When he could reach the glinting curve metal, he seized it and pulled it
loose of the soft earth. It was the missing railing from the hospital
bed.
"HOW LONG?" Julie demanded.
"Twenty-one minutes," Clint said.
They still stood near the chair where Frank had been sitting and beside
which Bobby had been stooping.
Lee Chen had gotten off the sofa, so Jackie Jaxx could sit down. The
magician-hypnotist had draped a damp washcloth over his forehead. Every
couple of minutes he protested. He could not really make people
disappear, though no one had accused him of being responsible for what
had happened to Frank and Bobby.
Having retrieved a bottle of Scotch, glasses, and ice from the office
wet bar, Lee Chen was pouring six stiff drinks,for each person in the
room, as well as for Frank and Bobby
"If you don't need a drink to steady your nerves now," he said, "you'll
need one to celebrate when they come back safe." He had already downed
one Scotch himself. The drink he poured now would be his second. This
was the first time in his life he had drunk hard liquor-or needed it.
"How long?" Julie demanded.
"Twenty-two minutes," Clint said.
And I'm still sane, she thought wonderingly. Bobby, you, come back to
me. Don't you leave me alone forever. How am I going to dance alone?
How am I going to live alone? How am I going to live?
BOBBY DROPPED the bed railing, and the lasers winked leaving him in the
shadow of the spiny ship, which seem darker than before the beams
appeared. As he looked up to see what would happen next, another light
issued from the underside of the craft, too pale to make him squint.
This one was precisely the diameter of the crater. In that queer,
pearly glow, the insects began to rise off the ground, as if they were
weightless. At first only ten or twenty floated upward, but then twenty
more and a hundred after that, rising as lazily and effortlessly as so
many bits of dandelion fluff, turning slowly, their tarantula legs
motionless, the eerie light gone out of their eyes, as if they had been
switched off. In a minute or two, the floor of the crater was
depopulated of insects, and the horde was being drawn up effortlessly in
that sepulchral silence that accompanied all of the craft's maneuvers
except for the base vibrations that had called the insect miners from
their bores.
Then the silence was broken by a flowerlike warble.
"Frank!" Bobby cried in relief, and turned as a gust of vile smelling
wind washed over him.
As the cold, hollow piping echoed across the crater again, there was a
subtle change in the hue of the light that issued from the ship above.
Now the thousands of red diamonds rose from the ash-gray soil in which
they lay and followed the insects upward, gleaming dully here and
brightly there, so many of them that it seemed as if Bobby was standing
in a rain of blood.
Another whirl of evil-scented wind cast up a cloud of the ashy soil,
reducing visibility, and Bobby turned in eager expectation of Frank's
arrival. Until he remembered that it might not be Frank but the
brother.
The piping came a third time, and the subsequent puff of wind carried
the dust away from him, so he saw Frank arrive less than ten feet from
him.
"Thank God!" As Bobby stepped forward, the pearly light underwent a
second subtle change. Reaching for Frank's hand, he felt himself
suddenly weightless. When he looked down he saw his feet drift off the
floor of the crater.
Frank grabbed at his outstretched hand and seized it.
Nothing had ever felt better to Bobby than Frank's firm grip, and for a
moment he felt safe. Then he became aware that Frank had risen from the
ground too. They were both being drawn upward in the wake of the
insects and diamonds, toward the belly of the alien vessel, toward
God-only-knew what nightmare inside.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
They were on Punaluu beach again, and the rain was coming down harder
than before.
"Where the hell was that last place?" Bobby demanded holding fast to
his client.
"I don't know," Frank said.
"It scares the hell out of me. it's so weird, but sometimes I seem to
be... drawn there. He hated Frank for having taken him there; he loved
him for having returned for him. When he shouted above the roar of the
surf, neither love nor hate was in his voice, which was just borderline.
"I thought you could only travel to places you've been
"Not necessarily. Anyway, I've been there before."
"But how did you get there the first time, it's another world. It can't
have been familiar to you-right, Frank?"
