The Bad Place

by Dean Koontz

  she had not learned to talk until she was six years old. She had never risen out of those deep, fast currents of extraordinary sensation to stand on the comparatively dry bank of life on which other people existed, but at least she had learned to interact with her mother, Candy, and others to a limited degree.

  Verbina had never coped half as well as Violet, and evidently never would. Having chosen a life almost exclusively defined by sensation, she exhibited little or no concern for the exercise and development of her intellect. She had never learned to talk, showed only the vaguest interest in anyone but her sister, and immersed herself with joyous abandonment in the ocean of sensory stimuli that surged around her. Running as a squirrel, flying as a hawk or gull, rutting as a cat, loping and killing as a coyote, drinking cool water from a stream through the mouth of a raccoon or field mouse, entering the mind of a bitch in heat as other dogs mounted her, simultaneously sharing the terror of the cornered rabbit and the savage excitement of the predatory fox, Verbina enjoyed a breadth of life that no one else but Violet could ever know. And she preferred the constant thrill of immersion in the wildness of the world to the comparatively mundane existence of other people.

  Now, although Verbina still slept, a part of her was with Violet in the soaring hawk, for even sleep did not necessitate the complete disconnection of their links to other minds. The continuous sensory input of the lesser species was not only the primary fabric from which their lives were cut, but the stuff of which their dreams were formed, as well.

  Under storm clouds that grew darker by the minute, the hawk glided high over the canyon behind the Pollard property. It was hunting.

  Far below, among pieces of dried and broken tumbleweed, between spiny clumps of gorse, a fat mouse broke cover. It scurried along the canyon floor, alert for signs of enemies at ground level but oblivious to the feathered death that observed it from far above.

  Instinctively aware that the mouse could hear the flapping of wings from a great distance and would scramble into the nearest haven at the first sound of them, the hawk silently tucked its wings back, half folding them against its body, and dived steeply, angling toward the rodent. Though she had shared this experience countless times before, Violet held her breath as they plummeted twelve hundred feet, dropping past ground level and farther down into the ravine; and though she actually was safely on her back in bed, her stomach seemed to turn within her, and a primal terror swelled within her breast even as she let out a thin squeal of pleasurable excitement.

  On the bed beside Violet, her sister also softly cried out. On the canyon floor the mouse froze, sensing onrushing doom but not certain from which quarter it was coming.

  The hawk deployed its wings as foils at the last moment; abruptly the true substance of the air became apparent and provided a welcome braking resistance. Letting its hindquarters precede it, extending its legs, opening its claws, the hawk seized the mouse even as the creature reacted to the sudden spread of wings and tried to flee.

  Though remaining with the hawk, Violet entered the mind of the mouse an instant before the predator had taken it. She felt the icy satisfaction of the hunter and the hot fear of the prey. From the perspective of the hawk, she felt the plump mouse’s flesh puncture and split under the sharp and powerful assault of her talons, and from the perspective of the mouse, she was wracked by searing pain and was aware of a dreadful rupturing within. The bird peered down at the squealing rodent in its grasp, and shivered with a wild sense of dominance and power, with a realization that hunger would again be sated. It loosed a caw of triumph that echoed along the canyon. Feeling small and helpless in the grip of its winged assailant, in the thrall of excruciating fear so intense as to be strangely akin to the most exquisite of sensory pleasures, the mouse looked up into the steely, merciless eyes and ceased to struggle, went limp, resigned itself to death. It saw the fierce beak descending, was aware of being rended, but no longer felt pain, only numb resignation, then a brief moment of shattering bliss, then nothing, nothing. The hawk tipped back its head and let bloody ribbons and warm knots of flesh fall down its gullet.

  On the bed Violet turned on her side to face her sister. Having been shaken from sleep by the power of the experience with the hawk, Verbina came into Violet’s arms. Naked, pelvis to pelvis, belly to belly, breasts to breasts, the twins held each other and shuddered uncontrollably. Violet gasped against Verbina’s tender throat, and through her link with Verbina’s mind, she felt that hot flood of her own breath and the warmth it brought to her sister’s skin. They made wordless sounds and clung to each other, and their frantic breathing did not begin to subside until the hawk tore the last red sliver of nourishing meat from the mouse’s hide and, with a flurry of wings, threw itself into the sky again.

