Chapter 54
THE WORLD turned green.
My brain shifted into overdrive, and the whole world slowed down.
My heart felt like a slow bass drum throbbing against my ribs as the cruiser soared off the end of the pier and into the transformed lake.
Lake Huron smelled wrong: moss and deep pine forest. It moved wrong: waves too tall but too slow, a turgid roiling that made my bowels churn exactly the same way, a slimy, oozing surf that lapped, sluglike, at the shore. Yesterday, standing on the road looking at it made my hands unconsciously ball into fists. I’d refused to approach the shoreline any closer than thirty feet or so.
And now it surged leprously beneath me, swelling to become the whole of my world.
I tried to suck in a breath, but my body felt as slow as the world around me.
The crui
