Something reached between his legs from behind, grabbing at his genitals. He gave a hoarse bark of fear and whirled around.
She was nude, too; but her breasts had decayed and fallen and Wayne could see the yellow bones of her rib cage through the slack, purple flesh. The gases in her body had long since swelled and exploded, and the skin hung down in putrid tatters. Her nose had collapsed or been nibbled away by fish; there was a hole in the center of her face. Her eyeballs were gelatinous, as yellow-white as pools of lake water about to break over her ruined cheeks. But her hair was the same: long and black and lustrous, as if the years of immersion had preserved it.
"Wayne," the awful mouth whispered. There was a shattered place at the side of her head, where she'd struck a diving platform a long time ago.
He moaned and backed away, toward deeper water.
What was left of Lonnie's face grinned. "I'm waiting for you in Fayette, Wayne. I need you sooooo bad." She came closer, bits of her floating away in the water "I'm still waiting, right where you left me."
"I didn't mean to!" he screamed.
"Oh, I want you to come back to Fayette. I'm so tired of swimmin', and I need my sweet lover boy back again. . . ."
"Didn't mean to . . . didn't mean to . . . didn't mean . . ." He stepped into deep water, sank, and heard himself scream underwater. He fought back to the surface, and now Lonnie was nearing him, holding out one purple claw.
"I need you, sweet thang," she said. "I'm waitin' for you to come home. I need you to heal me."
"Leave me . . . alone . . . please . . . leave me . . ."
He tried to swim away, but then she splashed behind him and her arms curled around his neck again. Her teeth nipped at his ear, and she whispered, "Let me show you what death is like, Wayne."
He sank as her weight became monstrous, as if she were made of concrete instead of rotten flesh and bone. She bore him deep. He opened his mouth; bubbles rushed from him, rising to the churning surface. They turned over and over, locked together as if in some hideous underwater ballet.
The light darkened. His cheek scraped against the bottom of the pool.
And then he was being pulled upward, wrenched to the surface, and dragged out onto the Astro turf. Someone turned him over on his stomach, and pressure squeezed the small of his back. Water streamed from his mouth and nose, and then he was throwing up his dinner and the three Zingers he'd eaten. He moaned, curled up on his side, and began sobbing.
"He'll be all right," Dorn said, stepping away from the body. His suit was soaked, and he glanced at Niles, who stood a few feet away with Felix. "What'd he try to do, drown himself?"
"I don't know." If Felix hadn't heard Wayne scream, Niles knew, the boy would be dead by now. When Dorn had leaped in, Wayne had been down in the deep water, struggling weakly as if trying to escape from something. "Bring me a canister of oxygen," he told Felix. "Fast." The boy's body was almost blue, and he was shivering violently. "And bring a blanket, too. Move it!"
They covered Wayne with the blanket and cupped an oxygen mask to his mouth and nostrils.
The boy shuddered and moaned, and then finally drew a rattling breath. His eyes came open, bulging with terror. Tears slid down his cheeks. He gripped Niles's hands, his fingers digging into the man's flesh.
Niles said quietly to the others, "Mr. Krepsin doesn't have to know about this. It was an accident. Wayne went swimming, and he got water in his lungs." He looked up at them, his eyes darkening. "Mr. Krepsin would be very upset if he thought we almost let Wayne . . . hurt himself. Do you both understand? Okay, he's breathing fine now. Shit, what a mess! Felix, I want you to go to the kitchen and pour Wayne a large glass of orange juice. Bring it up to his room."
Wayne pushed the oxygen mask away from his face. "She was here in the pool and she grabbed me and wanted me to die she's waiting for me she said she wanted me to know what death was like. . . ." His voice cracked, and he clung to Niles like a little boy.
"Help me with him," he told Dorn. "He's got to be ready to leave in the morning."
"No don't make me go back," Wayne moaned. "Please don't make me go back she's waiting for me in the lake she wants me to come back. ..."
"He's flipped his fucking lid!" Dorn picked up the pajamas, his wet shoes squeaking.
"So what else is new? Come on, let's get him upstairs."
"Don't make me go back!" Wayne blubbered. "I want to stay with Mr Krepsin, I want to stay and I'll be a good boy, I'll be good I swear I swear it. ..."
As they reached the glass partition, Niles looked over his shoulder at the pool and thought he saw a shadow—a huge shadow, maybe seven feet tall, that might have been some kind of animal standing on its hind legs—in the corner where there should have been no shadows. He blinked; the shadow was gone.
"What is it?" Dorn asked.
"Nothing. Damn it, this door should've been locked!"
"I thought it was."
"Forever," Wayne said, the tears dripping down his face. "I want to stay here forever Don't make me leave . . . please don't. ..."
Niles turned off the pool's light. For an instant the rippling of disturbed water sounded like a high, inhuman giggle.
TWELVE
Inferno
59
Lizards scampered over rocks baking in the sun. A distant line of sharp-edged mountains shimmered in the midday Mexican heat. As Niles came out of the air-conditioned interior of Krepsin's concrete bunker twenty-five miles north of Torreon, he slipped on his sunglasses to keep from being blinded by a world of burning white.
Niles, immaculate in a khaki suit, walked past Thomas Alvarado's copper Lincoln Continental toward the concrete garage where a few electric carts were kept. Under a brightly striped canvas awning, Wayne Falconer was hitting golf balls out into the desert, where pipe-organ cactus and palmetto grew like a natural barbed-wire fence. Wayne had been urged to find something to do while Krepsin went over business matters with Alvarado, Ten High's Mexican connection.
Wayne hit a ball and shielded his eyes from the glare, watching it bounce across the rocky terrain. It came to rest about twenty yards from one of the observation towers, where a bored Mexican security man dreamt of a cold margarita.
"Nice shot," Niles observed.
Wayne looked up. His eyes were drugged from the extra Valium in his system, his movements slow and heavy. Since the incident at the swimming pool several days before, Wayne had needed careful watching. He fawned over Mr. Krepsin at every opportunity, and Niles was sick of him. Wayne's face was puffy with sunburn.
"I'm almost through with this bucket of balls," he told Niles, his speech slurring. "Get another one."
"Mr Krepsin says my church is going to be the biggest one in the world."
"That's fine." Niles walked past him, in a hurry.
"Are you going out there again?" Wayne asked, motioning with his golf club toward the little white concrete structure about a mile away from the main house. "I saw Lucinda go out there with some food this morning. I saw her come back. Who's out there, Mr Niles?"
The man paid no attention to him. Suddenly there was the whoosh of the golf club, and a ball cracked off the garage wall and ricocheted dangerously close to Niles. He tensed and turned toward Wayne.
Wayne was smiling, but his face was slack and Niles sensed his belligerence. Niles had realized in the last few days that Wayne was jealous of his closeness to Mr. Krepsin. "You thought you could fool me, didn't you?" Wayne asked. "You thought you could put him right under my nose and I wouldn't know."