Velocity.
Papers fluttered to the floor from a massive mahogany desk as if a wind
had swept through the room, though the air was still now. They were in
a book-lined study with French windows. An old man had risen from a
wing-backed leather chair. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a white
shirt, a blue cardigan, and a look of surprise.
Frank said, "Doc," and with his free hand reached toward the startled
elder.
Darkness.
Bobby had figured out that all was lightless and featureless because,
for the moment, he did not exist as a coherent entity; he had no eyes,
no ears, no nerve endings with which to feel. But understanding brought
no diminishment of his fears.
Fireflies.
The millions of tiny, whirling points of light were probably the atomic
particles of which his flesh was constructed, being shepherded along
sheerly by the power of Frank's mind.
Velocity.
They were teleporting, and the process was probably just about
instantaneous, requiring only microseconds from physical dissolution to
reconstitution, though subjectively it seemed longer.
The decrepit house again. It must be the place in the hills north of
Santa Barbara. They were upslope from the gate, along the Eugenia hedge
that encircled the property.
Frank let out a low cry of terror the instant that he saw where he was.
Bobby was afraid of running into Candy just as much as Frank was, but
also afraid of Frank, and of teleporting.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
This time they didn't materialize with the balance and stability of
their arrival in the old man's study or at the peeling house with the
rusted gate, but with the clumsiness of their intrusion into that
apartment in San Diego. Bobby stumbled a few steps up a slope, still in
Frank's grip as firmly as if they had been handcuffed, and they both
fell to their knees on the plush, well cropped grass.
Frantically Bobby tried to wrench loose of Frank. But Frank held fast
with superhuman strength and pointed to a gravestone only a few feet in
front of them. Bobby looked around and saw that they were alone in a
cemetery, where massive coral trees and palms loomed eerily in the
purple-gray twilight.
"He was our neighbor," Frank said.
Gasping for breath, unable to speak, still twisting his hand in an
attempt to escape Frank's iron grip, Bobby saw the name NORBERT JAMES
KOLREEN in the granite headstone.
"She had him killed," Frank said,
"had her precious Candy kill him just because she felt he'd been rude to
her. Rude to her! The crazy bitch."
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
The book-lined study. The old man in the doorway now, looking into the
room at them.
Bobby felt as if he had been on a corkscrewing roller coaster for hours,
turning upside down at high speed, again and again until he couldn't be
sure any more if he was actually moving or standing still while the rest
of the world spun and loo around him.
"I shouldn't have come here, Dr. Fogarty," Frank said unsteadily. Blood
dripped off his injured hand, spotting a pale green section of the
Chinese carpet.
"Candy might've seen us at the house, might be trying to follow. Don't
want to lead him to YOU."
Fogarty said, "Frank, wait-",
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
They were in the backyard of the decaying house, thirty or forty feet
from steps and a porch that were as dilapidated as those at the front of
the place. Lights shone in the first-floor windows.
"I want to go, I want to be out of here," Frank said.
Bobby expected to teleport at once, and steeled himself against it, but
nothing happened.
"I want out of here," Frank said again.
When they did pop from that place to another, Frank cursed in
frustration. Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a woman stepped into
sight. She stopped on the threshold and stared at them.
The fading, muddy purple twilight barely exposed her, and the light from
the kitchen silhouetted her but did not reveal any details of her face.
Whether it was a trick of the strange illumination or an accurate
revelation of her form, Bobby couldn't know, but when starkly outlined,
she presented a powerful erotic picture: sylphlike, gracefully thing yet
clearly and feminine, a smoky phantom that seemed either thinly clad
nude, and that issued a call of desire without making a sound.
There was a powerful lubricity in this mysterious woman which made her
the equal of any siren that had ever induced sail to run their ships
onto hull-gouging rocks.
"My sister Violet," Frank said with obvious dread and disgust.
Bobby noticed movement, around her feet, a swarming of shadows. They
poured down the steps, onto the lawn, and he saw they were cats. Their
eyes were iridescent in the gloom. He was gripping Frank every bit was
hard as Frank was gripping him, for now he feared release as much as he
had previously feared continued captivity.
"Frank, get us out of here."
"I can't. I don't have control of this, of myself."
