Dark Screams: Volume Two Read Free Page B

thumb. He couldn’t see anything, dead bugs floated through the light like a dust storm, and a sudden newspaper page drifted up from the bottom, flapped in his face, and sank out of sight again. Glenn’s nerves were near snapping, and he thought with a touch of hysterical mirth that it might have been an obituaries page.
    He lowered his head and descended.
    Murky clouds swirled around him. He probed with the light, alert for another movement. The water felt thick, oily; a contaminated feel. He continued to slide down into the depths, and they closed over him. His fins stirred more pool silt, and the clouds refused the light. He stayed down as long as he could, until his lungs began to heave, and then he rose toward the surface like a flabby arrow.
    When he reached the top, something grasped his head.
    It was a cold, rubbery thing, and Glenn knew it was the grip of death. He couldn’t help it; he shrieked around the snorkel’s mouthpiece, twisted violently in the Water and caught sight of slick green flesh. His frantic movement dislodged the face mask, and water flooded in. He was blinded, water was pressing up his nostrils, and the thing was wrapped around his shoulders. He heard his gurgling underwater scream, flailed the thing off him and thrashed desperately away.
    Glenn kicked to the edge of the pool, raising geysers. The aluminum ladder was in front of him, and he reached up to haul himself out.
    No!
he thought, wrenching his hand back before it touched the metal—or what was supposed to pass as metal. That’s how it had killed Neil. It had emulated the other ladder and entwined itself around Neil as he entered the water, and it had taken him under and killed him in an instant while everyone else was laughing and unaware.
    He swam away from the ladder and hung on to the gutter’s edge. His body convulsed, water gurgling from his nostrils. His dangling legs were vulnerable, and he drew them up against his chest, so fast he kneed himself in the chin. Then he dared to look around and aim the light at the monster.
    About ten feet away, bouncing in the chop of his departure, was a child’s deflated rubber ring, the green head of a seahorse with a grinning red mouth lying in the water.
    Glenn laughed and spat up more of the pool.
Brave man,
he thought.
Real brave. Oh, Jesus, if Linda had been here to see this! I was scared shitless of a kid’s toy!
His laughter got louder, more strident. He laughed until it dawned on him that he was holding his face mask’s strap around his right wrist, and his right hand gripped the gutter.
    In his left hand was the underwater light.
    He had lost his snorkel. And the speargun.
    His laughter ceased on a broken note.
    Fear shot up his spine. He squinted, saw the snorkel bobbing on the surface five or six feet away. The speargun had gone to the bottom.
    He didn’t think about getting out of the pool. His body just did it, scrabbling up over the sloshing gutter to the concrete, where he lay on his belly in the rain and shivered with terror.
    Without the speargun, he had no chance.
I can use the chain cutter,
he thought.
Snap the bastard’s head off! But no, no:
The chain cutter needed two hands, and he had to have a hand free to hold the light. He thought of driving back to Birmingham, buying another speargun, but it occurred to him that if he got in the car and left Parnell Park, his guts might turn to jelly on the highway and Neil’s voice would haunt him:
“You know I didn’t drown, don’t you, Dad? You know I didn’t…”
    He might get in that car and drive away and never come back, and today was the last day of summer, and when they opened the drain in the morning, the monster would go back to the lake and await another season of victims.
    He knew what he had to do. Must do. Must. He had to put the face mask back on, retrieve the snorkel, and go down after that speargun. He lay with his cheek pressed against the concrete and stared at the black water; how many summer days