Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place
Page 16
door behind them, and switched on the fan.
Bobby's face was grayish, like a highly detailed portrait done in
pencil; even his freckles were colorless. His customarily merry blue
eyes were not merry now.
He said, "Are you crazy? You told him we'll take the case."
Julie blinked in surprise.
"Isn't that what you wanted?"
"No."
"Ah. Then I guess I heard you wrong. Must be too much wax in my ears.
Solid as cement."
"He's probably a lunatic, dangerous."
"I'd better go to a doctor, have my ears professionally cleaned."
"This wild story he's made up is just-"
She held up one hand, halting him in mid-sentence-
"It's real, Bobby. He didn't imagine that bug. What is that thing I've
never even seen pictures of anything like it."
"What about the money? He must've stolen it."
"Frank's no thief."
"What-did God tell you that? Because there's no other way you could
know. You only met Pollard little more than an hour ago."
"You're right," she said.
"God told me. And I always listen to God because if you don't listen to
Him, then He's likely to visit a plague of teeming locusts on you or
maybe set your house on fire with a lightning bolt. Listen, Frank's so
lost, adrift, I feel sorry for him. Okay?"
He stared at her, chewing on his pale lower lip for a moment then
finally said, "We work good together because we complement each other.
You're strong where I'm weak, and I'm strong where you're weak. In many
ways we're not at all alike but we belong together because we fit like
pieces of a puzzle.
"What's your point?"
"One way we're different but complementary is our motivation. This line
of work suits me because I get a kick out of helping people whore in
trouble through no fault of their own. I like to see good triumph.
Sounds like a comic-book hero, but it's the way I feel. You, on the
other hand, are primarily motivated by a desire to stomp the bad guys.
Yeah, sure, I like to see the bad guys all crumpled and whimpering, too,
but it is not as important to me as it is to you. And, of course,
you're happy to help innocent people, but with you that's second to the
stomping and crushing. Probably because you're still working out your
rage over the murder of your mother."
"Bobby, if I want psychoanalysis, I'll get it in a room when the primary
piece of furniture is a couch-not a toilet."
Her mother had been taken hostage in a bank holdup when Julie was
twelve. The two perpetrators had been high on amphetamines and low on
common sense and compassion. Before it was all over, five of the six
hostages were dead, and Julie's mother was not the lucky one.
Turning to the mirror, Bobby looked at her reflection, as if he was
uncomfortable meeting her eyes directly.
"My point is-suddenly you're acting like me, and that's no good, that
destroys our balance, disrupts the harmony of this relationship, and
it's the harmony that has always kept us alive, successful and alive.
You want to take this case because you're fascinated, it excites your
imagination, and because you'd like to help Frank, he's so pitiful.
Where's your usual outrage? I'll tell you where it is. You don't have
any because, at this moment anyway, there's no one to elicit it, no bad
guy. Okay, there's the guy he says chased him that night, but we don't
even know if he's real or just a figment of Frank's fantasy. Without an
obvious bad guy to focus your anger, I should have to drag you into this
every step of the way, and that's what I was doing, but now you're doing
the dragging, and that worries me. It doesn't feel right."
She let him ramble on, with their gazes locked in the mirror, and when
at last he finished, she said, "No, that's not your point."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, everything you just said is smoke. What's really bothering
you, Robert?"
His reflection tried to stare down her reflection.
She smiled.
"Come on. Tell me. We never keep secrets."
Bobby-in-the-mirror looked like some bad imitation of the real Bobby
Dakota. The real Bobby, her Bobby, was full of fun and life and energy.
Bobby-in-the-mirror was gray-faced, almost grim; his vitality had been
sapped by worry.
"Robert?" she prodded.
"You remember last Thursday when we woke?" he said. "The Santa Anas
were blowing. We made love."
"I remember."
"And right after we'd made love... I had the strange, terrible feeling
that I was going to lose you, that something out there in the wind
was... coming to get you."
"You told me about it later that night, at Ozzie's, when we were talking
about jukeboxes. But the windstorm ended, and nothing got me. Here I
am."
"That same night, Thursday night, I had a nightmare, the most vivid damn
dream you can imagine." He told her about the little house on the
beach, the jukebox standing in the san the thunderous inner voice-THE
BAD THING IS COMING, THE BAD THING, BAD THING!-and about the corrosive
sea that had swallowed both of them, dissolving the flesh and dragging
their bones into lightless depths.
"It rock me. You can't conceive of how real it seemed. Sounds crazy
but... that dream was almost more real than real life. I woke up,
scared as bad as I've ever been. You were sleeping, and I didn't wake
you. Didn't tell you about it later because I didn't see the point of
worrying you and because -.. well, it seemed childish to put much stock
in a dream. I haven't had the nigh mare again. But since then-Friday,
Saturday, yesterday I've had moments when a strange anxiety sort of
shivered through me, and I think maybe some bad thing is coming to get
you. And now, out there in the office, Frank said he's mixed up in a
bad thing, a real bad thing, that's heavy, and right away I made the
connection. Julie, maybe this guy is the bad thing I dreamed about.
Maybe we shouldn't take it.
She stared at Bobby-in-the-mirror for a moment, wondering how to
reassure him. Finally she decided that, because the roles had reversed,
she should deal with him as Bobby would deal with her in a similar
situation. Bobby would not resolve to logic and reason-which were her
tools-but would charm and humor her out of a funk.
Instead of responding directly to his concerns, she said, long as we're
getting things off our chests, you know who bothers me? The way you sit
on my desk sometimes while we're talking to a prospective client. With
some clients, it might make sense for me to sit on the desk, wearing a
short skirt, showing some leg, 'cause I have good legs, even if I say so
myself But you never wear skirts, short or otherwise, and you don't have
the gams for it, anyway."