There were a dozen cats, two dozen, still more. As they rushed off the
porch and across the first few yards of unmown grass, they were silent.
Then, simultaneously, they cried out, as if they were a single creature.
Their wail of anger and hunger instantly cured Bobby of his nausea and
made his stomach quiver, instead, with terror.
"Frank!"
He wished he hadn't taken off his shoulder holster back at the office.
His gun was back there on Julie's desk, of no use to him, but as he
glimpsed the bared teeth of the oncoming horde, he figured the revolver
wouldn't stop them anyway, at least not enough of them.
The nearest of the cats leaped.
JULIE WAS standing by her office chair, where it had been moved into the
center of the room for the session of hypnotic therapy. She was unable
to step away from it because she had last seen Bobby when he had been
next to that chair, and it was where she felt closest to him.
"How long now?"
Clint was standing at her side. He looked at his watch.
"Less than six minutes."
Jackie Jaxx was in the bathroom, splashing his face with cold water.
Still on the sofa with a sheaf of printouts, Lee Chen was not as relaxed
as he had been six and a half minutes ago. His Zen calm had been
shattered. He was holding those papers in both hands, as if afraid they
would vanish from his grasp, and his eyes were as wide now as they had
been the moment that Bobby and Frank disappeared.
Julie was lightheaded with fear, but she was determined not to lose
control of herself. Though there seemed to be nothing that she could do
to help Bobby, an opportunity for action might arise when she least
expected it, and she wanted to be calm and ready.
"Last night, Hal said that Frank returned the first time about eighteen
minutes after he'd left." Cli
nt nodded.
"Then we've twelve minutes to go."
"After his second disappearance, he didn't return for hours."
"Listen," Clint said,
"if they don't show up here again in twelve minutes or an hour or three
hours, that doesn't me anything terrible has happened to Bobby. It's
not going to be the same every time."
"I know. What I'm more worried about is... the damn railing." Clint
said nothing.
Unable to keep her voice even, she said,
"Frank never did bring it back. What happened to it?"
"He'll bring Bobby back," Clint said.
"He won't let Bobby out there... wherever he goes." She wished she
felt confident about that.
DARKNESS.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
Rain poured straight down in warm torrents, as if Bobby and Frank had
materialized under a waterfall. It pasted their clothes to them in an
instant. There was no wind whatsoever as if the tremendous weight and
ferocity of the rainfall had drowned the wind as it would a fire; the
air was steamy-humid They had traveled far enough around the globe to
have left twilight behind; the sun was up there somewhere behind steely
plating of gray clouds.
They were on their sides this time, facing each other like inebriates
who had been arm wrestling and had fallen drunkenly off their stools
onto the floor of the barroom, where they still lay with their hands
locked in competition. They were in a bar, however, but in lush
tropical foliage: ferns; dark grey plants with rubbery, deeply
granulated foliage; ground hugging succulent vines with leaves as plump
as gum candy and berries the same shade as the flesh of a Mandarin
orange.
Bobby pulled away from Frank, and this time his client let him go
without a struggle. He scrambled to his feet and push through the
slick, spongy, clinging flora.
He didn't know where he was going and didn't care. He just had to put a
little space between himself and Frank, distance himself from the danger
that Frank now represented to him. He was overwhelmed by what had
happened, overloaded with new experiences that he needed to consider and
to which he had to adapt before he could go on.
Within half a dozen steps he broke out of the tropical brush and onto a
dark expanse of land, the nature of which at first eluded him. The rain
came down not in droplets and not in sheets, but in roaring, silver-gray
cascades that dramatically reduced visibility; it swept his hair over
his eyes, too, which didn't help. He supposed some people, sitting by
windows in dry rooms, might even have seen beauty in the storm, but
there was just too damned much rain, a flood; it met the earth and the
greenery with a cacophonous roar that threatened to deafen him. The
rain not only exhausted him but made him wildly and irrationally angry,
as if he was being pelted not by rain but by spittle, great gobs of
phlegm spit, and as if the roar was actually the combined voices of
thousands of onlookers showering him with insults and other abuse. He
stumbled forward through the peculiarly mushy soil-not muddy, but
mushy-looking for someone to blame for the rain, someone to shout at and
shake and maybe even punch. In six or eight steps, however, he saw the
breakers rolling ashore in a tumult of white foam, and he knew he was
standing on a black-sand beach. That realization stopped him cold.
