Julie squatted beside him and said, "First, we've got to get Frank out
of here, back to the office."
"Yeah, but this is real strange," Bobby said, indicating the
irregularities in the pants.
"Strange and... important some how."
"What's wrong?" Frank repeated.
"Where'd you get these clothes?" Bobby asked him.
"Well... I don't know."
Julie pointed to the white athletic sock on Frank's right foot and Bobby
saw at once what had caught her attention: several blue threads,
precisely the color of the sweater. They were now loose, clinging to
the sock. They were woven into the very fabric of it.
Then he noticed Frank's left shoe. It was a dark brown hiking shoe, but
a few thing, squiggly white lines marred the leather on the toe. When
he studied them closely, he saw that the line appeared to be coming
sparse threads like those in the athletic socks scraping at them with
one fingernail, he discovered they were not stuck to the shoe, but were
an integral part of the surface of the leather.
The missing yarn of the sweater had somehow become a part of both the
khaki pants and one of the socks; the displaced threads of the sock had
become part of the shoe on the other foot.
"What's wrong?" Frank repeated, more fearfully than before.
Bobby hesitated to look up, expecting to see that the filaments of
displaced shoe leather were embedded in Frank's face, and that the
displaced flesh was magically entwined with the cable knit of the
sweater. He stood and forced himself to confront his client.
Aside from the dark and puffy rings around is eyes, the sickly pallor
relieved only by the flush on his upper cheeks, and the fear and
confusion that gave him a tormented look, nothing was wrong with his
face. No leather ornamentation. No khaki stitched into his lips. No
filaments of blue yarn or plastic shoelace tips or button fragments
bristling from his eyeballs.
Silently castigating himself for his overactive imagination, Bobby
patted Frank's shoulder.
"It's okay. It's all right. We'll figure it out later. Come on, let's
get you out of here."
IN THE embrace of darkness, enwrapped by the scent of Channel No. five
under the very blankets and sheets that had once warmed his mother and
that he had so carefully served, Candy dozed and awakened repeatedly
with a fear though he could not remember any nightmares.
Between periods of fitful sleep, he dwelt on the incident at the canyon,
earlier that night, when he had been hunting and had felt an unseen
presence put a hand on his head. He'd never before experienced anything
like that. He was disturbed by the encounter, unsure whether it was
threatening or benign, anxious to understand it.
He first wondered if it had been his mother's angelicence, hovering
above him. But he quickly dismissed that explanation. If his mother
had stepped through the veil between this world and the next, he would
have recognized her spirit, singular aura of love, warmth, and
compassion. He would have fallen to his knees under the weight of her
ghostly hand wept with joy at her visitation.
Briefly he had considered that one or both of his inscrutable sisters
possessed a heretofore unrevealed talent for psychic contact and reached
out to him for unknown reasons. They had, somehow like they controlled
their cats and appeared to have equal influence over other small
animals. Maybe they!" enter human minds as well. He didn't want that
pale, cold pair invading his privacy. At times he looked at them and
thought of snakes-sinuous albino snakes, silent and filled-with desires
as alien as any that motivated reptiles.
possibility that they could intrude into his mind was chill even if they
could not control him.
But between bouts of sleep, he abandoned that idea. If Violet and
Verbina possessed such abilities, they would have enslaved him long ago,
as thoroughly as they had enslaved the cats. They would have forced him
to do degrading, obscene things; they did not possess his self-control
in matters of the flesh and would live, if they could, in constant
violation of God's most fundamental commandments.
He could not understand why his mother had sworn him to keep and protect
them, any more than he could understand how she could love them. Of
course her compassion for those miscreant offspring was only one more
example of her saintly nature. Forgiveness and understanding flowed
from her like clear, cool water from an artesian well.
For a while he dozed. When he woke with a start again, he turned on his
side and watched the faint light of dawn appear along the edges of the
drawn blinds.
He considered the possibility that the presence in the canyon had been
his brother Frank. But that was also unlikely. If Frank had possessed
telepathic abilities, he would have found a way to employ them to
destroy Candy a long, long time ago. Frank was less talented than his
sisters and much less talented than his brother Candy.
Then who had approached him twice in the canyon, insistently pressing
into his mind? Who sent the disconnected words that echoed in his head:
What... where... what...
why... what... where... what... why... ?
