that chaos. Until now he had not realized what a powerful need he had
for stability and order. He'd always thought of himself as a free
spirit who thrived on change and the unexpected. But now he saw that he
had limits and that, in fact, beneath the devil-may-care attitude he
sometimes struck, beat the steady heart of a stability-loving
traditionalist. He suddenly understood that his passion for swing music
had roots of which he'd never been aware: the elegant and complex
rhythms and melodies of big-band jazz appealed to his bebop surface and
to the secret seeker of order who dwelt in his heart.
No wonder he liked Disney cartoons, in which Donald might run wild and
Mickey might get in a tangled mess Pluto, but in which order triumphed
in the end. Not for the chaotic universe of Warner Brothers' Looney
Tune which reason and logic seldom won more than a tempo victory.
"Sorry, Frank," he said at last.
"Give me a second. This isn't the place for it, but I'm having an
epiphany."
"Listen, Bobby, please, I'm telling the truth. Evidently I remember
everything when I travel. The very fact of traveling tears down the
wall blocking my memory, but as soon as I begin traveling, the wall goes
up again. It's part of the degeneration I'm undergoing, I guess. Or
maybe it's just a desperate attempt to forget what's happened to me in
the past, what's happening now, and what will sure as hell happen to me
in the days to come."
Though no wind had risen, some of the breakers were large now, washing
deep onto the beach. They battered the bottoms of Bobby's legs and, on
retreating, buried his feet in coal.
Struggling to explain himself, Frank said, "See, traveling isn't easy
for me, like it is for Candy. He can control where he wants to go, and
when. He can travel just by deciding to do it, virtually by wishing
himself someplace, like you suggested I might be able to do. But I
can't. My talent for portation isn't really a talent, it's a curse."
His voice was shaky.
"I didn't even know I could do it until seven years ago, the day that
bitch died. All of us who came from her are cursed, we can't escape it.
I thought I could escape by killing her, but that didn't release me."
After the events of the past hour, Bobby thought nothing could surprise
him, but he was startled by the confession Frank had made. This
pathetic, sad-eyed, dimpled, comic-fat pudgy man seemed an unlikely
perpetrator of matricide.
killed your own mother?"
"Never mind about her. We haven't time for her."
Frank looked back toward the brush out of which they had come and both
ways along the beach, but they were still alone in the downpour.
"If you'd known her, if you'd suffered under her hand," Frank said, his
voice shaking with anger, "if you had known the atrocities she's capable
of, you'd have picked up an ax and chopped at her too."
"You took an ax and gave your mother forty whacks?" That crazy sound
burst from Bobby again, a laugh as wet as the rain but not as warm, and
again he was spooked by himself
"I discovered I could teleport when Candy had me backed into a corner,
going to kill me for having killed her. And that's the only time I can
travel-when it's a matter of survival."
"Nobody was threatening you last night in the hospital."
"Well, see, when I start traveling in my sleep, I think maybe I'm trying
to escape from Candy in a dream, which triggers teleportation. Traveling
always wakes me, but then I can't stop, I keep popping from place to
place, sometimes staying a few seconds, sometimes an hour or more, and
it's beyond my control, like I'm being bounced around inside a goddamn
cosmic pinball machine. It exhausts me. It's killing me. You can see
how it's killing me."
Frank's earnest persistence and the numbing, relentless roar of the rain
had washed away Bobby's rage. He was still somewhat afraid of Frank, of
the potential for chaos that Frank represented, but he was no longer
angry.
"Years ago," Frank said, "dreams started me traveling maybe one night a
month, but gradually the frequency increased, until the last few weeks
it happens almost every time I go to sleep. And when we finally wind up
in your office or wherever this episode is going to come to an end,
you'll remember everything that's happened to us, but I won't. And not
only because I want to forget, but because what you suspected is
true-I'm not always putting myself back together without mistakes."
"Your mental confusion, loss of intellectual skills, amnesia-they're
symptoms of those mistakes."
"Yeah. I'm sure there's sloppy reconstruction and cell damage every
time I travel, nothing dramatic in any one trip, but the effect is
incremental... and accelerating. Sooner or later it's going to go
critical, and I'll either die or experience some weird biological
meltdown. Coming to you for help was pointless, no matter how good you
are at what you do, because nobody can help me. Nobody-
Bobby had already reached that conclusion, but he was still curious.
