"The Great and Secret Show" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

PART TWO: THE LEAGUE OF VIRGINS

The girls went down to the water twice. The first time was the day after the rainstorm that had broken over Ventura County, shedding more water on the small town of Palomo Grove in a single night than its inhabitants might have reasonably expected in a year. The downpour, however monsoonal, had not mellowed the heat. With what Me wind there was coming off the desert, the town baked in the high nineties. Children who'd exhausted themselves playing in the heat through the morning wailed away the afternoon indoors. Dogs cursed their coats; birds declined to make music. Old folks took to their beds. Adulterers did the same, dressed in sweat. Those unfortunates with tasks to per-form that couldn't be delayed until evening, when (God wiling) the temperature dropped, went about their labors with their eyes to the shimmering sidewalks, every step a trial, every breath sticky in their lungs.

But the four girls were used to heat; it was at their age the condition of the blood. Between them, they had seventy years' life on the planet, though when Arleen turned nineteen the following Tuesday, it would be seventy-one. Today she felt her age; that vital few months that separated her from her closest friend, Joyce, and even further from Carolyn and Trudi, whose mere seventeen was an age away for a mature woman like herself. She had much to tell on the subject of experience that day, as they sauntered through the empty streets of Palomo Grove. It was good to be out on a day like this, without being ogled by the men in the town#8212;they knew them all by name#8212;whose wives had taken to sleeping in the spare room; or their sexual banter being overheard by one of their mothers' friends. They wandered, like Amazons in shorts, through a town taken by some invisible fire which blistered the air and turned brick into mirage but did not kill. It merely laid the inhabitants stricken beside their open fridges.

"Is it love?" Joyce asked Arleen.

The older girl had a swift answer.

"Hell no," she said. "You are so dumb sometimes."

"I just thought...with you talking about him that way."

"What do you mean: that way?"

"Talking about his eyes and stuff."

"Randy's got nice eyes," Arleen conceded. "But so's Marty, and Jim, and Adam#8212;"

"Oh stop," said Trudi, with more than a trace of irritation. "You're such a slut."

"I am not."

"So stop it with the names. We all know that boys like you. And we all know why."

Arleen threw her a look which went unread given that all but Carolyn were wearing sunglasses. They walked on a few yards in silence.

"Anyone want a Coke?" Carolyn said. "Or ice cream?" They'd come to the bottom of the hill. The Mall was ahead, its air-conditioned stores tempting.

"Sure," said Trudi, "I'll come with you." She turned to Arleen. "You want something?"

"Nope."

"Are you sulking?"

"Nope."

"Good," said Trudi. " 'Cause it's too hot to argue." The two girls headed into Marvin's Food and Drug, leaving Arleen and Joyce on the street corner.

"I'm sorry..." Joyce said.

"What about?"

"Asking you about Randy. I thought maybe you...you know...maybe it was serious."

"There's no one in the Grove that's worth two cents," Arleen murmured. "I can't wait to get out."

"Where will you go? Los Angeles?"

Arleen pulled her sunglasses down her nose and peered at Joyce.

"Why would I want to do that?" she said. "I've got more sense than to join the line there. No. I'm going to New York. It's better to study there. Then work on Broadway. If they want me they can come and get me."

"Who can?"

"Joyce, " Arleen said, mock-exasperated. "Hollywood."

"Oh. Yeah. Hollywood."

She nodded appreciatively at the completedness of Ar-leen's plan. She had nothing in her own head anywhere near so coherent. But it was easy for Arleen. She was California Beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed and the envied possessor of a smile that brought the opposite sex to their knees. If that weren't advantage enough she had a mother who'd been an actress, and already treated her daughter like a Star.

Joyce had no such blessings. No mother to pave the way, no glamour to get her through the bad times. She couldn't even drink a Coke without getting acne. Sensitive skin, Doctor Briskman kept saying, you'll grow out of it. But the promised transformation was like the end of the world that the Reverend talked about on a Sunday; delayed and delayed.

With my luck, Joyce thought, the day I lose my zits and get my tits is the day the Reverend's right. I'll wake up perfect, open the curtains, and the Grove will be gone. I'll never get to kiss Randy Krentzman.

There, of course, lay the real reason behind her close questioning of Arleen. Randy was in Joyce's every thought, or every other, though she'd only met him three times and spoken to him twice. She'd been with Arleen during the first encounter, and Randy had scarcely looked her way when she was introduced, so she'd said nothing. The second occasion she'd not had any competition, but her friendly hello had been greeted with an off-hand: "Who are you?" She'd persisted; reminded him; even told him where she lived. On the third meeting ("Hello again," she'd said. "Do I know you?" he'd replied), she'd recited all her personal details shamelessly; even asked him, in a sudden rush of optimism, if he was a Mormon. That, she'd later decided, had been a tactical error. Next time she'd use Arleen's approach, and treat the boy as though his presence was barely endurable; never look at him; only smile if it was absolutely necessary. Then, when you were about to saunter away look straight into his eyes, and purr something vaguely dirty. The law of mixed messages. It worked for Arleen, why not for her? And now that the great beauty had publicly announced her indifference to Joyce's idol she had some sliver of hope. If Arleen had been seriously interested in Randy's affections then Joyce might have gone right around to the Reverend Meuse and asked him if he could hurry the Apocalypse up a little.

She took off her glasses and squinted up at the white hot sky, vaguely wondering if it was already on its way. The day was strange.

"Shouldn't do that," Carolyn said, emerging from Mar-vin's Food and Drug with Trudi following, "the sun'll burn out your eyes."

"It will not."

"It will so," Carolyn, ever the source of unwanted information, replied, "your retina's a lens. Like in a camera. It focuses#8212;"

"All right," Joyce said, returning her gaze to solid ground. "I believe you." Colors cavorted behind her eyes for a few moments, disorienting her.

"Where now?" said Trudi.

"I'm going back home," Arleen said. "I'm tired."

"I'm not," Trudi said brightly. "I'm not going home, either. It's boring."

"Well it's no use standing in the middle of the Mall," Carolyn said. "That's as boring as being at home. And we'll cook in the sun."

She looked roasted already. The heaviest of the four by twenty pounds or more, and a redhead, the combination of her weight, and skin that never tanned, should have driven her indoors. But she seemed indifferent to the discomfort, as she was to every other physical stimulus but that of taste. The previous November the entire Hotchkiss family had been involved in a freeway pile-up. Carolyn had crawled free of the wreckage, slightly concussed, and had subsequently been found by the police some way down the freeway, with half-chewed Hershey bars in both hands. There was more chocolate on her face than blood, and she'd screamed blue murder#8212;or so rumor went#8212;when one of the cops attempted to dissuade her from her snack. Only later was it discovered that she'd sustained half a dozen cracked ribs.

"So where?" said Trudi, returning to the burning issue of the day. "In this heat: where?"

"We'll just walk," said Joyce. "Maybe down to the woods. It'll be cooler there." She glanced at Arleen. "Are you coming?"

Arleen made her companions hang on her silence for ten seconds. Finally she agreed.

"Nowhere better to go," she said.

Most towns, however small, make themselves after the pattern of a city. That is, they divide. White from black, straight from gay, wealthy from less wealthy, less wealthy from poor. Palomo Grove, the population of which was in that year, 1971, a mere one thousand two hundred, was no exception. Built on the flanks of a gently sloping hillside, the town had been designed as an embodiment of democratic principles, in which every occupant was intended to have equal access to the center of power in the town, the Mall. It lay at the bottom of Sunrise Hill, known simply as the Hill, with four villages#8212;Stillbrook, Deerdell, Laureltree and Windbluff#8212;radiating from its hub, their feed thoroughfares aligned with the compass points. But that was as far as the planners' idealism went. Thereafter the subtle differences in the geography of the villages made each quite different in character. Wind-bluff, which lay on the southwest flank of the hill, commanded the best views, and its properties the highest prices. The top third of the Hill was dominated by half a dozen grand residences, their roofs barely visible behind lush foliage. On the lower slopes of this Olympus were the Five Crescents, streets bowed upon themselves, which were#8212;if you couldn't afford a house at the very top#8212;the next most desirable places to live.