Last night, he'd tried to get a mental grip on the presence. When it
hastily withdrew from him, he had tried to let part of his consciousness
soar up into the night with it, but he had been unable to sustain a
pursuit on that psychic plane. He sensed, however, that he might be
able to develop that ability.
If the unwelcome presence ever returned, he would try to knot a filament
of his mind to it and trace it to its source. In his twenty-nine years,
his own siblings were the only people he had encountered with what might
be called psychic abilities. If someone out there in the world was also
gifted, he must learn who it was. Such a person, not born of his
sainted mother, was a rival, a threat, an enemy.
Though the sun beyond the blinded windows had not fully risen, he knew
that he would not be able to doze again. He threw back the covers,
crossed the dark and furniture-crowded room with the assurance of a
blind man in a familiar place, and went into the adjoining bath. After
locking the door, he undressed without glancing in the mirror. He peed
force without looking down at his hateful organ. When he showered he
soaped and rinsed the sex thing only with the washcloth mitten that he'd
made and that protected his innocent from being corrupted by the
monstrous, wicked flesh.
FROM THE hospital in Orange, they went directly to their offices in
Newport Beach. They had a lot of work to do on Frank's behalf, and his
worsening plight evoked in them a greater sense of urgency than ever.
Frank strode with Hal, and Julie followed in order to be able to offer
assistance if unforeseen developments occurred during the trip. The
entire case seemed to be a series of unforeseen developments.
By the time they reached their deserted offices-the Dakota & Dakota
staff w
ould not arrive for a couple of hours yet-the sun was fully risen
behind the clouds in the east. A thing strip of blue sky, like a crack
under the door of the storm, was visible over the ocean to the west. As
the four of them passed through the reception lounge into their inner
sanctum, the rain halted abruptly, as if a godly hand had turned a
celestial lever; the water on the big windows stopped flowing in
shimmering sheets, and coalesced into hundreds of small beads that
glimmered with a mercury-gray sheen in the cloud-dulled morning light.
Bobby indicated the bulging pillowcase that Hal was carrying.
"Take Frank into the bathroom, help him change into the clothes he was
wearing when we checked him into the hospital. Then we'll have a real
close look at the clothes he's wearing now." Frank had recovered his
balance and most of his strength. He did not need Hal's assistance. But
Julie knew Bobby wouldn't let Frank go anywhere unchaperoned from now
on. They needed to keep an eye on him constantly, in order not to miss
any clues that might lead to an explanation of his sudden vanishments
and reappearances.
Before attending to Frank, Hal removed the rumpled clothes from the
pillowcase. He left the rest of its contents on Julie's desk.
"Coffee?" Bobby asked.
"Desperately," Julie said.
He went out to the pantry that opened off the lounge, to stir up one of
their two Mr. Coffee machines.
Sitting at her desk, Julie emptied the pillowcase. It contained thirty
bundles of hundred-dollar bills in packs bound by rubber bands. She
fanned the edges of the bills in ten bundles to ascertain if lower
denominations were included; they were all hundreds. She chose two
packets at random and counted them. Each contained one hundred bills.
Ten thousand in each.
By the time Bobby returned with mugs, spoons, cream, sugar, a pot of hot
coffee, all on a tray, Julie had concluded that it was the largest of
Frank's three hauls to date.
"Three hundred K," she said, as Bobby put the tray on the desk.
He whistled softly.
"What's that bring the total to?"
"With this, we'll be holding six hundred thousand for him
"Soon have to get a bigger office safe."
HAL YAMATAKA put Frank's other set of clothes on the coffee table.
"Something's wrong with the zipper in the pants. I don't mean just that
it doesn't work, which it doesn't. I mean, something's very wrong with
it."
Hal, Frank, and Julie pulled up chairs around the low glass topped
table, and drank strong black coffee while Bobby sat on the couch and
carefully inspected the garments. In addition to the oddities he had
noticed at the hospital, he discovered that most of the teeth in the
pants zipper were metal, as it should have been, while about forty
others, interspersed at random, appeared to be hard black rubber; in
fact, the slide jammed on a couple of the rubber ones.
Bobby stared in puzzlement at the anomalous zipper, slowly moving a
finger up and down one of the notched tracks,he was suddenly struck by
inspiration. He picked up one of the shoes Frank had been wearing and
examined the heel.
It looked perfectly normal, but in the heel of the second shoe thirty or
forty tiny, brass-bright bits of metal were embedded in the rubber,
flush with the surface of it.
"Anybody have a pen knife?" Bobby asked.
