Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place
Page 25
gap. She looked down at the chair, then across the room at Hal and
Julie, then at Bobby, who stepped to the foot of the bed to peer past
his two associates and the half-drawn privacy curtain.
Their astonishment at Frank's vanishing act must have been ill
concealed, for the woman frowned and said,
"What's wrong?"
Julie quickly crossed the room as Grace Fulgham slid the chair aside and
opened the door all the way.
"Everything's fine. We just spoke by phone with our man heading up the
search, and he says they've found someone who saw Mr. Pollard earlier
tonight. We know which way he was heading, so now it's only a matter of
time until we find him."
"We didn't expect you'd be here so long," Fulgham said frowning past
Julie at the curtained bed.
Even through the heavy door, maybe she had heard the faint warble of the
flute that wasn't a flute.
"Well," Julie said, "this is the easiest place from which to coordinate
the search." By standing just inside the door, with Hal's empty chair
between them, Julie was trying to block the nurse's advance with out
appearing to do so. If Fulgham got past the curtain, she might notice
the missing railing, the black sand in the bed, a the pillowcase that
was filled with God-knew-what. Questions about any of those things
might be difficult to answer convincingly, and if the nurse remained in
the room too long, she might be there when Frank returned.
Julie said, "I'm sure we haven't disturbed any of the other patients.
We've been very quiet."
"No, no," Nurse Fulgham said,
"you haven't disturbed any one. We just wondered if you might like some
coffee to help keep you awake."
"Oh."
Julie turned to look at Hal and Bobby.
"Coffee?'
"No,"
the two men said simultaneously. Then, speaking over each other, Hal
said, "No, thank you,"
and Bobby said, "Very kind of you."
"I'm wide awake," Julie said, frantic to be rid of the nurse but trying
to sound casual,
"and Hal doesn't drink coffee, and Bobby, my husband, can't handle
caffeine because of prostrate problems." I'm babbling, she thought.
"Anyway, we'll be leaving soon now, I'm sure."
"Well," the nurse said, "if you change your mind.
After Fulgham left, letting the door close behind her, Bobby whispered,
"Prostate trouble?"
Julie said, "Too much caffeine causes prostate trouble Seemed like a
convincing detail to explain why, with everything going on, you didn't
want coffee."
"But I don't have a prostate problem. Makes me sound like an old fart."
"I have it," Hal said.
"And I'm not an old fart."
"What is this?" Julie said.
"We're all babbling." She pushed the chair in front of the door and
returned to the bed, where she picked up the pillowcase-bag that Frank
Pollard had brought from... from where ever he had been
"Careful," Bobby said.
"Last time Frank mentioned a pillowcase, it was the one he trapped that
insect in." Julie gingerly set the bag on a chair and watched it
closely.
"Doesn't seem to be anything squirming around in it." She started to
untie the knotted cord from the neck of the sack.
Grimacing, Bobby said, "If you let out something big as a house cat,
with a lot of legs and feelers, I'm going straight to a divorce lawyer."
The cord slipped free. She pulled open the pillowcase, and looked
inside.
"Oh, God." Bobby took a couple of steps backward.
"No, not that," she assured him.
"No bugs. Just more cash." She reached into the sack and withdrew a
couple of bundles of hundred-dollar bills.
"If it's all hundreds, there could be as much as a quarter of a million
in here."
"What's Frank doing?" Bobby wondered.
"Laundering money for the mob in the Twilight Zone?" Hollow, lonely,
tuneless piping pierced the air again, and like a needle pulling thread,
the sound brought with it a draft that rustled the curtain.
Shivering, Julie turned to look at the bed.
The flowerlike notes faded with the draft, then soon rose again, faded,
rose, and faded a fourth time as Frank Pollard reappeared. He was on
his side, arms against his chest, hands fisted, grimacing, his eyes
squeezed shut, as if he were preparing himself to receive the killing
blow of an ax.
Julie stepped toward the bed, and again Hal stopped her.
Frank sucked in a deep breath, shuddered, made a low anguished mewling,
opened his eyes-and vanished. Within two or three seconds, he appeared
yet again, still shuddering. But immediately he vanished, reappeared,
vanished, reappeared, vanished, as if he were an image flickering on a
television set with poor signal reception. At last he stuck fast to the
fabric of reality and lay on the bed, moaning.
