Floater

by Gary Brandner

  Merilee Lund, in a harem outfit, was having an over-enthusiastic good time dancing with Todd Hartman, who was a slightly pudgy Robin Hood. Merilee didn’t seem to notice that her date’s eyes followed Lindy Grant all around the floor.

  Johnny Mathis crooned “Somewhere My Love,” and Lindy clung sensuously to Roman as they swayed together in the center of the floor. Lindy’s cat costume was easily the sexiest at the party, and she felt lightheaded and happy after a couple of vodka-Sevens. The salt tang of Roman’s sweat and the feel of his bare back under her hand was exciting.

  Roman, as usual, had chosen a costume that would display his muscular build. Lindy had to admit that he made a fine-looking Tarzan in his leopard-skin briefs. She could, however, have done without the leering Tarzan-Jane references, which became tiresome with repetition.

  Alec, livelier than usual with the unaccustomed beer in him, capered around in a hairy gorilla suit. By eleven o’clock everyone had grown bored with his routine of bowlegged hops, dangling arms, and grunts.

  “Why don’t you go climb a tree, monkey?” Merilee said, then laughed excessively, as though she’d said something really funny.

  “Climb this,” Alec muttered behind the gorilla mask, but not loud enough for anyone to hear.

  Out on the dance floor Roman pushed his pelvis hard against Lindy. He put his mouth close to her ear and whispered, “Let’s go upstairs. I’ve got a key to one of the bedrooms.”

  “Are you going to start that again?” Lindy said, but she didn’t pull away.

  “Come on,” he coaxed. “We’ll stop whenever you want to. I promise.”

  He thrust his body even harder against hers, and Lindy could feel his erection under the Tarzan briefs.

  “Okay,” she said, “but just for a little while.”

  Roman immediately started to lead her off the dance floor.

  “And no sneaky stuff,” Lindy added.

  “Trust me,” he said, holding up his right hand.

  As they passed the bar he grabbed a couple of cans of Stevens Point beer from the ice tub and a pint vodka bottle. They started up the stairs just as Alec lurched over in the gorilla suit.

  “Leaving us?” he said, his voice muffled behind the ape mask.

  “Mind your own business,” Lindy told him.

  “Yeah, get lost, King Kong,” said Roman.

  Alec made gobbling monkey sounds and stuck a paw into the ice tub for a beer, nearly losing his balance as he did so.

  Roman laughed at him and led Lindy on up the stairs.

  When they were together in the darkness of the small bedroom, Roman offered her the vodka bottle.

  “Didn’t you bring any Seven-Up?”

  “Only had two hands. Go ahead and try it straight. You might like it.”

  Lindy unscrewed the top and took a pull from the bottle. It didn’t taste as strong as she thought it would. She tried another while Roman popped a beer can and chug-a-lugged.

  Lindy sat down on the edge of the narrow bed and stretched, feeling like the cat she was impersonating. The smell of raw wood mingled with her own sweat and Roman’s musky odor in a heady perfume of sensuality.

  Roman came over and sat beside her. He found the zipper on the back of her costume and slipped his hand in and around to take hold of her breast. She wasn’t wearing a bra. He carried her hand down to his stiff penis. She squeezed it gently.

  “Does that cat suit come off in one piece?” he asked hoarsely.

  “You think you’re going to find out?” she teased.

  “Just curious.”

  He pulled the velvety material down over her shoulder, exposing a breast, pale in the darkness of the room. His mouth found her nipple and took it into his mouth.

  It felt good to Lindy. Better than ever before. His cock swelled even larger under her fingers, and she knew then that this was the night she would let Roman do it to her. Still, something made her uneasy.

  She pulled back, her nipple making a little pop when it slipped out of Roman’s mouth.

  “What about Frazier?” she said.

  “Huh? What about him?”

  “You left him out on the lake.”

  “So what? He can’t go anywhere.”

  “Will you go and get him afterwards?”

  “Afterwards?” Roman’s grin could be seen clearly in the semidarkness. “Sure. Now let’s see how that cat suit comes off.”

  • • •

  It had grown colder out on the lake as the night went on. Faint sounds of music and laughter floated across the water from the party cabin. Frazier shivered without letup, feeling more alone and miserable than ever before in his lonely and miserable life.

  As the hours passed and he heard no more wolf calls from the shore, the terrible realization came to him that he had been had. He had been an unmitigated jackass. Straight A’s in all his classes, scholarships waiting for him at at least three Ivy League schools, and he had been outsmarted by a couple of clods who would be lucky to get into junior college.

  Why had they done this to him? He had never offended Roman or Alec or anybody else. And could Lindy possibly be involved in the cruel practical joke?

  He tugged at the clothesline that bound his wrists behind him. There was play in the rope, but he didn’t have the strength to pull the knots loose. Better work on the blindfold first.

  Frazier eased down off the plank seat to the bottom of the boat. The scummy water that had collected there seeped through the seat of his clown pants and chilled his ass. He squirmed around so he could feel along the gunwale with his bound hands. He found the oarlock socket with a screw head that protruded a quarter of an inch. He knelt on the bottom of the boat and bent his head to catch the terry-cloth blindfold on the head of the screw. After several unsuccessful attempts, he managed to pull the blindfold down around his neck.

  He struggled back to a kneeling position, vision seriously blurred without his glasses. He just had time to locate the lights of the party cabin on the shore before he lost his balance. He pitched forward, hitting the gunwale with his chest and tipping the boat.

  Before Frazier could right himself, and with his hands still bound, he toppled over the side of the boat and into the water. His cry of terror was silenced as the lake filled his mouth.

  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 o
ff 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 Flint-stones.

  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 party 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.

  CHAPTER 15

  Los Angeles, July 1987

  LINDY

  The molded plastic seat dug into Lindy’s back as she sat stiffly in the boarding area of Terminal 7 at LAX waiting for Flight 541 to Denver and Milwaukee. She didn’t shift her position to a more comfortable one, holding on to the small pain to keep ugly thoughts of Wolf River out of her mind.

  It had been, however, impossible to think of anything else during the week since Nicole’s episode with the horrid pimple. The slightest rash or any tiny bruise on her daughter made Lindy tense with anxiety. Such little hurts could, of course, occur in the normal life of any adolescent girl, but they somehow had a dire message for Lindy.

  Then, last night, the dreadful experience in bed with Brendan had almost sent her over the edge. At least it had helped to tell someone the Wolf River story, or most of it. Even though he had listened sympathetically and without comment, Lindy didn’t think Brendan had completely bought her theory of a connection between what had happened at the Wolf Lake cabin and her present problems. But at least he hadn’t told her she was crazy.

  When she left him the next morning, Brendan had walked her out to her car and looked at her carefully. “Are you sure you want to make this trip?”

  “I’d rather be doing anything else,” she said, “but I’ve got to go.”

  “Okay. Call me when you get there. What’s the name of the hotel you’ll be staying at?”