The Raft (Stephen King)
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"The Raft" is a horror short story by Stephen King published in the Skeleton Crew collection.
"The Raft" is about four college students, two young men and two girls, who go out to swim in a Pennsylvania lake during the autumn, when nobody is around. After they swim out to a raft, a mysterious entity appears in the water beneath them and consumes them, one at a time, stranding the remaining ones on the raft.
"The Raft" was adapted to film as a segment of the 1987 horror anthology movie "Creepshow 2", directed by Michael Gornick with a screenplay by George Romero.
In the afterword to the book "Skeleton Crew" in which the story was first published in book form Mr. King states that the story was originally published in a slightly different version as "The Float" in 1968. Mr. King explains that the story was accepted for publication by Adam magazine. A short time after that Mr. King was arrested in the town of Orono, Maine for removing a number of traffic cones from the street after one of them had damaged Mr. King's car. Mr. King was unable to pay the two hundred and fifty dollar fine handed down by the court and was about to be jailed for thirty days when the payment check for his story "The Float" arrived in the mail, an event Mr. King referred to as akin to "having someone send you a real Get Out Of Jail Free Card." Despite the fact that Mr. King received payment for the story he has never been able to locate a copy of the magazine with the published story in it.