Neither the cats nor Verbina twitched at the crash of the chair or the
sharpness of his voice. They lay somnolent, indifferent.
"Outside," Violet said, still sitting on the floor beside her reclining
sister, working on the other twin's nails. She had a low, almost
whispery voice.
"Watching the house from the Eugenia hedge."
Candy glanced at the night beyond the windows.
"When?"
"Around four o'clock."
"Why didn't you wake me?"
"He wasn't here long. He's never here long. A minute or two, then he
goes. He's afraid."
"You saw him?"
"I knew he was there."
"You didn't try to stop him from leaving?"
"How could I?"
She sounded irritable now, but her voice was no less seductive than it
had been.
"The cats went after him, though."
"Did they hurt him?"
"A little. Not bad. But he killed Samantha."
"Who?"
"Our poor little pussy. Samantha."
Candy did not know the cats' names. They had always seemed to be not
just a pack of cats but a single creature, most often moving as one,
apparently thinking as one.
"He killed Samantha. Smashed her head against one of the stone
pilasters at the end of the walk." At last Violet looked up from her
sister's hand. Her eyes seemed to be a paler blue than before, icy.
"I want you to hurt him, Candy. I want you to hurt him real bad, the
way he hurt our cat. I don't care if he is our brother-"
"He isn't our brother any more, not after what he did Candy said
furiously.
"I want you to do to him what he did to our poor Samantha I want you to
smash him, Candy, I want you to crush his head crack his skull open
until his brains ooze out." She continued to speak softly, but he was
riveted by her words. Sometimes, like now, when her voice was even more
sensuous than us it seemed not merely to play upon his ears but to
slither inside his head, where it lay gently on his brain, like a mist,
a
"I want you to pound him, hit him and tear him until he's just
splintered bones and ruptured guts, and I want you to rip his eyes. I
want him to be sorry he hurt Samantha." Candy shook himself.
"If I get my hands on him, I'll kill him, all right, but not because of
what he did to your cat.
cause of what he did to our mother. Don't you remember what he did to
her? How can you worry about getting revenge on a cat when we still
haven't made him pay for our mother, after seven long years?" She
looked stricken, turned her face from him, and fell silent.
The cats flowed off Verbina's recumbent form.
Violet stretched out half atop her sister, half beside her.
and put her head on Verbina's breasts. Their bare legs were twined.
Rising part of the way out of her trance like state, Verbina stroked her
sister's silken hair.
The cats returned and cuddled against both twins where there was a warm
hollow to welcome them.
"Frank was here," Candy said aloud but largely to himself and his hands
curled into tight fists.
A fury grew in him, like a small turning wheel of wind out on the sea
but soon to whirl itself into a hurricane. However, rage was an emotion
he dared not indulge; he must control himself. A storm of rage would
water the seeds of his need. His mother would approve of killing Frank,
for Frank had betrayed the family; his death would benefit the family.
But if Candy let his anger at his brother swell into a rage, then was
unable to find Frank, he would have to kill someone else because the
need would be too great to deny. His mother, in Heaven, would be
ashamed of him, and for a while she would turn her face from him and
deny that she had ever given birth to him. Looking up at the ceiling,
toward the unseen sky and the place at God's court where his mother
dwelled, Candy said,
"I'll be okay. I won't lose control. I won't." He turned from his
sisters and the cats, and he went outside to see if any trace of Frank
remained near the Eugenia hedge or at the pilaster where he'd killed
Samantha.
BOBBY AND Julie ate dinner at Ozzie's, in Orange then shifted to the
adjoining bar. The music was provided Eddie Day, who had a smooth,
supple voice; he played contemporary stuff but also tunes from the
fifties and early sixties.
It wasn't Big Band, but some early rock-and-roll had a swing beat. They
could swing to numbers like "Dream Love, rumba to "La Bamba," and
cha-cha to any disco that was put into Eddie's repertoire, so they had a
good time.
Whenever possible, Julie liked to go dancing after she visited Thomas at
Cielo Vista. In the thrall of the music, keeping time to the beat,
focused on the patterns of the dance, she was able to put everything
else out of her mind-even guilt, even grief. Nothing else freed her so
completely. Bobby liked to dance too, especially swing. Tuck in, throw
out, change places, pull push, do a tight whip, tuck in again, throw
out, trade places with both hands linked, back to basic position...
