PUTRID POOLSIDE PERMUTATIONS: VISCOUS VARIATIONS OOZING UPON THE RAFT

By Quillon42

CHAPTER ONE

Every foot's breadth felt instead like a millimeter by now. It was between two of the crud-creeping cracks that Randy maintained his strained, starved stance, the woebegone lake's white boy waiting for the correct instant at which the spiteful slime undersole would settle the most. In this reality, Randy watched the colors begin to form and twist, and the loons laughed menacingly all around…

…but then yet another sucker jab to the schnoz kept himself in line. In time with this, the sentient sludge slid in underneath, at eleven in the evening on Day Two, it not raring to relent for at least an hour and a half this time as it burrowed beneath the barrels and the boards.

And this was the kind of unforeseeable crisis that the goodtime undergrad was faced with at present. Just forty-eight hours before, all that was meandering through his mind had been the drama of that prurient pyramid betwixt Rachel, that wispy fair-haired nymph for whom he pined soulfully…then LaVerne, the libertine for whom he lusted most salaciously…then finally Deke, that Cisco caught most viscously between these canny, catty coeds. Yea, just two days previous, the poser most dire was how to finesse the rescue of Rachel from the paws of the prat who happened also to be his prime pal, how to bail her out without it seeming to be going behind the back of the robust bastard who was also his bestie.

Oh, how Randy wished for such conflicts to persist as of now, those petty zeroth-world problems all presently preempted by an effing primordial amoeba. Verily, that entire aforementioned perverse pyramid of was pulverized in the wake of the thing's taste for human hosts. And it didn't discriminate either, not between any of those venerated, Wheedon-wheedled Cabin-in-the-Woods varieties of teen victims. Seeming Virgin Rachel and Whore LaVerne and Athlete Deke alike were all emptied into the entity by now, with Scholar Randy to complete the quartet. (As for the fifth archetype…all four of these effers were the Fools).

Yet again, though, how wrong it all went these past scores of hours. From the scrapping of shirts and shorts onto the shore, to the stripping of flesh amidst the wayward wavelets…it was like a Juicy Fruit commercial gone horribly awry. (So appropriate, especially given that LaVerne on our side of the fourth wall was in fact a Doublemint Twin). How indeed did that onyx ooze emerge to…gum up the works, so to speak, in so many more ways than one.

And now here he was, having survived a night with this piceous puddle, only to endure a morning and afternoon following with nothing to befall him save ensuing hours of augmenting hunger…

…Randy decided in this dooming midnight, of all times, that he had nothing to lose, to give it the old Horlicks University try.

[SPPPLLLAAAAAASSSSSSHHHHHH]

With seemingly the last breath in his stringbean body he heaved off, leaving behind on that raft the ring of his ruffian roommate, the sweatshirt of the mousy maiden he'd wished to snog, and the brassiere of the relationship-wrecker he'd actually fucked (if only for a fleeting minute). Randy threw caution to the wind and his body to these wintry waves, and pushed ahead, ahead, ahead the fifty effing yards to the shore…all of which especially now felt like more like an excruciating Ironman in acid than an innocent exercise in aqua.

Then Behind the buoyant boy, all along, was that enemy which was anything but an oil slick, its fifteen-foot-diametered deadliness closing in after the college carouser by the beat of each straggling stroke the young man took.

It was in the spotlight of the moon and in the squad-squabbling of the loons that a raggedy Randy rushed to the shore, here the student not stopping to huff out any fatally-foolish victory speech by the waterline but rather the fucker frantically feets-not-failingly fleeing for that yellow Camaro, tacky rock anthems still inexplicably emitting from its sordid speakers. Frighteningly the oily entity still lapped at the shore, it hurling itself again and again at the lake-languid lad, swart tendrils licking only inches away from the boy's legs as he reached for the keys in Deke's dungarees. Only seconds elapsed before the Scholar slid across the bank and slammed into the car, he sprinting from this locale of littoral liquefaction while getting was good.

…

…

…

Surveying his suite with new eyes now, Randy regarded it all with a keener sense of goneness than he'd ever known in his twentyish years. As with anyone else, there was a distantly similar twinge of gone that the young man would register whenever a relationship had run its course; routine jaunts to that ice cream shoppe that his freshman squeeze preferred, or to the malted place that his sophomore fling had loved to frequent, those frolics were forsaken once the bond in question had taken a break.

But this, what Randy was feeling instantly…it wasn't as if Deke had just dug in for the weekend with another coital conquest at the latter's pad…or even, firmament forfend, as if a feud had erupted between Pancho and Cisco, leading to simple estrangement between them. Deke was dead; worse, devoured, and everything now from the congealing chili in the refrigerator, to all those athletic medals milling about the other man's bureau…all they did was conjure up a figure with a fatal shooting pain in his foot; a friend sprawling as the insidious seeping sprouted beneath him; a clawing hand relinquishing its prized championship ring as the fingers seceded through the cracks of ramshackle raft slats.

It was all a new, ghastly gurgle of goneness that Randy couldn't choke back. Abruptly he made a beat for the kitchen, doing all he could to efface the mock-ups of cooking within that conjured Cisco in his mind anew.