"Who's talking about desks?"
"I am," she said, turning away from the mirror and looking at him
directly.
"We leased a seven-room suite instead of an eight-room to save money,
and by the time the rest of the staff was settled had only one office
for
ourselves, which seemed ok because There's plenty of room in there
for two desks, but you say you don't want one. Desks are too formal for
you. All you need is a couch to lie on while making calls, you say, yet
when clients come in, you sit on my desk."
"Julie-"
"Formica is a hard, nearly impervious surface, but sooner or later
you'll have spent so much time sitting on my desk, it'll be marked by a
permanent imprint of your ass -."
Because she wouldn't look at the mirror, he had to turn away from it,
too, and face her.
"Didn't you hear what I said about the dream?"
"Now, don't get me wrong. You've got a cute ass, Bobby, but I don't
want the imprint on my desktop. Pencils will keep rolling into the
depression. Dust will collect in it."
"What's going on here?"
"I want to warn you that I'm thinking of having the top of my desk
wired, so I can electrify it with a flick of a switch. You sit on it
then, and you'll know what a fly feels like when it settles on one of
those electronic bug zappers."
"You're being difficult, Julie. Why're you being difficult?"
"Frustration. I haven't gotten to stomp or crush any bad guys lately.
Makes me irritable."
He said, "Hey, wait a minute. You're not being difficult."
"Of course I'm not."
"You're being me!"
"Exactly." She kissed his right cheek and patted his left. "Now, let's
go back out there and take the case."
She opened the door and stepped out of the bathroom.
With some amusement, Bobby said, "I'll be damned," and followed her into
the office.
Frank Pollard was talking quietly with Clint, but he fell silent and
looked up hopefully as they entered.
Shadows clung to the corners like monks to their cloisters, and for some
reason the amber glow from the three lamps reminded her of the
scintillant and mysterious light of serried votive candles in a church.
The puddle of scarlet gems still glimmered on the desk.
The bug was still in a death crouch in the mason jar.
"Did Clint explain our fee schedule?" she asked Pollard.
"Yes."
"Okay. In addition, we'll need ten thousand dollars as advance against
expenses."
Outside, lightning scarred the bellies of the clouds. bruised sky
ruptured, and cold rain spattered against the windows.
VIOLET HAD been awake for more than an hour, and during most of that
time she had been a hawk, swooping high on the wind, darting down now
and then to make a swift kill. The open sky was nearly as real to her
as it was to the bird that she had invaded. She glided on thermal
currents, the air offering little resistance to the sleek fore edges of
her wings, with only the lowering gray clouds above, and the whole
huddled world below.
She was also aware of the shadowy bedroom in which her body and a
portion of her mind remained. Violet and Verbina usually slept during
the day, for to sleep away the night was to waste the best of times.
They shared a room on the second floor, one king-size bed, never more
than an arm's reach from each other, though usually entwined. That
Monday afternoon, Verbina was still asleep, naked, on her belly, with
her head turned away from her sister, occasionally mumbling wordlessly
into her pillow. Her warm flank pressed against Violet. Even while
Violet was with the hawk, she was aware of her twin's body heat, smooth
skin, slow rhythmic breathing, sleepy murmurings, and distinct scent.
She smelled the dust in the room, too, and the stale odor of the long
unwashed sheets and the cats, of course.
She not only smelled the cats, which slept upon the bed and the
surrounding floor or lay lazily licking themselves, but lived in each of
them. While a part of her consciousness remained in her own pale flesh
and a part soared with the feathered predator, other aspects of her held
tenancy in each of the cats, twenty-five of them now that poor Samantha
was gone. Simultaneously Violet experienced the world through her own
senses, through those of the hawk, and through the fifty eyes and
twenty-five noses and fifty ears and hundred paws and twenty-five
tongues of the pack. She could smell her own odor not merely through
her own nose but through the of all the cats: the faint soapy residue of
last night's bath pleasantly lingering with the tang of lemon-scented
shampoo; that always followed sleep; halitosis ripe with the ghosts of
the raw eggs and onions and raw liver that she eaten that morning before
going to bed with the rising sun. Each remember of the pack had a
sharper ol factory sense she didn't, and each perceived her scent
differently from what she did; they found her natural fragrance strange
yet intriguing and familiar.
She could smell, see, hear, and feel herself through their senses, as
well, for she was always inextricably linked with Verbina. At will, she
could swiftly enter or disengage from minds of other lifeforms, but
Verbina was the only other person with whom she could join in that way.
It was a permanence which they had shared since birth. She could never
disengage from her twin. Likewise, she could control the minds of
animals as well as inhabit them, but she was not able to control her
sister. Their link was not that of master and puppet, but special and
sacred.
All of her life, Violet had lived at the confluence of rivers of
sensation, bathed in great churning currents of and scent and sight and
taste and touch, experiencing the world not only through her own senses
but those of surrogates. For part of her childhood, she had been so
overwhelmed by sensory input that she could not cope; had turned inward,
to her secret world of rich, varied, and found experience, until she had
learned to control the quenching flood, harnessing it instead of being
swept away. Only had she chosen to relate to the people around her,
absolutism, and she had not learned to talk until she was six years old.
She had never risen out of those deep, fast current extraordinary
sensation to stand on the comparatively dry of life on which other
people existed, but at least she learned to interact with her mother,
Candy, and others to a limited degree.
Verbina had never coped half as well as Violet, and probably never
would. Having chosen a life almost exclusively by sensation, she
exhibited little or no concern for the 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
pref
erred 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,