Music soothed, but dance had the power to fill the heart with joy a to
numb those parts of it that were bruised.
During the musicians' break, Bobby and Julie sipped beer at a table near
the edge of the parquet dance floor. They talked about everything
except Thomas, and eventually they got around to The Dream-specifically,
how to furnish the seaside bungalow if they ever bought it. Though they
would not spend a fortune on furniture, they agreed that they could
indulge themselves with two pieces from the swing era: maybe a bronze
and marble Art Deco cabinet by Emile-Jacques Ruhlman and definitely a
Wurlitzer jukebox.
"The model 950," Julie said.
"It was gorgeous. Bubble tub Leaping gazelles on the front panels."
"Fewer than four thousand were made. Hitler's fault. Wurlitzer
retooled for war production. The model 500 is pretty too -or the 700."
"Nice, but they're not the 950."
"Not as expensive as the 950, either."
"You're counting pennies when we're talking ultimate beauty?" He said,
"Ultimate beauty is the Wurlitzer 950?"
"That's right. What else?"
"To me, you're the ultimate beauty."
"Sweet," she said.
"But I still want the 950."
"To you, aren't I the ultimate beauty?"
He batted his eyelashes.
"To me, you're just a difficult man who won't let me have my Wurlitzer
950," she said, enjoying the game.
"What about a Seeburg? A Packard Player-moor? Okay. A Rock-ola?"
"Rock-ola made some beautiful boxes," she agreed.
"We'll buy one of those and the Wurlitzer 950."
"You'll spend our money like a drunken sailor."
"I was born to be rich. Stork got confused. Didn't deliver me to the
Rockefellers."
"Wouldn't you like to get your hands on that stork now?"
"Got him years ago. Cooked him, ate him for Christmas dinner. He was
delicious, but I'd still rather be a Rockefeller."
"Happy?" Bobby asked.
"D
elirious. And it's not just the beer. I don't know why, but tonight
I feel better than I've felt in ages. I think we're going to get where
we want to go, Bobby. I think we're going to retire early and live a
long happy life by the sea."
His smile faded as she talked. Now he was frowning. She said, "What's
wrong with you, Sourpuss?"
"Nothing."
"Don't kid me. You've been a little strange all day. You've tried to
hide it, but something's on your mind."
He sipped his beer. Then: "Well, you've got this good feeling that
everything's going to be fine, but I've got a bad feeling."
"You? Mr. Blue Skies?" He was still frowning.
"Maybe you should confine yourself to office work for a while, stay off
the firing line."
"Why?"
"My bad feeling."
"Which is?" "That I'm going to lose you."
"Just try."
WITH ITS invisible baton, the wind conducted a chorus of whispery voices
in the hedgerow. The dense Eugenias formed a seven-foot-high wall
around three sides of the two-acre property, and they would have been
higher than the house itself if Candy had not used power trimmers to
chop off the tops of them a couple of times each year.
He opened the waist-high, wrought-iron gate between the two stone
pilasters, and stepped out onto the graveled shoulder of the county
road. To his left, the two-lane blacktop wound up into the hills for
another couple of miles. To his right, it dropped down toward the
distant coast, past houses on lots that were more parsimoniously
proportioned the nearer they were to the shore, until in town they were
only a tenth as big as the Pollard place. As the land descended
westward, lights were clustered in ever greater concentration-then
stopped abruptly, several miles away, as if crowding against a black
wall; that wall was the night sky and the lightless expanse of the deep,
cold sea.
Candy moved along the high hedge, until he sensed that he had reached
the place where Frank had stood. He held up both big hands, letting the
wind-fluttered leaves tremble against his palms, as if the foliage might
impart to him some psychic residue of his brother's brief visit.
Nothing.
Parting the branches, he peered through the gap at the house, which
looked larger at night than it really was, as if it had eighteen or
twenty rooms instead of ten. The front windows were dark; along the
side, toward the back, where the light was filtered through greasy
chintz curtains, a kitchen window was filled with a yellow glow. But
for that one light, the house might have appeared abandoned. Some of
the Victorian gingerbread had warped and broken away from the eaves. The
porch roof was sagging, and a few railing balusters were ken, and the
front steps were swaybacked. Even by the mere light of the low crescent
moon, he could see the house needed painting; bare wood, like glimpses
of dark bone, showed many places, and the remaining paint was either
peeling translucent as an albino's skin.
