she was gone Alec walked stiff-legged back to his chair, but he didn’t want to sit there just now. Instead he went to the
kitchenette and poured himself a glass of milk. He sat down at the table and sipped the cold white liquid. It didn’t much help his burning stomach.

  “God damn you,” he said to no one he could see. “God damn you!”

  CHAPTER 11

  Wolf River, October 1966

  Frazier Nunley went through the motions of the school day in an agony of anticipation. He had not been thinking with his usual clarity since two nights ago when he watched Lindy Grant unseen through her bedroom window. Today his mind was only fractionally on the words of the teachers and the pages of text. He was way ahead of them anyway.

  Frazier’s mind was on the bomb in his locker.

  Not a real bomb, of course, but it might as well have been. Ever since he had bought it, the Hummel shepherdess from Bonnie’s Gift Shop had seemed to Frazier to be alive and ticking.

  Never good with his hands, he had spent three hours last night wrapping and unwrapping the figurine in the most expensive gift wrap they had down at the Hallmark shop. The package still looked like it had fallen off a truck, but it was the best Frazier was able to do.

  He could have asked his mother, who wrapped things beautifully, to do it for him, but then he would have had to explain to her who it was for and what was the occasion. He would rather take his chances with his own amateurish wrapping.

  Once the shepherdess, well padded with tissue, was wrapped, the next problem to be faced was when and how to deliver it. Frazier’s inclination was to leave it on Lindy Grant’s doorstep, ring the bell, and run. But that would be cowardly. A nerd he might be, but Frazier Nunley was no coward.

  No, he would hand over the shepherdess to Lindy Grant in person. After all, what possible benefit could he gain from leaving the statuette as an anonymous gift? Was not his purpose, at the bottom, to establish some kind of communication with the lovely Lindy?

  So why, he demanded of himself, had he let the entire day go by, in which he had contrived to be within a few feet of Lindy several times, without handing over the shepherdess? Easy — he didn’t want anyone else around at the crucial moment when she unwrapped the gift, and it was nigh impossible to catch the popular Lindy Grant with no one else around. So the bomb waited, it’s gaudy gift wrapping concealed by a brown paper bag, on the top shelf of his locker.