  Below was the Pollard property: the Eugenia hedge; the gabled, slate-roofed, weathered-looking house; the twenty-year-old Buick that had belonged to their mother and that Candy sometimes drove; clusters of primrose burning with red and yellow and purple blooms in a narrow and untended flowerbed that extended the length of the decrepit back porch. Violet also saw Candy far below, at the northeast corner of the sprawling property.

  Still holding fast to her sister, gracing Verbina’s throat and cheek and temple with a lace of gentle kisses, Violet simultaneously directed the hawk to circle above her brother. Through the bird, she watched him as he stood, head bowed, at their mother’s grave, mourning her as he had mourned her every day, without exception, since her death those many years ago.

  Violet did not mourn. Her mother had been as much a stranger to her as anyone in the world, and she had felt nothing special at the woman’s passing. Indeed, because Candy was gifted, too, Violet felt closer to him than she had to her mother, which was not saying much because she did not really know him or care a great deal about him. How could she be close to anyone if she could not enter his mind and live with him, through him? That incredible intimacy was what welded her to Verbina, and it marked the myriad relationships she enjoyed with all the fowl and fauna that populated nature’s world. She simply did not know how to relate to anyone without that intense, innermost connection, and if she could not love, she could not mourn.

  Far below the wheeling hawk, Candy dropped to his knees beside the grave.

  27

  MONDAY AFTERNOON. Thomas sat at his worktable. Making a picture poem.

  Derek helped. Or thought he did. He sorted through a box of magazine clippings. He chose pictures, gave them to Thomas. If the picture was right, Thomas trimmed it, pasted it on the page. Most of the time it wasn’t right, so he put it aside and asked for another picture and another until Derek gave him something he could use.

  He didn’t tell Derek the awful truth. The awful truth was that he wanted to make the poem by himself. But he couldn’t hurt Derek’s feelings. Derek was hurt enough. Too much. Being dumb really hurt, and Derek was dumber than Thomas. Derek was dumber-looking, too, which was more hurt. His forehead sloped more than Thomas’s. His nose was flatter, and his head had a squashy shape. Awful truth.

  Later, tired of making the picture poem, Thomas and Derek went to the wreck room, and that was where it happened. Derek got hurt. He got hurt so much he cried. A girl did it. Mary. In the wreck room.

  Some people were playing a game of marbles in one comer. Some were watching TV. Thomas and Derek were sitting on a couch near some windows, Being Sociable when anyone came around. The aides always wanted people at The Home to Be Sociable. It was good for you to Be Sociable. When no one came around to Be Sociable with them, Thomas and Derek were watching hummingbirds at a feeder that hung outside the windows. Hummingbirds didn’t really hum, but they zipped around and were a lot of fun to watch. Mary, who was new at The Home, didn’t zip around and wasn’t fun to watch, but she hummed a lot. No, she buzzed. Buzz, buzz, buzz, all the time.

  Mary knew about eye cues. She said they really mattered, eye cues, and maybe they did, though Thomas had never heard of them and didn’t understand what they were
, but then a lot of things he didn’t understand were important. He knew what eyes were, of course. He knew a cue was a stick you hit balls with because they had a pool table right there in the wreck room, near where he and Derek were sitting, though nobody used it much. He figured it would be a bad thing, real bad, if you stuck yourself in the eye with a cue, but this Mary said eye cues were good and she had a big one for a Down’s kid.

  “I’m a high-end moron,” she said, real happy with herself, you could tell.

  Thomas didn’t know what a moron was, but he couldn’t see a high end to Mary anywhere, she was fat and mostly droopy all over.

  “You’re probably a moron, too, Thomas, but you ain’t high-end like me. I’m almost normal, and you ain’t as close normal as me.”

  All this only confused Thomas.

  It confused Derek even more, you could tell, and in his thick and sometimes hard to understand voice, Derek said, “Me? No moron.” He shook his head. “Cowboy.” He smiled. “Cowboy.”

  Mary laughed at him. “You ain’t no cowboy or ever going to be. What you are is you’re an imbecile.”