By contrast, Deerdell. Built on flat ground, and flanked on two sides by undeveloped woodland, this quadrant of the Grove had rapidly gone downhill. Here the houses lacked pools and needed paint. For some, the locale was a hip retreat. There were, even in 1971, a few artists living in Deerdell; that community would steadily grow. But if there was anywhere in the Grove where people went in fear for their automobiles' paintwork, it was here.

Between these two extremes, socially and geographically, lay Stillbrook and Laureltree, the latter thought marginally more upscale because several of its streets were built on the second flank of the Hill, their scale and their prices less modest with every bend the streets took as they climbed.

None of the quartet were residents of Deerdell. Arleen lived on Emerson, the second highest of the Crescents, Joyce and Carolyn within a block of each other on Steeple Chase Drive in Stillbrook Village, and Trudi in Laureltree. So there was a certain adventure in treading the streets of the East Grove, where their parents had seldom, if ever, ventured. Even if they had strayed down here, they'd certainly never gone where the girls now went: into the woods.

"It's no cooler," Arleen complained when they'd been wandering a few minutes. "In fact, it's worse."

She was right. Though the foliage kept the stare of the sun off their heads, the heat still found its way between the branches. Trapped, it made the damp air steamy.

"I haven't been here for years," Trudi said, whipping a switch of stripped twig back and forth through a cloud of gnats. "I used to come with my brother."

"How is he?" Joyce enquired.

"Still in the hospital. He's never going to come out. All the family knows that but nobody ever says it. Makes me sick."

Sam Katz had been drafted and gone to Vietnam fit in mind and body. In the third month of his tour of duty all that had been undone by a land mine, which had killed two of his comrades and badly injured him. There'd been a squirmingly uneasy homecoming, the Grove's little mighty lined up to greet the crippled hero. What followed was much talk of heroism and sacrifice; much drinking; some hidden tears. Through it all Sam Katz had sat stony featured, not setting his face against the celebrations but detached from them, as though his mind were still rehearsing the moment when his youth had been blown to smithereens. A few weeks later he'd been taken back to the hospital. Though his mother had told enquirers it was for corrective surgery to his spine the months dragged on until they became years, and Sam didn't reappear.

Everyone guessed the reason, though it went unadmitted. Sam's physical wounds had healed adequately well. But his mind had not proved so resilient. The detachment he'd evidenced at his homecoming party had deepened into cata-tonia.

All the other girls had known Sam, though the age difference between Joyce and her brother had been sufficient for them to have looked upon him almost as another species. Not simply male, which was strange enough, but old, too. Once past puberty, however, the roller-coaster ride began to speed. They could see twenty-five up ahead: a little way yet, but visible. And the waste of Sam's life began to make sense to them the way it could never have made sense to an eleven-year-old. Fond, sad memories of him silenced them for a while. They walked on through the heat, their bodies side by side, arms occasionally brushing arms, their minds diverging. Trudi's thoughts were of those childhood games, played with Sam in these thickets. He'd been an indulgent older brother, allowing her to tag along when she was seven or eight, and he thirteen. A year later, when his juices started telling him girls and sisters weren't the same animal, the invitations to play war had ceased. She'd mourned the loss of him; a rehearsal for the mourning she'd felt more acutely later. She saw his face in her mind now, a weird melding of the boy he'd been and the man he was; of the life he'd had and the death he lived. It made her hurt.

For Carolyn, there were few hurts, at least in her waking life. And today#8212;barring her wishing she'd bought a second ice cream#8212;none. Night was quite a different matter. She had bad dreams; of earthquakes. In them Palomo Grove would fold up like a canvas chair and disappear into the earth. That was the penalty for knowing too much, her father had told her. She'd inherited his fierce curiosity, and had applied it#8212; from first hearing of the San Andreas Fault#8212;to a study of the earth they walked upon. Its solidity could not be trusted. Beneath their feet, she knew, the ground was riddled with fissures, which might at any moment gape, as they would gape beneath Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, all the way up and down the West Coast, swallowing the lot. She kept her anxieties at bay with swallowings of her own: a sort of sympathetic magic. She was fat because the earth's crust was thin; an irrefutable excuse for gluttony.

Arleen cast a glance over at the Fat Girl. It never hurt, her mother had once instructed her, to keep the company of the less attractive. Though no longer in the public eye, the sometime star Kate Farrell still surrounded herself with dowdy women, in whose company her looks were twice as compelling. But for Arleen, especially on days like today, it seemed too high a price. Though they flattered her looks she didn't really like her companions. Once she'd have counted them her dearest friends. Now they were reminders of a life from which she could not escape quickly enough. But how else was she going to spend the time till her parole came through? Even the joys of sitting in front of the mirror palled after a time. The sooner I'm out of here, she thought, the sooner I'm happy.

Had she been able to read Arleen's mind Joyce would have applauded the urgency. But she was lost in thoughts of how best to arrange an accidental encounter with Randy. If she made a casual enquiry about his routines Arleen would guess her purpose, and she might be selfish enough to spike Joyce's chances even though she had no interest in the boy herself. Joyce was a fine reader of character, and knew it was quite within Arleen's capabilities to be so perverse. But then who was she to condemn perversity? She was pursuing a male who'd three times made his indifference to her perfectly plain. Why couldn't she just forget him and save herself the grief of rejection? Because love wasn't like that. It made you fly in the face of the evidence, however compelling.

She sighed audibly.

"Something wrong?" Carolyn wanted to know.

"Just...hot," Joyce replied.

"Anyone we know?" Trudi said. Before Joyce could muster an adequately disparaging reply she caught sight of something glittering through the trees ahead.

"Water," she said.

Carolyn had seen it too. Its brightness made her squint.

"Lots of it," she said.

"I didn't know there was a lake down here," Joyce remarked, turning to Trudi.

"There wasn't," came the reply. "Not that I remember."

"Well there is now," said Carolyn.

She was already forging ahead through the foliage, not caring to take the less thronged route. Her blundering passage cleared a way for the others.

"Looks like we're going to get cool after all," Trudi said, and went after her at a run.

It was indeed a lake, maybe fifty feet wide, its placid surface broken by half-submerged trees, and islands of shrubbery.

"Flood water," Carolyn said. "We're right at the bottom of the hill here. It must have gathered after the storm."

"That's a lot of water," Joyce said. "Did this all fall last night?"

"If it didn't where did it come from?" Carolyn said.

"Who cares?" said Trudi. "It looks cool."

She moved past Carolyn to the very edge of the water. The ground became more swampy underfoot with every step, mud rising up over her sandals. But the water, when she reached it, was as good as its promise: refreshingly cold. She crouched down, and put her hand in the lake, bringing a palmful of it up to splash her face.

"I wouldn't do that," Carolyn cautioned. "It's probably full of chemicals."

"It's only rainwater," Trudi replied. "What's cleaner than that?"

Carolyn shrugged. "Please yourself," she said.

"I wonder how deep it is?" Joyce mused. "Deep enough to swim, do you think?"

"Shouldn't have thought so," Carolyn commented.

"Don't know till we try," Trudi said, and began to wade out into the lake. She could see grass and flowers beneath her feet; drowned now. The earth itself was soft, and her steps stirred up clouds of mud, but she advanced until she was in deep enough for the hem of her shorts to be soaked.

The water was cold. It brought gooseflesh. But that was preferable to the sweat that had stuck her blouse to her breasts and spine. She looked back towards the shore.

"Feels great," she said. "I'm going in."

"Like that?" Arleen said.

"Of course not." Trudi waded back towards the trio, pulling her blouse out of her shorts as she went. The air rising from the water tingled against her skin, its frisson welcome. She wore nothing beneath, and would normally have been more modest, even in front of her friends, but the lake's invitation was not to be postponed.

"Anybody going to join me?" she asked as she stepped back among the others.

"I am," Joyce said, already unknotting her sneakers.

"I think we should keep our shoes on," Trudi said. "We don't know what's underfoot."

"It's only grass," said Joyce. She sat down and worked on the knots, grinning. "This is great," she said.

Arleen was watching her whooping enthusiasm with disdain.

"You two not joining us?" Trudi said.

"No," Arleen said.

"Afraid your mascara'll run?" Joyce replied, her grin widening.

"Nobody's going to see," said Trudi, before a rift developed. "Carolyn? What about you?"

