Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place

by The Bad Place(Lit)

  his hair. The music rose again.

  With the door shut and the window closed tight, the only possible source

  of the draft was the ventilation grille in the wall above the

  nightstand. But when Hal stood on his toes and raised his right hand in

  front of that outlet, he felt nothing coming from it. The chilly

  currents of air appeared to have sprung up within the room itself.

  He turned in a circle, moved this way and that, trying to get a fix on

  the flute. Actually, it didn't sound like a flute. He listened

  closely; it was more like a fluctuation of wind whistling through a lot

  of pipes at the same time, big ones and little ones threading together

  many vague but separate sounds that loosely sounded like keening that

  was simultaneously eerie and, mournful yet somehow... threatening. It

  faded, returned a third time. To his surprise and bewilderment,

  tuneless notes seemed to be issuing from the empty air around the bed.

  Hal wondered if anyone else in the hospital could hear the flute this

  time. Probably not. Though the music was louder now than when it had

  begun, it remained faint; in fact, if he had been asleep, the mysterious

  serenade would not have been loud enough to wake him.

  Before Hal's eyes, the air over the bed shimmered. For a moment he

  could not breathe, as if the room had become a temporary vacuum chamber.

  He felt his ears pop the same way they did during a too-rapid altitude

  change.

  The strange warbling and the draft died together, and Frank Pollard

  reappeared as abruptly as he had vanished. He was lying on his side,

  with his knees drawn up in the fetal position. For a few seconds he was

  disoriented; when he realized who he was, he clutched the bed railing

  and pulled himself into a sitting position. The skin around his eyes

  was puffy and dark but otherwise he was dreadfully pale. His face had a

  grey sheen to it, as if it wasn't perspiration pouring from him clear

  beads of oil. His blue cotton pajamas were rumpled, darkly mottled with

  sweat, and caked with dirt in places.

  He said,

  "Stop me."

  "What the hell's going on here?" Hal asked, his voice cracking.

  "Out of control."

  "Where did you go?"

  "For God's sake, help me." Pollard was still clutching the bed rail

  with his right hand, but he reached entreatingly toward Hal with his

  left.

  "Please, please..." Stepping closer to the bed, Hal reached out -and

  Pollard vanished, this time not only with a hissing sound, as before,

  but with a shriek and sharp crack of tortured metal. The

  stainless-steel railing, which he had been gripping so fiercely, had

  torn loose of the bed and vanished with him.

  Hal Yamataka stared in astonishment at the hinges to which the

  adjustable railing had been fixed. They were twisted and torn, as if

  made of cardboard. A force of incredible power had pulled Pollard out

  of that room, snapping quarter-inch steel.

  Staring at his own outstretched hand, Hal wondered what would have

  happened to him if he had been gripping Pollard. Would he have

  disappeared with the man? To where? Not someplace he would want to be:

  he was sure of that.

  Or maybe only part of him would have gone with Pollard. Maybe he would

  have come apart at a joint, just as the bed railing had done. Maybe his

  arm would have ripped out of his shoulder socket with a crack almost as

  sharp as that with which the steel hinges had separated, and maybe he

  would have been left screaming in pain, with blood squirting from

  snapped vessels.

  He snatched his hand back, as if afraid Pollard might suddenly reappear

  and seize it.

  As he rounded the bed to the phone, he thought that his legs were going

  to fail him. His hands were shaking so badly, he almost dropped the

  receiver and had difficulty dialing the Dakotas' home number.

  BOBBY AND Julie left for the hospital at 2:45.

  The night looked deeper than usual; street lamps and headlights did not

  fully penetrate the gloom. Shatters of rain fell with force, they

  appeared to bounce off the blacktop streets, as if they were hard

  fragments of a disintegrating vault that had come through the night

  above.

  Julie drove because Bobby was only three-quarters awake His eyes were

  heavy, and he couldn't stop yawning, and thoughts were fuzzy at the

  edges. They had gone to bed three hours before Hal Yamataka had

  awakened them. If Julie had to get by on only that much sleep, she

  could do it, Bobby needed at least six-preferably eight-hours in order

  to function well.

  That was a minor difference between them, no big deal.

  because of several such minor differences, Bobby suspected that Julie

  was tougher overall than he was, even if he could whip her ten times out

  of ten in an arm-wrestling competition. He chuckled softly.

  She said, "What?"

  She braked for a traffic light as it phased to red. Its blood image was

  reflected in distorted patterns by the black, murky like surface of the

  rain-slick street.

  "I'm crazy to give you an advantage by admitting this, I was thinking

  that in some ways you're tougher than me."