Hal withdrew one from his pocket.
Bobby used it to pry loose a couple of the shiny rectangles, which
appeared to have been set in the rubber when it was still molten. Zipper
teeth. They fell onto the glass table: tink... tink. At a glance he
estimated that the amount of rubber displaced by those teeth was equal
to what he had found in the zipper.
Sitting around IN the Dakotas' Disney-embellished office, Frank Pollard
was overwhelmed by a weariness that was cartoonish in its extremity, the
degree of utter exhaustion sufficient to render Donald Duck so limp that
he might slip off a chair and pour onto the floor in a puddle of mallard
flesh and feathers. It had been seeping into him day by day, hour by
hour, since he had awakened in that alleyway last week; but now it
suddenly poured through him as if a dike had broken. This surging flood
of weariness had a density not of water but of liquid lead, and he felt
enormously heavy; he could lift a foot or move a limb only with effort,
and even keeping his head up was a strain on his neck. Virtually every
joint in his body ached dully, even his elbow and wrist and finger
joints, but especially his knees, hips, and shoulders. He felt
feverish, not acutely ill, but as if his strength had been steadily
sapped by a low-grade viral infection from which he had been suffering
his entire life. Weariness had not dulled his senses; on the contrary,
it abraded his nerve endings as surely as a fine-grade sandpaper might
have done. Loud sounds made him cringe, bright light made him squint in
pain, and he was exquisitely sensitive to heat and cold and the textures
of everything he touched.
His exhaustion seemed only in part a result of his inability to sleep
more than a couple of hours a night. If Hal Yamataka and the Dakotas
could be believed-and Frank saw no reason for them to lie to him-he
performed an incredible vanishing act several times during the night,
though upon returning to his bed and staying put there, he could recall
nothing of what he had done. Whatever the cause of those
disappearances, no matter where he had gone or how or why, the very act
of vanishing seemed likely to require an expenditure of energy surely as
walking or running or lifting heavy weights or any other physical act;
therefore, perhaps his weakness and profound weariness were largely the
result of his mysterious journeys.
Bobby Dakota had pried only a couple of the brass teeth from the heel of
the shoe. After studying them for a moment he put down the penknife,
leaned back against the sofa, and looked thoughtfully at the gloomy but
rainless sky beyond the office's big windows. They were all silent,
waiting to hear what had been deduced from the condition of those
clothes and shoes Even exhausted, preoccupied with his own fears, and
only a one-day association with the Dakotas, Frank realized that Bobby
was the more imaginative and mentally nimble the two. Julie was
probably smarter than her husband; but was also a more methodical
thinker than he was, far less likely than he was to make sudden leaps of
logic to arrive at insight deductions and imaginative solutions. Julie
would more likely be right than Bobby was, but on those occasions when
they resolved a client's problems quickly, the resolution would be
attributable to Bobby. They made a good pair, and Frank was relying on
their complementary natures to help him.
Turning to Frank again, Bobby said, "What if, somehow you can teleport
yourself, send yourself from here to there in a wink?"
"But that's... magic," Frank said.
"I don't believe magic."
"Oh, I do," Bobby said.
&
nbsp; "Not witches and spells and genies in bottles, but I believe in the
possibility of fantastic thing The very fact that the world exists, that
we're alive, that we can laugh and sing and feel the sun on our skin...
that seems like a kind of magic to me."
"Teleport myself.? If I can. I don't know I can. Even if I have to
fall asleep first. Which means teleportation must be a function of my
subconscious mind, essentially involuntary."
"You weren't asleep when you reappeared in the hospital room or any of
the other times you vanished," Hal stared.
"Maybe the first time, but not later. Your eyes were open.
spoke to me."
"But I don't remember it," Frank said frustratedly-
"I remember going to sleep, then suddenly I was lying awake in bed, in a
lot of distress, confused, and you were all there."
Julie sighed. "Teleportation. How can that be possible?"
"You saw it." Bobby shrugged. He picked up his coffee and took a sip,
more relaxed than anyone in the room, as though having a client with an
astonishing psychic power was, if not an ordinary occurrence, at least a
situation that all of them should have realized was simply inevitable,
given enough years in the private security business.
"I saw him disappear," Julie agreed,
"but I'm not sure that proves he... teleported."
"When he disappeared," Bobby said, "he went somewhere. Right?"
"Well... yes.
"And going from one place to another, instantaneously, as an act of
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 26
