Shivers 7 Read Free Page A

shore behind him.
    He dives through the cattails, hits the water, and starts swimming.
    Bill is a good swimmer.
    And fast.

    * * *

    It’s a hot day. Been hot for a week now. Pushing a hundred degrees every day, and no breeze at all, and about six kinds of miserable if you’re not eating an ice-cream cone or sitting cool and cozy in an air-conditioned movie theater. So the water feels pretty good to our friend Bill.
    Or it should. After all, the water’s cold, like that August sun up there in the sky doesn’t bother it at all. Cold enough to raise gooseflesh on your skin. October cold. You’d think more kids would be at the lake on a day like this, because it isn’t that far from town. It’s just a mile or so off a country road which is a mile or so from the tract-house neighborhood where Bill and Jason both live.
    Yeah. You’d think more kids would be here today, relaxing in the shade beneath the old oak trees, taking a cool dip in the heat of the late afternoon. But no one comes to the lake much anymore.
    To tell the truth, it was never really good for swimming anyway. First off there are the cattails, which rim most of the lake. They’re like some kind of wall, and the little scab of a beach where Bill and Jason spotted the stranger is one of the few places where you can actually wade straight out into the water if you want to.
    You do that, you find out PDQ that the lake bottom is slimy muck. Kind of stuff that sucks at your feet like it wants to gobble ’em up while you wade through it. You get out a little further, to a place where it’s actually deep enough to swim, you run into clots of water lilies. They blanket big sections of the glassy surface and they’re cold and slimy and they make Bill think of dead fish floating belly up. He can’t stand them.
    So the lake’s no good for swimming. Oh, maybe kids might try it once in a while. Maybe they’d come here and swim across the lake... but only on a dare. And as far as dares go, it’d have to be a double-dog after that little girl drowned last year.
    It’s her ghost that kids have been talking about all summer. Some say they’ve seen her walking along the country road at night in wet cutoffs and a T-shirt, trying to find her way home. Others—mostly older kids, teenagers who visit the lake to drink beer—say they’ve heard her voice soughing through the cattails with the evening breeze. Sometimes Bill believes those stories and sometimes he doesn’t. Either way they scare him, and like any good detective he wants to know the truth. That’s why he and Jason came to the lake today with sleeping bags, canteens, and knapsacks packed with dinner. They’d planned to camp out tonight and find out for themselves if there’s really a ghost or not.
    One thing’s for sure—if there is a ghost, Bill and Jason are bound to recognize her, because the drowned girl was in their class. Her name was Cheryl Ann Rose. She took a dare from her friends last summer, tried to swim across the lake on a hot August afternoon. Liza Rycott said Cheryl Ann was doing fine until she hit one of those clots of water lilies. She went under and that was the last they saw of her. Took the cops three days to find Cheryl Ann’s body down there in that cold black water, down there in the mud with only a blanket of water lilies to keep her warm—
    No. Bill’s not going to think about Cheryl Ann. He can’t afford to do that now. Because he’s closing in on the bag. If he starts thinking about Cheryl Ann, he’s going to start thinking that every plant that brushes his foot is her ghostly hand, trying to pull him under.
    So he thinks about the bag instead, and that’s all he thinks about. As he raises his head for a breath he can see that the bag is mostly underwater, but the knotted end and a couple three inches of canvas still break above the surface. The material isn’t entirely saturated with water yet, and since the bag’s still floating there’s got to be a pocket of air