  She said, "That's no revelation. I've always known I'm tougher."

  "Oh, yeah? If we arm wrestle, I'll whip you every time

  "How sad." She shook her head.

  "Do you really think beating up someone smaller than you, and a woman to

  boot, makes you a macho man?"

  "I could beat up a lot of women bigger than me," Bobby assured her.

  "And if they're old enough, I could take them on two or three or four at

  a time. In fact, you throw half a dozen big grandmothers at me, and

  I'll take them all on with one hand tied behind my back!"

  The traffic light turned green, and she drove on.

  "I'm talking big grandmothers," he said.

  "Not frail little old ladies. Big, fat, solid grandmothers, six at a

  time."

  "That is impressive."

  "Damn right. Though it'd help if I had a tire iron."

  She laughed, and he grinned.

  But they could not forget where they were going or why, and their smiles

  faded to a pair of matching frowns. They drove in silence. The thump

  of the windshield wipers, which ought to have lulled Bobby to sleep,

  kept him awake instead.

  Finally Julie said, "You think Frank actually vanished in front of Hal's

  eyes, the way he says?"

  "I've never known Hal to lie or give in to hysteria."

  "Me neither."

  She turned left at the next corner. A few blocks ahead, beyond

  billowing curtains of rain, the lights of the hospital appeared to pulse

  and flicker and stream like an iridescent liquid, which made it look

  every bit was miragelike as a phantom oasis shimmering behind veils of

  heat rising from desert sands.

  WHEN THEY entered the room, Hal was standing at the foot of the bed,

  which was largely concealed by the privacy curtain. He looked like a

  guy who had not only seen a ghost, but had embraced it and kissed it on

  its cold, damp, putrescent lips.

  "Thank God, you're here." He looked past them, into th
e hall.

  "The head nurse wants to call the cops, file a missing person-"

  "We've dealt with that," Bobby said.

  "Dr. Freeborn talked to her by phone, and we've signed a release

  absolving the hospital."

  "Good." Gesturing toward the open door, Hal said, "We'll want to keep

  this as private as we can."

  After closing the door, Julie joined them at the foot of the bed.

  Bobby noted the missing railing and broken hinges.

  "What's this?"

  Hal swallowed hard. "He was holding the railing when he vanished... and

  it went with him. I didn't mention it on the phone, 'cause I figured

  you already thought I was nuts, this would confirm it."

  "Tell us now," Julie said quietly.

  They were all talking softly, for otherwise Nurse Fulgham was certain to

  stop by and remind them that most of the patients on the floor were

  sleeping.

  When Hal finished his story, Bobby said, "The flute, the peculiar

  breeze... that's what Frank told us he heard shortly after he regained

  consciousness that night in the alleyway, somehow he knew it meant

  someone was coming." Some of the dirt that Hal had observed on Frank's

  pajamas after his second reappearance, was on the bed sheets. Julie

  plucked up a pinch of it.

  "Not dirt exactly." Bobby examined the grains on her fingertips.

  "Black sand."

  To Hal, Julie said, "Frank hasn't reappeared since he left with the

  railing?"

  "No."

  "And when was that?"

  "A couple of minutes after two o'clock. Maybe two-oh-t two-oh-three,

  something like that."

  "About an hour and twenty minutes ago," Bobby said.

  They stood in silence, staring at the mountings from which the bed

  railing had been torn.

  Outside, a squall of wind that rained against the window with sufficient

  force to make it so like out-of-season Halloween pranksters pitching

  hands full of dried corn.

  Finally Bobby looked at Julie.

  "What do we do now?" She blinked.

  "Don't ask me. This is the first case I've worked on that involves

  witchcraft."

  "Witchcraft?" Hal said nervously.

  "Just a figure of speech," Julie assured him.

  Maybe, Bobby thought. He said, "We've got to assume he'll come back

  before morning, perhaps a couple of times, sooner or later he'll stay

  put. This must be what happens every night when he sleeps; this is the

  traveling he doesn't remember when he wakes up."

  "Traveling," Julie said. Under the circumstances, that ordinary word

  seemed as exotic and full of mystery as any in the language.

  CAREFUL NOT to wake the patients, they borrowed two additional chairs

  from other rooms along the corridor. Hal sat tensely just inside the

  closed door of room 638, in a position to prevent any of the hospital

  staff from walking in unimpeded. Julie sat at the foot of the bed, and

  Bobby stationed himself at the side of it nearest the window, where the

  railing was still in place.

  They waited.