Candy tried to put himself in Frank's mind, to imagine Frank kept
returning. Frank was afraid of Candy, and he had reason to be. He was
afraid of his sisters, too, and of all memories that the house held for
him, so he should have stayed away. But he crept back with frequency,
in search of something-perhaps something that even he did not understand
Frustrated, Candy let the branches fall together, retraced his steps
along the hedge, and stopped at one gate post, then other, searching for
the spot where Frank had fended off cats and smashed Samantha's skull.
Though far milder than it had been earlier, the wind nevertheless had
dried blood that had stained the stones, and darkness hid the residue
Still, Candy was sure he could find the killing place. He gently
touched the pilaster high and low, on all four faces, if he expected a
portion of it to be hot enough to sear his hand. But though he
patiently traced the outlines of the rough stones and the mortar seams,
too much time had passed; even his exceptional talents could not extract
his brother's lingering and He hurried along the cracked and canted
walkway, out the chilly night and into the stiflingly warm house again,
i the kitchen, where his sisters were sitting on the blankets the cats'
corner. Verbina was behind Violet, a comb in hand and a brush in the
other, grooming her sister's flat hair.
Candy said, "Where's Samantha?"
Tilting her head, looking up at him perplexedly, Violet said, "I told
you. Dead."
"Where's the body?"
"Here," Violet said, making a sweeping gesture with hands to indicate
the quiescent felines sprawled and curled around her.
"Which one?" Candy asked. Half of the creatures were still that any of
them might have been the dead one.
"All," Violet said.
"They're all Samantha now." Candy had been afraid of that. Each time
one of them died, the twins drew the rest of the pack into a circle,
placed the corpse at the center, and without speaking commanded the
living to partake of the dead.
"Damn," Candy said.
"Samantha still lives, she's still a part of us," Violet said. Her
voice was as low and whispery as before, but dreamier than usual.
"None of our pussies ever really leaves us. Part of him... or her...
stays in each of us... and we're all stronger because of that, stronger
and purer, and always together, always and forever."
Candy did not ask if his sisters had shared in the feast, for he already
knew the answer. Violet licked the corner of her mouth, as if
remembering the taste, and her moist lips glistened; a moment later
Verbina's tongue slid across her lips too.
Sometimes Candy felt as if the twins were members of an entirely
different species from him, for he could seldom fathom their attitudes
and behavior. And when they looked at him Verbina, in perpetual
silence-their faces and eyes revealed nothing of their thoughts or
feelings; they were as inscrutable as the cats.
He only dimly grasped the twins' bond with the cats. It was their
blessed mother's gift to them just as his many talents were his mother's
generous bequest to him, so he did not question the rightness or
wholesomeness of it.
Still, he wanted to hit Violet because she hadn't saved the body for
him. She had known Frank had touched it, that it could be of use to
Candy, but she had not saved it until he'd awakened, had not come to
wake him early. He wanted to smash her, but she was his sister, and he
couldn't hurt his sisters; he had to provide for them, protect them. His
mother was watching.
"The parts that couldn't be eaten?" he asked.
Violet gestured toward the kitchen door.
He switched on the outside light and stepped onto the back porch. Small
knobs of bone and vertebrae were scattered like queerly shaped dice on
the unpainted floorboards. Only two sides of the porch were open; the
house angled around the other two flanks of it, and in the niche where
the house walls met, Candy found a pie
ce of Samantha's tail and scraps
of fur, jammed there by the night wind. The half-crushed skull was on
the top step. He snatched it up and moved down on to unmown lawn.
The wind, which had been declining since late afternoon suddenly stopped
altogether. The cold air would have carried the faintest sound a great
distance; but the night was hushed. Usually Candy could touch an object
and see who had handled it before him. Sometimes he could even see
where some of those people had gone after putting the object down, and
when he went looking for them, they were always to be found where his
clairvoyance had led him. Frank had killed the cat, and Candy hoped
that contact with the remains would spark an inner vision that would put
him on his brother's trail again.
Every speck of flesh had been stripped from Samantha's broken pate, and
its contents had been emptied as well. Pick clean, licked smooth, dried
by the wind, it might have been a portion of a fossil from a distant
age. Candy's mind was fill not with images of Frank but of the other
cats and Verbina and Violet, and finally he threw down the damaged skull
in disgust.
His frustration sharpened his anger. He felt the need rising in him. He
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 11