"I don't know. I just don't understand any of it, Bobby turned to stand
face to face with Frank, and Bobby took notice of how much the man's
appearance had deteriorated they had teleported from the Dakota & Dakota
offices in New port Beach. Although the storm once more had soaked them
to the skin in seconds and left his clothes hanging on him shapelessly,
it wasn't just the rain that made him look disheveled, beaten, and
sickly. His eyes were more sunken than the whites of them were yellow,
as if he had contracted a disease, and the flesh around them was so
darkly bruised they appeared to as painted fake shiners with black shoe
polish. His skin was paler than pale, a deathly pale and his lips were
bluish, as though his circulatory system was failing. Bobby felt guilty
about having shouted at him, put his free hand on Frank's shoulder and
told him how sorry, that it was all right, that they were still fighting
on the same side of this war, and that everything would turn out fine-as
long as Frank didn't take them back to that place again. Frank said,
"Sometimes it's like I'm almost in touch with the minds of those people,
creatures, whatever they are in that ship." They were leaning on each
other now, for to forehead, seeking mutual support in their exhaustion.
"Maybe I've got another gift I'm not aware of, like for all of my life I
wasn't aware of being able to teleport until Candy backed me into a
corner and tried to kill me. Maybe I'm telepathic. Maybe the
wavelength my telepathy functions on is the major wavelength of that
race's brain activity. Maybe I feel them out there, even across
billions of light-years of space. Maybe that's why I feel as if I'm
being drawn to them, called to them."
Pulling back a few inches from Frank, Bobby looked into his tortured
eyes for a long moment. Then he smiled and pinched Frank's cheek, and
said, "You devil, you've really done a lot of thinking about this,
haven't you, really put the old noodle to work on it, huh?" Frank
smiled.
Bobby laughed.
Then they were both laughing, holding each other up by leaning into each
other, the way teepee poles held one another up, and a part of their
laugh was healthy, a release of tension, but part of it was that mad
laughter that had troubled Bobby earlier. Clinging to
his client, he
said, "Frank, your life is chaos, you're living in chaos, and you can't
go on like this. It's going to destroy you."
"I know."
"You've got to find a way to stop it."
"There is no way."
"You've got to try, buddy, you've got to try. Nobody can handle this. I
couldn't live like this for one day, and you've done it for seven
years!"
"No. It wasn't this bad most of that time. It's just lately, the last
few months, it's accelerated."
"A few months," Bobby said wonderingly.
"Hell, if we don't give your brother the slip soon and get back to the
office and step off this merry-go-round in the next few minutes, I swear
to God I'm going to crack. Frank, I need order, order and stability,
familiarity. I need to know that what I do today will determine where I
am and who I am and what I have to show for it tomorrow. Nice orderly
progression, Frank, cause and effect, logic and reason." Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
"HOW LONG?"
"Twenty-seven... almost twenty-eight minutes."
"Where the hell are they?"
"Julie," Clint said, "I think you ought to sit down. You're shaking
like a leaf, your color's not good."
"I'm all right." Lee Chen handed her a glass of Scotch. "Have a
drink."
"No."
"It might help," Clint said.
She grabbed the glass from Lee, drained it in a couple of long swallows,
and shoved it back into his hand.
"I'll get you another," he said.
"Thanks." From the sofa, Jackie Jaxx said,
"Listen, is anyone going to sue me over this?" Julie no longer sort of
liked the hypnotist. She loathed as much as she had loathed him when
they had first met in Vegas and taken on his case. She wanted to go
kick his head in. Though she knew the urge to kick him was irrational,
he really had not been the cause of Bobby's disappearance, but she
wanted to kick him anyway. That was the impulsive side of her, the
quick-to-anger side of which she was not proud.
she couldn't always control it, because it was part of her genetic
makeup or, as Bobby suspected, a predilection to violent response that
had begun to form in her on the day, in her childhood, when a
drug-crazed sociopath had brutally killed her mother. Either way, she
knew Bobby was sometimes dismayed by that dark side of her, much as he
loved everything else she made a bargain with both Bobby and God:
Listen, Bobby wherever you are-and you listen, too, God-if this just...
well, if I can just have my Bobby back with me, I won't be that way any
more, I won't want to kick in Jackie's head or anyone else's head,
either, I'll turn over a new leaf I will, just let Bobby come back to me
safe and sound
THEY WERE on a beach again, but this one had white that was slightly
phosphorescent in the early darkness.
Sand disappeared into a medium-thick fog in both directions. No rain
was falling, and the air was not as warm as it had been at Punaluu.
Bobby shivered in the chill, moist air.
"Where are we?"