"What is it with your family, Frank? Your brother has the power to make
that car disintegrate around you, then A power to blow out those street
lamps, and he can teleport.
what was that business with the cats?"
"My sisters, the twins, they have this thing with animals."
"How come all of you possess these... abilities? Who your mother, your
father?"
"We don't have time for that now, Bobby. Later. I'll try and explain
later."
He held out his cut hand, which had even stopped bleeding or was sluiced
free of blood by the rain could pop out of here any moment, and you'd be
stranded."
"No thanks," Bobby said, shunning his client's hand.
" me an old fuddy-duddy, but I'd prefer an airliner." He pa his hip
pocket.
"Got my wallet, credit cards. I can be back in Orange County tomorrow,
and I don't have to take a chance that I'll arrive there with my left
ear where my nose should be."
"But Candy's probably going to follow us, Bobby. If you're here when he
shows up, he'll kill you,"
Bobby turned to his right and started to walk toward the distant
restaurant.
"I'm not afraid of anyone named Candy."
"You better be," Frank said, grabbing his arm and halting him.
Jerking away as if making contact with his client was tantamount to
contracting the bubonic plague, Bobby said, could he follow us anyway?"
When Frank worriedly surveyed the beach again, Bobby realized that
because of the pounding rain and the underly crash of the surf, they
might not hear the telltale flute sounds that would warn them of Candy's
imminent arrival.
Frank said, "Sometimes, when he touches something recently touched, he
sees an image of you in his mind, sometimes he can see where you went
after you put the object down, and he can follow you."
"But I didn't touch anything back there at the house."
"You stood on the back lawn."
"So?"
"If he can find the place where the grass is trampled, where we stood,
he might be able to put his fingers to the ground and see us, see this
place, and come after us."
"For God's sake, Frank, you make this guy sound super natural."
"He's the next thing to it."
Bobby almost said he would take his chances with brother Candy,
regardless of his godlike powers. Then he remembered what the Phans had
told him about the savage murders of the Farris family. He also
remembered the Roman family, their brutalized bodies torched to cover
the ragged gashes that Candy's teeth had torn in their throats. He
recalled what Frank had said about Candy offering him the fresh blood of
a living baby, factored in the unmitigated terror in Frank's eyes at
that very moment, and thought of the inexplicable prophetic dream he'd
had about the "bad thing." At last he said, "All right, okay, if he
shows up, and if you're able to pop out of here before he kills us both,
then I'd be better off with you. I'll take your hand, but only until we
walk up to that restaurant, call a cab, and are on our way to the
airport." He gripped Frank's hand reluctantly.
"As soon as we're out of this area, I let go."
"All right. Good enough," Frank said.
Squinting as the rain battered their faces, they headed toward the
restaurant. The structure, which stood perhaps a hundred and fifty
yards away, appeared to be made of gray, weathered wood and lots of
glass. Bobby thought he saw dim lights in the place, but he could not
be sure; the large windows were no doubt tinted, which filtered out what
fraction of the lampglow was not already hidden by the veils of rain.
Every third or fourth incoming wave was now much larger than the others,
reached farther onto the beach, and sloshed around their legs with
enough force to unbalance them. They moved toward the higher end of the
strand, away from the breakers, but the sand was far softer there; it
sucked at their shoes and made progress more laborious.
Bobby thought of Lisa, the blond receptionist at Palomar Labs. He
pictured her coming along the beach right now, taking a crazy-romantic
walk in the warm rain with some guy who'd brought her to the islands,
pictured her face when she saw him strolling the black-sand beach
hand-in-hand with another man, cheating on Clint.
This time his laughter didn't have a scary edge.
Frank said, "What?"
Before Bobby could even start to explain, he saw that someone actually
was heading in their general direction through the obscuring rain. It
was a dark figure, not Lisa, a man, and he was only about thirty yards
away.
He hadn't been there a moment ago.
"It's him," Frank said.
Even at a distance the guy looked big. He spotted them turned directly
toward them.
Bobby said, "Get us out of here, Frank."
"I can't do it on demand. You know that."
"Then let's run," he urged, and he tried to pull Frank down the beach,
toward the abandoned lifeguard tower and what lay beyond.
