"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—" Carolyn began.

"Then what?"

"—we went swimming and—"

"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—when the dogs had marked their territory for the day—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?