dared not let the need bloom... but resisting was infinitely harder
than resisting the charms of women and other sins. He hated Frank. He
hated him so much, so deep he had hated him so constantly for seven
years, that he couldn't even bear the thought that he had slept through
an opportunity to destroy him.
Need....
He dropped to his knees on the weedy lawn. He fisted his hands and
hunched his shoulders and clenched his teeth, trying to make a rock of
himself, an unmovable mass that would not be swayed one inch by the most
urgent need, not one hair width by even the most dire necessity, the
most demanding hunger, the most passionate craving. He prayed to his
mother to give him strength. The wind began to pick up again, an he
believed it was a devil wind that would blow him toward temptation, so
he fell forward on the ground and dug his fingers into the yielding
earth, and he repeated his mother's name-Roselle-whispered her name
furiously into the grass and dirt, again and again, desperate to quell
the mention of his dark need. Then he wept. Then he got up. And went
hunting.
FRANK WENT to a theater and sat through a movie but was unable to
concentrate on the story. He ate dinner at El Torito, though he didn't
really taste the food; he just pushed down the enchiladas and rice as if
feeding fuel to a furnace. For a couple of hours he drove aimlessly
back and forth across the middle and southern reaches of Orange County,
staying on the move only because, for the time being, he felt safer when
in motion. Finally he returned to the motel.
He kept probing at the dark wall in his mind, behind which his entire
life was concealed. Diligently, he sought the tiniest chink through
which he might glimpse a memory. If he could find one crack, he was
sure that the entire facade of amnesia would come tumbling down. But
the barrier was smooth and flawless.
When he switched off the lights, he could not sleep.
The Santa Anas had abated. He could not blame his insomnia on the noisy
winds.
Although the amount of blood on the sheets had been minimal and though
it had dried since he'd awakened from his nap earlier in the day, he
decided that the thought of lying in bloodstained bedclothes was
preventing him from nodding off. He snapped on a lamp, stripped the
bed, turned up the heat, stretched out in the darkness again, and tried
to sleep without covers.
No good.
He told himself that his amnesia-and the resultant loneliness and sense
of isolation-was keeping him awake. Although there was some truth in
that, he knew that he was kidding himself.
The real reason he could not sleep was fear. Fear of where he might go
while sleepwalking. Fear of what he might do. Fear of what he might
find in his hands when he woke up.
DEREK SLEPT. In the other bed. Snoring so Thomas couldn't sleep. He
got up and stood by the window looking out. The moon was gone. The
dark was very big.
He didn't like the night. It scared him. He liked sunshine and flowers
all bright, and grass looking green, and blue all over so you felt like
there was a lid on the world to keep everything down here on the ground
and in place. At night the colors were gone, and the world was empty,
like somebody took the lid off and let in a lot of nothingness, and
looked up at all that nothingness and you felt you might just float away
like the colors, float up and away and out of the world, and then in the
morning when they put the lid back on, you wouldn't be here, you'd be
out there somewhere, and you could never get back in again. Never.
He put his fingertips against the window. The glass was cold. He
wished he could sleep away the night. Usually he slept okay. Not
tonight.
He was worried about Julie. He always worried about her a little. A
brother was supposed to worry. But this wasn't little worry. This was
a lot.
It started just that morning. A funny feeling. Not funny ha. Funny
strange. Funny scary. Something real bad's going to happen to Julie,
the feeling said. Thomas got so upset, tried to warn her. He made a
warning to her. They said the pictures and voices and music on the TV
were sent through the air, which he first thought was a lie, that they
were making fun of his being dumb, expecting him to believe anything,
but then Julie said it was true, so sometimes he tried to turn his
thoughts to her, because if you could send pictures and voices through
the air, thoughts ought to be easy. Be careful, Julie, he thought. Look
out, be careful something bad's going to happen.
Usually, when he felt things about someone, that someone was Julie. He
knew when she was happy. Or sad. When she was sick, he sometimes
curled up on his bed and put his hands on his own belly. He always knew
when she was coming to visit.
He felt things about Bobby too. Not at first. When Julie first brought
Bobby around, Thomas felt nothing. But slowly he felt more. Until now
he felt almost as much about Bobby as about Julie.
He felt things about some other people too. Like Derek. Like Gina,
another Down's kid at The Home. And like a couple of the aides, one of
the visiting nurses. But he didn't feel half as much about them as he
did about Bobby and Julie. He figured that maybe the more he loved
somebody, the bigger he felt things-knew things-about them.