But after floundering a few steps through the sand, Frank stopped and
said, "No, I can't, I'm worn out. I'm going to have to pray that I pop
out of here in time." He looked worse than worn out. He looked half
dead.
Bobby turned toward Candy again, and saw the brother slogging through
the soft, wet sand much faster than they had managed but still with some
difficulty.
"Why don't he just teleport from there to here in a flash, overwhelm
us?"
Frank's horror at the sight of his oncoming nemesis was complete in that
he didn't appear capable of speech. Yet words came with the shallow
breaths that rasped out of his mouth.
"Short hops, under a few hundred feet, aren't possible. Do you know
why." Maybe if the trip was too short, the mind had a fraction of a
second less than the minimum time required to deconstruct and fully
reconstruct the body. It didn't matter what the son was. Even if he
couldn't teleport across the remain stretch of sand, Candy was going to
reach them in seconds. He was only thirty feet away and closing, a
massive juggernaut of a man, with a neck thick enough to support a car
balanced on his head, and arms that would give him an advantage in a
wrestling match with a four-ton industrial robot. His blond hair was
almost white. His face was broad and sharp-featured and hard-and as
cruel as the face of one of those psychotic young boys who liked to set
ants on fire with matches and test the effects of their full-strength on
neighborhood
Charging through the storm, kicking up gouts of wet black sand with each
step, he looked less like a man than a demon with a fierce hunger for
human souls.
Holding fast to his client's hand, Bobby said, "Frank, for God's sake,
let's get out of here."
When Candy was close enough for Bobby to see blue eyes as wild and
vicious as those of a rattlesnake on Benzedrine, he let out a wordless
roar of triumph. He flung himself at them.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
Pale morning light filtered from a clear sky into the narrow
pass-through between two rotting, ramshackle buildings so crusted in the
filth of ages that it was impossible to determine what material had been
used to construct their walls. Bobby and Frank were standing in
knee-deep garbage that had been tossed out of the windows of the
two-story structures and left to decompose into a reeking sludge that
steamed like a compost pile. Their magical arrival had startled a
colony of roaches that scuttled away from them, and caused swarms of fat
black flies to leap up from their breakfast. Several sleek rats sat up
on their haunches to see what had arrived among them, but they were too
bold to be scared off.
The tenements on both sides had some windows completely open to the
outside, some covered with what looked like oiled paper, none with
glass. Though no people were in sight, from the rooms within the aged
walls came voices: laughter here; an angry exchange there; chanting, as
of a mantra, softly drifting down from the second floor of the building
on the right. It was all in a foreign tongue with which Bobby was not
familiar, though he suspected they might be in India, perhaps Bombay or
Calcutta.
Because of the ineluctable stench, which by comparison made the stink of
a slaughterhouse seem like a new perfume by Calvin Klein, and because of
the insistently buzzing flies that exhibited great interest in an open
mouth and nostrils, Bobby was unable to get his breath. He choked, put
his free hand over his mouth, still could not breathe, and knew he was
going to faint face first into the vile, steaming muck.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
In a place of stillness and silence, shafts of afternoon sunshine
pierced mimosa branches and dappled the ground with golden light. They
stood on a red oriental footbridge over a koi pond in a Japanese garden,
where sculpted bonsai and other meti
culously tended plants were
positioned among carefully raked beds of pebbles.
"Oh, yes," Frank said with a mixture of wonder and pleasure and relief.
"I lived here, too, for a while." They were alone in the garden. Bobby
realized that Frank always materialized in sheltered places where he was
unlikely to be seen in the act, or in circumstances-such as the middle
of a cloudburst-that almost ensured even a public place like a beach
would be conveniently deserted. Evidently, in addition to the
unimaginably demanding task of deconstruction-rather than
reconstruction, his mind was also capable of scouting the way ahead and
choosing a discreet point of arrival.
Frank said,
"I was the longest-residing guest they'd ever had. It's a traditional
Japanese inn on the outskirts of Kyoto." Bobby became aware that they
were both totally dry. their clothes were wrinkled, in need of an
ironing, but when Frank had deconstructed them in Hawaii, he had not
teleported the molecules of water that had saturated their clothes.
"They were so kind here," Frank said,
"respectful of my privacy, yet so attentive and kind." He sounded
wistful and eternally weary, as if he would have liked to have stopped
traveling right there, even if stopping meant dying at the hand of his
brother.
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 35