The girl shrugged. "Can't swim," she said.

"It's not deep enough to swim in."

"You don't know that," Carolyn observed. "You only waded out a few yards."

"So stay close to the shore. You'll be safe there."

"Maybe," Carolyn said, far from convinced.

"Trudi's right," Joyce said, sensing Carolyn's reluctance was as much to do with uncovering her fat as with swimming. "Who's going to see us?"

As she stripped off her shorts it occurred to her that any number of peepers might be hidden among the trees, but what the heck? Wasn't the Reverend forever saying life was short? Best not to waste it then. She stepped out of her underwear and started into the water.

William Witt knew each one of the bathers' names. In fact he knew the names of every woman in the Grove under forty, and where they lived, and which was their bedroom window; a feat of memory which he declined to boast of to any of his schoolmates for fear they spread it around. Though he could see nothing wrong with looking through windows he knew enough to know it was frowned upon. And yet he'd been born with eyes, hadn't he? Why shouldn't he use them? Where was the harm in watching? It wasn't like stealing, or lying, or killing people. It was just doing what God had created eyes to do, and he couldn't see what was criminal in that.

He crouched, hidden by trees, half a dozen yards from the edge of the water, and twice that distance from the girls, watching them undress. Arleen Farrell was hanging back, he saw, which frustrated him. To see her naked would be an achievement even he'd not be able to keep to himself. She was the most beautiful girl in Palomo Grove: sleek and blonde and snooty, the way movie stars were supposed to be. The other two, Trudi Katz and Joyce McGuire, were already in the water, so he turned his attentions to Carolyn Hotchkiss, who was even now taking off her bra. Her breasts were heavy, and pink, and the sight of them made him hard in his trousers. Though she stripped off her shorts and panties he kept staring at her breasts. He couldn't understand the fascination some of the other boys#8212;he was ten#8212;had with that lower part; it seemed so much less exciting than the bosom, which was as different from girl to girl as her nose or hips. The other, the part he didn't like any of the words for, seemed to him quite uninteresting: a patch of hair with a slit buried in the middle. What was the big deal about that?

He watched as Carolyn stepped into the water, only just suppressing a giggle of pleasure when she responded to the cold water with a half step backwards which set her flesh jiggling like jello.

"Come on! It's wonderful!" the Katz girl was coaxing her.

Plucking up her courage, Carolyn advanced a few more steps.

And now#8212;William could scarcely believe his luck#8212;Ar-leen was taking off her hat and unbuttoning her halter top. She was joining them after all. He forgot the others and fixed his gaze on Miss Sleek. As soon as he'd realized what the girls#8212;whom he'd been following for an hour, unsuspected#8212; were planning to do, his heart had started thumping so hard he thought he'd be ill. Now that thump redoubled, as the prospect of Arleen's breasts came before him. Nothing#8212;not even fear of death#8212;would have made him look away. He set himself the challenge of memorizing every tiny motion, so as to add veracity to his account when he told it to disbelievers.

She went slowly about it. If he'd not known better he'd have suspected she knew she had an audience, the way she teased and paraded. Her bosom was a disappointment. Not as large as Carolyn's, nor boasting large, dark nipples like Joyce's. But the overall impression, when she stepped from her cut-off jeans and slid down her panties, was wonderful. It made him feel almost panicky to see her. His teeth chattered like he had the flu. His face got hot, his innards seemed to rattle. Later in life William would tell his analyst that this was the first moment he realized that he was going to die. In fact that was hindsight speaking. Death was very far from his mind now. And yet the sight of Arleen's nakedness, and his invisibility as he witnessed it, did mark this moment as one which he would never quite outgrow. Events were about to occur that would temporarily make him wish he'd never come peeping (he'd live in fear of the memory, in fact), but when, after several years, the terror mellowed, he returned to the image of Arleen Farrell stepping into the waters of this sudden lake, as to an icon.

It was not the moment that he first knew he was going to die; but it was perhaps the first time he understood that ceasing would not be so bad, if beauty was there to escort him on his way.

The lake was seductive, its embrace cool but reassuring. There was no undertow, as at the beach. No surf beating against your back nor salt stinging your eyes. It was like a swimming pool created for the four of them only; an idyll that no one else in the Grove had access to.

Trudi was the strongest swimmer of the quartet, and it was she who headed from the shore with the greatest vigor, discovering, as she went, that contrary to expectation the water was getting deeper all the time. It must have gathered where the ground dipped naturally, she reasoned, perhaps even in a place where there'd once been a small lake, though she could remember no such spot from her ramblings with Sam. The grass had now gone from beneath her toes, which brushed instead bare rock.

"Don't go too far," Joyce called to her.

She turned. The shore was further than she'd estimated, the glaze of water in her eyes reducing her friends to three pink blurs, one blonde, two brunettes, half submerged in the same sweet-tasting element as she. It would be impossible to keep this fragment of Eden to themselves unfortunately. Arleen would be bound to talk about it. By evening the secret would be out. By tomorrow, thronged. They'd better make the most of their privacy. So thinking, she struck out for the middle of the lake.

Ten yards closer to shore, sculling along on her back in water no more than navel-deep, Joyce watched Arleen at the lake's edge, stooping to splash her belly and breasts. A spasm of envy for her friend's beauty went through her. No wonder the Randy Krentzmans of the world went gaga at the sight of her. She found herself wondering what it would be like to stroke Arleen's hair, the way a boy would, or kiss her breasts, or her lips. The idea possessed her so suddenly and so forcibly she lost her balance in the water, and swallowed a mouthful as she tried to right herself. Once she had, she turned her back on Arleen, and with a splashing stroke headed into deeper waters.

Up ahead Trudi was shouting something to her.

"What did you say?" Joyce yelled back, subduing her stroke so as to hear better.

Trudi was laughing. "Warm!" she said, splashing around, "it's warm out here!"

"Are you kidding?"

"Come and feel!" Trudi replied.

Joyce began to swim out to where Trudi was treading water, but her friend was already turning from her to follow the call-of the warmth. Joyce could not resist glancing back at Arleen. She had finally deigned to join the swimming party, immersing herself till her long hair spread around her neck like a golden collar, then starting an even-paced stroke towards the center of the lake. Joyce felt something close to fear at the thought of Arleen's proximity. She wanted some leavening company.

"Carolyn!" she called. "Are you coming?"

Carolyn shook her head.

"It's warmer out here," Joyce promised.

"I don't believe you."

"Really it is!" Trudi shouted. "It's beautiful!"

Carolyn seemed to relent, and began to splash her way in Trudi's wake.

Trudi swam on a few more yards. The water was not getting any warmer, but it was becoming more agitated, bubbling up around her like a Jacuzzi. Suddenly unnerved she tried to touch bottom, but the ground had gone from beneath her. Mere yards behind her the water had been at most four and a half feet deep; now her toes didn't even graze solid earth. The ground must have slid away violently, at almost the same spot that the warm current had appeared. Taking courage from the fact that three strokes would take her back to safety she ducked her head below the water.

Though her eyes were bad at a distance her short-range sight was good, and the water was clear. She could see down the length of her body to her pedalling feet. Beyond them, solid darkness. The ground had simply vanished. Shock made her gasp. She breathed water in through her nose. Spluttering and flailing she threw her head up to snatch some air.

Joyce was yelling to her.

"Trudi? What's wrong? Trudi?"

She tried to form some words of warning, but a primal terror had seized her: all she could do was throw herself in the direction of the shore, her panic merely churning the water to fresh and choking frenzy. Darkness below, and something warm there, waiting to pull me down.

In his hiding place on the shore William Witt saw the girl struggling. Her panic made him lose his erection. Something odd was happening out on the lake. He could see darts on the water's surface, circling Trudi Katz, like fish that were only just submerged. Some were breaking off and sliding towards the other girls. He didn't dare cry out. If he did they'd know he'd been spying on them. All he could do was watch with mounting trepidation as the events in the lake unfolded.