After rolling off his side, onto his back, he gazed at the ceiling. He
raised his fists from his chest, uncurled them, and stared at his hands,
baffled, as if he had never seen fingers before.
"Frank?" Julie said. He did not respond to her. With his fingertips
he explored the contours of his face, as if a Braille reading of his
features would recall to him the forgotten specifics of his appearance.
Julie's heart was racing, and every muscle in her body felt as if it had
been twisted up as tight as an overwound clock spring. She was not
afraid, really. It was not a tension engineered by fear but by the
sheer strangeness of what had happened.
"Frank, are you okay?"
Blinking through the interstices of his fingers, he said, "O It's you,
Mrs. Dakota. Yeah... Dakota. What's happened Where am I?"
"You're in the hospital now," Bobby said.
"Listen, the important question isn't where you are, but where the hell
had you been?"
"Been? Well... what do you mean?" Frank tried to sit up in bed, but
he seemed to temporarily lack the strength to get off his back.
Picking up the bed controls, Bobby elevated the upper half of the
mattress.
"You weren't in this room during most of the last few hours. It's
almost five in the morning, and you've been jumping in and out of here
like... like... like a crew remember of the Starship Enterprise who
keeps beaming back up to the mothership!"
"Enterprise? Beaming up? What're you talking about?"
Bobby looked at Julie. "Whoever this guy is, wherever he comes from, we
now know for sure that he's been living past the edge of modern culture,
on the fringe. You ever know a modern American who hasn't at least
heard of Star Trek?
To Bobby, Julie said, "Thanks for your analysis, Mr. Spock."
"Mr. Spock?" Frank said.
"See!" Bobby said.
"We can question Frank later," Julie said.
"He's confuse right now, anyway. We've got to get him out of here. If
the nurse comes back and sees him, how do we explain his reappearance?
Is she really going to believe he wandered back into the hospital, past
security and the nursing staff, up six floors with nobody spottin
g him?"
"Yeah," Hal said,
"and though he seems to be back good, what if he pops away again, in
front of her eyes?"
"Okay, so we'll get him out of bed and sneak him dow those stairs at the
end of the hall," Julie said,
"out to the car.
As they talked about him, Frank turned his head back and forth,
following the conversation. He appeared to be watching a tennis match
for the first time, unable to comprehend the rules of the game.
Bobby said, "Once we've gotten him out of here, we can tell Fulgham he's
been found just a few blocks away and that we're meeting with him to
determine whether he wants-or even needs-to be returned to the hospital.
He's our client, after all, not our ward, and we have to respect his
wishes."
Without having to wait for tests to be conducted, they now knew that
Frank was not suffering strictly from physical ailments like cerebral
abscesses, clots, aneurysms, cysts, or neoplasms. His amnesia did not
spring from brain tumors, but from something far stranger and more
exotic than that. No malignancy, regardless of how singular its nature,
would invest its victim with the power to step into the fourth dimension
or to wherever Frank was stepping when he vanished.
"Hal," Julie said, "get Frank's other clothes from the closet, bundle
them up, and stuff them in the pillowcase with the money."
"Will do."
"Bobby, help me get Frank out of bed, see if he can stand on his own
feet. He looks awful weak." The remaining bed railing stuck for a
moment when Bobby tried to lower it, but he struggled with it because
they could not take Frank out of bed on the other side without drawing
back the privacy curtain and exposing him to anyone who might push open
the door.
"You could've done me a big favor and packed this rail off to Oz with
the other one," Bobby told Frank, and Frank said,
"Oz?"
When the railing finally folded down, out of the way, Julie found that
she was hesitant to touch Frank, for fear of what might happen to her-or
parts of her-if he pulled another disappearing act. She had seen the
shattered hinges of the bed railing; she was also keenly aware that
Frank had not brought the railing back with him, but had abandoned it in
the other world or wherever to which he traveled.
Bobby hesitated, too, but overcame his apprehension, grabbing the man's
legs and swinging them over the edge of the bed, taking hold of his arm
and helping him into a sitting position, In some ways she might be
tougher than Bobby, but when it came to encounters with the unknown, he
was clearly moor flexible and quick to adapt than she was.
Finally she quelled her fear, and together she and Bobby assisted Frank
off the bed and onto his feet. His legs buckle under him, and they had
to support him. He complained of weakness and dizziness.
Stuffing the other set of clothes in the pillowcase, Hal said "if we
have to, Bobby and I can carry him."