  From her chair, Julie only had to turn her head slightly to look across

  the room at Hal. When she glanced the other way she could see Bobby.

  But because of the privacy curtain that was drawn along the side of the

  bed with the missing railing, Hal and Bobby were not in each other's

  line of sight.

  She wondered if Hal would have been astonished to see how quickly Bobby

  went to sleep. Hal was still pumped up by what had happened, and Julie,

  only having heard about Frank's sorcerous disappearance second-hand, was

  nonetheless eagerly nervously-anticipating the chance to witness the

  same bit of magic herself. Bobby was a man of considerable imaginative

  powers, with a childlike sense of wonder, so he was probably more

  excited about these events than either she or Hal was; furthermore,

  because of his premonition of trouble, he suspected that the case was

  going to be full of surprises, some nasty, and these events no doubt

  alarmed him. Yet he could slump against the inadequately padded arm of

  his chair, let his chin drop against his chest, and doze off. He would

  never be felled by stress. At times his sense of proportion, his

  ability to put anything in a manageable perspective, seemed superhuman.

  When Bobby McFerrin's song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" had been a hit a

  couple of years ago, she had not been surprised that her own Bobby had

  been enamored of it; the tune was essentially his personal anthem.

  Apparently by an act of will, he could readily achieve serenity, and she

  admired that.

  By 4:40, when Bobby had been slumbering contentedly for nearly an hour,

  she watched him doze with admiration that rapidly escalated to unhealthy

  envy. She had the urge to give his chair a kick, toppling him out of

  it. She restrained herself only because she suspected that he would

  merely yawn, up on his side, and sleep even more comfortably on the

  floor at which point her envy would become so all-consuming she would

  simply have to kill him where he lay. She imagined herself in court: I

  know murder is wrong, Judge, but he was just too laid-back to live.

  A cascade of soft, almost melancholy notes fell out of the air in front

  of her.

  "The flute!" Hal said, leaving his chair with the suddeness of a

  popcorn kernel bursting off a heated pan.

  Simultaneously, a breath of cool air stirred through the room, without

  apparent source.

  Getting to her feet, Julie whispered,

  "Bobby!" She shook him by the shoulder, and he came awake just as the

  music faded and the air turned crypt-still.

  Bobby rubbed his eyes with his palms, and yawned.

  "What's wrong?"

  Even as he spoke, the haunting music swelled again, but louder than

  before. Not music, actually, just noise. Hal was right: listening

  closely, you could also tell it was a flute.

  She stepped toward the bed.

  Hal had left his station by the door. He put a hand on her shoulder,

  halting her.

  "Be careful." Frank had reported three-maybe four-separate trips of the

  faux flute, and as many agitations of the air, before Blue Light had

  appeared on his trail that night in Anaheim and Hal had noticed that

  three episodes had preceded each of Frank's own reappearances. However,

  those accompanying phenomena evidently could not be expected in an exact

  pattern, for when the second rivulet of unharmonious finished spilling

  out of the wether, the air immediately above the bed shimmered, as if a

  double handful of pale tarnished sand had been swept up and set aflutter

  in rising currents of air and suddenly Frank Pollard winked into

  existence atop rumpled sheets.

  Julie's ears popped.

  "Holy cow!" Bobby said, which was just what Julie would have expected

  him to say.

  She, on the other hand, was unable to speak.

  Gasping, Frank Pollard sat up in bed. His face was bloodless. Around

  his rheumy eyes, the skin looked bruised. Sour perspiration glistened

  on his face and beaded in his beard stubble.

  He was holding a pillowcase half filled with something. The end was

  twi
sted and held shut with a length of cord. He let go of it, and it

  fell off the side of the bed where the railing was missing, striking the

  floor with a soft plop.

  When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and strange.

  "Where am I?"

  "You're in the hospital, Frank," Bobby said.

  "It's all right. You're where you belong now."

  "Hospital... " Frank said, savoring the word as if he had just heard

  it-and was now pronouncing it-for the first time. He looked around,

  obviously bewildered; he still didn't know where he was.

  "Don't let me slip-" He vanished mid-sentence. A brief hiss accompanied

  his abrupt departure, as if the air in the room was escaping through a

  puncture in the skin of reality.

  "Damn!" Julie said.

  "Where were his pajamas?" Hal said.

  "What?"

  "He was wearing shoes, khaki pants, a shirt and sweater," Hal said,

  "but the last time I saw him, a couple of hours ago, he still had on his

  pajamas." At the far end of the room, the door began to open but bumped

  against Hal's empty chair. Nurse Fulgham poked her head through the