  They had to ask her to say it a few times before they got it, but even then they didn’t really get it. They could say it but didn’t know what it was any more than they knew what one of these eye cues looked like.

  “You’ve got your normal people,” Mary said, “then morons under them, then imbeciles, who’re dumber than morons, and then you got idiots, who’re dumber than even imbeciles. Me, I’m a high-end moron, and I ain’t going to be here forever, I’m going to be good, behave, work hard to be normal, and someday go back to the halfway house.”

  “Halfway where?” Derek asked, which was what Thomas wondered too.

  Mary laughed at him. “Halfway to being normal, which is more than you’ll ever be, you poor damn imbecile.”

  This time Derek realized she was looking down on him, making fun, and he tried not to cry, but he did. He got red in the face and cried, and Mary grinned sort of wild, she was all puffed up, excited, like she’d won some big prize. She’d used a bad word—damn—and should be ashamed, but she wasn’t, you could tell. She said the other word again, which Thomas now saw was a bad word, too, “imbecile,” and she kept saying it, until poor Derek got up and ran, and even then she shouted it after him.

  Thomas went back to their room, looking for Derek, and Derek was in the closet with the door shut, bawling. Some of the aides came, and they talked to Derek real nice, but he didn’t want to come out of the closet. They had to talk to him a long time to get him to come out of there, but even then he couldn’t stop crying, and so after a while they had to Give Him Something. Once in a while when you were sick, like with the flu, the aides asked you to Take Something, which meant a pill of one shape or another, one color or another, big or little. But when they had to Give You Something, it always meant a needle, which was a bad thing. They never had to Give Something to Thomas because he was always good. But sometimes Derek, nice as he was, got to feeling so bad about himself that he couldn’t stop crying, and sometimes he hit himself, just hit himself in the face, until he broke himself open and got blood on himself, and even then he wouldn’t stop, so they had to Give Him Something For His Own Good. Derek never hit anyone else, he was nice, but For His Own Good he sometimes had to be made to relax or sometimes even made to sleep, which was what happened the day Mary the high-end moron called him an imbecile.

  After Derek was made to sleep, one of the aides sat beside Thomas at the worktable. It was Cathy. Thomas liked Cathy. She was older than Julie but not as old as somebody’s mother. She was pretty. Not as pretty as Julie but pretty, with a nice voice and eyes you weren’t afraid to look into. She took one of Thomas’s hands in both of hers, and she asked if he was okay. He said he was, but he really wasn’t, and she knew it. They talked a while. That helped. Being Sociable.

  She told him about Mary, so he’d understand, and that helped too. “She’s so frustrated, Thomas. She was out there in the world for a while, at a halfway house, and she even had a part-time job, making a little money of her own. She was trying so hard, but it didn’t work, she had too many problems, so she had to be institutionalized again. I think she regrets what she did to Derek. She’s just so disappointed that she needed to feel superior to someone.”

  “I am ... was... was out there in the world once,” Thomas said.

  “I know you were, honey.”

  “With my dad. Then with my sister. And Bobby.”

  “Did you like it out there?”

  “Some of it ... scared me. But when I was with Julie and Bobby ... I liked that part.”

  On his bed, Derek was snoring now.

  The afternoon was half gone. The sky was getting ugly-stormy. The room had shadows everywhere. Only the desk lamp was on. Cathy’s face looked pretty in the lampglow. Her skin was like peach-colored satin. He knew what satin was like. Julie once had a dress of satin.

  For a while he and Cathy were quiet.

  Then he said, “Sometimes it’s hard.”

  She put her hand on his head. Smoothed his hair. “Yeah, I know, Thomas. I know.”

  She was so nice. He didn’t know why he started to cry when she was so nice, but he did. Maybe it was because she was so nice.

  Cathy scooted her chair closer to his. He leaned against her. She put her arms around him. He cried and cried. Not hard terrible crying like Derek. Soft. But he couldn’t stop. He tried not to cry because crying made him feel dumb, and he hated feeling dumb.

  Through his tears, he said, “I hate feeling dumb.”

  “You’re not dumb, honey.”