"I'm not sure," Frank said,
"but I think we're probably on the Monterey Peninsula somewhere." A car
passed on a highway a hundred yards behind them.
"That's probably Seventeen-Mile Drive. You know it? The road from
Carmel through Pebble Beach-"
"I know it."
"I love the peninsula, Big Sur to the south," Frank said.
"It's another one of the places I was happy... for a while." Their
voices were strangely muffled by the mist. Bobby liked the solid ground
beneath his feet, and the thought that he was not only on his own planet
but in his own country and in his own state; but he would have preferred
a place with more concrete details, where fog did not obscure the
landscape. The white blindness of fog was another form of chaos, and he
had had more than enough disorder to last him for the rest of his life.
Frank said,
"Oh, and by the way, back there in Hawaii a minute ago, you were worried
about giving Candy the slip, but you don't need to be concerned. We
lost him several stops ago in Kyoto, or maybe on the slopes of Mount
Fuji."
"For God's sake, if we don't have to worry about leading him back to the
office, let's go home."
"Bobby, I don't have-"
"Any control. Yeah, I know, I heard, it's no big secret. But I'll tell
you something-you've got control on some level, way down deep in the
subconscious, more control than you think you have."
"No. I
"Yes. Because you came back to that crater for me," Bobby said. "You
told me you hate the place, that it's more frightening than anywhere
you've ever been, but you came back and got me. You didn't leave me
there with the bed railing."
"Pure chance that I came back."
"I don't think so." Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
THEY MADE the soft, pretty bing-bong signal come out of the wall,
because that was how they told all the people in Home it was just ten
minutes before supper was going to be eaten.
Derek was already out the door by the time Thomas got up from his chair.
Derek liked food. Everyone liked food of course. But Derek liked food
enough for three people.
Thomas got to the doorway, and Derek was already down the hall, walking
fast in that funny way he did, almost to the Dining Room. Thomas looked
back at the window.
Night was at the window.
He didn't like seeing night at the window, which was why he usually kept
the drapes closed after the light went out in the world. But after he
got himself ready for supper, he tried to find the Bad Thing out there,
and it helped a little to see the night when he was trying to send a
mind-string to it.
The Bad Thing was still so far away it couldn't be felt.
he wanted to try once more before going to eat food and be Sociable. He
reached out through the window, up into the dark, spinning the
mind-string toward where the Bad Thing used to be-and it was back. He
felt it right away, knew it was him, too, and he remembered the green
toad eating the beautiful yellow flutterby, and he pulled back into his
room faster than a toad tongue could snap out and catch him.
He didn't know if he should be happy or scared that it was back. When
it was gone away, Thomas was happy, because maybe it was going to be
gone away a long time, but he didn't know exactly where it was.
He was also a little scared because when it was gone away, he was ok.
But it was back.
He waited in the doorway a while.
Then he went to eat food. There was roast chicken. There was frenched
fries. There was carrots and peas. There was cold slaw. There was
Homemade bread, and people said there was going to be some chocolate
cake and ice cream for dessert though the people that said it was dumb
people, so he couldn't be sure. It all looked good, and it smelled
good, it even tasted good. But Thomas kept thinking about how flutterby
might've tasted to the t
oad, and he couldn't eat much of anything.
BOUNCING like two balls in tandem, they traveled to an empty lot in Las
Vegas, where a cool desert wind spun a tumbleweed past them and where
Frank said he had once lived in a house that was now demolished; moving
to that cabin at the top of a snowy mountain meadow, where they had
first teleported after leaving the office; to the graveyard in Santa
Barbara; to the top of an Aztec ziggurat in the lush Mexican jungles,
where the humid night air was full of buzzing mosquitoes and the cries
of unknown beasts, and where Bobby almost fell down the terraced side of
the pyramidal structure before he realized how high they were and how
precariously perched; to the offices of Dakota & Dakota They were
popping around so quickly, remaining in each place such a brief time-in
fact, briefer with each stop-that for a moment he stood in a corner of
his own office, blinking stupidly, before he realized where he was and
what he had to do. He tore his hand away from Frank, and he said,
"Stop it now, stop here." But Frank vanished even as Bobby spoke.
Julie was all over him an instant later, hugging him so tightly that she
hurt his ribs. He hugged her, too, and kissed her a long time before
coming up for air. Her hair smelled clean, and her skin smelled sweeter
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 37
