Dark Screams: Volume Two Read Free Page A

water had not yet gone back to the lake, and the monster that had killed Neil was still in there. Somewhere.
    He walked back to the car, got the underwater light and the speargun. It was getting dark, and he switched the light on.
    He wanted to make sure the thing found him once he was in the water—and the light should draw it like a neon sign over a roadside diner.
    Glenn sat on the edge of the pool and put on his fins. He had to remove his glasses to wear the face mask; everything was out of focus, but it was the best he could do. He fit the snorkel into his mouth, hefted the underwater light in his left hand, and slowly eased himself over the edge.
    I’m ready,
he told himself. He was shaking, couldn’t stop. The water, untended for more than two weeks, was dirty—littered with Coke cups, cigarette butts, dead waterbugs. The carcass of a blue jay floated past his face, and Glenn thought that it appeared to have been crushed.
    He turned over on his stomach, put his head underwater, and kicked off against the pool’s side, making a splash that sounded jarringly loud. He began to drift out over the drain, directing the light’s yellow beam through the water. Around and beneath him was gray murk. But the light suddenly glinted off something, and Glenn arched down through the chill to see what it was—a beer can on the bottom. Still, the monster could be anywhere.
Anywhere.
He slid to the surface, expelling water through the snorkel like a whale. Then he continued slowly across the pool, his heartbeat pounding in his ears and the sound of his breathing like a hellish bellows through the snorkel. In another moment his head bumped the other side of the pool. He drifted in another direction, guiding himself with an occasional thrust of a fin.
    Come on, damn you!
Glenn thought.
I know you’re here!
    But nothing moved in the depths below. He shone the light around, seeking a shadow.
    I’m not crazy,
he told himself.
I’m really not.
His head was hurting again, and his mask was leaking, the water beginning to creep up under his nose.
Come out and fight me, damn you! I’m in your element now, you bastard! Come on!
    Linda had asked him to see a doctor in Birmingham. She said she’d go with him, and the doctor would listen. There was no monster in the swimming pool, she’d said. And if there
was,
where had it come from?
    Glenn knew. Since Neil’s death, Glenn had done a lot of thinking and reading. He’d gone back through the
Courier
files, searching for any information about the Parnell Park swimming pool. He’d found that, for the last five years, at least one person had died in the pool every summer. Before that you had to go back eight years to find a drowning victim—an elderly man who’d already suffered one heart attack.
    But it had been in a copy of the Birmingham
News,
dated October tenth six years ago, that Glenn had found his answer.
    The article’s headline read “ ‘Bright Light’ Frightens Lake Residents.”
    On the night of October ninth, a sphere of blue fire had been seen by a dozen people who lived around Logan Martin Lake. It had flashed across the sky, making a noise—as one resident put it—“like steam whistling out of a cracked radiator.” The blue light had gone down into the lake, and for the next two days, dead fish washed up on shore.
    You found the pipes that brought you up into our swimming pool, didn’t you?
Glenn thought, as he explored the gray depths with his light. Maybe you came from somewhere that’s all water, and you can’t live on land. Maybe you can suck the life out of a human body just as fast and easy as some of us step on ants. Maybe that’s what you live on—but by God I’ve come to stick you, and I’ll find you if I have to search all—
    Something moved.
    Down in the gloom, below him. Down near the drain. A shadow…
something.
    Glenn wasn’t sure what it was. He just sensed a slow, powerful uncoiling.
    He pushed the speargun’s safety off with his