Joyce felt the warmth next. It ran over her skin and inside her too, like a swallow of Christmas brandy, coating her innards. The sensation distracted her from Trudi's splashing, and indeed from her own jeopardy. She watched the darting water, and the bubbles breaking the surface all around her, popping like lava, slow and thick, with an odd detachment. Even when she tried to touch bottom, and couldn't, the thought that she might drown was a casual one. There were more important feelings. One, that the air breaking from the bubbles around her was the lake's breath, and breathing it was like kissing the lake. Two, that Arleen would be swimming this way very soon, the golden collar of hair floating in the water behind her. Seduced by the pleasure of the warm water, she didn't forbid herself the thoughts she'd turned her back on mere moments before. Here they were, she and Arleen, buoyed up in the same body of sweet water, getting closer and closer to each other, while the element between them carried the echoes of their every motion back and forth. Perhaps they would dissolve in the water, their bodies become fluid, until they mingled in the lake. She and Arleen, one mixture, released from any need for shame; beyond sex into blissful singularity.

The possibility was too exquisite to be postponed a moment longer. She threw her arms above her head and let herself sink. The spell of the lake, however, powerful as it was, couldn't quite discipline the animal panic that rose in her as the water closed over her head. Without her willing it, her body began to resist the pact she'd made with the water. She began to struggle wildly, reaching up to the surface as if to snatch a handhold of air.

Both Arleen and Trudi saw Joyce go under. Arleen instantly went to her aid, shouting as she swam. Her agitation was matched by the water around her. Bubbles rose on all sides. She felt their passage, like hands brushing her belly, her breasts and between her legs. At their caress the same dreaminess that had caught Joyce, and had now subdued Trudi's panic, took hold of her. There was no specific object of desire to carry her under, however. Joyce was conjuring the image of Randy Krentzman (who else?) but for Arleen her seducer was a crazy quilt of famous faces. Dean's cheekbones, Sinatra's eyes, Brando's sneer. She succumbed to this patchwork the same way Joyce and, a few yards from her Trudi, had. She threw up her arms and let the waters take. her.

From the safety of the shallows Carolyn watched the behavior of her friends, appalled. Seeing Joyce go under she'd assumed there was something in the water, dragging her down. But the behavior of Arleen and Trudi gave the lie to that. She witnessed them plainly giving up. Nor was this simple suicide. She'd been close enough to Arleen to observe a look of pleasure crossing that beautiful face before it sank. She'd even smiled! Smiled, then let herself go.

These three girls were Carolyn's only friends in the world. She could not simply watch them drown. Though the water where they'd disappeared was becoming more frenzied by the moment she struck out for the place using the only stroke she was faintly proficient in: an ungainly mixture of doggy-paddle and crawl. Natural laws, she knew, were on her side. Fat floated. But that was little comfort as she saw the ground falling away beneath her feet. The bottom of the lake had vanished. She was swimming over a fissure, which was somehow claiming the other girls.

Ahead of her, an arm broke the surface. In desperation she reached for it. Reached; snatched; connected. As she took hold, however, the water around her began to churn with fresh fury. She made a cry of horror. Then the hand she'd grasped took fierce hold of her, and dragged her down.

The world went out like a pinched flame. Her senses deserted her. If she was still holding somebody's fingers she couldn't feel them. Nor, though her eyes were open, could she see anything in the murk. Vaguely, distantly, she was aware that her body was drowning; that her lungs were filling with water through her gaping mouth, her last breath leaving her. But her mind had forsaken its casing and was drifting away from the flesh it had been hostage to. She saw that flesh now: not with her physical eyes (they were still in her head, rolling wildly) but with her mind's sight. A barrel of fat, rolling and pitching as it sank. She felt nothing for its demise, except perhaps disgust at the rolls of blubber, and the absurd inelegance of her distress. In the water beyond her body the other girls still resisted. Their thrashings were also, she presumed, merely instinctual. Their minds, like hers, had probably floated out of their heads, and were watching the spectacle with the same dispassion. True, their bodies were more attractive than hers, and thus perhaps more painful in the losing. But resistance was, in the end, a waste of effort. They were all going to die very soon, here in the middle of this midsummer lake. Why?

As she asked the question her eyeless gaze offered the answer. There was something in the darkness below her floating mind. She could not see it, but she felt it. A power#8212;no, two powers#8212;whose breaths were the bubbles that had broken around them and whose arms the eddies that beckoned them to be corpses. She looked back at her body, which still struggled for air. Her legs were pedalling the water madly. Between them, her virgin cunt. Momentarily she felt a pang for pleasures that she'd never risked pursuing, and would never now have. Damn fool that she was, to have valued pride over sensation. Mere ego seemed a nonsense now. She should have asked for the act from every man who'd looked at her twice, and not been content till one had said yes. All that system of nerves and tubes and eggs, going to death unused. The waste of it was the only thing here that smacked of tragedy.

Her gaze returned to the darkness of the fissure. The twin forces she'd sensed there were still approaching. She could see them now; vague forms, like stains in the water. One was bright; or at least brighter than the other. But that was the only distinction she could make. If either had features they were too blurred to be seen, and the rest#8212;limbs and torso#8212;were lost in the shoals of dark bubbles that rose with them. They could not disguise their purpose, however. Her mind grasped that all too easily. They were emerging from the fissure to claim the flesh from which her thoughts were now mercifully disconnected. Let them have their bounty, she thought. It had been a burden, that body, and she was glad to be rid of it. The rising powers had no jurisdiction over her thoughts; nor sought any. Flesh was their ambition; and they each wanted the entire quartet. Why else were they struggling with each other, stains light and dark interwoven like a barber's pole as they rose to snatch the bodies down?

She had assumed herself free prematurely. As the first tendrils of mingled spirit touched her foot the precious moments of liberation ceased. She was called back into her cranium, the door of her skull slamming behind her with a crack. Eyesight replaced mindsight; pain and panic, that sweet detachment. She saw the warring spirits wrap themselves around her. She was a morsel, pulled back and forth between them as they each fought to possess her. The why of it beyond her. She would be dead in seconds. It mattered not at all to her which claimed the corpse, the bright or the less than bright. Both, if they wanted her sex (she felt their investigations there, even at the last), would have no joy back from her, nor from any of them. They were gone; the four of them.

Even as she relinquished the last bubble of breath from her throat, a gleam of sunlight hit her eyes. Could it be she was rising again? Had they dismissed her body as redundant to their purpose, and let the fat float? She snatched the chance, however small it was, pushing up towards the surface. A new shoal of bubbles rose with her, that almost seemed to bear her up towards the air. It was closer by the instant. If she could hold on to consciousness a heartbeat longer she might yet survive.

God loved her! She broke the surface face-first, puking water then drinking air. Her limbs were numb, but the very forces that had been so intent on drowning her now kept her afloat. After three or four breaths she realized the others had also been released. They choked and splashed around her. Joyce was already making towards the shore, pulling Trudi after her. Arleen now began to follow. Solid ground was only a few yards away. Even with legs and arms barely functional Carolyn covered the distance, until all four of them could stand up. Bodies racked with sobs they staggered towards dry land. Even now they cast backward glances, for fear whatever had assaulted them decided to pursue them into the shallows. But the spot in the middle of the lake was completely placid.

Before they'd reached the shore, hysteria took hold of Arleen. She began to wail, and shudder. Nobody went to comfort her. They had barely suEcient energy to advance one foot in front of the other, never mind waste breath in trying to calm the girl. She overtook Trudi and Joyce to reach the grass first, dropping down on the ground where she'd left her clothes and attempting to drag on her blouse, her sobs redoubling as she struggled, failing to find the armholes. A yard from the shore Trudi fell to her knees and threw up. Carolyn trudged down-wind of her, knowing that if she caught a whiff of vomit she'd end up doing the same. It was a wasted maneuver. The gagging sound was sufficient cue. She felt her stomach flip; then she was painting the grass in bile and ice cream.

Even now, though the scene he was watching had moved from the erotic to the terrifying to the nauseating, William Witt could not take his eyes off it. To the end of his life he'd remember the sight of the girls rising from the depths where he was certain they must have drowned, their efforts, or pressure from below, shoving them up into the air so high he saw their breasts bob.

Now the waters that had almost claimed them were still. Not a ripple moved; not a bubble broke. And yet, could he doubt that something other than an accident had occurred in front of him? There was something alive in the lake. The fact that he'd seen only its consequences#8212;the Sailings, the screams#8212;rather than the thing itself, shook him to the gut. Nor would he ever be able to quiz the girls as to their assailants' nature. He was alone with what he'd seen.