"I'm sorry to be so much trouble," Frank said.
To Julie, he had never sounded or looked more pathetic, an she felt a
flush of guilt about her reluctance to touch him.
Flanking Frank, their arms around him to provide support Julie and Bobby
walked him back and forth, past the rain washed window, giving him a
chance to recover the use of his legs. Gradually his strength and
balance returned.
"But my pants keep trying to fall down," Frank said.
They propped him against the bed, and he leaned on Julie while Bobby
lifted the blue cotton sweater to see if they be needed to be cinched in
one notch. The tongue end of the bell was weakened by scores of small
holes, as if industrious insect had been boring at it. But what insects
ate leather? When Bobby touched the tarnished brass buckle, it crumbled
a though it was made of flaky pastry dough.
Gaping at the glittering crumbs of metal on his finger Bobby said,
"Where do you shop for clothes, Frank? In dumpster?"
In spite of Bobby's light tone, Julie knew he was unnerve What substance
or circumstances could so profoundly alter the composition of brass?
When he brushed his fingers against the bed sheets to wipe off the
curious residue, she flinched, not expecting his flesh to have been
contaminated by the contact with the brass, and to crumble as the buckle
had done.
AFTER CINCHING Frank's pants with the belt that he had worn when he'd
checked into the hospital, Hal helped Bobby slip their client out of the
room. With Julie scouting the way, they went quickly and quietly along
the hall and through the fire door at the head of the emergency stairs.
Frank's skin remained cold to the touch, and he was still clammy with
perspiration; but the effort brought a flush to his cheeks, which made
him look less like a walking corpse.
Julie hurried to the bottom of the stairwell to see what lay beyond the
lower door. With the thump and scrape of their footsteps echoing
hollowly off the bare concrete walls, the three men went down four
flights without much difficulty. At the fourth-floor landing, however,
they had to pause to let Frank catch his breath.
"Are you always this weak when you wake up and don't remember where
you've been?" Bobby asked.
Frank shook his head. His words issued in a thing wheeze: "No. -Always
frightened... tired, but not as bad... as this. I feel like...
whatever I'm doing... wherever I'm going... it's taking a bigger and
bigger toll. I'm not... not going to survive... a lot more of this."
As Frank was talking, Bobby noticed something peculiar about the man's
blue cotton sweater. The pattern of the cable knit was wildly irregular
in places, as if the knitting machine had briefly gone berserk. And on
the back, near his right shoulder blade, a patch of fibers was missing;
the hole was the size of a block of four postage stamps, though with
irregular rather than straight edges. But it wasn't just a hole. A
piece of what appeared to be khaki filled the gap, not merely sewn on
but woven tightly into the surrounding cotton yarn, as if at the garment
factory itself. Khaki of the same shade and hard finish as the pants
that Frank was wearing.
A shiver of dread pierced Bobby, although he was not sure why. His
subconscious mind seemed to understand how the patch had come to be and
what it meant, and grasped some hideous consequence not yet fulfilled,
while his conscious mind was baffled.
He saw that Hal, on the other side of Frank, had noticed the patch, too,
and was frowning.
Julie ascended the stairs while Bobby was staring in puzzlement at the
khaki swatch.
"We're in luck," she said.
"There're two doors at the bottom. One leads into a hallway off the
lobby, where we'd probably run into a security man, even though they
aren't looking for Frank any more. But the other door leads into the
parking garage, the same level our car's on. How you doing, Frank? You
going to be okay?"
"Getting my... second wind," he said less wheezingly than before.
into the blue cotton sweater.
While Julie studied the peculiar patch, Bobby let go of Frank and, on a
hunch, stooped down to examine the legs of his client's pants. He found
a corresponding irregularity: blue cotton yarn from the sweater was
woven into the slacks. It was now one spot of the same size and shape
as that in the sweater, near a series of three smaller holes near the
cuff on the right leg however, he was sure that more accurate
measurements would confirm what he knew from a quick look-that the tot
amount of blue yarn in those three holes would just about fill the hole
in the shoulder of the sweater.
"What's wrong?" Frank asked.
Bobby didn't respond but took hold of the somewhat baggy leg of the
pants and pulled it taut, so he could get a better look at the three
patches. Actually,
"patches" was an inaccurate word because these abnormalities in the
fabric did not look like repairs; they were too well blended with the
material around them to be handwork.