"Frank!" he shouted, and when he turned to look back the way he had
come, he saw that Frank was following him, a few steps behind and
round-backed, as if he were an old man unable to stand up to the force
of the rain, or as if his spine had been warped by all the moisture.
"Frank, dammit, where are we?"
Frank stopped, unbent his back slightly, lifted his head, and blinked
stupidly.
"What?"
Raising his voice even further, Bobby shouted above the tumult: "Where
are we!"
Pointing to Bobby's left, Frank indicated an enigmatic, rain shrouded
structure that stood like the ancient shrine of a long dead religion,
perhaps a hundred feet farther down the black beach.
"Lifeguard station!" He pointed the other direction, up the beach,
indicating a large wooden building considerably farther from them but
less mysterious because its size made it easier to see.
"Restaurant. One of the most popular on the island."
"What island?"
"The big island."
"What big island?"
"Hawaii. We're standing on Punaluu Beach."
"This was where Clint was supposed to take me," Bobby said. He laughed,
but it was a strange, wild laugh that spooked him, so he stopped.
Frank said, "The house I bought and abandoned is over there." He
indicated the direction from which they had come.
"Overlooking a golf course. I loved the place. I was happy there for
eight months. Then he found me. Bobby, we have to get out of here."
Frank took a few steps toward Bobby, out of the mushy mire and onto that
section of the beach where the sand was compacted.
"That's far enough," Bobby ordered when Frank was six or eight feet from
him.
"Don't come any closer."
"Bobby, we have to go now, right away. I can't teleport correctly when
I want. That'll happen when it happens, but at least we have to get
away from this part of the island. He knows I lived here. He's
familiar with this area. And he may be following us."
The fiery anger in Bobby was not quenched by the rain; grew hotter than
ever.
"You lying bastard."
"It's true, really," Frank said, obviously surprised by Bobby's
vehemence.
They were close enough to converse wit out shouting now, but Frank still
spoke louder than usual to be heard over the crackle-hiss-patter-rumble
of the deluge
"Candy came here after me, and he was worse than I'd ever seen him, more
horrible, more evil. He came into my house with a baby, an infant he'd
picked up somewhere, only a month old, he'd probably killed its parents.
He bit into that poor baby's throat, Bobby, then laughed and offered me
its blood, taunted me with it. He drinks blood, you know, she taught
him to drink blood, and he relishes it now, thrives on it. And when I
wouldn't join him at the baby's throat, he threw it waside the way you'd
discard an empty beer can, and he came for me but I... traveled.
"I didn't mean you were lying about him."
A wave broke closer to shore than the others, washing around Bobby's
feet and leaving short-lived, lacelike traceries of foam on the black
sand.
"I mean you lied to us about your amnesia. You remember everything. You
know exactly who you are."
"No, no." Frank shook his head and made negating gestures with his
hands.
"I didn't know. It was a blank. And maybe it'll be a blank again when
I stop traveling and stay put someplace."
"Lying shit!" Bobby said.
He stooped, scooped up handsful of wet black sand and threw it at Frank
in a blind fury, two more sopping handsful, then two more. He began to
r
ealize that he was behaving like a child throwing a tantrum.
Frank flinched from the wet sand but waited patiently for Bobby to stop.
"This isn't like you," he said, when at last Bobby relented.
"To hell with you."
"Your rage is all out of proportion to anything you imagine I've done to
you." Bobby knew that was true. As he wiped his wet sand covered hands
on his shirt and tried to catch his breath, he began to understand that
he was not angry at Frank but at what Frank represented to him. Chaos.
Teleportation was a fun house ride in which the monsters and dangers
were not illusory, in which the constant threat of death was to be taken
seriously, in which there were no rules, no verities that could be
relied upon, where up was down and in was out. Chaos. They had ridden
the back of a bull named Chaos, and Bobby had been flat-out terrified.
"You okay?" Frank asked.
Bobby nodded.
More than fear was involved. On a level deeper than intellect or even
instinct, perhaps as deep as the soul itself, Bobby had been offended by
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 34