For the first time in his life his self-elected role as voyeur weighed heavily upon him. He swore to himself he'd never spy on anyone again. It was an oath he kept for a day before breaking.

As to this event, he'd had enough of it. All he could see of the girls now were the outlines of their hips and buttocks as they lay in the grass. All he could hear, with the vomiting over, was weeping.

As quietly as he could, he slipped away.

Joyce heard him go. She sat up in the grass.

"Somebody's watching us," she said.

She studied the patch of sunlit foliage, and again it moved. Just the wind, catching the leaves.

Arleen had finally found her way into her blouse. She sat with her arms wrapped around her. "I want to die," she said.

"No you don't," Trudi told her. "We just escaped that."

Joyce put her hands back to her face. The tears she thought she'd bettered came again, in a wave.

"What in Christ's name happened?" she said. "I thought it was just...flood water."

It was Carolyn who supplied the answer, her voice without inflection, but shaking.

"There are caves under the whole town," she said. "They must have filled with water during the storm. We swam out over the mouth of one of them."

"It was so dark," Trudi said. "Did you look down?"

"There was something else," Arleen said. "Besides the darkness. Something in the water."

Joyce's sobs intensified in response to this.

"I didn't see anything," Carolyn said. "But I felt it." She looked at Trudi. "We all felt the same, didn't we?"

"No," Trudi replied, shaking her head. "It was currents out of the caves."

"It tried to drown me," Arleen said.

"Just currents," Trudi reiterated. "It's happened to me before, at the beach. Undertow. Pulled the legs from under me."

"You don't believe that," Arleen ^said flatly. "Why bother to lie? We all know what we felt."

Trudi stared hard at her.

"And what was that?" she said. "Exactly."

Arleen shook her head. With her hair plastered to her scalp and mascara smeared across her cheeks, she looked anything but the Prom Queen beauty of ten minutes before.

"All I know is it wasn't undertow," she said. "I saw shapes. Two shapes. Not fishes. Nothing like fishes." She looked away from Trudi, down between her legs. "I felt them touch me," she said, shuddering. "Touch me inside."

"Shut up!" Joyce suddenly erupted. "Don't say it."

"It's true, isn't it?" Arleen replied. "Isn 't it?"She looked up again. First at Joyce, then at Carolyn; finally at Trudi, who nodded.

"Whatever's out there wanted us because we're women."

Joyce's sobs climbed to a fresh plateau.

"Keep quiet," Trudi snapped. "We've got to think about this."

"What's to think?" Carolyn said.

"What we're going to say for one thing," Trudi replied.

"We say we went swimming#8212;" Carolyn began.

"Then what?"

"#8212;we went swimming and#8212;"

"Something attacked us? Tried to get inside us? Something not human?"

"Yes," said Carolyn. "It's the truth."

"Don't be so stupid," Trudi said. "They'll laugh at us."

"But it's still true, " Carolyn insisted.

"You think that makes any difference? They'll say we were idiots to go swimming in the first place. Then they'll say we got the cramps or something."

"She's right," said Arleen.

But Carolyn clung to her convictions. "Suppose somebody else comes here?" she said. "And the same thing happens. Or they drown. Suppose they drown. Then we'd be responsible."

"If this is just flood water it'll be gone in a few days," Arleen said. "If we say anything everyone in town will talk about us. We'll never live it down. It'll spoil the rest of our lives."

"Don't be such an actress," Trudi said. "We're none of us going to do anything we don't all agree on. Right? Right, Joyce?" There was a stifled sob of acknowledgment from Joyce. "Carolyn?"

"I suppose so," came the reply.

"We just have to agree on a story."

"We say nothing," Arleen replied.

"Nothing?" said Joyce. "Look at us."

"Never explain. Never apologize," Trudi murmured.

"Huh?"

"It's what my daddy says all the time." The thought of this being a family philosophy seemed to brighten her. "Never explain..."

"We heard," said Carolyn.

"So it's agreed," Arleen went on. She stood up, gathering the rest of her clothes from the ground.

"We all keep quiet about it."

There was no further sound of argument from any source. Taking their cue from Arleen, they all proceeded to dress then headed back towards the road, leaving the lake to its secrets and its silences.

At first, nothing happened. There were not even nightmares. Only a pleasant languor, affecting all four of them, which was perhaps the afterglow of coming so close to death and walking away from it. They concealed their bruises from view, and went about being themselves, and keeping their secret.

In a sense it kept itself. Even Arleen, who had been the first to voice her horror at the intimate assault they'd all suffered, rapidly came to take a strange pleasure in the memory, which she didn't dare confess, even to the other three. In fact they spoke to each other scarcely at all. They didn't need to. The same strange conviction moved in all of them: that they were, in some extraordinary fashion, the chosen. Only Trudi, who'd always had a love of the Messianic, would have put such a word to what she Felt. For Arleen, the feeling was sim-ply a reinforcing of what she'd always known about herself: that she was a uniquely glamorous creature, for whom the rules by which the rest of the world was run did not apply. For Carolyn, it meant a new confidence in herself which was a dim echo of that revelation she'd had when death had seemed imminent: that every hour without appetites fulfilled was wasted. For Joyce, the feeling was simpler still. She had been saved from death for Randy Krentzman.

She wasted no time in making her passion known. The very day after the events at the lake she went directly to the Krentzman house in Stillbrook and told him in the plainest possible terms that she loved him and intended to sleep with him. He didn't laugh. He simply looked at her with bewilderment, then asked her, somewhat shamefaced, whether they knew each other. On previous occasions his forgetting her had practically broken her heart. But something had changed in her. She was no longer so fragile. Yes, she told him, you do know me. We've met several times before. But I don't care if you remember me or not. I love you and I want you to make love to me. He went on staring at her through this speech, then said: this is some joke, right? To which she replied that it absolutely was not a joke, that she meant every word she said, and given that the day was warm and the house empty but for the two of them was there any time better than the present?

Bewilderment had not undone the Krentzman libido. Though he didn't understand why this girl was offering herself gratis, an opportunity like this came along too infrequently to be despised. Thus, attempting the tone of one to whom such proposals come daily, he accepted. They spent the afternoon together, performing the act not once but three times. She left the house around six-fifteen and wended her way home through the Grove with a sense of some imperative satisfied. It was not love. He was dim, self-centered, and a sloppy lover. But he had perhaps put life into her that afternoon, or at least offered his teaspoonful of stuff to the alchemy, and that was all she'd really wanted from him. This change of priorities went unquestioned. Her mind was crystal clear on the need for fecundity. On the rest of life, past, future and present, it was a blur.

Early the next morning, having slept more deeply than she had for years, she called him up, and suggested a second liaison, that very afternoon. Was I that good? he enquired. She told him he was better than good; he was a bull; his dick the world's eighth wonder. He readily agreed, both to the flattery and the liaison.

Of the quartet she turned out to be perhaps the luckiest in her choice of mates. Vain and empty-headed though Krentzman was, he was also harmless, and in his inept way, tender. The urge that took Joyce to his bed, working with equal vigor upon Arleen, Trudi and Carolyn, drove the others into less conventional embraces.

Carolyn made overtures to one Edgar Lott, a man in his mid-fifties who had moved down the street from her parents' house the year before. None of the neighbors had become friendly with him. He was a loner; his only company two dachshunds. These, the absence of female visitors, and most particularly his penchant for color co-ordination in his dress (handkerchief, neck-tie and socks always in matching pastel) led all to assume he was homosexual. But naive as Carolyn was in the particularities of intercourse she knew Lott better than her elders. She'd caught his eye several times, and hindsight told her his looks had meant more than hello. Intercepting him as he took the dachshunds for their morning constitutional she got to talking with him, then asked#8212;when the dogs had marked their territory for the day#8212;if maybe she could come home with him. Later, he would tell her that his intentions had been perfectly honorable, and if she hadn't thrown herself upon him, demanding his devotion on the kitchen table, he would not have laid a finger on her. But with the offer there, how could he refuse?

