“Tell it to the mosquitoes,” Melanie said, slapping her forearm with a sharp percussive crack that echoed out over the lake.

They were on the dock now and there was something in the water, definitely something in the water, and it was no hallucination because they were there with him and they saw it too and if he snatched the flashlight out of Ken’s hand it was because he was in the grip of a dread beyond anything he’d ever known. The beam ricocheted off the surface, running every which way till he steadied it and focused it on what was there in the water, bobbing facedown just off the end of the dock.

“Oh, my God,” one of the women said, and it was the worst moment of his life, of anybody’s life, till the other woman said, “What is it?” and what had been Lori, what he was sure was Lori, transmuted itself into something else altogether, a primate, yes, but one that was so much smaller, one with fur and a tail and hands like fine leather gloves.

“Shit,” Ken said with real vehemence. “Oh, shit.” The beam wavered. He felt his throat clench. “Who’s going to tell Flora Lu?”

Chapter 5

5.

Lori was at breakfast the next morning, barefoot, in a blue terry cloth robe, spooning up cornflakes as if nothing had happened. Her hair was snarled and her eye shadow so smudged she looked as if she’d been squeezed through a tube, but she was alive and whole and the sight of her there at the table surrounded by party guests who’d never left and in some cases hadn’t even gone to bed, made him surge with joy. He’d twice gone down to her room in the middle of the night, but she wasn’t there and that made him panic all over again, convinced that Ken had been wrong, that he’d never seen her at all—or he’d seen her earlier, much earlier, and just hadn’t realized it because of the condition he was in, that they were all in. He kept seeing the drowned monkey, the way it had given up its being to bob there in a spreading stain of its own fluids, and as he lay in his bed drifting in and out of consciousness, it kept sprouting Lori’s limbs and wearing her face and spinning round and round on him in mockery.