  “Yeah, I am. Hate it. But I can’t be nothing else. I try not to think about being dumb, but you can’t not think about it when it’s what you are, and when other people aren’t, and they go out in the world every day and they live, but you don’t go out in the world and don’t even want to but, oh, you want to, even when you say you don’t.” That was a lot for him to say, and he was surprised that he had said it all, surprised but also frustrated because he wanted so bad to tell her how it felt, being dumb, being afraid of going out in the world, and he’d failed, hadn’t been able to find the right words, so the feeling was still all bottled up in him. “Time. There’s lots of time, see, when you’re dumb and can’t go out in the world, lots of time to fill up, but then there really ain’t enough time, not enough for learning how to be not afraid of things, and I’ve got to learn how not to be afraid so I can go back and be with Julie and Bobby, which I want to do real bad, before all the time runs out. There’s too big amounts of time and not enough, and that sounds dumb, don’t it?”

  “No, Thomas. It doesn’t sound dumb.”

  He didn’t move out of her arms. He wanted to be hugged.

  Cathy said, “You know, sometimes life is hard for everyone. Even for smart people. Even for the smartest of them all.”

  With one hand he wiped at his damp eyes. “It is? Sometimes is it hard for you?”

  “Sometimes. But I believe there’s a God, Thomas, and that he put us here for a reason, and that every hardship we have to face is a test, and that we’re better for enduring them.”

  He raised his head to look at her. Such nice eyes. Good eyes. They were eyes that loved you. Like Julie’s eyes or Bobby’s.

  Thomas said, “God made me dumb to test me?”

  “You’re not dumb, Thomas. Not in some ways. I don’t like to hear you call yourself dumb. You’re not as smart as some, but that’s not your fault. You’re different, that’s all. Being ... different is your hardship, and you’re coping with it well.”

  “I am?”

  “Beautifully. Look at you. You’re not bitter. You’re not sullen. You reach out to people.”

  “Being Sociable.”

  She smiled, pulled a tissue from the box of Kleenex on the worktable, and wiped the tears from his face. “Of all the smart people in the world, Thomas, not a one of them handles hardship better than you do, and most not as well.”
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  He knew she meant what she said, and her words made him happy, even if he didn’t quite believe life was ever hard for smart people.

  She stayed a while. Made sure he was okay. Then she left.

  Derek was still snoring.

  Thomas sat at the worktable. Tried to make more poem.

  After a while he went to the window. Rain was coming down now. It trickled on the glass. The afternoon was almost gone. Night was soon coming down on top of the rain.

  He put his hands against the glass. He reached into the rain, into the gray day, into the nothingness of the night that was slowly sneaking up on them.

  The Bad Thing was still out there. He could feel it. A man but not a man. Something more than a man. Very bad. Ugly-nasty. He’d felt it for days, but he hadn’t TVed a warning to Bobby since last week because the Bad Thing wasn’t coming any closer. It was far away, right now Julie was safe, and if he TVed too many warnings to Bobby, then Bobby would stop paying attention to them, and when the Bad Thing finally showed up, Bobby wouldn’t believe in it any more, and then it would get to Julie because Bobby wouldn’t be paying attention.

  What Thomas most feared was that the Bad Thing would take Julie to the Bad Place. Their mother went to the Bad Place when Thomas was two years old, so he’d never known her. Then their dad went to the Bad Place later, leaving Thomas with just Julie.

  He didn’t mean Hell. He knew about Heaven and Hell. Heaven was God’s. The devil owned Hell. If there was a Heaven, he was sure his mom and dad went there. You wanted to go up to Heaven if you could. Things were better there. In Hell, the aides weren’t nice.

  But, to Thomas, the Bad Place wasn’t just Hell. It was Death. Hell was a bad place, but Death was the Bad Place. Death was a word you couldn’t picture. Death meant everything stopped, went away, all your time ran out, over, done, kaput. How could you picture that? A thing wasn’t real if you couldn’t picture it. He couldn’t see Death, couldn’t get a picture of it in his head, not if he thought about it the way other people seemed to think about it. He was just too dumb, so he had to picture it in his head as a place. They said Death came to take you, and it had come to take his father one night, his heart had attacked him, but if it came to take you, then it had to take you to some place. And that was the Bad Place. It’s where you were taken and never allowed to come back. Thomas didn’t know what happened to a person there. Maybe nothing nasty. Except you weren’t allowed to come back and see people you loved, which made it nasty enough, no matter if the food was good over there. Maybe some people went on to Heaven, some to Hell, but you couldn’t come back from either one, so both were part of the Bad Place, just different rooms. And he wasn’t sure Heaven and Hell were real, so maybe all there was in the Bad Place was darkness and cold and so much empty space that when you went over there you couldn’t even find the people who’d gone ahead of you.