Mismatched in years and anatomy they nevertheless coupled with a rare fury, the dachshunds sent into a frenzy of jealousy as they did so, yapping and chasing their tails till they exhausted themselves. After the first bout he told her he hadn't touched a woman in the six years since his wife's death, which had driven him to alcohol. She too, he said, had been a substantial creature. Talk of her girth made him hard again. They set to. This time the dogs just slept.

At first, the match worked well. Neither was the least judgmental when it came to the removal of clothes; neither wasted time with declarations on the other's beauty, which would have sounded ridiculous; neither pretended this was forever. They were together to do what nature had designed their bodies to do, careless of the frills. Not for them the candlelit romance. Day in, day out she went visiting Mr. Lott, as she referred to him in her parents' company, only to have his face between her breasts seconds after the door was closed.

Edgar could hardly believe his luck. That she'd seduced him was extraordinary enough (even in his youth no woman had ever paid him that compliment); that she came back, and back again, unable to keep her hands off him until the act was thoroughly performed, verged on the miraculous. He was not surprised therefore when, after two weeks and four days, she stopped visiting. A little saddened, but not surprised. After a week of her absence he saw her on the street and he asked her politely if#8212;quote, unquote#8212;we could resume our hanky-panky? She looked at him strangely, then told him no. He hadn't sought an explanation, but she offered one anyway. I don't need you any more, she told him lightly, and tapped her stomach. Only later, sitting in his stale house with his third bourbon in his hand, did he realize what the words and the gesture meant. It drove him to a fourth and a fifth. A return to his old ways all too rapidly followed. Though he had tried very hard to keep sentiment out of the exchange, now#8212; with the fat girl gone#8212;he realized she had broken his heart.

Arleen had no such problems. The path she chose, pressed by the same unspoken dictate as the rest, took her into the kind of company which wore their hearts not on their sleeves, but on their forearms, in Prussian blue ink. It had begun for her, as it had for Joyce, the day after their near-drowning. She'd dressed up in her finest clothes, got in her mother's car, and taken herself off down to Eclipse Point, a small stretch of beach north of Zuma, notorious for its bars and its bikers. The occupants of the area were not all that surprised to see a rich girl in their midst. Such types regularly drove down from their fancy houses to taste the low-life, or have the low-life taste them. A couple of hours was usually enough, before they beat a retreat, back to where the closest they got to rough trade was the chauffeur.

In its time the Point had seen some famous faces come, incognito, looking to suck on its underbelly a while. Jimmy Dean had been a regular in his wildest times, seeking a smoker who wanted a human ash-tray. One of the bars had a pool table sacred to the memory of Jayne Mansfield, who had reputedly performed on it an act even now spoken of only in reverential whispers. Another had carved in the boards of its floor the outline of a woman who had claimed to be Veronica Lake, and had passed out dead drunk on that spot. Arleen, therefore, followed a well-trodden path from luxury's lap to the squalor of a bar she chose for no better reason than its name: The Slick. Unlike many who had preceded her, however, she didn't need a drink to give her an excuse for licentiousness. She simply offered herself. There were any number of takers, among whom she made no distinction whatsoever. Nobody who came seeking failed to find.

The next night she came back for more, and for more the night after, her eyes fixing on her paramours as though she were addicted to them. Not all took advantage. Some, after that first night, viewed her warily, suspecting that such largesse was only offered by the mad or the diseased. Others found a streak of gallantry in them they'd not suspected, and tried to coax her up off the floor before the line had reached the runts of the pack. But she protested loudly and ripely at any such intervention; told them to leave her be. They withdrew. Some even joined the line again.

While Carolyn and Joyce were able to keep their affairs to themselves, Arleen's behavior could not go unnoticed indefinitely. After a week of her disappearing from the house in the middle of the evening and returning as dawn came up#8212;a week in which her only reply to questions about where she was going was a quizzical look, almost as though she herself wasn't sure#8212;her father, Lawrence Farrell, decided to follow her. He considered himself a liberal parent, but if his princess was falling in with a bad crowd#8212;footballers, maybe, or hippies#8212;then he might be obliged to give her some advice. Once out of the Grove she drove like one demented, and he had to put his foot down just to keep a discreet distance. A mile or two shy of the beach he lost her. It took him an hour of scouring the parking lots before he found the car, parked outside The Slick. The bar's reputation had reached even his liberally plugged ears. He entered, fearing for his jacket and his wallet. There was great commotion inside; a howling ring of men, beer-gutted animals with hair to the middle of their backs, gathered around some floor show at the far end of the bar. There was no sign of Arleen. Satisfied that he'd made a mistake (she was probably simply walking the beach, watching the surf) he was about to leave when somebody began chanting his princess's name.

"Arleen! Arleen!"

He turned back. Was she watching the floor show too? He dug through the crowd of onlookers. There, at the center, he found his beautiful child. Somebody was pouring beer into her mouth, while another performed with her that deed he, like all fathers, hated to think of his daughter performing, except#8212;in dreams#8212;with him. She looked like her mother, lying beneath this man; or rather, as her mother had looked that long ago when she'd still been capable of arousal. Thrashing and grinning, mad for the man on top of her. Lawrence yelled Arleen's name, and stepped forward to pull the brute from his labor. Somebody told him to wait his turn. He hit the man on the jaw, a blow which sent the slob staggering back into the crowd, many of whom were already unzipped and primed. The fellow spat out a wad of blood, and launched himself at Lawrence, who complained as he was beaten to his knees that this was his daughter, his daughter...my God, his daughter. He didn't give up his protests till his mouth was no longer capable of making the words. Even then he tried to crawl to where Arleen was lying, and slap her into recognition of what she was doing. But her admirers simply dragged him out and dumped him on the edge of the highway. There he lay for a while, until he could muster the energy to get to his feet. He staggered back to the car, and waited several hours, crying sometimes, until Arleen emerged.

She seemed quite unmoved by his bruises and his bloody shirt. When he told her he'd seen what she'd done she cocked her head slightly, as though she wasn't entirely certain what he was talking about. He ordered her into his car. She went without protest. They drove home in silence.

Nothing was said that day. She stayed in her room, and played the radio, while Lawrence spoke to his lawyer about closing down The Slick, to the cops about bringing his assailants to justice, and his analyst about where he'd failed. That night she left again, in the early evening, or at least tried to. He intercepted her in the driveway however, and the round of recriminations postponed from the previous night erupted. All the time, she just stared at him, glassy-eyed. Her indifference inflamed him. She wouldn't come inside when he asked her, nor would she tell why she was doing what she was doing. His concern became fury, his voice rising in decibels and his vocabulary in venom until he was calling her a whore at the top of his voice, and there were drapes being twitched aside all around the Crescent. Eventually, blinded by tears of sheer incomprehension, he struck her, and might have done further damage had Kate not intervened. Arleen didn't wait. With her raging father in her mother's custody she ran off, and found herself a ride down to the beach.

The Slick was raided that night. There were twenty-one arrests, mostly for minor drug offenses, and the bar was closed down. When the officers arrived Lawrence Farrell's princess was performing the same bump and grind number she'd been performing nightly for over a week. It was a story not even Lawrence's crude attempts at bribery could keep out of the newspapers. It became prime reading material up and down the coast. Arleen was put into the hospital for a full medical check-up. She was found to have two sexually transmitted diseases, plus an infestation of crabs, and was suffering the kind of wear and tear her exploits had been bound to induce. But at least she wasn't pregnant. Lawrence and Kathleen Farrell thanked the Lord for that small mercy.

The revelations about Arleen's forays to The Slick brought a severe tightening of parental controls around the town. Even in the East Grove there were noticeably fewer kids wandering the streets after dark. Illicit romance became tough to come by. Even Trudi, the last of the four, would soon be obliged to give up her partner, though she'd found a near-perfect cover for her activities: religion. She'd had the wit to seduce one Ralph Contreras, a man of mixed blood who worked as a gardener for the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Laureltree, and had a stammer of such proportions it to all intents and purposes left him speechless. She liked him that way. He provided the service she required, and kept his mouth shut about it. All in all, the perfect lover. Not that she cared much about his technique, as he valiantly played the male for her. He was simply a functionary. When he had completed his duties#8212;and her body would tell her when that moment came#8212;she would not think of him again. At least, so she told herself.