Sometimes when Julie was worried about him, Thomas wanted real bad to
tell her that he knew how she felt, and that he was all right. Because
just knowing he -understood would make her happier. But he didn't have
the words. He couldn't explain how or why he sometimes felt other
people's feelings. And he didn't want to try to tell them about it
because he was afraid of looking dumb.
He was dumb. He knew that. He wasn't as dumb as Derek, who was very
nice, good to room with, but who was real slow. They sometimes said
"slow" instead of "dumb" when they talked in front of you. Julie never
did. Bobby never did. But some people said "slow" and thought you
didn't get it. He got it. They had bigger words, too, and he really
didn't understand those, but he sure understood "slow." He didn't want
to be dumb, nobody gave him a choice, and sometimes he thought a message
to God, asking God to make him not dumb any more, but either God wanted
him to stay dumb always and forever but why? or God just didn't get the
messages.
Julie didn't get the messages either. Thomas always knew when he got
through to someone with a thought. He never got to Julie.
But he could sometimes get through to Bobby, which was funny. Not ha-ha
funny. Strange funny. Interesting funny. When Thomas sent a thought
to Julie, Bobby sometimes got it instead. Like this morning. When he'd
sent a warning to Julie -Something bad is going to happen, Julie,
something real bad is coming -Bobby had picked it up. Maybe because
Thomas and Bobby both loved Julie. Thomas didn't know. He couldn't
feel sure- But it sure happened. Bobby tuned in.
Now Tho
mas stood at the window, in his pajamas, and looked out at the
scary night, and he felt the Bad Thing over there, felt it like a ripple
in his blood, like a tingle in his body The Bad Thing was far away, not
anywhere near Julie, but coming.
Today, during Julie's visit, Thomas wanted to tell her about the Bad
Thing coming. But he couldn't find a way to say and make sense, and he
was scared of sounding dumb. Julie and Bobby knew he was dumb, sure,
but he hated to sound dumb in front of them, to remind them how dumb he
was. Every time he almost started to tell her about the Bad Thing he
just forgot how to use words. He had the words in his mind, all lined
up in a row, ready to say, but then suddenly they were mixed up, and he
couldn't make them get back in the right order, so he couldn't say the
words because they'd be just words without meaning anything, and he'd
look really, real dumb.
Besides, he didn't know what to tell her the Bad Thing was He thought
maybe it was a person, a real terrible person over there, going to do
something to Julie, but it didn't exactly feel like a person. Partly a
person, but something else. Something that made Thomas feel cold not
just on his outside but on his inside, too, like standing in a winter
wind and eating ice cream at the same time.
He shivered.
He didn't want to get these ugly feelings about whatever out there, but
he couldn't just go back to bed and tune out either, because the more he
felt about the far-away Bad Thing the better he could warn Julie and
Bobby when the thing wasn't so far away any more.
Behind him, Derek murmured in a dream.
The Home was real quiet. All the dumb people were deep asleep. Except
Thomas. Sometimes he liked to be awake when everyone else wasn't.
Sometimes that made him feel smarter than all of them put together,
seeing things they couldn't see and knowing things they couldn't know
because they were asleep and he wasn't.
He stared at the nothingness of night.
He put his forehead against the glass.
For Julie's sake, he reached. Into the nothingness. Toward the
far-away.
He opened himself. To the feelings. To the ripple-tingle.
A big ugly-nasty hit him. Like a wave. It came out of the night and
hit him, and he stumbled back from the window and fell on his butt
beside the bed, and then he couldn't feel the Bad Thing at all, it was
gone, but what he had felt was so big and so ugly that his heart was
pounding and he could hardly breathe, and right away he thought to
Bobby: Run, go, get away, save Julie, the Bad Thing's coming, the Bad
Thing, run, run.