To be able to reach a way station of serene in some cranny of his slimeshocked mind…this was all that this hokiest from Horlicks had desired as of now. Despite the impulses averse to anything aquatic, something within Randy still reached for the tap, the part of him suppressing any modicum of hunger of thirst now relenting.

And then the blackest of gack that gushed from the faucet had made Pancho pounce away from the sink of a sudden, the brash boy fumbling for the fridge anew to retrieve a bottle of drinking water to quench the dry aridity that was draining him.

It wasn't until Randy had whisked off the cap that the crude had ensued from the container, it erupting abruptly towards the wayward waster's eyes like the most fatal of faux peanut-brittle pythons.

The totality of these unctuous frights had flushed the raft refugee from the kitchen, he dry-heaving headily now as adrenaline worked to exterminate his appetite. Several pantomimes of purging later and Randy collapsed onto the apartment floor, remaining there for about fifteen minutes. Then he commenced an agonized crawl towards his bed, and what he knew would be foreseeably futile forays at rest that his conscience debated he deserved.

Really that was the thing that was tearing him up inside, as of now: Randy couldn't determine, as he knelt languidly and lackadaisically next to that tattered twin mattress, whether it had in actuality been that aqueous ebony emission that was appearing in bottle and basin…or whether it was just malicious manifestations of his mind, they assailing him utterly for not being fast enough to save Rachel…for being too "fast," in a different, dirtier sense, to save LaVerne…

Lying on the bed a moment, with no covers upon him, Randy continued to deliberate over whether it was in fact the ink from without, or the inklings from within, that were visiting him now. Then a minute later he pulled up the comforter and found himself thronged with the most infernal and impromptu form of torment.

He noticed with aghast that stitched…etched within the interior of the thick fabric were the faces of that threesome of fools he'd fled from while absconding from that cosmic pond scum.

Randy assayed to relieve himself of the coaxing quilt, but it would not release him. In fact, he found that he more he attempted to extricate himself from the soft spread, the more it splashed smotheringly upon him, the oversized afghan engulfing him entirely. Then he was faced anew with the features of the other Fools once more, grafted into the already-meticulously-sewn sheets and grinning or grimacing directly into his grill.

And Rachel returned unto Randy once more with that haunted look, hunting him down with that same accusatory gaze that she gave just before the foursome of fuckabouts headed off those miles upon miles of forsaken wilderness byways to the lake, all so out of season. Frantically the boy searched for some kind of sympathy, pity even from those staring eyes as the girl's face began to ebb from the forefront of this bedside blackness…but nothing of the kind could be gleaned as her eyelids swept shut while the overly shy Sandy-Duncanlike countenance crumbled down into the duvet.

The visage of Cisco was one not to buckle so quickly, though. Randy thought a second to call out to his complete contrasting foil of a friend, shout out that phony camaraderie pet name that was as flimsy as their entire asinine acquaintanceship. This was cut off at the pass, though, drowned out by a muted scream from the demigod jock that sounded in auditory volume not at all, but which at the same time flooded the other man utterly in white noise. It deafened Randy with so much overstimulation; essentially it was the aural counterpart to All Those Colors, of vermilion and of ochre and of otherwise, which lulled so many raftgoers into a slide through the lake-lurking slick.

His ears overrun now, Randy couldn't even register the vavavoom of a victim whom he ended up knowing most intimately, comprehending most carnally in fact during a most untoward, off-guard moment upon those panels cresting the clunking barrels in the center of Cascade Lake. Now LaVerne was lathering his cheeks with a tongue made of tendrils, lacerating into his lips with teeth still tethered up with that same tar that took her down into the depths only so many hours ago.

And now this same Lady of Horlicks lay down with the douche once more, she slithering southward with her menacing mouth, fresh fangs skirting the breadth of the young man's midsection. Verily LaVerne now went down on Randy—not as low enough on the body as the boy might have liked, but certainly more deeply than he ever could have conceived, and with even more vicious verve than the guy himself did upon the girl as he schlemieled and schlemazeled his way into her semi-conscious figure's Shirley, all once upon that lurid lake.

Other students in the apartment complex who had an hour before watched the wobbly Randy barely manage into his unit…they all could now make out the most muffled of moans, ensuing intermittently over the course of half the overnight. All who could hear just wrote the utterances off as post-teen angst and melancholy, in the dead of yet another dreary autumn semester.

When Randy was in fact found, at the request of his regularly-laissez-faire parents a few days later, the investigating authorities were horrified to find a frittering-away form playing at the remains of the reckless young man. The most disgusting detail of it all was that police had the hardest time drawing him away from his bed, as his entire abdomen was permeated over by some kind of bile blacker than any imagined by intellectuals obsessing over the humors in eras past. Even more curious, the oily compound connected the boy inextricably to the fabric, such that man was merged with muck was merged with the mantle upon the mattress.

The only one item which could take the incomers' attention away from this awfulness-in- oleaginous was a scrap scrawled over with what at first appeared to be blood, but was found in fact to be just red ink from a nearby ballpoint.

But the words that were let out upon the leaf…

Everything that happened on the lake, it's all on me…

Please bury my body along with the others at the bottom of Lake Cascade.

So did the note prompt the cops, a begging done in fact not at the behest of the boy himself, but rather that of the bilge which had burrowed into his brain and issued virtual mental mandates for him to feed additional, hapless humans to it, that sequoia-diametered coagulation of hazard and hatred.