As it was, the affairs they were all having (Trudi's included) were#8212;because of Arleen's indiscretions#8212;quickly to become public knowledge. Though she might have found it easy to forget her trysts with Ralph the Silent, Palomo Grove would not.

The newspaper reports about the scandalous secret life of small-town beauty Arleen Farrell were as explicit as the legal departments of those journals would permit, but the details had to be left for rumor to supply. A small black market in what were claimed to be photographs of the orgy proved lucrative, though the pictures were so dingy it was difficult to be sure they were of the real thing. The family itself#8212;Lawrence, Kate, sister Jocelyn and brother Craig#8212;had a brighter light thrown upon them. Folks living on the other side of the Grove rerouted their shopping trips so as to come along the Crescent past the house of infamy. Craig had to be taken out of school because his peers bullied him unmercifully for the dirt on his big sister; Kate upped her tranquilizer intake until she was slurring any word of more than two syllables. But there was worse to come. Three days after Arleen had been snatched back from the bikers' den an interview purporting to be with one of Arleen's nurses appeared in the Chronicle. It said that the Farrell girl spent most of her time in a sexual frenzy, her talk one obscenity after another, interrupted only by tears of frustration. This in itself was newsworthy enough. But, the report went on, the patient's sickness went beyond that of an overheated libido. Arleen Farrell believed herself possessed.

The tale she told was elaborate, and bizarre. She, plus three of her friends, had gone swimming in a lake close to Palomo Grove, and been attacked by something that had entered them all. What this occupying entity had demanded of Arleen, and#8212;presumably#8212;of her fellow bathers, was that she get herself with child by whomever was available to provide the service. Hence her adventures at The Slick. The Devil in her womb had simply been looking for a surrogate father amid that rank company.

The article was presented with no trace of irony; the text of Arleen's so-called confession was quite absurd enough without requiring editorial gilding. Only those in the Grove blind or illiterate failed to read the revelations brought on by drugs and beauty. No one considered there to be an iota of truth in her claims, of course, except the families of the friends Arleen had been out with on Saturday, July 28th. Though she didn't name Joyce, Carolyn or Trudi the quartet were known to be fast friends. There could be no doubt in the minds of any who had a passing acquaintance with Arleen whom she'd written into her Satanic fantasies.

It rapidly became apparent that the girls would have to be shielded from the fallout following Arleen's preposterous claims. In the McGuire, Katz and Hotchkiss households the same exchange, give or take an endearment, took place.

The parent asked: "Do you want to leave the Grove for a while, until the worst of this blows over?" To which the child replied; "No, I'm fine. Never better."

"Are you sure it's not upsetting you, sweetheart?"

"Do I look upset?"

"No."

"Then I'm not upset."

Such well-balanced children, the parents thought, to face the tragedy of a friend's lunacy with this show of calm; aren't they a credit to us?

For a few weeks they were just that: model daughters, bearing the stress of their situation with admirable aplomb. Then the perfect picture began to deteriorate, as oddities in their behavior patterns made themselves apparent. It was a subtle process; one which might well have gone unnoticed for longer had the parents not been watching over their babies with such fastidiousness. First, the parents noticed their offspring keeping odd hours: sleeping at noon, and pacing at midnight. Food-fads appeared. Even Carolyn, who had never been known to refuse the edible, took a near pathological dislike to certain items: seafood in particular. The girls' air of serenity disappeared. It its place came moods that swung from the monosyllabic to the garrulous, the glacial to the crazed. It was Betty Katz who first suggested her daughter see the family doctor. Trudi didn't object. Nor did she seem in the slightest surprised when Doctor Gottlieb pronounced her healthy in every respect; and pregnant.

Carolyn's parents were the next to fear that the mystery of their offspring's behavior merited medical investigation. The news was the same, with the added rider that if their daughter intended to carry her child to full-term then it would be advisable if the mother-to-be lost thirty pounds.

If there had been any hope of denying a pattern in these diagnoses that hope was undone by the third and final proof. Joyce McGuire's parents had been the most reluctant to concede their child's complicity in this scandal, but finally they too sought examination of their daughter. She, like Carolyn and Trudi, was in good health. She too was pregnant. The news called for a reassessment of Arleen Farrell's story. Was it possible that lurking beneath her insane ramblings was a shred of truth?

The parents met, and talked together. Between them they beat out the only scenario that made any sense. There had clearly been a pact of some kind made between the girls. They'd decided#8212;for some reason known only to them#8212;to become pregnant. Three of them had succeeded. Arleen had failed, and it had pitched what had always been a highly strung girl into the throes of a nervous breakdown. The problems that now had to be addressed were threefold. First, to locate the would-be fathers and then prosecute them for their sexual opportunism. Second, to terminate the pregnancies as quickly and safely as possible. Thirdly, to keep the whole business quiet so that the reputations of the three families would not suffer the same fate as that of the Farrells, whom the righteous inhabitants of the Grove now treated as pariahs.

In all three they failed. In the matter of the fathers simply because none of the girls, even under parental duress, would name the culprits. In the issue of aborting the babies, because again the children steadfastly refused to be browbeaten into giving up what they'd wasted no little sweat procuring. And finally, in their attempts to keep the whole sorry business under wraps, because scandal likes the light, and it only took one indiscreet doctor's receptionist to begin the journalists sniffing after fresh evidence of delinquency.

The story broke two days after the parents' meeting, and Palomo Grove#8212;which had been rocked by Arleen's disclosures, but not overturned#8212;sustained an almost mortal blow.

The Mad Girl's Tale had made interesting reading for the UFO sighting and Cancer Cure crowd, but it was essentially a bust. These new developments, however, touched a much more sensitive nerve. Here were four families whose solid, well-heeled lives had been shattered by a pact made by their own daughters. Was there some kind of cult involved, the press demanded to know? Was the anonymous father conceivably the same man, a seducer of young women whose very namelessness left endless room for speculation. And what of the Farrell child, who'd first blown the whistle on what was being called the League of Virgins? Had she been driven to more extreme behavior than her friends because, as the Chronicle was the first to report, she was actually infertile? Or had the others yet to unburden themselves of their true excesses? This was a story that would run and run. It had everything: sex, possession, families in chaos, small-town bitchery, sex, insanity and sex. What was more, it could only get better from here.

As the pregnancies advanced the press could follow the progress. And with luck there'd be some startling payoff. The children would be all triplets, or black, or born dead.

Oh, the possibilities!

It was hushed at the center of the storm; hushed and still. The girls heard the howls and accusations heaped on them from parents, press and peers alike, but weren't much touched by them. The process that had begun in the lake continued on its own inevitable way, and they let it shape their minds as it had, and did, their bodies. They were calm as the lake was calm; their surface so placid the most violent attack upon it left not so much as a ripple.

Nor did they seek each other out during this time. Their interest in each other, and indeed in the outside world, dwindled to zero. All they cared to do was sit at home growing fuller, while controversy raged around them. That too, despite its early promise, dwindled as the months went by, and new scandals claimed the public's attention. But the damage to the Grove's equilibrium had been done. The League of Virgins had put the town on the Ventura County map in a fashion it would never have wished upon itself, but, given the fact, was determined to profit by. The Grove had more visitors that autumn than it had enjoyed since its creation, people determined to be able to boast that they'd visited that place; Crazy-ville; the place where girls made eyes at anything that moved if the Devil told them to.

There were other changes in the town, which were not so observable as the full bars and the bustling Mall. Behind closed doors the children of the Grove had to fight more vehemently for their privileges, as their parents, particularly the fathers of daughters, withdrew freedoms previously taken for granted. These domestic frays cracked several families, and broke some entirely. The alcohol intakes went up correspondingly; Marvin's Food and Drug did exceptional business in hard liquor during October and November, the demand taking off into the stratosphere over the Christmas period, when, in addition to the usual festivities, incidents of drunkenness, adultery, wife-beating and exhibitionism turned Pa-lomo Grove into a sinners' paradise.

With the public holidays, and their private woundings, over, several families decided to move out of the Grove altogether, and a subtle reorganization of the town's social structure began, as properties thought desirable#8212;such as those in the Crescents (now marred by the Farrells' presence)#8212;fell in value, and were bought up by individuals who could never have dreamt of living in that neighborhood the summer before.

So many consequences, from a battle in troubled waters.