THE DREAM was filled with the music of Glenn Miller's "Moonlight
Serenade," though like everything in dreams, the song was indefinably
different from the real tune. Bobby was in a house that was at once
familiar yet total strange, and somehow he knew it was the seaside
bungalow to which he and Julie were going to retire young. He drifted
into the living room, over a dark Persian carpet, comfortable-looking
upholstered chairs, a huge old chesterfield with rounded back and thick
cushions, a rusty looking carpet with bronze panels, an Art Deco lamp,
and overflowing bookshelves. The music was coming from outside, so he
was out there. He enjoyed the easy transitions of the dream, moving
through a door without opening it, crossing a wide porch a descending
wooden stairs without ever quite lifting a foot. The sea rumbled to one
side, and the phosphorescent foam of breakers glowed faintly in the
night. Under a palm tree, in the sand, with a scattering of shells
around it, stood a Wurlitzer 950, ablaze with gold and red light, bubble
tubes percolating gazelles perpetually leaping, figures of Pan
perpetually pipin record-changing mechanism gleaming like real silver,
and large black platter spinning on the turntable. Bobby felt as
"Moonlight Serenade" would go on forever, which would have been fine
with him, because he had never been more mellow more at peace, and he
sensed that Julie had come out of the house behind him, that she was
waiting on the damp sand near the water's edge, and that she wanted to
dance with him, as he turned, and there she was, exotically illuminated
by the Wurlitzer, and he took a step toward her "Run, go, get away, save
Julie, the Bad Thing's coming, Bad Thing, run, run!
The indigo ocean suddenly leapt as if under the lash of a storm, and
spume exploded into the night air.
Hurricane winds shook the palms.
The Bad Thing! Run! Run!
The world tilted. Bobby stumbled toward Julie. The sea surged up
around her. It wanted her; it was going to seize her; it was water with
a will, a thinking sea with a malevolent consciousness gleaming darkly
in its depths.
The Bad Thing!
The Glenn Miller tune speeded up, whirling at double time.
The Bad Thing!
The soft, romantic light from the Wurlitzer flamed brighter, stung his
eyes, yet did not drive back the night. It was radiating light as if
the door to Hell had opened, but the darkness around them only
intensified, yielding nothing to that supernatural blaze.
THE BAD THING! THE BAD THING!
The world tilted again. Heaved and rolled.
Bobby staggered across the carnival-ride beach, toward Julie, who seemed
unable to move. She was being swallowed by the churning oil-black sea.
THE BAD THING THE BAD THING THE BAD THING!
With the hard crack of riven stone, the sky split above them, but no
lightning stabbed out of that crumbling vault.
Geysers of sand erupted around Bobby. Inky water exploded out of sudden
gaping holes in the beach.
He looked back. The bungalow was gone. The sea rose on all sides. The
beach was dissolving under his feet.
Screaming, Julie disappeared under the water.
BADTHINGBADTHINGBADTHINGBADTHING
A twenty-foot wave loomed over Bobby. It broke. He was swept away. He
tried to swim. The flesh on his arms and hands bubbled and blistered
and began to peel off, revealing glints of ice-white bone. The midnight
seawater was an acid. His head went under. He gasped, broke the
surface, but the corrosive sea had already kissed away his lips, and he
felt his gums receding from his teeth, and his tongue turned to rancid
mush in the salty rush of caustic brine that he had swallowed. Even the
spray-filled air was erosive, eating away his lungs in an instant, so
when he tried to breathe he could not. He went down, flailing at the
waves with arms and hands that were only bone, caught in an undertow,
sucked into everlasting darkness, dissolution, oblivion.
BAD THING!
Bobby sat straight up in bed.
He was screaming, but no cry issued from him. When he realized he had
been dreaming, he stopped trying to scream and finally a low and
miserable sound escaped him.
He had thrown off the sheets. He sat on the edge of the bed feet on the
floor, both hands on the mattress, steadying himself as if he was still
on that heaving beach or struggling to swim in those roil
ing tides.
The green numbers of the projection clock glowed fain on the ceiling:
2:43.
For a while the drum-loud thud of his own heart filled him with sound
from within, and he was deaf to the outer warmth But after a few seconds
he heard Julie breathing rhythmically, and he was surprised that he had
not awaken her. Evidently he had not been thrashing in his sleep.
The panic that infused the dream had not entirely left him His anxiety
began to swell again, partly because the room was lightless as that
devouring sea. Afraid of waking Julie did not switch on the bedside
lamp.
As soon as he was able to stand, he got up and circled the bed in the
perfect blackness. The bathroom was on her side but a clear path was
provided, and he found his way as he had on countless other nights,
without difficulty, guided by both experience and instinct.
He eased the door shut behind him and switched on the lights. For a
moment the fluorescent brilliance prevented him from looking into the
glary surface of the mirror above the double sinks. When at last he
regarded his reflection, and that his flesh had not been eaten away. The
dream had been frighteningly vivid, unlike anything he'd known before;
and in some strange way it had been even more real than waking like with
intense colors and sounds that pulsed through his slumbering mind with
the full glare dazzle of light along the filament of an incandescent
bulb. Though aware that it had been a dream, he had half feared that
the nightmare ocean had I its corrosive mark on him even after he woke.
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 12