  That scared him most of all. Not just losing Julie to the Bad Place, but not being able to find her when he went over there himself.

  He was already afraid of the night. All that big empty. The lid off the world. So if just the night itself was so scary, the Bad Place would be lots worse. It was sure to be bigger than the night, and daylight never came in the Bad Place.

  Outside, the sky got darker.

  Wind blew the palms.

  Rain ran down the glass.

  The Bad Thing was far away.

  But it would come closer. Soon.

  28

  CANDY WAS having one of those days when he could not accept that his mother was dead. Every time he crossed a threshold or turned a comer, he expected to see her. He thought he heard her rocking in the parlor, humming softly to herself as she knitted a new afghan, but when he went in there to look, the rocking chair was filmed with dust and draped with a shawl of cobwebs. Once, he hurried into the kitchen, expecting to find her in a brightly flowered housedress overlaid with a ruffle-trimmed white apron, dropping neat spoonsful of cookie batter on baking sheets or perhaps mixing a cake, but, of course, she was not there. In a moment of acute emotional turmoil, Candy raced upstairs, certain that he would find his mother in bed, but when he burst into her room, he remembered that it was his room now, and that she was gone.

  Eventually, to jar himself out of that strange and troubling mood, he went into the backyard and stood by her lonely grave in the northeast comer of the large property. He had buried her there, seven years ago, under a solemn winter sky similar to the one that currently hid the sun, with a hawk circling above just as one circled now. He had dug her grave, wrapped her in sheets scented with Chanel No. 5, and lowered her into the ground secretly, because interment on private property, not designated as a gravesite, was against the law. If he had allowed her to be buried elsewhere, he would have had to go live there with her, for he could not have endured being separated from her mortal remains for any great length of time.

  Candy dropped to his knees.

  Over the years the original mound of earth had settled, until her grave was marked by a shallow concavity. The grass was sparser there, the blades coarse, wiry, different from the rest of the lawn, though he did not know why; even in the months following her burial, the grass above her had not flourished. No headstone memorialized her passing; although the backyard was sheltered by the high hedge, he could not risk calling attention to her illegal resting place.

  Staring at the ground before him, Candy wondered if a headstone would help him accept her death. If every day he saw her name and the date of her death deeply cut into a slab of marble, that sight should slowly but permanently engrave the loss upon his heart, sparing him days like this, when he was disturbed by a queer forgetfulness and by a hope that could never be fulfilled.

  He stretched out on the grave, his head turned to one side with an ear against the earth, as if he half expected to hear her speaking to him from her subterranean bed. Pressing his body hard into the unyielding ground, he longed to feel the vitality that she had once radiated, the singular energy that had flowed from her like heat from the open door of a furnace, but he felt nothing. Though his mother had been a special woman, Candy knew it was absurd to expect her corpse, after seven years, to radiate even a ghost of the love that she had lavished upon him when she was alive; nevertheless, he was grievously disappointed when not even the faintest aura shimmered upward through the dirt from her sacred bones.

  Hot tears burned in his eyes, and he tried to hold them back. But a faint rumble of thunder passed through the sky, and a few fat droplets of rain began to fall, and neither the storm nor his tears could be restrained.

  She lay only five or six feet beneath him, and he was overcome by an urge to claw his way down to her. He knew her flesh would have deteriorated, that he would find only bones cradled in a vile muck of unthinkable origin, but he wanted to hold her and be held, even if he had to arrange her skeletal arms around himself in a staged embrace. He actually ripped at the grass and tore up a few handsful of topsoil. Soon, however, he was wracked by powerful sobs that swiftly exhausted him and left him too weak to struggle with reality any longer.

  She was dead.

  Gone.

  Forever.

  As the cold rain fell in greater volume, pounding on Candy’s back, it seemed