That battle had not gone unwitnessed, of course. What William Witt had learned of secrecy in his short life as a voyeur proved invaluable as subsequent events unfolded. More than once he came close to telling somebody what he'd seen at the lake, but he resisted the temptation, knowing that the brief stardom he'd earn from it would have to be set against suspicion and possible punishment. Not only that; there was every chance he'd not even be believed. He kept the memory alive in his own head, however, by going back to where it had happened on a regular basis. In fact he'd returned there the day after it had all happened, to see if he could spot the occupants of the lake. But the water was already retreating. It had shrunk by perhaps a third overnight. After a week it had gone entirely, revealing a fissure in the ground which was evidently a point of access to the caves that ran beneath the town.

He wasn't the only visitor to the spot. Once Arleen had unburdened herself of what had happened there that afternoon, countless sightseers came looking for the spot. The more perceptive among them quickly recognized it: the water had left the grass yellowed and dusted with dried silt. One or two even attempted to gain access to the caves, but the fissure presented a virtually straight drop with no ready means of descent. After a few days of fame the spot was left to itself and to William's solitary visits. It gave him a strange satisfaction, going there, despite the fear he felt. A sense of complicity' with the caves and their secret, not to mention the erotic rrisson that came when he stood where he'd stood that day, and imagined again the nakedness of the bathers.

The fate of the girls didn't much interest him. He read about them once in a while, and heard them talked about, but out of sight for William was pretty much out of mind. There were better things to watch. With the town in disarray he had much to spy on: casual seductions and abject slavery; furies; beatings; bloody-nosed farewells. One day, he thought, I'll write all of this down. It'll be called Witt's Book, and everyone in it will know, when it's published, that their secrets all belong to me.

When, on the infrequent occasions he did think of the girls' present condition, it was thoughts of Arleen he favored, simply because she was in a hospital where he couldn't see her even if he wanted to, and his powerlessness, as for every voyeur, was a spur. She was sick in the head, he'd heard, and nobody quite knew why. She wanted men to come to her all the time, she wanted babies the way the others had babies, but she couldn't and that was why she was sick. His curiosity concerning her died, however, when he overheard somebody report that the girl had lost all trace of her glamour.

"She looks half dead" was the way he'd heard it put. "Drugged and dead."

After that, it was as if Arleen Farrell no longer existed, except as a beautiful vision, shedding her clothes on the edge of a silver lake. Of what that lake had done to her he cleansed his mind thoroughly.

Unfortunately the wombs of the quartet's remaining members could not cast the experience and its consequence out except as a bawling reality, which new stage in the humiliation of Palomo Grove began on April 2nd, when the first of the League of Virgins gave birth.

Howard Ralph Katz was born to his eighteen-year-old mother Trudi at 3:46 a.m., by cesarean section. He was frail, weighing a mere four pounds and two ounces when he first saw the light of the delivery room. A child, it was agreed, who resembled his mother, for which his grandparents were duly grateful given that they had no clue as to the father. Howard had Trudi's dark, deep-set eyes, and a spiral skull cap of brown hair, even at birth. Like his mother, who had also been premature, he had to fight for every breath during the first six days of his life, after which he strengthened quickly. On April 19th Trudi brought her son back to Palomo Grove, to nurse him in the place she knew best.

Two weeks after Howard Katz saw the light, the second of the League of Virgins gave birth. This time there was something more for the press to elaborate on than the production of a sickly baby boy. Joyce McGuire gave birth to twins, one of each, born within a minute of each other in a perfectly uncomplicated fashion. She named them Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray, names she'd chosen (though she would never admit this, not to the end of her days) because they had two fathers: one in Randy Krentzman, one in the lake. Three, if she counted their Father in Heaven, though she feared he'd long passed her over in favor of more compatible souls.

Just over a week after the birth of the McGuire twins Carolyn also produced twins, boy and girl, but the boy was delivered dead. The girl, who was big-boned and strong, was named Linda. With her birth the saga of the League of Vir-gins seemed to have reached its natural conclusion. The funeral of Carolyn's other child drew a small audience, but otherwise the four families were left alone. Too much alone in fact. Friends ceased to call; acquaintances denied ever having known them. The story of the League of Virgins had besmirched Palomo Grove's good name, and despite the profit the town had earned from the scandal there was now a general desire to forget that the incident had ever occurred.

Pained by the rejection they sensed from every side the Katz family made plans to leave the Grove and return to Alan Katz's home city, Chicago. They sold their home in late June to an out-of-towner who got a bargain, a fine property and a reputation in one fell swoop. The Katz family were gone two weeks later.

It proved to be good timing. Had they delayed their departure by a few more days they would have been caught up in the last tragedy of the League's story. On the evening of July 26th the Hotchkiss family went out for a short while, leaving Carolyn at home with baby Linda. They stayed out longer than they intended, and it was well after midnight, and therefore the 27th, when they got back. Carolyn had celebrated the anniversary of her swim by smothering her daughter and taking her own life. She had left a suicide note, which explained, with the same chilling detachment the girl had used to talk of the San Andreas Fault, that Arleen Farrell's story had been true all along. They had gone swimming. They had been attacked. To this day she did not know what by, but she had sensed its presence in her, and in the child, ever since, and it was evil. That was why she had smothered Linda. That was why she was now going to slit her wrists. Don't judge me too harshly, she asked. I never wanted to hurt anybody in my life.

The letter was interpreted by the parents thus: that the girls had indeed been attacked and raped by somebody, and for reasons of their own had kept the identity of the culprit or culprits to themselves. With Carolyn dead, Arleen insane and Trudi gone to Chicago, it fell upon Joyce McGuire to tell the whole truth, without excision or addition, and to lay the story of the League of Virgins to rest.

At first, she refused. She couldn't remember anything about that day, she claimed. The trauma had wiped the memory from her mind. Neither Hotchkiss or Farrell were content with that, however. They kept applying the pressure, through Joyce's father. Dick McGuire was not a strong man, either in spirit or body, and his Church was wholly unsupportive in the matter, siding with the non-Mormons against the girl. The truth had to be told.

At last, to keep the browbeaters from doing any more damage to her father than they already had, Joyce told. It made a strange scene. The six parents, plus Pastor John, whc was the spiritual leader of the Mormon community in the Grove and its surroundings, were sitting in the McGuires dining room listening to the pale, thin girl whose hands went first to one cradle then to the other as she rocked her children to sleep telling, as she rocked, of their conception. First she warned her audience that they weren't going to like what she was about to tell. Then she justified her warning with the telling. She gave them the whole story. The walk; the lake; the swim; the things that had fought over their bodies in the water; their escape; her passion for Randy Krentzman#8212; whose family had been one of those to leave the Grove months before, presumably because he'd made a quiet confession of his own; the desire she'd shared with all the girls to get pregnant as efficiently as possible#8212;

"So Randy Krentzman was responsible for them all?" Carolyn's father said.

"Him?" she said. "He wasn't capable."

"So who was?"

"You promised to tell the whole story," the Pastor reminded her.

"So I am," she replied. "As far as I know it. Randy Krentzman was my choice. We all know how Arleen went about it. I'm sure Carolyn found somebody different. And Trudi too. The fathers weren't important, you see. They were just men."

"Are you saying the Devil is in you, child?" the Pastor asked.

"No."

"The children, then?"

"No. No." She rocked both cradles now, one with each hand. "Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray aren't possessed. At least not the way you mean. They just aren't Randy's children. Maybe they've got some of his good looks..." she allowed herself a tiny smile. "...I'd like that," she said. "Because he was so very handsome. But the spirit that made them is in the lake."

"There is no lake," Arleen's father pointed out.

"There was that day. And maybe there will be again, if it rains hard enough."

"Not if I can help it."

Whether he entirely believed Joyce's story or not Farrell was as good as his word. He and Hotchkiss rapidly raised sufficient donations from around town to have the entrance to the caves sealed up. Most of the contributors signed a check simply to get Farrell off their doorstep. Since his princess had lost her mind he had all the conversational skill of a ticking bomb.

In October, a few days short of fifteen months after the girls had first gone down to the water, the fissure was blocked with concrete. They would go there again, but not for many years.

Until then, the children of Palomo Grove could play in peace.